Kodaikanal is not loaded with “things to see.” The ridge, the slopes, and the valleys are beautiful, the air is cool, and those aspects are certainly a break for the visitor from the plain below. Nevertheless there was one place I wanted to visit – the solar observatory at the high end of Observatory Road. I’d been up the hill before on another errand but when I turned off, there was hill above me and since they build observatories where there is a clear view of the sky, there was still a distance to go both horizontally as well as straight up.
After some inquiries I found I had two conflicting bits of information and while both agreed that the observatory would be open on Friday, neither agreed on the time. Now that coupled with my absent mind, weeks went by until I made a firm plan to visit. When I pay Rs. 60 to endanger my life in a taxi, I want to make sure of seeing what I set out to see and not be walking around at cloud level with nothing to look at. Yesterday (Friday January 25th) was to be the day. The cab ride up the road was pretty. We drove up the same catchment in which the lake lies, which was off to our left. The vernacular stone houses, the humble ones as well, always hold my attention. I have said before that Kodaikanal is not packed together as a flat ground town would be whether Madurai or Manhattan. Green spaces here are natural, usually caused by the impossibility of building on the grade and too there are enough institutions around to keep people from building one on top of another as you see on the plains.
Arriving at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics I signed in at the gate and walked the last kilometer to the museum. Inside the walls were covered with poster-sized NASA color prints with text. Up near the ceiling, pictures of past directors hung. The observatory goes back to the mid 1880s and so the directors’ corner was populated with men in suits from a collection of decades. In a room on the north side of the building, there was a projection of the sun on a screen. There were several visitors and the uniformed guide/guard explained several points about the sun. The problem for me is that he spoke the local language, Tamil.
Since I carried a small scope from place to place for a little over 40 years, I was familiar with looking for sunspots when the sun’s image is projected on anything clean, white, and smooth. I squinted at the image, which was probably about two feet across and I think I saw a few solar storms. I say “think” because visitors or staff had used ballpoint pens to mark sunspot locations and either permanently marked the screen surface or else no one had ever bothered to wipe off the screen. It wasn’t their job.
It must be the Year of the Quiet Sun because among the pen marks, I found very few sunspots, perhaps three or four. It may be that the staff failed to focus the apparatus. A projection like this one is not a sophisticated observation problem. I believe that it was Galileo who first projected the solar disk onto something white. Any scope or probably even binoculars will do. The biggest challenge is to prop up the scope where it won’t move but back to the mutilated screen. Had someone hung a fresh piece of paper in the screen position each day, first, you could seen the solar disturbances clearer and two, you could keep track of them by saving the paper screens with notations from days before. The sun rotates. It takes roughly a month for a full turn around and that is approximate because of the gases at different latitudes move at different speeds. Outdoors something else was going on.
I walked round outside of the museum and found the reflecting mirror that directed the sunlight into the building. The apparatus had a flat mirror which was housed in a roll-away shed on tracks. Were it to rain (and this area is subject to the monsoon,) the shed protects the mechanism that turns the mirror. I had never seen a machine like that. It measured about three feet long, about the same height, and about two feet wide. There was a small electric motor with a Watt type governor that controlled the speed of a cogwheel which was set at right angles to another matching wheel. Too often the works of a machine are covered or else the parts are moving so fast as not to show how it works; this was the exception. You could follow the twisting axle to a worm drive that engaged another cogwheel and so on until you got to the mirror that reflected a six inch beam of sunshine across the yard, through a missing pane of glass in the window and into the museum. From there the light went into a projector and onto the screen - the one with the marks from ball point pens.
After pretty well figuring out how the works functioned, I was joined by some other visitors. Since people show up in Kodaikanal from all parts of India, I don’t know where anyone was from but the only requirement in this case was that they understand English.
“Good Morning, Institute Visitors! My name is John Hallum and I am a ranger for the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. This machine you see here…..” I really didn’t do it that way but I did begin a short interpretation on solar astronomy and this machine, which could track the sun, more or less. About every fifteen or twenty minutes, a guide/guard would come out for a fine adjustment. Had I felt like I had to cook a cover story for the staff member, I could have blamed the lack of synchronization on the elliptical orbit of Earth. And how the manufacturer, T. Cook of London, couldn’t have compensated for the ellipse. But the machine was simply out of whack and an adjustment three times an hour was better than hiring a laborer to sit there holding a mirror for five hours every Friday. The visitors overlooked any design defects in either machine or lecturer. It seemed that everyone had a good time. I certainly did.
There was still some uphill left to climb and so up I went past the tunnel where, I think, they study the sun’s spectrum. I must check on that when I meet someone who has done the operation. At this observatory, there was a long tunnel off to one side. About every 25 or 30 feet there was a ventilator coming up from the tunnel. The idea being that they need to keep the air temperature stable so as not to distort the sun’s image with “heat waves.”
Even farther up the ridge stood an observatory with a dome at either end of the building, each with a scope and each for stellar study.
I decided that I wouldn’t take a taxi on the way home. The weather was near perfect and I could use the exercise. After all it was all downhill.
About halfway down the ridge, I thought a break might be good. A woman, who had never heard of the Tower of Babel, came out from where she and some others were building a house and asked me to phone someone. I must look like a card carrying cell phone operator and a Tamil speaker to boot. Finally a man dressed in a blindingly white long shirt and dhoti joined us and she took up the matter with him. She dressed in a bright and spotless sari typical of women construction workers. While his clothes were as clean as hers, he was not doing construction work because you can’t work if you keep both your hands behind your back. While these two sorted out the lady’s problem, I crossed the road to see what the growling was all about.
There was a troop of maybe twenty-five monkeys of all ages up a stand of gum trees. Their problem was that while they’d been checking out a sack of garbage, someone tossed down a gulch beside the road, they’d been joined by a couple of dogs. The dogs took over the rubbish and the monkeys took to the trees. About two limbs from the lowest on one tree sat the boss monkey. He weighed almost as much as the dogs but while he had a terrible growl, he wouldn’t come down and bite. The dogs took their time sniffing through the trash and only when they left off sniffing and walked beneath the tree, did the monkeys make an aggressive move. And that was all it was. The dogs went on their way ignoring the threat and the old monkey and the rest of the troop reclaimed the rubbish. I walked on.
The hillside offers beautiful views and the rich and poor both must enjoy living on the slope. The rich enjoy driving their cars uphill and past their guards stationed in little houses about the size of an outhouse. Somebody got busy and produced a bunch of them with a good pitch to the roof. Since the guard shacks are small enough to be loaded on a flatbed, I suspect many were built in a shop and then moved on site.
The Class A building material in the area is squared and dressed stone. Most of the villas are built with stone. A few of the villas have guard houses built to match. The yards are planted and kept up well by gardeners. Since these estates are “tipped up on edge” because of the slope, you get a good view of the grounds.
The houses of the poor are made with rubble - stone without any particular shape. Between the facing on the inside of the house and that on the outside, there is a filling of dirt. I don’t know how it works. There should be a bond between the two but…. The examples of this kind of building are never over one story. They use the technique for garden walls as well. Occasionally you’ll see a tumbled down house. Whether it was structural failure or whether the house was abandoned for other reasons, I don’t know. The guarding in the case of the poor is done by dogs or chickens. And the climb up the hill must keep the family healthy until they get to be my age anyhow. The slope from the road to the house is often steep enough to require building steps.
Several times I saw women walking down the hill with loads of firewood on their heads. The wood looked green but none of the sticks were over three inches in diameter. Green or not, being that small, the wood should dry quickly. The wood is for sale in town but the ladies could be wood gathering for themselves as well.
Even going downhill with plenty of breaks, the sun was warm enough to make me carry my jacket over my shoulder. I was pretty well dried out by the time I crossed “the bund,” a dam with a road over it. This was a privately built structure that backed up water across a swamp and formed the lake I visit several times a week. I climbed up the opposite hill to a venerable establishment called Spencer’s. It is the first grocery store I’ve found in India. Nothing flashy. It reminded me of a village store in the Alaskan bush. High ceilings and a long shotgun lay out. No shopping carts. There is not a big selection of anything but the stocking clerks were meticulously dusting and arranging their wares. I picked up a bottle of water. As it was early in the afternoon, it had been a long dry morning since coffee at breakfast. I found a place to sit outside and drank the whole liter. I walked on to PT Road and went to see my Tibetan friend. He made me a pot of ginger/lemon tea, my new addiction, and I read my pocket book, licked shaker salt off the back of my hand, and soaked up that pot of tea. After two and a half pounds of liquid, I felt better. Nothing broken, worn out, injured, and now being reliquefied I felt squared away. Tomorrow, the “Talking Library.”
#
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Monday, January 14, 2008
Shelter
The first trip across India we had limited time and money so long term shelter was not of interest. We stayed in temples, first-class waiting rooms at railway stations, and on rare occasions hotels. If you’ve read all the entries I’ve posted, you may remember the grim “retiring rooms” at the Mumbai’s Victoria Station. Part of the problem there was that first you had to have a ticket out of Mumbai, secondly, I couldn’t get a ticket because everyone wanted to go home, and thirdly, so did I. Well actually I wanted to go someplace other than Mumbai. I only saw the rooms from the outside but they looked to be able to double as prison cells and indeed may have. Between the heat and the bars on the windows, I bought a bus ticket to get out of town. And since that time, I’ve not gone looking for “retiring rooms.”
It seems that the days of crashing in railway first-class waiting rooms are over. For the historians the way that worked was that you came through the door into the waiting room and tossed your pack on a couch. The keeper of the room came out to ask you to register. You signed in and at that time you gave him something under twenty-five cents and he went away happy. We too were happy because we had a safe place to leave our packs and a comfortable couch to curl up on in our sleeping bags. There was a clean restroom connected to the waiting room. Life was further simplified because in the 1,549 recognized languages of India, all rickshaw drivers knew what, “railway station” meant. You might get lost on the way out but never on the way back.
For a stay of several days there were the temples. The Sikhs welcome all people as family. I can’t remember ever accepting their hospitality but it was genuine. We stayed at the Bengal Buddhist Society at Calcutta for several days. You paid what you wanted to. The cells were bare but safe behind a padlock. There were showers, but cold water only, and that was winter. Not freezing cold but you got wet, stopped the water, soaped up, rinsed off, stopped the water again, and dried off. All this you did quickly. Once when God was in an unusually good mood, He taught Man how to heat water.
I busted the history exam in New Delhi. We heard about the Birla Temple and upon asking for a room were told that we needed a letter from the American Embassy saying that we were in need. The story with the embassy was that if you were in need, they wanted to ship you back to the States as an indigent so while they didn’t want to give us the note, they relented. That was nice of them.
