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Running, panting, laughing we stepped onto the afternoon ferry that almost left without us. Like everything Indian, the ferry was overbooked and we spilled onto the edge of the seating area, standing on the sternum with ten other strangers. We stood with just a railing between us and the vast expanse of the glistening sea. The wind was bellowing and the sun was shining upon us, in all it’s afternoon strength. It took me back to the early mornings, standing in the balcony with a view to nowhere. My feet against the cool tiled floor, surrounded by dewy house plants in an unknown town that belonged to unknown people. I could hear the birds chirping, along with strange insects and crickets that sang their cadences from night till morning as I stood with a hot cup of coffee that was made up of 70% water just like me. I imagined my toes slipping into the sand of the abandoned beach and being surrounded by people I would go on to call my friends. The distant laughter rang true in my head. The cool salty sea, brushing against me, as I stood there knee deep. The expanse of the horizon in-front of me and the hilly forests at my back. The ever changing colours of the sky, that encompassed within itself all shades of pink, blue, orange and purple all at once. I remembered the changing scenery of just endless roads. The roads bended, converged, diverged, that went up and then down. Terrains I was familiar with, all encompassed into one. To never knew what the destination was until I reached there. To not know what the day’s schedule was, to leave the room with a tiny backpack with barely any survival kits and even lesser money. To not look at the GPS or the hundred other social media accounts I made to stay in constant touch with my friends. To be unplugged, I guess. I remembered, that the town was a part of a war that no one remembered, with memorials in English, that was legible to very few and affected even fewer. I remembered being curious about it and then going on a search for the burial grounds. Grounds that didn’t exist according to the people. Maybe they never understood us, or what we were searching for, or why. The kind auto-rickshaw driver, who accompanied us to every cemetery that he knew of and then wandered with us in the lanes with old abandoned buildings, covered with moss on both sides of the road, until we came across it. Neither did we know anyone who had died in the war, nor was the cemetery well kept. Yet, on the last day, of the beautiful isolated town, full of beaches and painted skies, this was the first thing we set out to do. I remembered the kind tea-stall owner, Sayali Raul who greeted us with a shy sheepish smile. One of us engaged with her and made small talk, while waiting for the bus to arrive. For every Indian, morning chai is a staple that can’t be missed no matter where you are. So, with tea in hand, I was still soaking in the air of that strange town, recollecting what had transpired just a few hours ago when, from the tin roof of her stall, she revealed from a secret pocket, a torn book bitten at the edges. It read Sayalichi Phule, a collection of poetry written by her. She read out one of her recent written poetry in Marathi and while I could barely string the words together, there was an aura of wonder and empowerment. She held us captive with her passion and read us her poem- “A woman should break away the boundaries that the men and society have set for her.” The coincidental conversation seemed so ordinary, but her words had spun magic. Stepping back to the hustle and bustle of Mumbai, nothing seemed to have changed. Come Monday morning, we went back to the grind of assignments. Alibaug existed, only in memory and old photographs after all we were strangers to the town who now carried with them, a piece of its story.