Puri Travel Diary: Walking Beside My Mother Through Odisha's Spiritual Heart

“Tomorrow?”

My mother stopped what she was doing and looked at me as if I had said something impossible.

“The train is tomorrow, and you’re telling me now?”

I nodded, trying to look more confident than I felt.

I had managed to book Tatkal tickets from Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction to Bhubaneswar less than a day before our departure. We didn’t have a return ticket, and we certainly didn’t have a hotel. My brother sent me the contact number of a stay in Puri, and I called immediately. The manager spoke only in Odia. I don’t speak the language, and he didn’t switch to Hindi either. Somehow, between repeated sentences, long pauses and a lot of guessing, we managed to understand each other well enough to book a room. When I ended the call, I looked at my mother and said, “At least we’ll have somewhere to sleep.”

The following morning, while I was still checking whether I had packed everything, she was already in the kitchen making puri and sabzi. Some things don’t change, no matter how suddenly a trip is planned. According to her, homemade food is as essential to a train journey as the tickets. By the time we left home, the steel tiffin had found its place inside one of our bags.

There is a rhythm to Indian train journeys that makes strangers feel familiar. Someone is always looking for the correct seat, someone is offering homemade snacks to the family across the aisle, and every few minutes, a tea vendor walks through the compartment calling out for customers. We opened our tiffin after a while and shared the meal my mother had packed. It tasted exactly as it always does, yet somehow better.

The journey ended in Bhubaneswar, where the cab I had booked was already waiting for us. Before leaving the city behind, we stopped at a roadside tea stall. It wasn’t the kind of place that appears on travel lists. A few plastic chairs, a kettle that never seemed to leave the stove, and people stopping for a quick cup before continuing wherever they were headed. We stood there with our chai, stretching our legs after the long train ride, before getting back into the car.

As the road drew closer to Puri, the weather began to change. Dark clouds gathered overhead, and by the time we reached our stay, rain had arrived. We watched it from our room, listening to it drum against the windows while the tiredness of the journey slowly caught up with us.

When we finally stepped outside, the town felt refreshed. The roads were still damp, the breeze had turned cooler, and my mother wrapped a shawl around herself before we started walking towards the beach. The sea announced itself gradually.

First came the smell of food drifting through the air—seafood sizzling on hot pans, roasted corn turning over charcoal, and jhalmuri vendors calling people over as they mixed mustard oil, onions and spices into paper cones with practised hands. Then came the crowd. Families wandered along the promenade, children chased each other with glowing toys, photographers negotiated with tourists, and shopkeepers tried to persuade passers-by to stop for a look.

The sea waited behind all of it. As we moved closer, the conversations around us slowly gave way to the sound of the waves. The beach was crowded, but the water had a way of making everything else seem distant.

I walked ahead without thinking. My mother didn’t. She stayed where the sand was still dry, watching the waves from a safe distance. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go near the water. She was trying to convince herself that she didn’t. So I walked back and held out my hand for her.

She laughed, but after a few minutes, slipped her hand into mine. We walked slowly until the water reached her feet. The first wave was enough to make her stop.

“Bas,” she said. “This is enough.”

After a while, she stopped stepping back each time the water reached us. The hesitation was still there, but it had made room for something else. She began looking at the sea instead of worrying about it.

“Take a picture,” she said suddenly.

That surprised me. A few minutes earlier, she hadn’t even wanted to come anywhere near the water. She stood awkwardly, unsure of what to do with her hands, laughing every time another wave interrupted her attempt to pose. Looking through those photographs later, I realised the best ones were the ones where she had forgotten I was holding a camera.

We brushed the sand off our feet and wandered back towards the promenade. A jhalmuri seller was busy mixing the ingredients in a steel bowl with the speed of someone who had done it thousands of times before. We ordered one packet to share, followed by a roasted corn that disappeared almost as quickly.

It was only when we realised how crowded the beach had become that we decided to head to the Jagannath Temple instead. After a quick stop at our stay to change, we took an auto towards Grand Road. The driver could go only as far as the barricades, so we joined everyone else on foot. Once inside, I found myself paying attention to things I usually wouldn’t: the sound of temple bells carrying through the crowd, the priests calling out instructions, people whispering prayers under their breath as they waited for their turn. There was nothing to photograph and nowhere else to look. A few moments later, we stood before Lord Jagannath.