The temple was covered with heavy marble and had a low deep chant piped through the halls. As with the Calcutta temple, the Birla was very clean but Spartan. There had been another Spartan who stayed there nearly twenty years before but it would be close to thirty years before I would know of his residency. Several days went by and then we took our leave. My wife had heard that there was a garden in the compound and wanted me to go with her to see it. I was impatient to get going so I stayed with the packs while she found and walked through the garden. Upon returning, she seemed in something of a daze and to have more questions than were answered. She said that the garden was pretty but that was all she said. Many years later I saw a PBS production and a film on Gandhi and the Birla Temple was where he lived at the end of his life. He was shot to death while walking in the garden.
Often an old mansion is turned into a hotel. We stayed in one the first night in Calcutta. The dinning room could seat the entire staff of civil servants during the Raj or at least above a certain grade. Equally interesting was the plumbing for the bathtub. The tub was a claw and ball arrangements and could double as a horse trough. The contraption that heated the water over the tub seemed to be designed by several people beginning just after the Battle of Plassey and ending after Independence with an equal number of plumbers. There was a vertical tank about eight inches in diameter and about three or four feet high. I can’t remember if it was gas or electrically heated but I’ve never seen so many ideas as to how the tank should really be plumbed. What if this thing is plugged somehow and failed to vent? We could be scalded! Well of course we lived but I’ll die wondering just how the water was heated and which way the water flowed through those pipes. Some things were preserved after the British quit India and while lying stretched out in this horse trough, you have time to wonder at this 19th century wonder.
The manager, Bosco, a small man with the dimensions of a tennis ball and with the attending bounce, at the hotel in Panaji, said that an old house had been converted into the Hotel Republica but the owner, Said, said that the old hotel was just an old hotel. It’s most important improvement, I thought, was a ceiling fan. Bosco was very proud of its English bathroom, which means that the bathroom no longer had a squat toilet. The toilets that it did have were probably recycled from a house or hotel, which had been torn down. The toilets had seen some hard use and had been scrubbed sometime ago with sand or pumice. Upon seeing that that was probably a mistake, they gave up the effort and never cleaned the device again. An English bathroom means also that there was a shower head. In Goa you don’t need a water heater. You live in one. A shower reminded me of swimming in an unheated pool and drying off beneath the ceiling fan was a slow process but it was the one time during the day when you’d be sure to be cool. The Republica charged about eleven or twelve dollars U.S. per day. Bosco was very adamant that tonight’s rent be paid the first thing every morning. There were no extra charges for the lizards who kept the room pretty much bug free but the lizards did defecate. You didn’t want to use the lights at night for fear it would attract the malaria carrying mosquito. I got to sleep early in Goa with the fan swinging overhead. More than once I lay in the semidarkness (stray light comes up from the street) and wondered when the fan would break its wire support and drop.
I stayed in Goa a month getting shots, getting over my Asiatic cold, and finding someway to get money from my U.S. account into my pocket in India. Because of the duration, I became attached to this corner of the Indian oven. After all, I had witnessed a historic moment at the old Republica. One afternoon when I was trying to take a nap, someone knocked at the door. I opened to find and to be pushed aside by a group of about five men. Bosco led the men. If anyone asks you how many men it takes to hook up a TV in a hotel in Goa, the answer is five. There went my writing table as well as my nap. By subcontinent standards, the television was of high quality in Goa. I found two programs that I would recommend to you – one on the history of the Forbidden City and the other a David Attenborough production on snakes. Since that time I’ve had to be satisfied by Animal Planet as high art. If you are not a watcher, it normally amounts to an overweight male actor chasing an alligator through a swamp or visa versa. The alligator never wins.
The other hotels I’ve stayed in during the southern swing, either cost less or perhaps provided soap, towels, and toilet paper. With the exception of the Republica, you could ask for room service if you wanted. During Diwali I sent a fellow off to bring food. Fried bread, gravy, and a bottle of water. I take pleasure in the simple things of life especially surviving the Festival of Joy.
The Coaker’s Tower at Kodaikanal was the most expensive room I took, about $18 U.S. but while I left the towel, I kept the bath soap. It was very clean and had the clouds in the valley cooperated, I would have had a very good view from my window, all of which is figured in with the price of soap. Coaker’s tower was the quietest place I stayed. The J.C. (nothing to do with Jesus but I did ask) Grand is right across from the bus stand and that place is as noisy as a cockpit during a fight.
As for noise, school trips and groups of young men (not the guys at Kanyakumari. They behaved) but a bunch of company boys get together and make up their own tour. Lots of yelling up and down the hall, TV full blast, it would never occur to them that there was anybody in the world. This is not arrogance so much as an outgrowth of considering self against the backdrop of a population of 1.2 billion people. On a school trip, one kid tried out all the doorbells on my floor. He wasn’t being mean or disruptive but just trying to amuse himself until his group left the hotel. Thank goodness they never stay over one night. One day in the early afternoon, I heard voices, but not shouts, outside my room. I looked out into the hall and there were perhaps thirty middle aged to old women and one or two men. Everybody had lined up in an orderly manner and lunch of rice and the entrée was being served right in the hallway. I said hello to everybody as I went along the hallway and then downstairs to ask the desk clerk what was what. This was a tour group from West Bengal down to enjoy the Hills. They were all teachers. A chow line in a corridor of a hotel was new to me.
Before I leave life at the J.C. Grand, there is the matter of the shower. Indians are hell on personal cleanliness. Any stories you hear about the condition of urban India does not have anything to do with the way they keep themselves. John Jacobs, who got me on the train at Ernakulam, told me under his breath, “The people in Tamil-Nadu are not so clean and we in Kerala.” He saw I was surprised and he went on, “Yes, they bathe only once a day.” Since I did as well, I wanted to hear more. “Yes, when you called me, I was in the bath. That is the reason why I did not answer my cell.”
Having remembered the heat, the best times for a wash-up in Kerala should be before bed and about eleven a.m. or noon. John preferred a shower just before bed and first thing in the morning. Now that I live in Tamil-Nadu, I’ve settled on the first thing in the morning. It takes a half-hour to warm the water and I can doze away the last half-thoughts of sleep while the water heats.
But regardless where you are in India, it is not uncommon to see a boy or man wash himself in the street or a river or where ever he finds water and a way to ladle it above his head. They wear the dhoti untucked so that the hem drops to the ankles then they pour water over their head, liter after liter from a pitcher. Whether soap is used, I couldn’t tell. If you are drenching yourselves twice a day, it could be that soap can be dispensed with.
The J.C. Grand has a European toilet in the bathroom as well as a hot water heater but the bather mixes hot and cold water in a five gallon bucket. No soap, towels, or toilet paper but they did provide a pitcher to pour water over your head. While this system is not as water conservative as the gravity feed showers I used in Queensland or Alaska, the pitcher over the head works to the point that I’ve become accustomed to putting the whole operation on auto-pilot and thinking pleasant thoughts about the coming day only to discover that I’m squeaky clean. I suspect that things are different at the Carlton.
You can rent a house much less than a hotel room with the understanding that you’ll be in town for a while. Just for a figure about $5.00 per night, $150 a month. I passed on that. There was only one house within easily walking distance of the part of town where I like to stay. That house was very pretty with a lush garden but I had a promoter between me and the landlord and when he said thirteen dollars a night, I decided I’d stick with the hotel. The cleaning lady and the dhobi wallah show up regularly.
While I don’t intend on settling in Calcutta, I have it on good authority (a call center voice) that you can get a nice apartment in a good section of town (Victoria Memorial area) for $135 per month. In the Himalayas for a hotel with meals is about $450 a month.
A single occupancy at the Carlton runs Rs. 5,000 about $125 per night and a double is a thousand more. You get a rowing skiff (you do the rowing) for a half-hour free. It’s my understanding that the price covers food as well.
Regardless of other surprises, the price of living was pretty much what I expected. There are some things more expensive. The dhobi wallah cost more than a laundry mat in Alaska. But you are not expected to watch televised game shows. Somehow I’ll learn to live with it.
#
It seems that the days of crashing in railway first-class waiting rooms are over. For the historians the way that worked was that you came through the door into the waiting room and tossed your pack on a couch. The keeper of the room came out to ask you to register. You signed in and at that time you gave him something under twenty-five cents and he went away happy. We too were happy because we had a safe place to leave our packs and a comfortable couch to curl up on in our sleeping bags. There was a clean restroom connected to the waiting room. Life was further simplified because in the 1,549 recognized languages of India, all rickshaw drivers knew what, “railway station” meant. You might get lost on the way out but never on the way back.
For a stay of several days there were the temples. The Sikhs welcome all people as family. I can’t remember ever accepting their hospitality but it was genuine. We stayed at the Bengal Buddhist Society at Calcutta for several days. You paid what you wanted to. The cells were bare but safe behind a padlock. There were showers, but cold water only, and that was winter. Not freezing cold but you got wet, stopped the water, soaped up, rinsed off, stopped the water again, and dried off. All this you did quickly. Once when God was in an unusually good mood, He taught Man how to heat water.
I busted the history exam in New Delhi. We heard about the Birla Temple and upon asking for a room were told that we needed a letter from the American Embassy saying that we were in need. The story with the embassy was that if you were in need, they wanted to ship you back to the States as an indigent so while they didn’t want to give us the note, they relented. That was nice of them.
The temple was covered with heavy marble and had a low deep chant piped through the halls. As with the Calcutta temple, the Birla was very clean but Spartan. There had been another Spartan who stayed there nearly twenty years before but it would be close to thirty years before I would know of his residency. Several days went by and then we took our leave. My wife had heard that there was a garden in the compound and wanted me to go with her to see it. I was impatient to get going so I stayed with the packs while she found and walked through the garden. Upon returning, she seemed in something of a daze and to have more questions than were answered. She said that the garden was pretty but that was all she said. Many years later I saw a PBS production and a film on Gandhi and the Birla Temple was where he lived at the end of his life. He was shot to death while walking in the garden.
Often an old mansion is turned into a hotel. We stayed in one the first night in Calcutta. The dinning room could seat the entire staff of civil servants during the Raj or at least above a certain grade. Equally interesting was the plumbing for the bathtub. The tub was a claw and ball arrangements and could double as a horse trough. The contraption that heated the water over the tub seemed to be designed by several people beginning just after the Battle of Plassey and ending after Independence with an equal number of plumbers. There was a vertical tank about eight inches in diameter and about three or four feet high. I can’t remember if it was gas or electrically heated but I’ve never seen so many ideas as to how the tank should really be plumbed. What if this thing is plugged somehow and failed to vent? We could be scalded! Well of course we lived but I’ll die wondering just how the water was heated and which way the water flowed through those pipes. Some things were preserved after the British quit India and while lying stretched out in this horse trough, you have time to wonder at this 19th century wonder.
