Vizag Diary:Continued...

26th Feb, Sunday:10:00 p.m.

We headed straight towards Sonora Beach Resort in Aditi's black Corsa. The same group. I was disappointed as the others, once we reached there. An area approximately of a tennis court size was barricaded with tent-clothes and bamboos. Music was too loud and the DJ deserved a kick. Ekta decided to go and check the chaos by herself first. So she entered and came back by the time Abhishek finished his cigarette."The music is all crap. Most of the people are already drunk. There are separate areas for the stags and the couples. Stags are peeping lecherously at the couples. It is dirty out there"- Ekta quipped angrily and headed straight towards the car.

So, what's next? "TDS, where else yaar?" - screamed Tirthankar. "Can we go for a drive in the highway?"- I asked gingerly. Ekta was silent. Aditi and Abhishek then decided, we would have a mix-and-match outing today. We went to TDS first and repeated the yesterday night. Only exception was, I carried my SONY Cybershot digital camera today. We came out after couple of hours. "I'll drive"-announced Ekta. "No" said her sister. "You are drunk". "But only two shots of whiskey and the rest are just beers"-Ekta tried to argue. "I can see that. No more discussion. Get into the car."-Aditi played elder sibling's role perfectly.

Vizag is a small city. We were into the highway in ten minutes. This highway, one of the finest in the country, connects vizag to Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta), my native city in the north and Hyderabad in the south where I have been working at present .The highway is breathtakingly beautiful in the day. In the night it is magnificently charming. Soil is red in this part of the country. Small, broken hills stands like old fortresses on both sides of the road. We were moving in great speed. Some Punjabi Bhangra song was playing in the car's audio system. It turned into a noise from the song after sometime, as it was absolutely silent outside. I asked Aditi to switch it off.

And suddenly the night came inside the car. We stop talking. Rather we could not. We were mesmerised. We could only see the portion of the black, tall reptile like highway in the diffused car light. The night was in a move so was I. Suddenly the eerie feeling of the yesterday morning came back. I was in that state of mind when there appeared a yellow dot on the horizon. It started to grow bigger and it kept on growing. Once it came close I realised it was a huge truck. It whizzed past us. It was so close or may be it appeared like that, I thought. But Aditi was sitting cool. I just peeked at the dashboard and saw we were going between 130-140 km an hour. We went ahead for another half an hour before Abhishek broke the silence by saying "aab waapa's chal (lets go back now)".

I did a stupid thing while coming back. I was feeling a bit suffocated inside the car. So I lowered the glass of the right side rear window and stoop a little bit outside. The stream of air hit me like hell and almost knocked me out of the car. The sound of air was so deafening. I couldn't hear anything. The vision got blur too. For a moment I felt I was flying in the air with the car. Someone told something from inside the car. I couldn't hear anything. And then Tirthankar drag me inside the car and shut the window glass. "What are you doing? Are you trying to kill us all"?- Ekta snapped at me. I was not aware of the fact that it was dangerous to open the glass of the rear window when a car was moving at a speed of more than 100km/hr. The car could be gone out of balance. But before any damage done, we drove back to our home safely. We all dropped at Aditi’s place.

Aditi’s apartment was opposite to the Taj Hotel and along the beach road. Her balcony was bang opposite to the sea. We all sit there. I looked at the sea and saw how a horizon merged into another. It was difficult to figure out whether the stars were twinkling from the surface of the sea or the ships with their tiny lights hanging from the sky? I just could not make out at which line the sky blended into the sea. The crystal clear dark sky with blinking stars emarged from behind our head and landed on the sea in front of us. It’s the seer size of the sky and sea made me numb. The concept of plane looked very confusing to me at that point of time. An absolutely surreal view. It was completely quiet at 3’0 clock in the morning. Only the sound of waves at repeated intervals hit my ears. But after sometime it also became a part of the silence and I couldn’t make the difference. Abhishek started singing “akash bhara surjo tara…”-a great song in Bengali, composed by Rabindranath Tagore. I translated it as far as possible to my non-Bengali friends. We came back to our apartment in the early morning before sunrise and collapsed in the bed immediately.