Silence...!

As I told you, me and a friend of mine went to a falls in Kerala called Aathirapally. We stayed at the one and only hotel there, owned and operated by the KTDC. We only stayed one night there, but that was a very eerie experience for me.

When I say, eerie, don't start thinking on the lines of ghosts and ghouls. No..., the eerie feeling I got was due to the pin drop silence I encountered there. This was all the more pronounced when my friend went to take a bath. He didn't take much time to finish his bath, but each minute felt very very long for me. Saying an hour or infinity maybe more poetic, but somehow sounded like crossig over into bullshitting for me.

I finished my bath first and went out to sit in the balcony for some fresh and cool air as it was quite warm in the room. As I spent most if not all of my life in cities big and small, I never had the chance to encounter such silence before. No screeching tyres, no impatient drivers honking away mindless of what is going on around them, no sms'es or missed calls on the cell. Not even the sound of a cricket for crying out loud!

I tried to concentrate to pick up the even the hint of a sound, any sound, but couldn't. Even the roar of the river, which was a constant companion to us through the day, abandoned me then. I felt so alone there that it was almost scary. I tried to call up some friends of mine using my trusty BSNL cell phone. But even that, which has range in every remote corner imaginable, didn't have enough range there.

Thankfully, my friend finished his bath by this time and came out. We chatted for about 2 odd hours about anything and everything and then turned in for the night.

I don't know, maybe it was just the state of mind I was in at that point in time. If you went there, you might not feel the same thing.