The manager, Bosco, a small man with the dimensions of a tennis ball and with the attending bounce, at the hotel in Panaji, said that an old house had been converted into the Hotel Republica but the owner, Said, said that the old hotel was just an old hotel. It’s most important improvement, I thought, was a ceiling fan. Bosco was very proud of its English bathroom, which means that the bathroom no longer had a squat toilet. The toilets that it did have were probably recycled from a house or hotel, which had been torn down. The toilets had seen some hard use and had been scrubbed sometime ago with sand or pumice. Upon seeing that that was probably a mistake, they gave up the effort and never cleaned the device again. An English bathroom means also that there was a shower head. In Goa you don’t need a water heater. You live in one. A shower reminded me of swimming in an unheated pool and drying off beneath the ceiling fan was a slow process but it was the one time during the day when you’d be sure to be cool. The Republica charged about eleven or twelve dollars U.S. per day. Bosco was very adamant that tonight’s rent be paid the first thing every morning. There were no extra charges for the lizards who kept the room pretty much bug free but the lizards did defecate. You didn’t want to use the lights at night for fear it would attract the malaria carrying mosquito. I got to sleep early in Goa with the fan swinging overhead. More than once I lay in the semidarkness (stray light comes up from the street) and wondered when the fan would break its wire support and drop.
I stayed in Goa a month getting shots, getting over my Asiatic cold, and finding someway to get money from my U.S. account into my pocket in India. Because of the duration, I became attached to this corner of the Indian oven. After all, I had witnessed a historic moment at the old Republica. One afternoon when I was trying to take a nap, someone knocked at the door. I opened to find and to be pushed aside by a group of about five men. Bosco led the men. If anyone asks you how many men it takes to hook up a TV in a hotel in Goa, the answer is five. There went my writing table as well as my nap. By subcontinent standards, the television was of high quality in Goa. I found two programs that I would recommend to you – one on the history of the Forbidden City and the other a David Attenborough production on snakes. Since that time I’ve had to be satisfied by Animal Planet as high art. If you are not a watcher, it normally amounts to an overweight male actor chasing an alligator through a swamp or visa versa. The alligator never wins.
The other hotels I’ve stayed in during the southern swing, either cost less or perhaps provided soap, towels, and toilet paper. With the exception of the Republica, you could ask for room service if you wanted. During Diwali I sent a fellow off to bring food. Fried bread, gravy, and a bottle of water. I take pleasure in the simple things of life especially surviving the Festival of Joy.
The Coaker’s Tower at Kodaikanal was the most expensive room I took, about $18 U.S. but while I left the towel, I kept the bath soap. It was very clean and had the clouds in the valley cooperated, I would have had a very good view from my window, all of which is figured in with the price of soap. Coaker’s tower was the quietest place I stayed. The J.C. (nothing to do with Jesus but I did ask) Grand is right across from the bus stand and that place is as noisy as a cockpit during a fight.
As for noise, school trips and groups of young men (not the guys at Kanyakumari. They behaved) but a bunch of company boys get together and make up their own tour. Lots of yelling up and down the hall, TV full blast, it would never occur to them that there was anybody in the world. This is not arrogance so much as an outgrowth of considering self against the backdrop of a population of 1.2 billion people. On a school trip, one kid tried out all the doorbells on my floor. He wasn’t being mean or disruptive but just trying to amuse himself until his group left the hotel. Thank goodness they never stay over one night. One day in the early afternoon, I heard voices, but not shouts, outside my room. I looked out into the hall and there were perhaps thirty middle aged to old women and one or two men. Everybody had lined up in an orderly manner and lunch of rice and the entrée was being served right in the hallway. I said hello to everybody as I went along the hallway and then downstairs to ask the desk clerk what was what. This was a tour group from West Bengal down to enjoy the Hills. They were all teachers. A chow line in a corridor of a hotel was new to me.
Before I leave life at the J.C. Grand, there is the matter of the shower. Indians are hell on personal cleanliness. Any stories you hear about the condition of urban India does not have anything to do with the way they keep themselves. John Jacobs, who got me on the train at Ernakulam, told me under his breath, “The people in Tamil-Nadu are not so clean and we in Kerala.” He saw I was surprised and he went on, “Yes, they bathe only once a day.” Since I did as well, I wanted to hear more. “Yes, when you called me, I was in the bath. That is the reason why I did not answer my cell.”
Having remembered the heat, the best times for a wash-up in Kerala should be before bed and about eleven a.m. or noon. John preferred a shower just before bed and first thing in the morning. Now that I live in Tamil-Nadu, I’ve settled on the first thing in the morning. It takes a half-hour to warm the water and I can doze away the last half-thoughts of sleep while the water heats.
But regardless where you are in India, it is not uncommon to see a boy or man wash himself in the street or a river or where ever he finds water and a way to ladle it above his head. They wear the dhoti untucked so that the hem drops to the ankles then they pour water over their head, liter after liter from a pitcher. Whether soap is used, I couldn’t tell. If you are drenching yourselves twice a day, it could be that soap can be dispensed with.
The J.C. Grand has a European toilet in the bathroom as well as a hot water heater but the bather mixes hot and cold water in a five gallon bucket. No soap, towels, or toilet paper but they did provide a pitcher to pour water over your head. While this system is not as water conservative as the gravity feed showers I used in Queensland or Alaska, the pitcher over the head works to the point that I’ve become accustomed to putting the whole operation on auto-pilot and thinking pleasant thoughts about the coming day only to discover that I’m squeaky clean. I suspect that things are different at the Carlton.
You can rent a house much less than a hotel room with the understanding that you’ll be in town for a while. Just for a figure about $5.00 per night, $150 a month. I passed on that. There was only one house within easily walking distance of the part of town where I like to stay. That house was very pretty with a lush garden but I had a promoter between me and the landlord and when he said thirteen dollars a night, I decided I’d stick with the hotel. The cleaning lady and the dhobi wallah show up regularly.
While I don’t intend on settling in Calcutta, I have it on good authority (a call center voice) that you can get a nice apartment in a good section of town (Victoria Memorial area) for $135 per month. In the Himalayas for a hotel with meals is about $450 a month.
A single occupancy at the Carlton runs Rs. 5,000 about $125 per night and a double is a thousand more. You get a rowing skiff (you do the rowing) for a half-hour free. It’s my understanding that the price covers food as well.
Regardless of other surprises, the price of living was pretty much what I expected. There are some things more expensive. The dhobi wallah cost more than a laundry mat in Alaska. But you are not expected to watch televised game shows. Somehow I’ll learn to live with it.
#
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Clothing
Somewhere between fashion whim and utility you sort through clothes to take on any journey. Whatever the selection it must be able to be moved in a one trip. No turning back for a second load. When the Astors and the Vanderbilts wandered from watering hole to watering hole, they took their steamer trunks and even in the last half of the twentieth century, I’ve see an individual move with seven pieces of luggage, one being an acoustic guitar, but really it is a time when we can think in terms of small being beautiful. Not what do you want, not what can I use, but what is the basic need. Five shirts, skivvies, pairs of socks, one or two pair of pants (the second pair can double as long johns,) a sweater (one of Man’s greatest inventions, they stretch like skin rather than confine,) a light parka for temperate climates. If you need gloves or anything more, buy it in the country. The gloves that you’d buy in the U.S. are probably made in that country anyway. Towels are nice things to have but if you pack it wet and travel, you may have second thoughts. They can serve as scarves or parka hood liners. In India finding towels, soap, and toilet paper in a hotel room probably means that you are paying more for the room than you needed to. A fellow traveler once told a bunch of young people that should they ever leave the United States to take a few of anything they expected to use and then replace the small supply rather than take a lifetime supply. The little bottle of aspirin will do.
Rachel and I talked over the matter of fashion. I have a pair of slacks that I intended to wear. She shook her head. She believed that anyone with a pack should wear jeans. Dress pants are for other occasions. I wear jeans.
I traveled in Europe before the washer/dryer combination became common…and I’m assuming in the past half century that they are now more common. But in the fifties Dacron and other wash and wear fabrics came on the market. An evening chore before or after the shower was to wash out what you wore. I repeated this in Goa but found a sign in this hotel in Kodaikanal asking us not to wash our clothes.
Among the Untouchables there is a sub-caste that is made up of dhobi-wallahs, washer fellows. The day I rode into Kodaikanal, the sun shown. There were acres of clothes drying on the hillside. The dhobi-wallah is a luxury that everybody affords. I suspect that I afford the luxury more than a Tamil speaker but…. Shorts, socks, shirt, and skivvies run Rs. 40 or ten rupees per item or the four for a dollar a day. You may remember the lady I met in the backwater jungle at Kochi. She laughed and said, “I washing,” and she whacked a wet piece of clothing against a rough rock. I believe that I got a trade off at least once. The tee shirt I received had a trademark I don’t remember and about a dozen holes but other than being awakened at an early daylight hour by the dhobi-wallah a knocking at my door, the system works pretty well. On rare occasions I let him have a shot at the jeans and it is then that I know he is earning those ten rupees.
India has affirmative action and this favors the Untouchables and the tribesmen who still live in the wilderness. Yes, wilderness and the government does not burn them out! These folks are called the Adivasi. So proportions are drawn up and if you are running an office, you will have the gazetted number of the “under class.” Everybody agrees that the system should be tossed. What nobody agrees on is when. There are still people living in the bush and there are still dhobi-wallahs that want a better life. One day in the future….
The caste system is most easily explained by who may feed whom. Brahmans do not always want to go into the priesthood and since they are the “cleanest” of any caste, they often are the cooks and food handlers. Nehru kept one in his entourage as his cook. Since the caste makes up only about three or four percent of the population, a problem arises because there are not enough Brahmans to feed everybody. You just have to run an establishment the best you can. The Astoria just down the street has even hired a Christian as a cook!
At the bottom of the occupations are the “night soil” removers. After all somebody has to do it. Baskets were invented before bowls and imagine how the baskets leaked when set upon a person’s head. And that is why the Untouchables were so called. In America the Untouchable is the poor. They must be stupid or lazy or they wouldn’t be poor, the thinking goes. What is amusing to me is that there are many hugely rich Untouchable families. Given a sector of population, there will be some who are thinking and who succeed. An example of an Untouchable task is cremating the dead. There is a family in Varanasi, who has more money than anyone reading this article because they monopolize the burning ghats! Transfer this to the U.S. and imagine some one family, who has a monopoly on all the funeral homes in New Jersey. So while Untouchables may or may not be rich, it is the task they are born to, not their bank account, that defines them. In the case of the dhobi-wallah he gets classified as an Untouchable because he handles dirty laundry. There might be menstrual blood on a garment and while that is not in the same category as packing the contents of a latrine in a basket balance on your head, it keeps you out of the food handling business or moonlighting as a priest.
Now back to the affirmative action matter, since the law says that there will be a certain number of the Untouchable going to the best universities, those scholars who are crowed out by the system, apply for demotion into a lower caste so as to use their abilities to find a place in the institution of higher learning. In my next life I may return as a snake charmer then who knows, I may wind up with a scholarship to Harvard Law School. Nothing is simple in India. No wonder Buddha found a tree where it was quiet to think it all out.
