The best time to travel

Pattamadai was one grandmother's village, and Sengottai was the other's.  They were not even forty miles apart, but boy was it a pain to travel from one place to another!

It took almost five hours from the time we left one doorstep and walked into the other grandma's home.  Five tiring hours for forty miles of travel via public transport buses!

The main road in Sengottai

The bus stop at Sengottai was practically in my grandmother's backyard.  We would be at the stop by the post office a few minutes before the time that the bus was scheduled to arrive there.  And then the long bus ride, with stops that seemed to occur every two minutes.

The bus stop at Pattamadai was a long, long walk from home.  It always which seemed infinitely longer on those sunny and hot 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 was very exciting, even with the oxen farting and shitting as they walked.

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, about 60 years ago
(From parents' collections)

Travel was so arduous that elders always consulted the almanac to chalk out auspicious days, which seemed to assure them that they would safely return after completing a productive trip.  

It was just us three siblings traveling one summer.  We got bored at Pattamadai and got tired of the heat and the mosquitoes.  We preferred to return to Sengottai, which was always a tad cooler thanks to its location by the hills.  But, we weren't allowed to leave for two days because they were considered inauspicious.  செவ்வாய் புதன் வடக்க சூலம்  Yes, inauspicious for travel over those forty miles.

During another summer holidays, we weren't allowed to leave Pattamadai for a couple of days because there was a death in a house up the street.  The person who died was not related to us, but that didn't matter to the elders who were guided by the tradition that a death in the street meant that we couldn't leave!

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."

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

In mid-July, I left for a two month stay in Chennai.  I did not consult any almanac.  I bought the ticket based on my preferences and the availability of seats on the flight segments.  A distance from one side of the planet to another that is obviously way more than the forty miles that separated Pattamadai and Sengottai, and travel that involved flying for hours over oceans, the crossing of which was forbidden in the old traditions. 

In my almanac, every day that I am alive and well and able to do things is always an auspicious day!