Six Months in Suryapet

It isn’t such a small town though I keep calling it a small town but it isn’t very big either. But if you consider that you need an autorickshaw to ferry you across town then one can call it a big town. Another thing, it’s got a CCD outlet, even if it is five kilometers out of town. A CCD outlet is something not many small towns in the country can boast of. As if having a CCD wasn’t enough for me, recently, another new joint opened on the opposite side of the town, this too five kilometers out of town and like CCD, on the highway. ‘7’ is the name of the place which is swank, neat and very hip considering its located in nowhere land. I’ve been there once and found it extremely good, notwithstanding the fact a masala dosa is forty bucks for which money I can get four in town.

No place that has three bus stands can be called small. Most towns I passed through had two. Suryapet has three, which makes it a big town. One is in the middle of the town, the Old Bus stand, which is not exactly a bus stand but a smallish ground where the buses enter. This is the place where most of the action is, with villagers swarming all over the place because this is the bus stand from where the buses to the surrounding villages start from. The road to the bus stand and around it abounds with the kind of small shops that sell things the villagers need to buy in a hurry. Then on the main road is another bus stand, the New Bus stand or Nalgonda bus stand where the buses to other places in the district stop. Finally, there’s the Hi-Tech bus stand, called so because the ‘Hi-Tech’ Express/Luxury/Volvo buses on their way to and from the capital stop. It is a long way off from the middle of the town from where the auto guys charge ten bucks to take you.

Anyway, that’s just to show how big (or small) Suryapet is. It even has an engineering college so that makes it not a very small town. However, it isn’t a town one can stay for too long in without getting portions of one’s brain permanently unhinged. Last week I completed six months of stay at Suryapet. Another six months and I could perhaps look forward to writing a book titled ‘A Year in Suryapet.’ It isn’t likely though because our office is going to shift to another town, the district headquarters of Nalgonda in another couple of months. In any event, what with I’ve experienced in Suryapet so far it is unlikely that I will write ‘A Year in Suryapet’, so rest easy.

But one experience that I found unforgettable is that of having one’s office bang next door to the local government hospital. It is quite distressing to be in such quite proximity to a hospital. On days when I don’t travel in villages I sit in my room in the office, just a few meters from the hospital that I can see through the window. Whenever I hear the sound of an ambulance siren coming closer to the hospital, I become anxious. A couple of minutes afterwards, depending on what the ambulance brought in, I hear loud wails of the women folk. It means that someone has died. The louder the wails the more tragic the death or the patient was a youngster. The next morning I read in the papers about it and feel sad for no reason. So that’s one thing in Suryapet I can never forget.