Men and women here wear sandals. They don’t protect stubbed toes as well as I like. They are not as warm as shoes. Probably your feet get dustier and there is always the chance of stepping on a “land mine” but there are things that crawl into damp, dark shoe leather. It could be that fresh air and sunshine are preferable. This is a test. This is only a test. But I’m trying out the open air approach at the moment. Possibly more on this later should one of these damned cab drivers runs over my toes
Later… the first pair had a light plastic fitting, which held the strap over the top of the foot. The fitting lasted four or five days before breaking. The sandals were designed in Italy. Isn’t that where the Ferrari is manufactured? I had my receipt; I had the sandals; I got a replacement that I have hopes of lasting two weeks.
Later…later…the sandals did not last two weeks but about three days. I dropped them on the merchant’s floor and said in effect, “Forget it!” Sha-bah-rat, a Kashmiri friend, went down and talked to the merchant. Today a salesman chased me down in the street and invited me to the shop. The other salesman ran for tea. The merchant was ashamed of himself…a little. He said that he had called Bata and said that the design was faulty and that they needed to make good. Well the outcome is now I am wearing a more expensive pair of sandals for a week and then if they are still in one piece, I pay the difference. In other words he has sold me a more expensive pair of shoes. Want a lesson in salesmanship? Come to the East.
American hippies are in short supply in India. Israel provides them. I thought Palestine got through that stage with John, the Baptist, but the locust and wild honey has been replaced by bhang and mushrooms. The local lost tribe is also the chief experimenters in wearing traditional Indian clothing or it could be a creative mix of clothing of different regions. Dreadlocks may come from John Marnie or it could be they learned the sadhu’s secret hair spray, cow dung.
The individual Indian enjoys prosperity that I don’t remember forty years back. Many Indian women, especially from the lower income brackets, wear the most flamboyant fabrics. Yesterday was New Year’s Day. I took a walk down by the lake and some of the saris looked to be fashioned after the fireworks of the night before. This is not hyperbola. Once the sewing in of bits of mirrors into the cloth was regional. I believe it came out of Gujarat. A good idea spreads. There is the safety factor. Should the women be wearing such a fabric at night, the motorist (assuming he is driving with his headlights on) can certainly see the pedestrian ahead if she lights up like an exploding aerial bomb. But with the prosperity comes the thought, “When I get some money, I’m going to dress like a movie star.” Actually many of the movie stars dress western and with much more conservative colors. It could be that nobody has taken the time to notice. The lady, who makes my breakfast, wears a sari fit for a First Family. To my way of looking at it, it is both funny and pathetic. On the one hand my short order cook could be just as easily be wearing a formal evening gown. She could drop the egg turner and hurry off to a reception for the prime minister. And if that is not an inappropriate dress, check out the lady who does service as a wheelbarrow. She loads rock in a basket (yes, one that would leak were the soil and rock wet,) sets this on her head, and walks off to dump it where ever the foreman tells her to drop it.
On the other hand in the US, I’ve met people, who lived among the plastics, who come from the hard times of the Great Depression. When you have wondered if you will find a slice of bread for supper and you’ve worked hard, you deserve double-wide luxury. And if what you always wanted was a pretty dress like movie stars once wore and you’ve packed dirt and rock on your head, then the sari is the payoff.
One day I noticed a woman in her late twenties/early thirties. She wore slacks, a sweater, short sleeved, a scarf thrown across her throat, the ends of which fell back across each shoulder. She wore her hair in the traditional braid. Her clothes were of quiet browns. Nothing day-glow. No reflectors. She looked capable of jumping a collapsed sewer line, detouring around building material stacked on a sidewalk, or stepping over a pile of rubbish. She dressed like she knew where she lived and how best to live in it. It could be that she, rather than the come-to-life-siren-out-of-a-Mogul-miniature, is and will be the new face of India.
#
Rachel and I talked over the matter of fashion. I have a pair of slacks that I intended to wear. She shook her head. She believed that anyone with a pack should wear jeans. Dress pants are for other occasions. I wear jeans.
I traveled in Europe before the washer/dryer combination became common…and I’m assuming in the past half century that they are now more common. But in the fifties Dacron and other wash and wear fabrics came on the market. An evening chore before or after the shower was to wash out what you wore. I repeated this in Goa but found a sign in this hotel in Kodaikanal asking us not to wash our clothes.
Among the Untouchables there is a sub-caste that is made up of dhobi-wallahs, washer fellows. The day I rode into Kodaikanal, the sun shown. There were acres of clothes drying on the hillside. The dhobi-wallah is a luxury that everybody affords. I suspect that I afford the luxury more than a Tamil speaker but…. Shorts, socks, shirt, and skivvies run Rs. 40 or ten rupees per item or the four for a dollar a day. You may remember the lady I met in the backwater jungle at Kochi. She laughed and said, “I washing,” and she whacked a wet piece of clothing against a rough rock. I believe that I got a trade off at least once. The tee shirt I received had a trademark I don’t remember and about a dozen holes but other than being awakened at an early daylight hour by the dhobi-wallah a knocking at my door, the system works pretty well. On rare occasions I let him have a shot at the jeans and it is then that I know he is earning those ten rupees.
India has affirmative action and this favors the Untouchables and the tribesmen who still live in the wilderness. Yes, wilderness and the government does not burn them out! These folks are called the Adivasi. So proportions are drawn up and if you are running an office, you will have the gazetted number of the “under class.” Everybody agrees that the system should be tossed. What nobody agrees on is when. There are still people living in the bush and there are still dhobi-wallahs that want a better life. One day in the future….
The caste system is most easily explained by who may feed whom. Brahmans do not always want to go into the priesthood and since they are the “cleanest” of any caste, they often are the cooks and food handlers. Nehru kept one in his entourage as his cook. Since the caste makes up only about three or four percent of the population, a problem arises because there are not enough Brahmans to feed everybody. You just have to run an establishment the best you can. The Astoria just down the street has even hired a Christian as a cook!
At the bottom of the occupations are the “night soil” removers. After all somebody has to do it. Baskets were invented before bowls and imagine how the baskets leaked when set upon a person’s head. And that is why the Untouchables were so called. In America the Untouchable is the poor. They must be stupid or lazy or they wouldn’t be poor, the thinking goes. What is amusing to me is that there are many hugely rich Untouchable families. Given a sector of population, there will be some who are thinking and who succeed. An example of an Untouchable task is cremating the dead. There is a family in Varanasi, who has more money than anyone reading this article because they monopolize the burning ghats! Transfer this to the U.S. and imagine some one family, who has a monopoly on all the funeral homes in New Jersey. So while Untouchables may or may not be rich, it is the task they are born to, not their bank account, that defines them. In the case of the dhobi-wallah he gets classified as an Untouchable because he handles dirty laundry. There might be menstrual blood on a garment and while that is not in the same category as packing the contents of a latrine in a basket balance on your head, it keeps you out of the food handling business or moonlighting as a priest.
Now back to the affirmative action matter, since the law says that there will be a certain number of the Untouchable going to the best universities, those scholars who are crowed out by the system, apply for demotion into a lower caste so as to use their abilities to find a place in the institution of higher learning. In my next life I may return as a snake charmer then who knows, I may wind up with a scholarship to Harvard Law School. Nothing is simple in India. No wonder Buddha found a tree where it was quiet to think it all out.
Men and women here wear sandals. They don’t protect stubbed toes as well as I like. They are not as warm as shoes. Probably your feet get dustier and there is always the chance of stepping on a “land mine” but there are things that crawl into damp, dark shoe leather. It could be that fresh air and sunshine are preferable. This is a test. This is only a test. But I’m trying out the open air approach at the moment. Possibly more on this later should one of these damned cab drivers runs over my toes
Later… the first pair had a light plastic fitting, which held the strap over the top of the foot. The fitting lasted four or five days before breaking. The sandals were designed in Italy. Isn’t that where the Ferrari is manufactured? I had my receipt; I had the sandals; I got a replacement that I have hopes of lasting two weeks.
Later…later…the sandals did not last two weeks but about three days. I dropped them on the merchant’s floor and said in effect, “Forget it!” Sha-bah-rat, a Kashmiri friend, went down and talked to the merchant. Today a salesman chased me down in the street and invited me to the shop. The other salesman ran for tea. The merchant was ashamed of himself…a little. He said that he had called Bata and said that the design was faulty and that they needed to make good. Well the outcome is now I am wearing a more expensive pair of sandals for a week and then if they are still in one piece, I pay the difference. In other words he has sold me a more expensive pair of shoes. Want a lesson in salesmanship? Come to the East.
American hippies are in short supply in India. Israel provides them. I thought Palestine got through that stage with John, the Baptist, but the locust and wild honey has been replaced by bhang and mushrooms. The local lost tribe is also the chief experimenters in wearing traditional Indian clothing or it could be a creative mix of clothing of different regions. Dreadlocks may come from John Marnie or it could be they learned the sadhu’s secret hair spray, cow dung.
The individual Indian enjoys prosperity that I don’t remember forty years back. Many Indian women, especially from the lower income brackets, wear the most flamboyant fabrics. Yesterday was New Year’s Day. I took a walk down by the lake and some of the saris looked to be fashioned after the fireworks of the night before. This is not hyperbola. Once the sewing in of bits of mirrors into the cloth was regional. I believe it came out of Gujarat. A good idea spreads. There is the safety factor. Should the women be wearing such a fabric at night, the motorist (assuming he is driving with his headlights on) can certainly see the pedestrian ahead if she lights up like an exploding aerial bomb. But with the prosperity comes the thought, “When I get some money, I’m going to dress like a movie star.” Actually many of the movie stars dress western and with much more conservative colors. It could be that nobody has taken the time to notice. The lady, who makes my breakfast, wears a sari fit for a First Family. To my way of looking at it, it is both funny and pathetic. On the one hand my short order cook could be just as easily be wearing a formal evening gown. She could drop the egg turner and hurry off to a reception for the prime minister. And if that is not an inappropriate dress, check out the lady who does service as a wheelbarrow. She loads rock in a basket (yes, one that would leak were the soil and rock wet,) sets this on her head, and walks off to dump it where ever the foreman tells her to drop it.
On the other hand in the US, I’ve met people, who lived among the plastics, who come from the hard times of the Great Depression. When you have wondered if you will find a slice of bread for supper and you’ve worked hard, you deserve double-wide luxury. And if what you always wanted was a pretty dress like movie stars once wore and you’ve packed dirt and rock on your head, then the sari is the payoff.
One day I noticed a woman in her late twenties/early thirties. She wore slacks, a sweater, short sleeved, a scarf thrown across her throat, the ends of which fell back across each shoulder. She wore her hair in the traditional braid. Her clothes were of quiet browns. Nothing day-glow. No reflectors. She looked capable of jumping a collapsed sewer line, detouring around building material stacked on a sidewalk, or stepping over a pile of rubbish. She dressed like she knew where she lived and how best to live in it. It could be that she, rather than the come-to-life-siren-out-of-a-Mogul-miniature, is and will be the new face of India.
