Travel with me (Part1) Waking up with India

It’s five o’clock in the morning and I am balancing a cup of tea and my laptop as I walk out onto my third floor terrace to watch the sunrise and do some writing. It’s my first week in Pondicherry, my passport stamp says “Six month” and I am on an adventure of a lifetime.

The street my flat is on is narrow, just wide enough for the tuk-tuks to pass one another, but most of the traffic is pedestrians, cows, bikes and motorcycles. There are Coconut trees everywhere, mixed with lush trees, bougainvillea and Jasmine bushes lining the street.

The silence breaks when the crows start to circle a large rain tree across the street. As the sun comes up I can make the faint outline of the crows and a few fruit bats circling around the sky. The Hindu temple down the street starts to chant over a loudspeaker. It's loud enough that people a quarter of a mile away can probably hear it. A few minutes go by and the Catholic Church around the corner also starts to chant over a loudspeaker. Then if that didn't wake everyone up, there is a loud siren that sounds off at about 5am to alert the locals that it is time to start work at the factory.

My eyes follow a scratching sound down to the ground. There I see a very old, very tiny women beginning to sweep the streets in front of her flat. Her broom is made of Coconut branches. The sound of her anklets, jingle as she cleans her doorway and prepares to draw a beautiful rice chalk design at her front door. In the south of India, where I am, they call it a Kolam. In the north, they call it a Mondala. It is the duty of the eldest woman in the house to draw a new Kolam at the front door every morning to bless the home and all who enter. As I watch her I am broken from my trance by the sound of the first motor scooter speeding past her and down my street. As he approaches her, he honks his horn over and over as to say “here I come” “here I am” and “here I go”!

The sounds of the city grow louder. By 5:30am Pondicherry is wide awake. Two blocks away the cars, trucks, auto ricks (tuk-tuks), Trash Tractors, motor scooters and bicycles have begun their dance down the busy and sometimes unmarked streets of Pondicherry. The lines on the road are more like a suggestion! It is a fast dance that goes on till late in the night. Just as a side note: It took me a week to get the courage to cross the streets alone!

They say India is a paradox, so much chaos and noise, coupled with this sense of harmony, extreme wealth shoulder to shoulder with abject poverty, magnificent architecture just steps away from the slums. I guess that's why they call it “Incredible India”. Having said all that, I found the people to be pretty happy and they usually have a smile for you when your eyes meet.

An hour passes and I take a walk down to a corner store. Across the street is an elementary school. The street is filled with traffic. It's a sea of yellow Tuk-Tuks each with five or six children squeezed into them. Some are on motorbikes and it is not uncommon to see four to six people on one motorcycle. The children are filing out onto the sidewalk and running into the school yard. They all have on their uniforms. The girls all have their hair fixed in two braids with bright blue ribbons tied in perfect bows. They hold hands in groups as They wave goodbye to their parents.

The sun has been up a few hours now and the sky is a beautiful periwinkle blue with a variety of clouds streaming the horizon. For the next hour or two the temperature will be mild and then the heat shows up and the humidity. It won’t cool off again until 1:00am the next morning, unless the rain comes.
The morning is my favorite time here in Pondicherry. When I return home I will always reflect on the time I spend quietly alone on the terrace watching India wake up

I took all the picture on my iPhone 4.

I hope you enjoyed my story and if you ever decide to check out Pondicherry, send me a message. I would be happy to help out a fellow Expat, Nomad and or travel bug with any info I Can.