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.


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