The darshan itself lasted only a short while, but it didn’t feel hurried. When we came out, we found a place to sit inside the temple complex and stayed there for some time, watching devotees arrive with the same anticipation we had felt only a little earlier. We picked up dinner from a small vegetarian restaurant on the way back and ate in our room, talking about everything except the places we had visited. The conversation wandered from family stories to things waiting for us back home. Looking back, I realise those conversations are what I remember most from travelling together. They rarely happened with the same ease in the middle of everyday life.

The sea looked different the next time we met it.

The beach near our stay was quieter than the one we had visited on our first evening. We left our slippers near the shore, walked into the water for a few minutes and then settled under a shack with fresh coconut water. It was there, without any prompting from me, that my mother began talking about the last time she had come to Puri.

“I came here with your father,” she said, looking towards the sea rather than at me. “We were both scared of the water.”

I smiled. “Really? Papa too?”

“He wouldn’t admit it,” she laughed. “But yes, he was. He stood there for a long time before finally walking ahead. I kept telling him not to go too far. Then he turned around and asked me to come.”

She paused, almost as if she was watching that moment play out again. For a while, we sat quietly, each of us looking at the same stretch of water, though I suspect we were seeing different things.

Then she looked at me and smiled.

“This time, you were the one asking me.”

It was such a simple sentence that it could easily have slipped past me. Instead, it stayed.

That afternoon, we wandered through Grand Road again, stopped for lunch and spent the rest of the day exactly as we wanted to; without checking off places or looking at maps. By then, Puri had begun to feel familiar enough that we didn’t mind repeating ourselves. We found ourselves back on the beach with another paper cone of jhalmuri in our hands, laughing at the fact that it had quietly become part of our routine.

The following day was reserved for Konark, though the morning had a different plan in store for us. My mother wasn’t feeling well when she woke up, and for a few minutes, I wondered if we should skip the trip altogether. There was a small clinic near our stay, so we walked there first, and once the doctor cleared her to travel, we set off.

The road to Konark ran alongside stretches of greenery, with the sea appearing every now and then before disappearing again. By the time we reached the temple, the sun had become unforgiving, so my mother decided to rest in the shaded waiting area outside while I went in.

I had seen photographs of the Konark Sun Temple countless times, but standing before it was different. The stone wheels, the carvings and the scale of the monument demanded more attention than any school textbook had ever prepared me for. I walked around slowly, trying to take in the details. Afterwards, I bought two coconut waters and headed back to where my mother was waiting.

Our next stop was Chandrabhaga Beach. Compared with the beach in Puri, it felt quieter, with fewer people scattered along the shoreline. We found a shack, ordered tea and watched the sea for a while. My mother was content to sit there while I wandered closer to the water.

After a few minutes, I heard her call my name.

“Come here. Let me take a picture.”

I handed her my phone without asking any questions. She adjusted it carefully, asked me to stand still and clicked several photographs with complete confidence. When she gave the phone back, I opened the gallery. One picture had far too much sky. Another had mostly sand. In one, I was standing so close to the edge that it looked as though I had accidentally walked into someone else’s photograph.

We looked at each other and burst into laughter.

“I tried,” she said between laughs.

“I know,” I replied. “And that’s why I’m not deleting any of them.”

Those photographs still sit in my phone. They aren’t the kind you frame or post online, but they remind me of that afternoon far better than a perfectly composed picture ever could.

Back in Puri, we spent our last evening doing what we had done throughout the trip, walking without a fixed plan. We stopped near the temple market to try the sweets everyone had been recommending. I liked the malai puri immediately, but chhena poda wasn’t quite to my taste. Before leaving, we packed a few boxes of khaja to take home for family and friends.

The next morning, our bags waited quietly by the door. The steel tiffin that had travelled with us from home was empty now, but I still slipped it carefully into my bag. Somehow, it felt just as much a part of the journey as the train tickets I had booked in such a hurry.

When people think of Puri, they usually think of the temple, the beaches or the food. I’ll remember all of those, too. I’ll remember the smell of roasted corn mixing with the salty breeze, sharing paper cones of jhalmuri, sitting in the temple after darshan, and watching the evening gather around the sea.

But whenever I think about that trip, my mind returns to one small moment. A woman who had insisted she would stay away from the water stood at the edge of the sea with her hand in mine.