#
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Food...and Drink
Travelers all have their favorite haunts when it comes to food. Sometime it depends on the bargain price. The rock bottom is food from the stalls, where you stand and eat off a banana leaf. I like to sit down at a table. The stall scene is balancing your food on the left hand and digging into rice and one of a dozen gravies with your right. People, who like to demonstrate their expertise with chop sticks at Chinese restaurant, will enjoy this exercise. If they do it expertly, they can gross out the uninitiated, which includes me. Personally I am fond of silverware. In Kodaikanal I’ve found several places I like to eat…and a few where I don’t.
Down on PT Road you find dozens of shops selling gifts and antiques, and several eateries. On Sunday, it is the site of the weekly market where the country people sell their produce and wares. The road gets it name from the great Tamil poet Tyagaraiar. That’s why they call it PT Road. A favorite place to eat is the Cloud Street Café and Restaurant. If you have an envelope of money for me, I’ll pick it up there. Word gets around and you see travelers from many countries. Sharath takes the morning shift and his wife, Tanya takes the evening. When I first showed up, Tanya’s UK English, as a first language, made me decide that if the food was half as good as her English, I would become a regular. Sharath comes from Goa and speaks softly. PT Road can get noisy especially on market day and so between my hearing and his accent, listening takes longer. His ear is more sophisticated and he understands that an “American breakfast” consists of bacon, eggs (soft and sunny side up,) toast with butter and strawberry jam, and to top it off, a pile of French fries. While I waited for coffee, I browsed the bookshelves. The paper backs run from Maxim Gorky to Louis L’Amour. The restaurant is clean and well lighted by day. All bets are off as to power outages in India therefore at night you might dine by candle light. The pasta is good but when I wasn’t all that hungry in the evening I’d settle for an “Israeli salad.” Tanya has made several trips to Israel and learned food preparation there. I spend about four dollars for the breakfast and other meals run a little less. They make lassi, a mixture of yogurt, a dash of salt, more than a dash of sugar, and you cut it with water until you can suck it through a straw. All this is run though a blender and normally it is cool and so refreshing if you’ve been off on a walk.
Someplace I don’t like to eat is a stainless steel place open 24 hours a day called Goldan Parks. It is non-veg and the waiters speak pretty good Tamil. They can screw up an order about as well as the best of them and I doubt if they’ve washed the windows since they built the hotel on top of which the café perches. The hotel is nice looking, the restaurant is well designed, but maintenance and trained personnel are something in India’s future.
But back on PT Road there is The Tibetan Brothers Café. I think one of the brothers has since opened his own place but the brother left is talkative and friendly. If you are really hungry, he serves plain rice with beef curry and a condiment. It’s a good idea to buy a bottle of water and with coffee that comes to about two dollars, twenty-five. The food is spicy but then you are supposed to drink a gallon of water a day or some such.
The owner was born in Tibet and he and the family made a break for the south in 1963 when he was 13. They came through the passes riding sherpas. I haven’t found out why he couldn’t walk but it may have been the risk of altitude sickness. I’ll try his English on the question.
There are not many Tibetans here but I speak to them when we meet and they always flash a smile and speak.
If I’m not up for Tanya’s Israeli salad but still want something light, I eat at the Tava Café. It is a basement affair and totally vegetarian. I ate the first thing I saw at the top of the menu called Dahl Makhani. Nothing to do with Donald McDonald’s. It’s a small serving of beans and lintels, a side of thin sliced red onions with a squeeze of lime, and a mango chutney. You need to order one or two paratas (fried bread) and of course lassi to drink and you don’t walk away hungry. Especially after the second lassi. The chutney seems to have been made in with a flail. There are broken seeds in it and it reminds me of a very flavorful condiment with bones.
I’m not interested in food fads but even before I came to India, I noticed I liked several vegetarian meals. Pinto beans and corn bread lead off the list. Since they use the worst grade of meat in enchiladas why bother? Just have cheese filling. I could think of some others were I to take the time but consider that the Indians have been eating meatless for a few thousand years and they know how to make food taste good. There must be about a dozen ingredients in the sauces but the flavor is good and only rarely have I had to back off from the spice.
I’ve probably written about the string bean pepper. Just think of those cross sections as hatching cobra eggs. You bite them; they bite you and a liter of water is not an antidote. You are going to burn. So you watch for them and fish them out. Life returns to 98.4°F.
Days off are interesting. The Moslems take off Friday, the Jews Saturday, the Christians call Sunday the Sabbath, and I think that the Hindu’s call for a day of rest on Monday. Haven’t heard form the Buddhists, but the Tibetan Brothers does close for certain celebrations. The Dali Lama’s birthday being one. Then the Cloud Street closes on Tuesday. Tanya and Sharath call a harbor day for the café. Their reasoning is that most of the power outages come on Tuesday.
So on Tuesday morning I climb the hill to the Carlton, Kodaikanal’s five star hotel. Generally speaking only guest eat in the dining room but they let in at least one townie on Tuesday.
The dining room is off white with dark wood pillars and beams. Of course there are table clothes and soft napkins. The waiters are dressed in dark suits with ties. They wear shoes with heels that sound a subdued click when walking. The waiters don’t move unless they have a destination and while no one runs, they certainly move out smartly.
There is an Indian buffet laid out each Tuesday morning but I order coffee first and then a tomato and mushroom cheese omelet with toast. In every café in India I’ve been in they serve coffee in small cup seemingly designed for a little girl’s tea party. The Carlton has American sized cups and excellently brewed coffee. The bill is about six dollars but that includes all the coffee you can drink and plenty of time to read or to just watch other guests and staff. There is a second place where food is served. This is out on a veranda and this is more what-you-see-is-what-you-get buffet. It seems to be a package deal affair. I’ve seen it used primarily for conferences.
The dining room crowd is young. Not many grandparents, often children, and the wives seldom wear saris. They dress in slacks and blouses, casual but dignified. There may be a change in the air. Often (most of the time) when I meet someone, I’m first ask where I’m from; secondly, if I’m a tourist, and then nearly always, do you have your family with you? The Indians leave only the servants behind and years ago they sometime took them. They needed someone to order around. It is not uncommon to see eight or ten in a party with ages to near zero to my age. How odd, they think, that I travel by myself. The dining room crowd travel with family but it is parents and children and seldom more. I wonder if it is a matter of that this family lives away from the ancestral home. The Indian professionals have moved to and with the job. The extended family is at the old home. Just a guess.
On Sunday PT Road becomes a market. Both sides of the road are for selling, the center for walking, and for dogs, and trucks and motorcycles. Since the cows would sample the wares, they are excluded. Private automobiles merge with the crowd but I can’t believe that cab drivers would be so silly. On past and down the road from the Tibetan Brothers, there is an acre and a half which has concrete pads for traders who want a way to run up a plastic awning and stay off the ground, mud or dust. Last market day I walked into this area because a full-sized truck had got itself mired among the road traffic and could hardly move. By going into the market I planned to pass him and go on to the library, which is still further down hill. Something distracted me (there is much to be distracted by) and when I looked back at the truck, he had moved forward and again I did not want to squeeze past him. I wanted to walk around him. So I took in the acre “plaza.” For the most part, the stalls are selling produce. I can’t think of any produce that you could find in Sitka that you couldn’t find here.
I saw a fellow selling sugar cane. I haven’t had sugar cane since I was a kid so I bought a peeled length and bit in to a disappointment. The farmer had cut it too soon and while there was water enough, the sugar content was very low. I found a deserving vendor and after cutting off my gnawings, I gave it to him. Long ago, I read that sugar cane comes from India. Through the trade route west, the crusaders picked it up and took it to Europe. Sugar has been rotting teeth from that day to this. The stuff we had in Texas when I was in grade school was better. In Puerto Rico there are small cane presses that crush the cane over a block of ice. The drink is delicious.
The small farmers harvest on Saturday and ride busses, trucks, cabs, or anything else that will move and haul stuff. There are a few people selling clothes, a few hardware, and some sold dried fish. One stall sold live (but just barely) catfish. After market day, my Tibetan friend always has mutton on hand. How that’s brought in and sold, I haven’t found out. That could be an early morning transaction. It was now getting on toward midday. But I did finally find a stall with fresh meat hanging. They didn’t need a sign; they laid the heads of the kids on the counter. I don’t know if the heads can be used for food but I got a twinge of homesickness. That beautiful meat wanted a pit with mesquite coals at the bottom, a grill about three feet above, and a lid to keep the smoke in. I stopped off to talk. I don’t know how much of what I said jumped the language barrier but we parted smiling. Next week, I need to find out who their buyers are.
At day’s end there is an exodus back to the communities that lie along the road system. You don’t take coals to Newcastle so quite a lot stock gets dumped. In one pile I saw a bushel of okra lying beside the road. Of course nobody knows how to fry okra properly but along with that goat, if you could find some slow-boiled pintos, some cornbread, and fried okra…… The cows converge and get a good meal and by sunup, the city sends in sweepers to clean the road and the plaza. Everything is waiting for next week. I’m thinking, I’m thinking, and wonder if Tanya would take on the experiment of a mess of fried okra. Now that would elevate Kodaikanal a few more feet closer to Heaven if she did.
I suspect that this article could be updated from time to time. I can’t think how to do it but yesterday was an example.
I was on my way to lunch and was walking on the best sidewalk in town (it was the one where I fell on my face but that was only one hole and the sidewalk may be 300 yards long.) This is the sidewalk that runs along Anna Salai or Bazaar Road and is Main Street in Kodaikanal. I saw a very old man carrying a Kelty pack. I stopped him and complemented him on his choice of equipment. He said in very good English that he bought it in San Diego and that although he loved India, he couldn’t wait until he would fly out to his American home. His name was Kasi and he was born in a village near Cape Cormorin, the place of the Sunrise. To make the story of a too short of an afternoon shorter, Kasi and I had some talking to do. He was a computer science who had studied at Stanford and taught at McGill and was now retired. I said he was old. He was born two years after me. Because of his youth he walked my legs off around the lake while we ate “Asian apples” which have a local name of custard apples but since they are local and grow nowhere else in India, Asian apple will do. We settled many of the world’s problems, Indian ones any way. He had no suggestions for the Bush Administration. So when we parted down by the lake bus stand, which is where the demonstration was to take place, I still hadn’t had lunch and it was about five. I was more interested in water but put both off and went to the cyber café and posted an article on the blogsite.
That morning I had met a couple, Brent and Shelly, from Seattle and they suggested that I meet them and others for drinks at 6:30 at the Carlton. That sounded good. By the time I was done with the internet, I had time for a bottle of water at the Cloud Street Café and then walked over to the hotel. Once I located the bar, I found some of the crowd from the café there and ordered a glass of red zinfandel. I was looking for burgundy but having never heard of the red side of the zinfandel family, I decided to try something new. It could be like the custard apple. You’ve got to come to the Palani Hills to find it.
