33
‘Bike?’ Ananya beamed when I went to pick her up on a black Yamaha RX 100.
‘Bala’s,’ I said.
Ananya sat pillion in a maroon salwar kameez, using her white dupatta to
cover her head and face. She looked like a member of Veerappan’s gang.
Pondicherry is a hundred and forty kilometres away from Chennai, down the
East Coast Road, or ECR, running along the Bay of Bengal. Fisherman’s Cove
falls on the way, twenty kilometres outside Chennai city.
We left Ananya’s office at Anna Salai. She sat behind me and held the sidebars
tight. By the time we left the city at Lattice Bridge Road, she switched from
gripping the sidebars to my shoulders. We took the Old Mahabalipuram Road,
which led us to ECR.
‘This is beautiful,’ I said as the sea became visible.
‘I told you.’ Ananya planted a kiss on the back of my neck.
We halted at Fisherman’s Cove where I met the catering manager briefly.
Everything seemed under control for the Citibank event. We left the resort and
came on the ECR again. An hour of driving later, we passed Mahabalipuram. It
had stunning rock-cut temples next to the sea.
‘Wow, these are amazing temples,’ I said as the wind swept back my hair.
The ECR ended an hour after Mahabalipuram. The roads became narrower. We
passed several little towns with long names and sprawling paddy fields. At a few
places, I had to stop to make way for bullock carts, village school kids and
goatherds. We reached Pondicherry around noon, and my first reaction was
disappointment.
‘This is it?’ I asked as I reached the main chowk in the town. It was like any
other small town in India, dusty and noisy with Cola ad signs painted on uneven
walls.
‘The nice part is inside, the French quarter and the Aurobindo Ashram,’
Ananya said as I negotiated a sharp bend in the road along with fifty other two-
wheelers and four trucks.