After nearly a year, I went home recently. What is the point of being just an overnight journey from home if you can’t visit as often as you would want to? But well, that is enough matter for another post.
Anyway, the first two days I found myself struggling not to feel and behave like an outsider, like a tourist. The place had changed, new swanky buildings, more apartment blocks than I would ever have thought possible in that little city, twice as many vehicles on the roads… Ah roads – they were the same!
Roaming around the familiar streets of Fort Kochi, I was fascinated by the many little things that I had merely looked at in passing during all earlier walks there. The quaint buildings, the park, the roads, the cafes, the ancient trees, the “you buy we fry” stalls. Maybe the fact that S was going berserk with the camera helped this feeling. At the Chinese nets, the fishermen called out with a well practiced sophistication that ill suited them: “Come on madam, come up here, take nice photographs, see the fish”.
Drive along the water front and sure signs of the great growth the city is waiting to witness – like a roll call of all the major builders in the country, boards proudly announce the upcoming residential complexes. Advertisements everywhere you look announcing even more such properties, in areas that would have been considered back of the beyond as early as five years ago.
The city is changing faster than I can grasp or keep track of. There’s only one solution – go home often enough!
:)
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