30 December. Madurai.
The seven-day break in this diary is attributable to a nameless fever.
On Christmas Eve morning, when we left Tisaiyanvilai, I felt slightly peculiar but thought nothing of it – until suddenly, as we waited at Tirunelveli Junction for a train to Madurai, I became really ill. We were waiting for a train because we had just missed the bus; and we had missed the bus because we were waiting at the post office for a delivery of foreign mail that again failed to come; and, as a final complication, I had also missed the bank, which on that day closed at noon by way of celebrating Christmas.
This was the first time I have ever been literally penniless – our last paise had gone on the train tickets – and I found the experience interesting. It underlined the extent to which even the poorest of us depends on what little money we have as an essential prop to our personalities; and I began to see the begging type of hippy, who has voluntarily made a vow of poverty, from a new angle. Not for nothing do most religions regard poverty as a pre-requisite for the perfection of sanctity.
Our train, marked EXPRESS in giant lettering up and down its sides, left Tirunelveli at four o’clock and took five-and-a-half hours to cover ninety-five miles. It was almost empty because the railwaymen had been on strike up to that morning and the general public had not yet realised the strike was over.
By the time we arrived here I was too feverish to articulate and Rachel also was sickening fast. However, in the Tirunelveli waiting-room we had met a kindly young Swiss couple – our first foreign fellow-travellers since leaving Goa – and by some means these guardian angels got us installed in Madurai’s Travellers’ Bungalow, just beyond the station yard. I dimly recollect stumbling across row after row of railway sleepers in pitch darkness under the noses of gigantic steam engines (c. 1910) which hissed menacingly while Rachel vomited over my legs. Then I was on a bed and she was on a couch in a high-ceilinged room well furnished with rosewood pieces – and haunted by generations of I.C.S. officers on tour to inspect their Empire.
I had heard our Swiss friends urging the pudgy, puzzled little caretaker to get us a doctor from somewhere without delay – the irony of it, hours after leaving a doctor’s house! – but this man proved more than slightly obtuse and from 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve to 11 a.m. on Stephen’s Day no one even put a head around the door to see if we were still alive. Mercifully our gallon water-bottle had been almost full when we arrived and I suppose Rachel helped herself; she tells me she slept most of the time and never had a headache. Meanwhile I dosed myself with fistfuls of codeine which had no effect whatever on any of my symptoms. The worst of these was a headache so excruciating that at times I half-believed myself to be dying of meningitis. And the noise off-stage did nothing to help.
Indians love noise and habitually amplify their degraded cinema pop music to truly diabolical proportions. In this case I have no idea where the original sound came from, but an amplifier had been attached to the roof directly above our window and it is no exaggeration to say that during the first two days and nights in that room I was driven almost insane. Only those who have personally suffered Indian pop music at close range will be able to give me the sympathy I deserve. Occasionally there was a lull in the inferno and I almost wept with relief, but no lull lasted longer than it takes to change a record. Perhaps Richard Lannoy was right when he commented in The Speaking Tree – ‘Indian pop music … pervades the lives of the Indian masses as does no other form of entertainment … Here is a people … distracted from the human predicament by the highly organised mass media. The pop arts of India merely block individuation, alienate people from personal experience, and intensify their moral isolation from each other, from reality, and from themselves.’
By 11 a.m. on the twenty-sixth I had realised that if I were not to die of neglect some action must be taken. Leaning on the wall I made it to the veranda and tried to persuade three passers-by that I genuinely and urgently needed medical attention; but they all insisted that I must go to a clinic or hospital as no doctor would come to me. However, I knew it would be suicidal to go doctor-hunting in a steady downpour of cold rain with a high temperature, so I tottered despairingly back to my sweat-sodden bed.
Then Rachel appeared beside me, in a rather genie-like way. ‘I’m better,’ she said, ‘and I’m hungry. May I go out to look for food? Why don’t you get a doctor? You look terrible. Have you no medicine? Why am I better?’
I mumbled that no doctor was available, whereupon Rachel said, ‘Why don’t you write a letter to a doctor and get a servant to take it?’
‘What doctor? What servant?’ I muttered muzzily.
‘Any doctor and any servant,’ said Rachel, impatiently.
I raised my head and began to take her seriously. She brought me pen and paper and in shaky capitals I appealed to a ‘Dear Doctor’ while she trotted off to fetch ‘a servant’. Moments later she was back with a young cycle-rickshaw-wallah she had found sheltering on the veranda. His English was unintelligible but he seemed to understand when I explained that if he returned with a doctor I would give him Rs.5 before I left Madurai. Pocketing my note he disappeared and less than fifteen minutes later showed an elderly Indian woman doctor into the room. She was from a Christian maternity hospital scarcely five minutes’ walk away and she assured me that had we gone there on Christmas Eve we would have been given a very warm welcome and appropriate treatment.
But what was ‘appropriate treatment’? Despite heavy doses of fabulously expensive British-made drugs my temperature remained between 101° and 104° for the next few days, while my headache resisted every available pain-killer and I developed a strange racking cough – quite unlike bronchitis – which almost caused me to faint with exhaustion.*
Obviously I could not be moved, but my faithful doctor called four times a day – no doubt she feared further ghastly complications – and ordered the caretaker to provide fresh bedding and two-hourly pots of tea. She also brought her senior partner, Dr Kennett, to examine me, which I gathered was a significant measure of her concern. Dr Kennett is an astonishing 80-year-old who has done so much for the poor of this city that a main street has been named after her. Following her visit, the attitude towards us of the caretaker and his staff changed from polite indifference to a respectful eagerness to please.