The bar was, not surprising, very tastefully decorated. The bartenders were smartly dress and along with the wine, they brought something like sunflower seeds and salted potato chips with no curry powder. I was getting hungry. So while I met Sharon from Jacksonville, Florida and others, I made it a point to keep the potato chips within reach. We were joined by others and I was having a fine time talking over building with Brent, a carpenter, I’d met that morning. The potato chips were running low so when the bartender delivered other drinks, I asked for more. By the way, the wine was good. It tasted very much like burgundy. The bartender came back and brought Brent his beer and began pouring another. “Who is that far?” I asked and was told it was for me, who was far from finished with my wine. I told the bartender potato chips, not Kingfisher beer, and Brent smoothed the situation by saying he’d take the open bottle. I had to keep in mind that the Cloud Street closed at eight or eight thirty and so if I began a retreat about 7:30 I’d be about right for a plate of pasta. So Brent and I built a few more houses and the time ticked on. I got up and went to the bar to pay. It took a few minutes to pull up the paperwork, which had a thirty plus rupee tax onto a Rs.250 (something like $7 U.S.) glass of wine. That plate of delicious pasta that I would eat later would run about Rs.100. So this is not an every evening thing that I get to build houses over a coffee table so I gave the bartender a Rs.500 note and he passed it on to his assistant along with the paperwork and this was put into a leather binder and the assistant disappeared out the door. I waited. After nearly five minutes, I asked where my change was. There were about ten people in the bar and if their drinks were as expensive as mine, how would they make change for the lot of them? Again, where’s my change? The bartender and another assistant followed by me, went out of the bar, across the lobby, and into the dining room, where the waiters tried to seat me. These were the guys I see every Tuesday morning and we passed pleasantries because I was not going to follow the bartender through the kitchen doors. I needed the Hello and How are you, sirs just for a reality check. The money came back through the swinging doors. I took two hundred and left the rest for a tip and walked back to say good byes in the bar. I could see breaking a five hundred rupee note would pose a difficulty for a street vendor but a five star hotel with prices to back it up……….? I love India!
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Down on PT Road you find dozens of shops selling gifts and antiques, and several eateries. On Sunday, it is the site of the weekly market where the country people sell their produce and wares. The road gets it name from the great Tamil poet Tyagaraiar. That’s why they call it PT Road. A favorite place to eat is the Cloud Street Café and Restaurant. If you have an envelope of money for me, I’ll pick it up there. Word gets around and you see travelers from many countries. Sharath takes the morning shift and his wife, Tanya takes the evening. When I first showed up, Tanya’s UK English, as a first language, made me decide that if the food was half as good as her English, I would become a regular. Sharath comes from Goa and speaks softly. PT Road can get noisy especially on market day and so between my hearing and his accent, listening takes longer. His ear is more sophisticated and he understands that an “American breakfast” consists of bacon, eggs (soft and sunny side up,) toast with butter and strawberry jam, and to top it off, a pile of French fries. While I waited for coffee, I browsed the bookshelves. The paper backs run from Maxim Gorky to Louis L’Amour. The restaurant is clean and well lighted by day. All bets are off as to power outages in India therefore at night you might dine by candle light. The pasta is good but when I wasn’t all that hungry in the evening I’d settle for an “Israeli salad.” Tanya has made several trips to Israel and learned food preparation there. I spend about four dollars for the breakfast and other meals run a little less. They make lassi, a mixture of yogurt, a dash of salt, more than a dash of sugar, and you cut it with water until you can suck it through a straw. All this is run though a blender and normally it is cool and so refreshing if you’ve been off on a walk.
Someplace I don’t like to eat is a stainless steel place open 24 hours a day called Goldan Parks. It is non-veg and the waiters speak pretty good Tamil. They can screw up an order about as well as the best of them and I doubt if they’ve washed the windows since they built the hotel on top of which the café perches. The hotel is nice looking, the restaurant is well designed, but maintenance and trained personnel are something in India’s future.
But back on PT Road there is The Tibetan Brothers Café. I think one of the brothers has since opened his own place but the brother left is talkative and friendly. If you are really hungry, he serves plain rice with beef curry and a condiment. It’s a good idea to buy a bottle of water and with coffee that comes to about two dollars, twenty-five. The food is spicy but then you are supposed to drink a gallon of water a day or some such.
The owner was born in Tibet and he and the family made a break for the south in 1963 when he was 13. They came through the passes riding sherpas. I haven’t found out why he couldn’t walk but it may have been the risk of altitude sickness. I’ll try his English on the question.
There are not many Tibetans here but I speak to them when we meet and they always flash a smile and speak.
If I’m not up for Tanya’s Israeli salad but still want something light, I eat at the Tava Café. It is a basement affair and totally vegetarian. I ate the first thing I saw at the top of the menu called Dahl Makhani. Nothing to do with Donald McDonald’s. It’s a small serving of beans and lintels, a side of thin sliced red onions with a squeeze of lime, and a mango chutney. You need to order one or two paratas (fried bread) and of course lassi to drink and you don’t walk away hungry. Especially after the second lassi. The chutney seems to have been made in with a flail. There are broken seeds in it and it reminds me of a very flavorful condiment with bones.
I’m not interested in food fads but even before I came to India, I noticed I liked several vegetarian meals. Pinto beans and corn bread lead off the list. Since they use the worst grade of meat in enchiladas why bother? Just have cheese filling. I could think of some others were I to take the time but consider that the Indians have been eating meatless for a few thousand years and they know how to make food taste good. There must be about a dozen ingredients in the sauces but the flavor is good and only rarely have I had to back off from the spice.
I’ve probably written about the string bean pepper. Just think of those cross sections as hatching cobra eggs. You bite them; they bite you and a liter of water is not an antidote. You are going to burn. So you watch for them and fish them out. Life returns to 98.4°F.
Days off are interesting. The Moslems take off Friday, the Jews Saturday, the Christians call Sunday the Sabbath, and I think that the Hindu’s call for a day of rest on Monday. Haven’t heard form the Buddhists, but the Tibetan Brothers does close for certain celebrations. The Dali Lama’s birthday being one. Then the Cloud Street closes on Tuesday. Tanya and Sharath call a harbor day for the café. Their reasoning is that most of the power outages come on Tuesday.
So on Tuesday morning I climb the hill to the Carlton, Kodaikanal’s five star hotel. Generally speaking only guest eat in the dining room but they let in at least one townie on Tuesday.
The dining room is off white with dark wood pillars and beams. Of course there are table clothes and soft napkins. The waiters are dressed in dark suits with ties. They wear shoes with heels that sound a subdued click when walking. The waiters don’t move unless they have a destination and while no one runs, they certainly move out smartly.
There is an Indian buffet laid out each Tuesday morning but I order coffee first and then a tomato and mushroom cheese omelet with toast. In every café in India I’ve been in they serve coffee in small cup seemingly designed for a little girl’s tea party. The Carlton has American sized cups and excellently brewed coffee. The bill is about six dollars but that includes all the coffee you can drink and plenty of time to read or to just watch other guests and staff. There is a second place where food is served. This is out on a veranda and this is more what-you-see-is-what-you-get buffet. It seems to be a package deal affair. I’ve seen it used primarily for conferences.
The dining room crowd is young. Not many grandparents, often children, and the wives seldom wear saris. They dress in slacks and blouses, casual but dignified. There may be a change in the air. Often (most of the time) when I meet someone, I’m first ask where I’m from; secondly, if I’m a tourist, and then nearly always, do you have your family with you? The Indians leave only the servants behind and years ago they sometime took them. They needed someone to order around. It is not uncommon to see eight or ten in a party with ages to near zero to my age. How odd, they think, that I travel by myself. The dining room crowd travel with family but it is parents and children and seldom more. I wonder if it is a matter of that this family lives away from the ancestral home. The Indian professionals have moved to and with the job. The extended family is at the old home. Just a guess.
On Sunday PT Road becomes a market. Both sides of the road are for selling, the center for walking, and for dogs, and trucks and motorcycles. Since the cows would sample the wares, they are excluded. Private automobiles merge with the crowd but I can’t believe that cab drivers would be so silly. On past and down the road from the Tibetan Brothers, there is an acre and a half which has concrete pads for traders who want a way to run up a plastic awning and stay off the ground, mud or dust. Last market day I walked into this area because a full-sized truck had got itself mired among the road traffic and could hardly move. By going into the market I planned to pass him and go on to the library, which is still further down hill. Something distracted me (there is much to be distracted by) and when I looked back at the truck, he had moved forward and again I did not want to squeeze past him. I wanted to walk around him. So I took in the acre “plaza.” For the most part, the stalls are selling produce. I can’t think of any produce that you could find in Sitka that you couldn’t find here.
I saw a fellow selling sugar cane. I haven’t had sugar cane since I was a kid so I bought a peeled length and bit in to a disappointment. The farmer had cut it too soon and while there was water enough, the sugar content was very low. I found a deserving vendor and after cutting off my gnawings, I gave it to him. Long ago, I read that sugar cane comes from India. Through the trade route west, the crusaders picked it up and took it to Europe. Sugar has been rotting teeth from that day to this. The stuff we had in Texas when I was in grade school was better. In Puerto Rico there are small cane presses that crush the cane over a block of ice. The drink is delicious.
The small farmers harvest on Saturday and ride busses, trucks, cabs, or anything else that will move and haul stuff. There are a few people selling clothes, a few hardware, and some sold dried fish. One stall sold live (but just barely) catfish. After market day, my Tibetan friend always has mutton on hand. How that’s brought in and sold, I haven’t found out. That could be an early morning transaction. It was now getting on toward midday. But I did finally find a stall with fresh meat hanging. They didn’t need a sign; they laid the heads of the kids on the counter. I don’t know if the heads can be used for food but I got a twinge of homesickness. That beautiful meat wanted a pit with mesquite coals at the bottom, a grill about three feet above, and a lid to keep the smoke in. I stopped off to talk. I don’t know how much of what I said jumped the language barrier but we parted smiling. Next week, I need to find out who their buyers are.
At day’s end there is an exodus back to the communities that lie along the road system. You don’t take coals to Newcastle so quite a lot stock gets dumped. In one pile I saw a bushel of okra lying beside the road. Of course nobody knows how to fry okra properly but along with that goat, if you could find some slow-boiled pintos, some cornbread, and fried okra…… The cows converge and get a good meal and by sunup, the city sends in sweepers to clean the road and the plaza. Everything is waiting for next week. I’m thinking, I’m thinking, and wonder if Tanya would take on the experiment of a mess of fried okra. Now that would elevate Kodaikanal a few more feet closer to Heaven if she did.
I suspect that this article could be updated from time to time. I can’t think how to do it but yesterday was an example.
