The road begins before you leave
You have not started driving yet and already the air has changed. Udupi does this, it pulls the salt in before you reach the sea. The Krishna Matha sits at the town's centre the way a full stop sits at the end of a sentence: everything arranges itself around it. You may not be religious. That does not matter here. The courtyard's stone is cool underfoot even in the afternoon, and the priests move through their work with the particular unhurriedness of people who are not performing for anyone. You eat a meal at one of the udupi restaurants that line the streets near the matha, not the exported, laminated-menu version, but the real one, where the sambar has tamarind in it that you can taste separately from the lentils, and the rice arrives in a quantity that assumes you are actually hungry. You leave Udupi not because you are finished with it but because the road is already asking.
