Andhra Again!

Childhood recollections remain enshrined in our hearts forever and nothing can be as wondrous as returning to a place blurred by the passage of time—and, suddenly, miraculously, finding words, sights and flavours rising from the depths of memory!

- Malavika Bhattacharya

Twenty-seven years. That’s how long it had been. Now here I was again, zipping through the streets of a once familiar, but now entirely alien city in Andhra Pradesh. The Andhra Pradesh of the late 1980s no longer exists, of course, now that the state of Telangana has been carved out of it.

As I pulled out of the new terminal at Vijayawada’s Gannavaram Airport, nearly three decades after the last time I was here, I did not know what to expect. I was returning to a place whose language I had clean forgotten, whose sights were a blur at best, whose flavours I had never grown to love; yet this was the place that was my home for the very first years of my life. Those early years, from zero until three, had been spent in a creaky circular bungalow in the coastal town of Machalipatnam, just outside Vijayawada, with frequent visits to the “big city” for our shopping needs, or to board a train to Delhi. Now, in the year I turned the big three zero, here I was, back in Vijayawada, back in that same swathe of land along the Krishna river, dotted with low-rise buildings with peeling yellow facades and dishevelled government offices.

Except, this time, these visuals existed only in the recesses of my mind. Driving out of the shiny new airport terminal, I sped past a swanky Toyota showroom, an INOX Cineplex, and modern shopping and dining outlets. A somewhat bizarre sight caught my attention: looming blue-green sculptures of the characters from the film Avatar stood calmly in a park. Vijayawada had modernised, and how!