I was on my way to lunch and was walking on the best sidewalk in town (it was the one where I fell on my face but that was only one hole and the sidewalk may be 300 yards long.) This is the sidewalk that runs along Anna Salai or Bazaar Road and is Main Street in Kodaikanal. I saw a very old man carrying a Kelty pack. I stopped him and complemented him on his choice of equipment. He said in very good English that he bought it in San Diego and that although he loved India, he couldn’t wait until he would fly out to his American home. His name was Kasi and he was born in a village near Cape Cormorin, the place of the Sunrise. To make the story of a too short of an afternoon shorter, Kasi and I had some talking to do. He was a computer science who had studied at Stanford and taught at McGill and was now retired. I said he was old. He was born two years after me. Because of his youth he walked my legs off around the lake while we ate “Asian apples” which have a local name of custard apples but since they are local and grow nowhere else in India, Asian apple will do. We settled many of the world’s problems, Indian ones any way. He had no suggestions for the Bush Administration. So when we parted down by the lake bus stand, which is where the demonstration was to take place, I still hadn’t had lunch and it was about five. I was more interested in water but put both off and went to the cyber café and posted an article on the blogsite.
That morning I had met a couple, Brent and Shelly, from Seattle and they suggested that I meet them and others for drinks at 6:30 at the Carlton. That sounded good. By the time I was done with the internet, I had time for a bottle of water at the Cloud Street Café and then walked over to the hotel. Once I located the bar, I found some of the crowd from the café there and ordered a glass of red zinfandel. I was looking for burgundy but having never heard of the red side of the zinfandel family, I decided to try something new. It could be like the custard apple. You’ve got to come to the Palani Hills to find it.
The bar was, not surprising, very tastefully decorated. The bartenders were smartly dress and along with the wine, they brought something like sunflower seeds and salted potato chips with no curry powder. I was getting hungry. So while I met Sharon from Jacksonville, Florida and others, I made it a point to keep the potato chips within reach. We were joined by others and I was having a fine time talking over building with Brent, a carpenter, I’d met that morning. The potato chips were running low so when the bartender delivered other drinks, I asked for more. By the way, the wine was good. It tasted very much like burgundy. The bartender came back and brought Brent his beer and began pouring another. “Who is that far?” I asked and was told it was for me, who was far from finished with my wine. I told the bartender potato chips, not Kingfisher beer, and Brent smoothed the situation by saying he’d take the open bottle. I had to keep in mind that the Cloud Street closed at eight or eight thirty and so if I began a retreat about 7:30 I’d be about right for a plate of pasta. So Brent and I built a few more houses and the time ticked on. I got up and went to the bar to pay. It took a few minutes to pull up the paperwork, which had a thirty plus rupee tax onto a Rs.250 (something like $7 U.S.) glass of wine. That plate of delicious pasta that I would eat later would run about Rs.100. So this is not an every evening thing that I get to build houses over a coffee table so I gave the bartender a Rs.500 note and he passed it on to his assistant along with the paperwork and this was put into a leather binder and the assistant disappeared out the door. I waited. After nearly five minutes, I asked where my change was. There were about ten people in the bar and if their drinks were as expensive as mine, how would they make change for the lot of them? Again, where’s my change? The bartender and another assistant followed by me, went out of the bar, across the lobby, and into the dining room, where the waiters tried to seat me. These were the guys I see every Tuesday morning and we passed pleasantries because I was not going to follow the bartender through the kitchen doors. I needed the Hello and How are you, sirs just for a reality check. The money came back through the swinging doors. I took two hundred and left the rest for a tip and walked back to say good byes in the bar. I could see breaking a five hundred rupee note would pose a difficulty for a street vendor but a five star hotel with prices to back it up……….? I love India!
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Wednesday, January 2, 2008
The Lake
As I’ve said, Kodaikanal is on a ridge. Where ever the houses and buildings stops for a few hundred yards into vacant land, there stands eucalyptus perhaps two-hundred feet tall, which heel in a light wind like ships’ masts. The trees reach up into the haze and thick cloud coming over the ridge. When the clouds blow clear, you see that the trees rise over the cedars and broadleaved trees. The ridge is curved and forms a catchment or bowl, which funnels rainwater. The freshets run together to make a brook and other brooks collide to form a fast moving creek that used to run here. In 1868 Sir Vere Hentry Levings, an Irish gentleman, thought to dam the creek and a lake with long arms and legs sprawled out over the valley.
Sometime later they built a five kilometer raised walk, which discourages all except the most determined bicyclist from harassing pedestrians. The road just beyond the walk serves as an ample bike path. The bike riders share with a few automobiles, several motorcycles whose drivers want to feel the wind in their faces, and there are saddle horses to carry out-of-towners.
No special togs required for either men or women, but the women usually wear an “improper” sari, called a chuedahr. It works fine It’s improper because there was a case brought to court in which the plaintive was excluded from a part of or all of a temple because she was said to be dressed in a chuedahr, which the temple staff considered improperly. A traditional sari is a wrap around skirt that drops to the ankles. Because it is a wrap, when the woman steps forward, the wrap expands and allows for the step. This chuedahr, the “slacks” version of the sari, also reaches to the ankles thereby preserving decorum and modesty, which is the kind of sari that allows a woman to mount a horse. Now since she’ll readily admit that she doesn’t know how to control the animal, the owner comes to her aid. With the lady’s sandals tucked safely in the stirrups, the owner mounts a bicycle and with one hand on the handlebars and one hand on the horse’s halter, he leads horse and rider at a trot along the road. The woman holds onto were a saddle horn would be in a western saddle. (The British never progressed to that level of technology.) And down the road they go, man, bike, horse, and saddle all black and brown. The flower perched in the saddle can be of any color and were one watching for a day, every color ever thought of would come past.
On a walk around the lake you can spot a dozen different varieties of birds. The kingfisher with his fluorescent blue back will be one of them. Fishermen, after flinging out hook, sinker, and “cork,” drowse on the bank keeping one eye open to watch the sliver of wood, he cut for a bobber, duck under the water.
A partial walk, maybe not the whole five kilometers, is about standard for me. I meet walkers, who are on a school trip and prefer an ice cream to a horseback ride. I’d see a baker’s dozen of girls walk toward me. Half would break eye contact and watch for kingfishers. Two or three other would eye me suspiciously. I’d smile and nod and then one would remember a snippet of her intro to English, and say, “Hello.” I would ask, “How are you?” and that would lead to a “Hi” or “I’m just fine and how are you?” Well, by then I was just fine and said so and almost every girl would have a chance to practice pages one and two from her English book. They’d pass me but I could hear them twitter and giggle as they compared how much they said to me.
Out on the lake are rowboats and peddle/paddlers. The rowboats have their owner on the oars while the paddle boats will be rented out to a family with bored children or talkative friends. The crews are made up with a complement of clowns and conversationalist. If you can ride a bike, you can’t get into trouble with one of these craft. No one wears life jackets but no one horses around enough to fall over the side. I might stop along the walk to sit and read. At times a rowboat would come nearby and we might exchange waves and greetings; other times I become part of the tree I leaned back on and nobody says hello to a tree.
On the town side of the lake there are dozens of small food and curio stands. On the other side of the lake, you can look into well kept gardens and at large villas. Some belong to an individual while others are owned by companies and are get-aways for executives. Almost all advertise what their dog will do to you should you decide to take a walk on the grounds. I saw only one dog and many signs with peeling paint. The signs bluster is worse than a mythical dog bite.
The light changes with the cloud patterns and a five kilometer walk is long enough for me. About the time I looked around to see how many more kilometers I have to go, I heard. “Excuse me sir, but of what country are you?”
Two young men riding rented bicycles slow as they paced me. I answered, “I’m from Ah-med-di-cah.”
“And are you a tourist in India?”
“Something like that. I may stay for a while.”
“You like India?”
“Certainly! Look around you. The place is beautiful,”
“And in Ah-med-di-cah you have many lowers?”
“Lowers” was a new word for me but so once was Ah-med-di-cah. “’Lowers,’ what’s that?”
“Lowers, women. You have many lowers?”
Bombay student, Agit Sangvi was a close friend at Texas Tech. During the sweltering summer of 1955 we both attended summer school to expedite our getting a degree and getting out of college as quickly as possible. One memory of that summer was that the grounds keeper decided to go organic and to distribute a layer of pig manure (Tech is an agriculture and mechanics land-grant college) over the already green grass of campus. First you fling it, then you water it, and then you smell it. The grounds keeper lived off campus. Agit and I lived in Doak Hall. He had some dry cleaning to turn in across the street in front of the college. Long ago I forgot the street’s name but I still remember the name of the cleaners. The Wogue Cleaners, no the Vogue Cleaners. Agit had a “v” in his last name but English “v”s are not the same as Indian “v”s. According to him, his last name was pronounced Sangwe. “Agit, vogue, not wogue.” He answered with “Wogue.”
“Oh lovers! Perhaps tens, maybe a hundred, I never really counted. Now say ‘lovers.’”
It didn’t work. “Watch me!” I sunk my upper teeth into my lower lip and said, “Vah!”
“Vah!”
Again with teeth in lip, “Say ‘Vee!”
“Vee!”
“Good! Now say, ‘Voh!’”
“Voh!” and in unison.
“Say, ‘Vu!”
“Vu!” with perfection.
“Now say ‘Lo-Vers!”
“Lowers!” They rode on.
My plan is to empty the employment offices of Nebraska. Bring all those Johnny Carson speakers over here to India at something better than an American minimum wage with a housing and a food allowance. Then we can address the problem of “lowers.” The only difficulty that I can see is if they came to a place like Kodaikanal, they might never see Omaha again.
I walked toward the bridge and saw two or three hundred people standing out in a clearing. Nobody seemed to be the center of attention but clearly it was a demonstration about to form up. I hurried across the bridge and looking back over my shoulder, I asked a well-dressed man who those people were.
“Sir, that is a bus stand,” he explained.
I was impressed. Kodaikanal was large enough to have two bus stands!
- - - - - - - - -
In this same catchment as the lake is Bryant Park and if a relation to Wm. Cullen Bryant, then probably by the distance from Kodaikanal to 42nd Street. Mr. Bryant, a forester, in 1920 for the price of fifty cents purchased twenty acres and began clearing and planting trees, experimenting with many varieties of pines. Twenty years later he or his staff began planting flowers as well. Two years later he handed the half-dollar purchase over to the Kodaikanal Municipality. The public has enjoyed the plant collections in and out of the greenhouse. Then there are the monkeys….
