We planned a loop of temple towns—Madurai, Thanjavur, Mahabalipuram—and let the schedule breathe. Some mornings we had a plan, some days we simply followed the smell of filter coffee to the next street.
The towers of the Meenakshi temple at dusk were our favourite hour, all of us watching the colours change while the flower sellers packed up for the night. In Thanjavur, a temple priest spent twenty minutes explaining the shadow play of the Brihadeeswarar dome.
What we remember most is not the monuments but the rhythm—the temple bells, the banana-leaf lunches, the auto drivers who corrected our Tamil word by word. Ten days felt like a slow season of good news.
