An evening on the path

It is almost dark on a summer evening in Tiruvannamalai and I am standing at a place where the girivalam path splits from the chengam road. Girivalam path is a well made road with footpaths on both sides (for the most part) for walking pilgrims. When you look from here, there is small Ganesha shrine right at the trijunction and then wide paved footpath starts; on which sadhus in their saffron robes are seen sleeping or sitting. Lines of trees cover over the road from the both sides and it looks like the road disappears between them in distance.

A family is running a tea, snack and food place covered and fenced with metal sheets annexed to the front of their home. In one corner on slightly raised platform there are stoves for tea, coffee and with their vessels and lined-up plastic jars of small snacks like chakris and some confectionaries. If you ask you may even be able to locate chewing tobacco products and cigarettes. The rest of the area works as a restaurant (if it can be called that way) with few modular plastic chairs and tables that are sagging slightly from the middle and their half-naked children running between them. The woman is in charge of the tea and snacks bar and the man is on general arrangements and waiting. Mother in law is on the kitchen stove in another corner.

I decide to have something for this seems almost like the last human outpost before a long solitary journey on this beautiful path on this night. In fact I have walked already 2 km from the ashram, but this seems definitely like a point where the walk really starts as now one leaves the town road for the rural road along the Arunachala. I started the walk from the ashram when it was light and I was amidst the hustle-bustle of the town, vehicles, shops and then slowly saw it all get sparser and sparser until I reached this point. Now the big busses to Bangalore and most other vehicles will take the chengam road and the few pilgrims like me and few other stray vehicles will continue on the path. There is deep silence in the atmosphere except that of the sounds of vehicles passing on the road which are few and far in between as this is the very outskirts of Tiruvannamalai. The air is warm and it will take a while before it will cool down. Each sound of passing vehicle can be listened perfectly separately and in full detail unlike in the town where it all merges into the background noise of everything. The Arunachala stands motionless and in all-witnessing majesty as ever. The Arunachala is like the sun or the moon or a force of the nature; not going anywhere, standing right there; showing people the permanence of some things while they pass by on this earth.

The man asks me to wash my hands (I am surprised) and invites me to the table. I wash them at the makeshift washbasin that drains into a dirty drum below and (I think) that drum might be drained into trickling stream of water that disappears towards the back of the house where there is nothing but trees and bushes.

As I am eating with my bare hands feeling my breathing and staring into dark on this poignant evening, observing the simple and unassuming life of the folks around me, I feel grounded and established.