The park lies at the end of one of the arms of the lake and sports a horticulture station on the premises. I walked past the building and on to a greenhouse, which houses a whole zoo of plants. I climbed the trail that leads up the catchment. The land goes uncultivated about half way up the hill and there is where I encountered the monkeys. The troop could have numbered between fifty and seventy-five. Of course they were of all ages with some of the older ones with red faces and gray hair. They miss nothing and saw me before I saw them. I had shopped before coming into the park, buying an “Asian apple” and a papaya. These I carried in a plastic bag but it was of no interest to them. Monkey-watching is an easy activity. This troop had grown up around people and had long ago learned all there was of interest to them about us. I suspect they thought of me with no more curiosity than I would of a cow in the street. For the most part, they busied themselves with what was edible among the trees and in the grass. Whatever it was that they ate; it was too small for me to see so toss a coin, seeds or insects? There is something that at the same time is intriguing and disturbing about such a troop. They completely ignored me but were it from their having lived on the outskirts of our society or was it from their innate lack of curiosity, of having satisfied that they knew all that there was worth knowing about “the lesser side of the family.” The young ones, small enough to sit in your hand, played a grab and run game while their elders busied themselves with the grain-sized bits of food they found. Two or three groomed themselves. Slowly they moved on around the shoulder of the hill with no more speed than a cloud drifting across the ridge.
I climbed to the top of the hill and found an entrance/exit not far from my hotel but then decided I needed more flower/monkey time so I turned and walked down the trail again. When I came onto where the monkeys had been, I had the hillside to myself.
I revisited the greenhouse and then found a bench beneath a shelter where, were the sun to ever get overly warm, you could sit. No more than I had settled on a bench then a twelve-year old ran up to me and told me what was what. Self-confidence was not this boy’s short suit. And while I would guess he spoke Tamil, the rest I pretty well knew. There were a dozen monkeys within a few yards and another two dozen beyond them and anybody with a simian sized brain would know that that old man with the red face and white hair climbing down from that tree had something on his mind bigger than a bug I couldn’t see. What he couldn’t see but intended to investigate was what I had in the sack.
Then everything seemed to move in slow motion and that was possibly for the best, I was tired enough from my walk to lack any kind of craftiness ascribed to my species. The old guy casually ambled over to me and with one finger extended ripped open the bag. Both the “apple” and the papaya fell to the ground. He grabbed the apple and I retrieved the papaya. Possession being nine points of the law and every one of those points being backed by a sharp tooth, he went his way and I mine.
The kid was back with hands on hips, telling me the Tamil equivalent of, “I told you so.” All I could do was laugh and wonder how the Asian apple tasted. I’d never eaten one and the old guy wasn’t telling.
#
Sometime later they built a five kilometer raised walk, which discourages all except the most determined bicyclist from harassing pedestrians. The road just beyond the walk serves as an ample bike path. The bike riders share with a few automobiles, several motorcycles whose drivers want to feel the wind in their faces, and there are saddle horses to carry out-of-towners.
No special togs required for either men or women, but the women usually wear an “improper” sari, called a chuedahr. It works fine It’s improper because there was a case brought to court in which the plaintive was excluded from a part of or all of a temple because she was said to be dressed in a chuedahr, which the temple staff considered improperly. A traditional sari is a wrap around skirt that drops to the ankles. Because it is a wrap, when the woman steps forward, the wrap expands and allows for the step. This chuedahr, the “slacks” version of the sari, also reaches to the ankles thereby preserving decorum and modesty, which is the kind of sari that allows a woman to mount a horse. Now since she’ll readily admit that she doesn’t know how to control the animal, the owner comes to her aid. With the lady’s sandals tucked safely in the stirrups, the owner mounts a bicycle and with one hand on the handlebars and one hand on the horse’s halter, he leads horse and rider at a trot along the road. The woman holds onto were a saddle horn would be in a western saddle. (The British never progressed to that level of technology.) And down the road they go, man, bike, horse, and saddle all black and brown. The flower perched in the saddle can be of any color and were one watching for a day, every color ever thought of would come past.
On a walk around the lake you can spot a dozen different varieties of birds. The kingfisher with his fluorescent blue back will be one of them. Fishermen, after flinging out hook, sinker, and “cork,” drowse on the bank keeping one eye open to watch the sliver of wood, he cut for a bobber, duck under the water.
A partial walk, maybe not the whole five kilometers, is about standard for me. I meet walkers, who are on a school trip and prefer an ice cream to a horseback ride. I’d see a baker’s dozen of girls walk toward me. Half would break eye contact and watch for kingfishers. Two or three other would eye me suspiciously. I’d smile and nod and then one would remember a snippet of her intro to English, and say, “Hello.” I would ask, “How are you?” and that would lead to a “Hi” or “I’m just fine and how are you?” Well, by then I was just fine and said so and almost every girl would have a chance to practice pages one and two from her English book. They’d pass me but I could hear them twitter and giggle as they compared how much they said to me.
Out on the lake are rowboats and peddle/paddlers. The rowboats have their owner on the oars while the paddle boats will be rented out to a family with bored children or talkative friends. The crews are made up with a complement of clowns and conversationalist. If you can ride a bike, you can’t get into trouble with one of these craft. No one wears life jackets but no one horses around enough to fall over the side. I might stop along the walk to sit and read. At times a rowboat would come nearby and we might exchange waves and greetings; other times I become part of the tree I leaned back on and nobody says hello to a tree.
On the town side of the lake there are dozens of small food and curio stands. On the other side of the lake, you can look into well kept gardens and at large villas. Some belong to an individual while others are owned by companies and are get-aways for executives. Almost all advertise what their dog will do to you should you decide to take a walk on the grounds. I saw only one dog and many signs with peeling paint. The signs bluster is worse than a mythical dog bite.
The light changes with the cloud patterns and a five kilometer walk is long enough for me. About the time I looked around to see how many more kilometers I have to go, I heard. “Excuse me sir, but of what country are you?”
Two young men riding rented bicycles slow as they paced me. I answered, “I’m from Ah-med-di-cah.”
“And are you a tourist in India?”
“Something like that. I may stay for a while.”
“You like India?”
“Certainly! Look around you. The place is beautiful,”
“And in Ah-med-di-cah you have many lowers?”
“Lowers” was a new word for me but so once was Ah-med-di-cah. “’Lowers,’ what’s that?”
“Lowers, women. You have many lowers?”
Bombay student, Agit Sangvi was a close friend at Texas Tech. During the sweltering summer of 1955 we both attended summer school to expedite our getting a degree and getting out of college as quickly as possible. One memory of that summer was that the grounds keeper decided to go organic and to distribute a layer of pig manure (Tech is an agriculture and mechanics land-grant college) over the already green grass of campus. First you fling it, then you water it, and then you smell it. The grounds keeper lived off campus. Agit and I lived in Doak Hall. He had some dry cleaning to turn in across the street in front of the college. Long ago I forgot the street’s name but I still remember the name of the cleaners. The Wogue Cleaners, no the Vogue Cleaners. Agit had a “v” in his last name but English “v”s are not the same as Indian “v”s. According to him, his last name was pronounced Sangwe. “Agit, vogue, not wogue.” He answered with “Wogue.”
“Oh lovers! Perhaps tens, maybe a hundred, I never really counted. Now say ‘lovers.’”
It didn’t work. “Watch me!” I sunk my upper teeth into my lower lip and said, “Vah!”
“Vah!”
Again with teeth in lip, “Say ‘Vee!”
“Vee!”
“Good! Now say, ‘Voh!’”
“Voh!” and in unison.
“Say, ‘Vu!”
“Vu!” with perfection.
“Now say ‘Lo-Vers!”
“Lowers!” They rode on.
My plan is to empty the employment offices of Nebraska. Bring all those Johnny Carson speakers over here to India at something better than an American minimum wage with a housing and a food allowance. Then we can address the problem of “lowers.” The only difficulty that I can see is if they came to a place like Kodaikanal, they might never see Omaha again.
I walked toward the bridge and saw two or three hundred people standing out in a clearing. Nobody seemed to be the center of attention but clearly it was a demonstration about to form up. I hurried across the bridge and looking back over my shoulder, I asked a well-dressed man who those people were.
“Sir, that is a bus stand,” he explained.
I was impressed. Kodaikanal was large enough to have two bus stands!
- - - - - - - - -
In this same catchment as the lake is Bryant Park and if a relation to Wm. Cullen Bryant, then probably by the distance from Kodaikanal to 42nd Street. Mr. Bryant, a forester, in 1920 for the price of fifty cents purchased twenty acres and began clearing and planting trees, experimenting with many varieties of pines. Twenty years later he or his staff began planting flowers as well. Two years later he handed the half-dollar purchase over to the Kodaikanal Municipality. The public has enjoyed the plant collections in and out of the greenhouse. Then there are the monkeys….
The park lies at the end of one of the arms of the lake and sports a horticulture station on the premises. I walked past the building and on to a greenhouse, which houses a whole zoo of plants. I climbed the trail that leads up the catchment. The land goes uncultivated about half way up the hill and there is where I encountered the monkeys. The troop could have numbered between fifty and seventy-five. Of course they were of all ages with some of the older ones with red faces and gray hair. They miss nothing and saw me before I saw them. I had shopped before coming into the park, buying an “Asian apple” and a papaya. These I carried in a plastic bag but it was of no interest to them. Monkey-watching is an easy activity. This troop had grown up around people and had long ago learned all there was of interest to them about us. I suspect they thought of me with no more curiosity than I would of a cow in the street. For the most part, they busied themselves with what was edible among the trees and in the grass. Whatever it was that they ate; it was too small for me to see so toss a coin, seeds or insects? There is something that at the same time is intriguing and disturbing about such a troop. They completely ignored me but were it from their having lived on the outskirts of our society or was it from their innate lack of curiosity, of having satisfied that they knew all that there was worth knowing about “the lesser side of the family.” The young ones, small enough to sit in your hand, played a grab and run game while their elders busied themselves with the grain-sized bits of food they found. Two or three groomed themselves. Slowly they moved on around the shoulder of the hill with no more speed than a cloud drifting across the ridge.
I climbed to the top of the hill and found an entrance/exit not far from my hotel but then decided I needed more flower/monkey time so I turned and walked down the trail again. When I came onto where the monkeys had been, I had the hillside to myself.
I revisited the greenhouse and then found a bench beneath a shelter where, were the sun to ever get overly warm, you could sit. No more than I had settled on a bench then a twelve-year old ran up to me and told me what was what. Self-confidence was not this boy’s short suit. And while I would guess he spoke Tamil, the rest I pretty well knew. There were a dozen monkeys within a few yards and another two dozen beyond them and anybody with a simian sized brain would know that that old man with the red face and white hair climbing down from that tree had something on his mind bigger than a bug I couldn’t see. What he couldn’t see but intended to investigate was what I had in the sack.
Then everything seemed to move in slow motion and that was possibly for the best, I was tired enough from my walk to lack any kind of craftiness ascribed to my species. The old guy casually ambled over to me and with one finger extended ripped open the bag. Both the “apple” and the papaya fell to the ground. He grabbed the apple and I retrieved the papaya. Possession being nine points of the law and every one of those points being backed by a sharp tooth, he went his way and I mine.
The kid was back with hands on hips, telling me the Tamil equivalent of, “I told you so.” All I could do was laugh and wonder how the Asian apple tasted. I’d never eaten one and the old guy wasn’t telling.
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