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‘Yaar, you’re really weird. A girl is asking you to go on a honeymoon and you’re being coy like a newly married bride who gets shy when she sees the large glass of milk on her suhaag raat. Look at this, there is an “Amazing Andamans” package at 40 per cent discount.’
‘How many days?’
‘What will you do with the days? It’s for seven nights. I’m booking this one.’
‘I’m not really comfortable with the idea of going on a honeymoon without actually being married.’
‘Let’s just go, yaar. You’ll get to practice before your real honeymoon. Mention your honeymoon experience with your work experience on matrimonial sites, then see how many rishtas you get. Girls like guys who are well-experienced.’
‘A honeymoon is a joke for you, isn’t it?’
‘Life’s a joke. The more you take life seriously, it takes you for a ride that much more.’
‘I’m feeling weird.’
‘Oye, you keep feeling like that. The package is booked and it is non-refundable. Now we have to go.’
‘When do we leave?’
‘The day after tomorrow, Friday night onwards. Take five days off from work.’
‘So quickly?’
‘What else, now do we have to wait for a wedding to celebrate your honeymoon? This one was on a discount. Okay, now I gotta go to the market. Have to prep for the trip.’
‘What prep? You only have to pack, right?’
‘I am going to get mehendi done. At least get some feeling of wedding at the honeymoon, no?’
Sudha could do anything to ‘feel’ a certain way; Chandar was a bit scared of this. She not only got mehendi done on her hands, but on her feet as well. She bought red bangles too. When she got back, she looked exactly the way Chandar used to envision her in his thoughts.
‘How do I look?’
‘Exactly like that.’
‘Like what, tell me?’
‘Exactly like how you looked in my dreams.’
‘Okay, let’s go and get a photo clicked.’
‘Photo? Why?’
‘Who knows maybe you’ll stop dreaming? So we should at least have a photo, no?’
Sudha dragged Chandar to the photo studio and both of them got a number of photographs clicked in the popular shaadi poses. There was even a photo in which she looked like the husband, and Chandar, the wife.
A for Andaman and Nicobar
Sudha and Chandar spent two days in Port Blair and then went to Havelock. It’s a three-hour distance on a cruise ship. It is said there is a beach in Havelock called Radhanagar where the sunset is so beautiful that even the clocks stop ticking to stare at the scene.
Chandar and Sudha’s hotel was very close to Radhanagar beach. After entering the room, Chandar switched on the TV and found that only two or three channels were available. The phone couldn’t detect a signal either. On the bed, towels had been placed twisted into a heart, and colourful scented flowers had been scattered as well. The open-roofed bathroom received direct sunlight. It seemed as if not only the bathroom, but even the sunlight filtering in from the roof would also get offended if the two of them didn’t shower together.
There were two chairs lying outside the room and the sea was only a hundred metres away. There was a bed placed right next to the chairs, the kind you’d see in films. The sounds of the sea could be heard clearly in the room.
When two human beings had come close for the first time in some ancient past, it would have definitely happened by the sea. The sun was probably about to set. Those two people would have probably tried to stop the sun from going down, and they would have become one in their efforts to stop the daylight from receding. And this union would have forced the sun to keep up its light for a few more minutes so that the shadows of those two people could come together in the twilight.
Since then, the world seeks those two individuals every evening, the two who wish to stop the day from turning. It’s just that we have created plenty of small worlds apart from this one. We don’t have the leisure to step out of this world; the first condition to step into that one is leisure.
