It was (also) six years ago ...

After submitting an essay (fingers crossed that it will be accepted for publication) in which I quoted Franz Kafka, I was reminded of another Kafka story that I referred to in a post about the old life in the old country.

The following is from 2013:
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Pattamadai was one grandmother's village, and Sengottai was the other's.  Boy was it a pain to travel from one place to another, though they were barely forty miles apart!


View Grandmas in a larger map

It rarely took anything less than four hours from the time we left one doorstep and walked into the other grandma's home.  Four tiring hours for forty miles!

The main road in Sengottai

The bus stop at Sengottai was practically at my grandmother's backyard.  A few minutes before the scheduled arrival time, we were there at the stop by the post office.  And then the long bus ride, with stops that seemed to occur every two minutes.

Pattamadai bus stop was a long, long walk from home.  About a mile, perhaps, which seemed infinitely longer on those sunny summer days.

The road home from the Pattamadai bus stand

Walk we did if we didn't have anything heavy to carry.  If not, via letters--the ancient days before even landlines became common--we would have pre-arranged for a bullock-cart.  Yep, bullock-cart.  We kids then competed for the car equivalent of "riding shotgun."  To sit up front, with sometimes the bulls farting and shitting as they walked, was somehow very attractive to us then.

But, we couldn't complain much about such travel conditions because the elders had even worse stories from their childhood days.  The complicated logistics and travel that took up an entire day were big reasons why they rarely traveled at all.  If it was out of the range of a bullock-cart ride, well, forget about it then.

A few of the extended family getting set for a short trip
(From parents' collections)

Thus, in those days, it was all too common for the elders to chalk out auspicious days for travel.  Yes, even for a travel over those forty miles.

Once, it was just us three siblings traveling, and we got bored at Pattamadai and got tired of the heat and the mosquitoes.  We preferred to return to Sengottai, but weren't allowed to leave for two days because they were considered inauspicious.

Life was not easy, in the old days, and a belief in such auspicious days for travel was one way they thought they could deal with the probabilities of things going wrong.  After all, that we are mortals is not any new wisdom, and those astrological superstitions helped them deal with the uncertainties of life.

Franz Kafka writes about the uncertain life in the story, The Next Village:

My grandfather used to say: "Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -- not to mention accidents -- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey."

If we think of Sengottai or Pattamadai or Kafka's village as metaphors of various stations in life to/from which we travel, then we can equally, and forcefully, argue that given the uncertainties related to the decisions we make, it is amazing that we venture into new areas, literal and otherwise.

Yet, we take those chances.  We humans have been taking those chances ever since walked upright and wandered out of Africa.

Perhaps, in the future, we might even go to Mars. Or somewhere else where no man has ever gone before.  It is, after all, yet another village in this grand cosmic life.