JULY 3 — Journeys bring you somewhere, and halfway through my mom’s funeral in January I decided I’d go to India again.

We were just in Tamil Nadu 10 days prior, and I wanted something from returning back to India, at least perform a ritual. The thing is, it was equally about giving both her families in India a first-hand account of how I managed to lose her just days after arriving back in Kuala Lumpur.

I did not look forward to that part. No orphan does I guess.

June 7

As it is in most travels, it began with a chicken rice lunch.

Nothing is more Malaysian than having Myanmarese Christian United Nation refugees serving you traditional Chinese dishes.

My brother and his partner Sara figured that Malaysians about to be in South India for five days, need their local fix. Eddie and I were ready for our ERL ride to the new low cost airport, adventurously named KLIA2.

Ah Kit was already at the airport by the time our train arrived. If you know Ah Kit, you realise it is quite the achievement.

We all were travelling light except for the large suitcase with all my mom’s sarees. She had quite the collection, and we were going to get it back home to Alangudi, to the home she was raised in.

The “we” was four dudes.

On Pamban Bridge, Eddie keeps it easy as Muthu and Pandian worry about Ah Kit (not in picture) jumping off the bridge.

Eddie, the young lad who was waiting for his university placement after his Form Six. Mom brought him up since he was born, and they had this amazing bond. Eddie performed the last rites, as it is expected of a son.

Ah Kit, or Allan, is an entrepreneur with the penchant for story-telling. He slept many a night in my living room while we were in school and woke up to breakfast in Cheras. I was his best man and a nightmare emcee at his wedding reception.

Ah Kit soaking in the environment and excitement by sharing his super vege home-made juice laced with gin. — Pix by Praba Ganesan

Willie was not checking in with us because he already left six hours before to Chennai. We were to meet in Trichy after he gets his visa-on-arrival for his Filipino passport. There is no Indian embassy in Manila where he lives so he had to fly through Kuala Lumpur early to get to the only South Indian airport which did facilitate his documentation process.

With me, that’s four.

Except for me the rest were ethnic Chinese. I wasn’t thinking my Tamil families were bigoted but I am certain when I told them I had friends with me they did not reckon every one of them looked decidedly Chinese.

Perhaps even AirAsia’s A380 transporting us was apprehensive about us, because after boarding a situation developed delaying the flight by an hour.

A young girl with a group of 10 lost her passport at the gate, and despite the pleading by her family we had to leave her behind after the pilot decided to withdraw her luggage from the flight.

I was not bored waiting as I was stuck in constant negotiations. The first seat allocated to me in the middle had a family of three with an aged man, presumably the father, asking me not to break the family up.

Which led me to his son’s seat at the back of the plane which had another problem, there was a larger family. They did not want to break up for a four-hour flight, which brings me to my seat 1A — first row, first window seat and excellent leg room. FYI: Indian families do not like to break up, even in mid-air.

All well it was not, because as soon as the plane taxied for lift-off, the kid behind me started screaming for dear life. It was partially amusing the tricks his mom was attempting to get the two- year-old to shush up, but it was still totally nerve-wrecking having someone with that much resolve screaming unrelenting till we were well into cruise control.

The child was part of another large family group heading to their village. It is likely the whole flight roster of 200 plus passengers was made up of about 20 large families. Right across the aisle was the key player for that Muslim family’s travel. Abdul, the financial services professional, was getting married near Pudukottai, which is halfway from Trichy to Karaikudi, the closest town to all my families’ villages.

Abdul’s wingman was his brother-in-law Ansari. The family has a stationery shop in Taman Desa. I’m sure Abdul’s wedding with another Malaysian of Tamil Muslim descent was no less than spectacular, if they managed to moderate the toddler’s decibel levels with valium.

The cabin crew at our end was Narayanan, a stout Chinese-Indian, whose name means messenger of the gods. It is double ominous when his work partner for the sector was Claudia Alexis from Penang. I’m not sure but Penang gives me the Voodoo vibes.

At the plain looking Trichy International Airport, Willie was ready, so was my cousin Muthu outside.

Willie meets our driver Pandian, and a clash of driving cultures was about to ensue for days with no end.

It was 7pm by the time we got to Karaikudi to get hotel rooms. Muthu said before we arrived that there are always hotel rooms in the town, always. Unfortunately half of Karaikudi was getting married that evening and there was no room to be had inside Karaikudi. There was, however, multiple bridegroom parades across the town accompanied by over-elaborate fireworks. We ended up eventually that night in a plantation traditional healing retreat cum hotel.

When we arrived at my mom’s village, Alangudi, I still had not worked out what I would tell my grandmother.

Inside the family home in Alangudi, grandma is a force of nature in the fields.

I did not have to, and my three Amigos did provide adequate cover, and hid the fact that was the first Indian village they had ever been to in their lives.

Dinner was fantastic, not according to me, but Ah Kit who comes from a line of Hainanese caterers who are not easily impressed.

