To treat the unexpected success of our last son in his Exam
We have to arrange some thing - tension free.
“Let it be a tour” suggestion came from family circle.
But, to where? His mother suggested a name of place never I familiar before.
She got it from her previous Wayanad group tour with our Gulf members. They usually get tour in Kerala in Monsoon season because it coincided with their holiday.
She remembers the announcement from the bus by then tour leader (it was not other than my elder brother, Mehmood KP) “ Sorry dears, due to the technical reason we cannot forward to Kuruwa Dweep.” Remembering this, ‘Kuruwa’ now becomes her ambition and our destination.
We, 13 family members, reached the starting point of the Kuruwa at noon with joy and appreciated the scenic views before crossing it. It was really a splendid creation of the nature, but as if it has hidden some mysteries. It is not mere an island, but a set of some islets surrounded by shallow water with full of sharp and slippery rocks. To reach every islet we had to cross through these bridgeless ‘sirath’ several times. Children were actually with the hilarious dream to play in the shallow water between these islets. As some one said, ‘every win has a pain’ we suffered lot to cross through this devil’s lake. Some fell by slippery and some one’s legs trapped in granite trammel inside the water. Fact is that we had no options other than to face these obstacles, because we are at the middle of the destiny (destination). It was heard that some of us was whispering ‘nafsy,nafsy’ (save me, save me) while crossing this ‘mahshara like situation. It has said that in ‘mahshara’ there will be expectation of heaven after miseries, but here we had only the repetition of this painful crossing and walking through the jungle part.
However, it is interesting that at the middle of these hardships children are swimming, playing, spraying with water with hilarious joy.
We returned to the starting point at 6 evening after painful but successful trip. Any way, now, when we remembering it, we seem proud to take the adventure and thanks to the God by saving us all from the devil surrounded the island, which we later knew about, even if some say it is a superstition.
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The Devil’s Pool,
By Paulo Coelho
I am looking at a lovely natural pool near the village of Babinda in Australia.
A young Aborigine boy comes over to me.
‘Be careful, you don’t slip,’ he says.
Rocks, apparently quite safe to walk on, surround the small pool.
“This place is called Devil’s Pool” the boy goes on. ”Many year ago
Oolona, a beautiful Aborigine girl who was married to a warrior from Babinda,
fell in love with another man. They fled into these mountains; but the husband found them. The lover escaped, but Oolona was murdered here in these waters.
Ever since then, Oolona thinks that every man who comes near is her lost love,
and she kills him with her watery embrace”
Later on, I asked the owner of the small hotel about the Devil’s pool.
“It might just be superstition”, he says, :but the fact that eleven tourist have died there in the last ten years, and they were all men”
Selected from the book of Paulo's Short Stories compilations- "Like the flowing River"
