Rameshwaram -3

Sun 30 Mar'14, 5:15 am
We set out for the Dhanush Kodi beach. There is a strip of land that stretches out from mainland India towards Sri Lanka. It tapers to a point and then bulges up again to form an island. Rameshwaram is this island. Dhanush Kodi is the easternmost extreme of Rameshwaram. It is the point where the land ends and the sea begins.

Dhanush Kodi is the likeliest place where the old Ram Setu might have existed. The sea is shallow for some distance. It might have required some ingenuity, but it would not have been impossible to connect India and Lanka at this point.

We take two autos to get to the nearer edge of Dhanush Kodi. Then we change to a mini-bus that takes us another 6.8 kms over sandy beach to the pointiest end of the beach.

The water is so clear here that you can easily see the bottom of the shallow beach. A few feet on, the sea floor rises and forms a small island.  Looking at the island from across a thin strip of sea, I feel as if I have entered a magical place in a fairy tale.

We wade into the water to try and reach the small island. We decide that if the sea floor drops too deep, we will turn around. Three of us holding hands walk towards the shining island. The highest that the water reaches is upto my hips, and I am the smallest person around.

The floor rises very sharply as we near the island and it is a fight to move forward, with the sand slipping beneath our feet. But we finally make it.

The island is just about 10 feet across. Small waves lap at the miniature shore. They are like little shining fish in the soothing red sun.

We are a varied group that has collected on this small island - my husband, mom-in-law, a friend with his wife and his 3 year old son. The child and I seem to share the same delight in the waves. I sit down cross-legged in the shallow water and dig my fingers into the wet sand. The child (S.) seems delighted by the idea and does the same!

It is complete peace and tranquility that we are experiencing right now and we don't want to leave. But we were given only 20 minutes by the mini-bus driver who brought us here. So, very reluctantly, we come back to the main beach.

From here the bus takes us to the old Dhanush Kodi village. The village suffered a cyclone in 1964. The bigger stone buildings - a church, a railway station- were all destroyed, but the residents returned afterwards.

We see the remains of an old church. The broken stones in the walls have coral patterns. We wonder if the church was under water for some time and the coral grew on it, or if coral stones were used in the construction.

We meet an old man who was actually in the village the day before the cyclone. His brother-in-law was the station master at Dhanush Kodi at the time and it was his wedding that day.

The village has ground water wells in a couple of spots. A few women are pulling out water with the help of cups made of 2 litre water bottles that have been cut in half and attched to long sticks. We request for a drink. The water is sweet.

A boy in a small shop shows us a floating stone that he says is part of the floating bridge that Ram made to get to Lanka. It is a coral stone. It is an interesting idea, except that I am not sure that a bridge constructed out of floating corals would have been able to sustain the weight of the army. There must be another explanation.