There was sadness that six months earlier I was sitting down with my mom inside the house, and now I’ve returned alone and my mom is not going to visit them anymore. I can’t explain, but they were just glad I was back. I didn’t need to explain too much.

June 8

The lodge with nothing around did not look better in the morning, so we were not upset about leaving.

The big trip was to Rameshwaram, the temple in the southern most point of India, 150km away.

Before that a stop at my uncle’s rice-field next to his water treatment plant, and then my dad’s village of Konapet.

Uncle Panchanathan's other rice-field. Willie does his lectures before and after the snap.

There were all kinds of agricultural and water processing observations which could be made, and Willie the engineering freak of nature made them all. They are still talking today about what they did not understand from what Willie was saying.

Willie’s ability to impress the locals did not stop there because at my Konapet, he almost defecated in someone’s laundry room because Ah Kit convinced him that that’s how they do it that south in India.

My dad’s older cousin is the alpha for the five families related close to me in the village, and Suppiah was also a key leader at the village temple which was in a two-month carnival period.

There can be no mourning in the village during that period which avoided the womenfolk crying hard — as it was expected since they were all close to mom.

A bride belongs more to her husband’s community than her own family’s and they regarded my late father very highly. My mom dying was devastating for my aunts especially.

We promised to lunch there on our return from Rameshwaram.

For the books, the oddest team to take on Tamil Nadu have only the water behind them before heading back to Karaikudi.

We did not head to Rameshwaram until Willie was done reprimanding the driver for taking too many risks on the road. To those unaware of drivers in South India, know this, they are mad. The only luck you can have is to have one who is not completely loco.

By five we were on Pamban Bridge, connecting the mainland to the temple island. My mother never mentioned that Rameshwaram was an island with a temple at its tip. Fishing boats inundate the waters and heaps of people stop unannounced on the bridge, like us, to snap pictures.

We were booked at a hotel by the train station, and by 7pm Willie had already spotted novice mistakes in the WiFi settings for the hotel. The hotel employees fared better than the farmers at my uncle’s land.

We had tea and we were served by Abdul and John Kennedy. In the holy city where Lord Rama had allegedly contemplated before crossing the sea to Sri Lanka to free his imprisoned wife Sita, which resulted in a temple drawing crowds from all over India, it had to be that our waiters were a Muslim and a Christian giving us background information on the island’s Hindu elements.

Secular India is certainly a different kind of proposition.

We had an evening out before the temple rituals in the morning, and thanks to Abdul number two of our trip, we dumped the four-wheel drive at the hotel and walked to the only hotel with a bar, uncannily named Hotel Tamil Nadu and run by the state government.

Thanks to Abdul number two we bumped into Abdul number three, well not him but his home.

The backstreets through the city dwellings brought us past the family home of India’s ex-president Abdul Kalam. The poet is also the supposed founder of the Indian nuclear programme — pointing missiles at Karachi. Trust India to rely on a Muslim to present a nuclear deterrent to unyielding neighbours Pakistan.

Before there are images of wild nights in the temple city, the state run bar closes at 10pm and even the most run-down karaoke in Kuala Lumpur shows more liveliness. All of Tamil Nadu shuts its drinking facilities by 10pm, but it does not matter as I’m told the locals if they imbibe do so early and quick, and eat at home thereafter.

June 9

Everything begins at the break of dawn and we were late comers to the seaside next to the temple where rituals are carried out.

Eddie and I had to put on vaistais — white sarongs men wear at cultural and religious events — hire a priest with my cousin’s assistance and dip in the sea water. Hundreds of people performing their personal prayers beginning with salt on their lips.

I welcomed getting submerged in the water, even if Willie noticing what else was floating asked me to keep my mouth closed, because I was silly enough to walk the kilometre from the parking lot barefoot and the Indian summer day sun peaked by the time we concluded. Water gave my soles temporary reprieve.

Those who read me would have figured that I am not your vision of religious piety, I was doing this — the ritual — for mom.

Rameshwaram is famous for the performing of rites for the dearly departed and the adjacent temple was the first and last long distance trip my mother took before leaving India as a 16-year-old with her new husband. Pregnant, she promised to name her firstborn Ramesh, and wished for three more children when she was there.

She spoke always about that island, even if she was there only once. In a way, I want to feel what she felt when she was there. Am I an extension of that day?

The priest wanted me to repeat him, which is easier said than done since he was speaking in Sanskrit. The part I fancied was feeding bananas and paste-balls to the livestock roaming all over the seaside area. I did not fancy them dropping their load as they felt, where they felt like it.

The rituals were completed by a walk through the temple with stops at 22 wells. Willie and Ah Kit were as wet as Eddie and I by the time we completed our well tour. All’s well ends well never sounded truer.

Checked out and cleansed in and out, we did not leave Rameshwaram quite yet. There is a 15km drive with nothing on either side except sea, the final peninsula to the end of the republic, and Pandian drove us there.

Full tourist marks as the sea dominates the empty patch with only soft-sand large jeeps and desolate huts. Go India, and stand there. The words escape me.

It was way past lunch time and it was time to return to Karaikudi.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.