Vanquishing the Demons of Kanyakumari!!!

It was 5:30 in the morning and I was on a call taxi from Nagercoil to Kanyakumari, also known as Cape Comarin, the tourist town at the southern-most tip of the Indian map.  I had come to Nagercoil as the guest for a corporate show.  My georgraphy isn’t on par with my science and math skills and though I knew that the Cape-town was nearby, I needed one of my acquaintances at the show to inform me that it was just 20 km away.  “Just 20 kms?!! I have to go then!!! I have to vanquish the Demons of Kanyakumari!!!!”, a voice inside my head started yelling.  Sure enough, about 16 hours later I was approaching the trisangamam, the point where three massive water bodies, the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea met.   As I made my way through a sea of another kind, a sea of humans waiting to get a glimpse of the first rays of the sun against the backdrop of the mighty statue of the poet saint Tiruvalluvar, my mind went into flashback mode.  What were these demons that I so desperately wanted to destroy?

 Magnificient statue of Tiruvalluvar silhouetted against the sunrise at Kanyakumari

I was a little kid then.  I’m guessing I must’ve been 10 years old though I may be entirely wrong!!!  My memory for chronology of events is extremely poor.  That is the reason I started photographing almost every incident in my life - so I wouldn’t forget them.  A little bit like the protagonist of the movie Memento (that would be Ghajini’s Surya or Aamir Khan for those who follow Tamil or Hindi movies respectively).  My parents and the three of us, brothers, were visiting Kanyakumari.  My chithappa, chiththi (uncle and aunt) and their children Veena and Subramani were with us.  I remember we had breakfast at a very shady looking tiffin-shop near the beach.  “Dosai, idly yedavadhu irukkaa?” (Do you have dosa or idlies?), the elder gents of the family asked at the hotel.  “Dosa-yum meen kozhambum irukku!”  (We have dosa with fish curry), came the response.  Everybody in our family frowned dutifully, as you would expect strict vegetarians to.  “Naanga PUUUUUUUUUUUREE Vegetarian!” (We are PUUUUUUUUUURE Vegetarians.).  The guy said they had vegetarian sambar too.  There were big discussions among the family members about how they would be cooking the vegetarian and non-vegetarian food with the same utensils and it would not be PUUUUUUUUUUUURE enough.  The poor guy insisted with a poker face that they used separate vessels.  However, the ladies refused to believe him.  Finally, hunger took over (as it always does) and we decided to eat there.  There are urban legends in our family that Kumar (my eldest sibling) saw them taking the chunks of fish out of the fish curry and serving it to us as vegetarian sambar!

Once the food rituals were over, we made our way to the beach.  We got into the water.  What was knee deep for the elders was waist deep for me.  As we were standing there a huge wave hit the shores.  Not huge by tsunami standards, not by general human standards, maybe not even for kids, but what it did manage to do was dislodge my feet from the sands.  I fell down backwards into the water.  Here I was gasping for breath.  I was grappling all over trying to get hold of something to pull me back to the surface.  I couldn’t find anything.   I could see the water surface a couple of feet above my head.  I was choking.  I regretted not having learnt swimming.  I was hoping someone would notice and give me a hand.  Nothing.  I thought I was going to die at the southern tip of the country.  The place from where Swami Vivekananda took off from the beach and swam to a nearby rock to meditate, would consume my life before the world knew of my greatness!  God, save me!  My entire relatively short span of ten years of living flashed before my eyes.  No… this was not how it was meant to be!  Sure enough, it wasn’t.  As the wave washed away, my feet found their spot.  I somehow recovered and my head popped out of the surface of the water.  So, was everyone around me panicking that the little kid almost drowned in water?  Nah!  They were pretty oblivious to it and hadn’t even noticed that I had fallen down and gotten up.  What seemed like an ordeal which lasted an eternity for me seemed to have been just a few measly moments in actual world time!  I had just slipped and gotten up – that’s it.  But, I vividly remember every nanosecond of that incident.  I had a headache to prove it.  I knew I had had a near death experience.  For some reason, I don’t think I told anyone about it.  Maybe I felt it made me look sissy.  We all walked away from Kanyakumari, but the demons would keep haunting me every time I got into water.  Kanyakumari followed me wherever I went.  Whenever I slipped my head back into the waters in any swimming pool – be it at IIT madras or at an apartment complex in Sunnyvale, the fear of dying by drowning would come rushing back in an instant.

There are two ways of handling fear.  One is to cope with it.  Accept it as a part of life and move on.  The other is to stare fear right back into its face.  Once you do that, fear, more often than not vanishes.  I’ve always had a proclivity towards the latter approach.  Heights scare me, so I bungee-jumped.  I once had to drop out of a difficult course (Advanced Topics in Compiler Design) while doing my Masters.  Before I graduated, I needed to take any one course to fulfil my graduation requirements and I had a whole array of subjects to choose from.  I could’ve taken a relatively easy course, fulfilled my course requirements and graduated.  But, I would’ve had to live with the knowledge that I never conquered that one course which made me drop out.  I simply couldn’t allow that to happen.  So, I took the same course again, worked my rear off, and didn’t just clear that course but got the only A+ grade on offer, that semester, in that course.

I stepped knee deep into the waters of Kanyakumari, took a few deep breaths, sat on a rock and clicked a few pictures.  Half an hour later, I was breathing easy on my way back to Nagercoil.  The demons of Kanyakumari had been vanquished.