My Journey To Chennai - Swathi Udhyakumar

My journey to Chennai began with my marriage. As I sat in my bus thinking about my destination, I had a strange feeling and a strong emotion towards my city, Bangalore. I had grown in this place; I had spent all my childhood and my adolescence in this garden city. As the bus started moving I had a feeling of insecurity, my heart started beating fast and my eyes started to wet, my insides where repelling and screaming “I don’t want to leave my city”, and these feelings subsided once my husband caught my hand and pulled my head towards his shoulder and asked me to rest; I felt some kind of magic in his touch and started feeling quite secured again. As I was resting on his shoulder, I started thinking again about my destination Chennai. My whole family, even the youngest member had warned me about Chennai’s climate, they had kept on telling me Chennai is very hot and humid and my younger sister had teased me saying “Next time when Swathi comes back she will be fully tanned to such an extent that we will not be able to recognize her”, this statement had actually created some kind of fear in me and Chennai’s climate became my big concern. My mom was so afraid about the climate to such an extent that she started advising me even when I was telling my last “bye” to her before leaving to Chennai. Being born and brought up in Bangalore, my main concern became Chennai’s climate. I kept on thinking how far I would adjust to this climate. Apart from the climate, I knew very less about Chennai. I knew Chennai is one of the metropolitan cities and in the past it was called as Madras and apart from this Chennai had beaches and Chennai was very dirty compared to Bangalore. My husband had been staying in Chennai for the past 3 months and had clearly warned me about eating on Chennai roads. As I was thinking about Chennai food and water, I suddenly remembered about the Cauvery issue between two states. Whenever someone confronted me about Karnataka government, not supplying enough water to Tamilnadu state, I had always fought with them. I drifted to sleep as I was thinking about my last fight regarding Cauvery issue with a relative who was from Tamilnadu. To be Cont…