To the Gangetic Plains...With Love [2]

“...Longed a lot for thine streets,

Ich took a bath in despair blood…”

A popular number from the bollywood echoed in the corridor of the women's hostel revealing the shadows of the unspoken aspirations and nurtured dreams. The monsoon clouds reached the north of the country in July, and thus brought a respite to the scorching summer. Alamelu takes bath twice in a day in dettol diluted water and washes her hair after applying coconut oil. This north Indian city is filthy, noisy, crowded and polluted unlike her serene and green village in the south. 
It is the first day of her training in Allahabad, and she does her daily rituals of prayer after which she takes a moist mixture of sandalwood paste and saffron powder and draws a slender horizontal line with it on her forehead beneath the bindi. A crisp yellow Poochampally cottton saree suited her wheatish complexion and a three inch heeled footwear added height to her medium stature. She looked in the mirror to see if any hair strand popped out of her long neatly patted and plaited curly locks. All seemed perfect except her emerald eyes, which she inherited from her grandmother. Alamelu Subramani would have gone unnoticed like any other medium statured,dark Indian girl had it not been for her green eyes and chiselled features. She had a  deadly gorgeous combination of dark skin and light eyes like that of the people found around the Mediterranean. Alamelu grabbed the kohl stick and highlighted her jewel in the face. From Ghayassudinpur where she lived, it would hardly take half of an hour by a three wheeler. She boarded one with other two trainees of her batch and told the driver of the vehicle " Railway Colony." 
...[ to be continued]