Anasuya used to watch a show called "crystal maze"...yes..that was it"s name,during her school days, and would raise hell if we ever tried to change the channel.She was nuts on that show, ....A clean shaven(head too)anchor, used to host it, i remember,...who collected a bunch of youngsters around him and all of them would run from one maze to another,.... to find the crystal.

I think that was exactly what came to my mind as me and the husband almost ran alongside a sixty plus man, who dragged his left leg ,-- which never quite recovered after a paralytic attack,he informed us,-- as he took us across the twenty two wells in the Ramanath temple.He accosted us on our way back from the beach,...He was a haqdaar,...or you could say...someone who had rights over drawing water from the temple wells,having bought them at an auction and only he and some other persons, who also bought those rights were entitled to draw water from the wells. So all the people who had to take those holy baths necessarily had to pay him for each bucket he drew up.

So, what do u say?,he asked us?.

My husband and he haggled for sometime over the fees , finally agreeing at a mutually acceptable point.Then like Pete..or was it mike? "o"Brien or whoever it was,in crystal maze,he raced us , through the queues,with a speed that was amazing for a man handicapped by both age and disability.He would draw two buckets ,up the wells painstakingly,pour them over us...would not even hear when we , feeling ashamed to be served by an older man ,told him that one bicket was enough.He seemed to think it would compromise his code of work ethics if he did that.


Now to have an idea of the topography of these wells...The temple, which was a huge one,had massive prakarams skirting it on four sides..,and within them there were many inner prakarams and corridors,many other smaller temples,courtyards....the wells were situated among them.,at different places ..well only twenty were wells.. One was a pond, the other one was a sort of pipe through which holy water flowed and emptied into a container ot a sort of tub...The wells never dry up, though it was no surprise because after all they were almost in the sea bed,...the sea being just a quarter of furlong away...They were not too deep either..ofcource you need not go deep in coastal areas...you dig up three feet,,and the water would start filling up.They were pleasantly cool,and my husband who even tasted them, vouch faced to be varying. in taste.some were quite salty,,some not so salty.


At the beginning, i felt a bit diffident about this public bathing...I never did it, i protested.."who do u think u are?" my husband, was amused to ask me.."certainly no Elizabeth Taylor"i remarked, but nevertheless felt very shy .If it were not for the ritual, i would have done with just a sprinkling of some on my head, but once i entered the game...so to speak,..it was fun to play with water under the pleasant open skies, and air..just like my childhood.


We went in,sometime later,for the darshan , and bowed before the lord and his consort, where my forefathers once bowed,and went back with their supplications fulfilled.Unlike at the meenakshi temple,here i was...under oath, to be back again.