This year, for my husband's birthday, we were constrained by time and budget, and decided to go to Pondicherry, considering its proximity to Chennai - not much time and money spent on the travel and we could take a bus back any time we wanted.

We started the day before Navin's birthday and reached Pondy by bus (three and a half hours) around noon. As we walked out of the bus-stand, my first impression was that of a typical Tamil Nadu small town - hot, dusty, dirty, crowded, noisy and foul-smelling as you passed certain quarters. A friend of ours had told us of this small guesthouse overlooking the sea and we took an auto to the place (the friendly auto-driver filling us in on the various sightseeing spots in the city). We discovered that Rs. 20 was the highest auto fare that one paid -- if the auto could go any farther than that, one would either be in Tamil Nadu or cruising in the Bay of Bengal!

On the way to the hotel, we saw that more than half the shops lining the street were "Liquor Lands," the equivalent of our state's "Wine Shops." Then Maraimalai Adigalar Salai suddenly became Rue Bussy (Bussy Street), and the atmosphere seemed to change with the name - the streets were clean and had French names, no gaps between the roads and the pavements so there was no dust, the houses were large and colonial, huge trees shaded the streets, quaint restaurants and shops dotted the area, and most bewildering for me, there were a number of foreigners zipping around on two-wheelers or cycling sedately (was it the French connection or the Auroville fascination?).

I thought, if nothing, we could just walk around the place and enjoy the going-back-in-time feeling.

As we speechlessly took in the new milieu and congratulated ourselves on our choice of Pondy, we were further overwhelmed by the sight of the blue horizon streching forever beyond the road, and then we turned right into Goubert Avenue, or simply Beach Road, to reach our small hotel. The street was one-sided (!) with the sea lining it on the other. Though the hotel was a little rundown and the room somewhat shabby (all A/c rooms taken too), we were hooked because of the lure of the sea.

We changed and went and had an excellent lunch at a restaurant called DeBussy, which we had sighted on our way, on Rue Bussy, of course. The meal and the walk back in the sun taking its toll, we took a siesta in keeping with the custom of the place!

The evening was very hot and sultry and we had to get out of the room if we didn't want the heat to kill us. We had barely walked half-a-kilometre on the Beach Road when we found out the reason for the high humidity - a heavy downpour hit the city and sent us rushing back to our room. We didn't want to get lost in the rain and we were too tired for adventures that day. So we skipped dinner and had an extended night's sleep.

To be continued...