Apart from all this professional attention, both these doctors were motherly kindness personified. They lent me Rs.100, regularly sent a servant with tempting little delicacies from their own kitchen, and provided Rachel with an abundance of Christmassy snacks, toys, games and balloons. Then yesterday Dr Kennett’s car took us to the hospital, where we are now installed in a two-bed cubicle amidst the howls of the newly born. Today my temperature is at last normal, and if it remains so we plan to go to Periyar tomorrow afternoon to convalesce in the depths of the wildlife sanctuary.
31 December. Kumili.
This morning I rose and shone. Fifteen watt, as you might say, but an improvement on the blackout of the past week.
After breakfast we set off with our cycle-rickshaw friend to see what is perhaps the most impressive of all Hindu temples. The morning was a perfection of clear golden sunshine from an azure sky – after several dark days of non-stop monsoon rain – and the building that came into view in the distance, as we crossed the high railway bridge, seemed almost unreal in its alien loveliness. It is in fact a whole complex of buildings and one could spend days exploring and admiring – though that might overtax Rachel’s interest: she was happy enough to leave after five hours. Moreover, since the Madurai temple is one of South India’s main tourist attractions mlecchas are courteously catered for and racketeers of every sort rigorously suppressed.
On the way back to the hospital we called at the bank – always a long-drawn-out procedure – and by the time we had packed, said grateful good-byes and caught the two-thirty bus I was feeling decidedly feeble. And so – I suspect – was the ever-uncomplaining Rachel, who is still suffering from that odd cough and has not yet regained her appetite. She has had no treatment for our nameless disease because I am very against children being stuffed with antibiotics.
This afternoon’s journey took us south-west, through a region where the density of the human population was matched by a staggering number of cattle, mainly the much-revered humped whites. There were also hundreds of buffaloes and several herds of minute donkeys which are commonly used as baggage-animals and too often beaten savagely. Naturally none of these beasts looked well fed, yet even on this rather arid plain I saw no starving animals, as one frequently does in North India. Rachel was distressed on the donkeys’ behalf and not consoled when I told her that according to Hindu mythology the ass is the steed or vehicle of Sitala, the goddess of smallpox (one of the ten aspects of Kali), and so is regarded by most Indian peasants with a mixture of fear and contempt. Under the Mughals, no Hindu of the North-West frontier province – now Pakistan – was allowed to ride anything but an ass. I cannot understand why donkeys are universally scorned, despite their being so useful. Perhaps their voice is against them. Luckily Rachel did not notice that many of those we passed today had had their nostrils slit, it being the erroneous belief of Indians that this mutilation modifies the bray.
For miles our narrow road ran between low, grotesquely shaped, rock-strewn hills towards the high blue wall of the Ghats. Then, having crossed the Tamil Nadu–Kerala border at the little town of Cumbum, we drove straight at the apparently sheer mountain barrier that here rises abruptly from the plain. ‘There must be a tunnel!’ said I to Rachel. But instead there was a dramatic road which I would have immensely enjoyed on foot though I did not greatly relish it from the seat of an overloaded Indian bus.
When we got here just after sunset the air felt cold. Kumili is a single-street village, 3,300 feet above sea-level and four miles from Periyar, and in the larger of its two doss-houses we are occupying a cubicle in which I can only move crabwise between our cots. An icy draught is sneaking through a broken window and I have just come face to face with my first South Indian bed-bug (now deceased). I feel so exhausted the New Year will have to see itself in without me, but I daresay 1974 will be none the worse for my non-attendance at its birth.
1 January, 1974. Thekkady, Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary.
If the denizens of Kumili celebrated our Western New Year I did not hear their celebrations, or feel their draughts or bedbugs, or suffer any other interference with my ten-hour sleep.
By seven-thirty this morning we were on the way to Thekkady, which is the administrative and tourist centre for the sanctuary. Near the lake the Wildlife Preservation Officer has his headquarters in a little bungalow, and an inconspicuous wooden landing-stage has been built for the small motor-launches that take visitors on game-watching expeditions.
‘How far is it?’ asked Rachel, as we walked away from Kumili through the crisp early morning mountain air.
‘Four miles,’ I replied.
Rachel looked at me sardonically. ‘I thought we were supposed to be convalescing,’ she said. ‘I don’t call carrying your big rucksack four miles convalescing. Is there no bus?’
‘No,’ I said firmly – hoping one would not overtake us, for ‘The whole area of the Sanctuary abounds in natural scenery,’ as my tourist brochure puts it. Soon we saw a troop of Nilgiri langurs, and then that most lovely creature, the Indian Giant Squirrel, and Rachel forgot all about the snags of convalescing with mamma. At the sanctuary border-post an amiable young policeman asked – without getting up from his breakfast – if we were carrying any guns, and then made a sign that we could duck under the barrier and proceed.
The Kerala Tourism Development Corporation owns both Thekkady’s hotels. One is the expensive, Western-style Aranya Nivas, where a bottle of beer costs Rs.9, and the other is Periyar House – clean, comfortable, spacious, efficiently staffed, teetotal, vegetarian and only Rs.10 for an airy, well-appointed single room overlooking jungle and lake. Tonight Periyar House is almost full and the guests include half a dozen semi-hippy European youngsters and a party of elderly Prussians with thick guide-books and severe sunburn. But the Aranya Nivas, not surprisingly, is empty. I have been told it depends almost entirely on rich Americans and the flashy, hard-drinking type of North Indian who is out to impress his benighted Southern cousins. A pleasing feature of Thekkady is that one can without difficulty avoid one’s fellow-tourists; even on the motor-launch this morning there were only four Madrassis and a camera-obsessed Japanese youth.
Periyar Lake is twenty miles long and was formed in 1895 by the construction of a dam across the Periyar river to help irrigate large tracts of Tamil Nadu. Its maximum depth is about 140 feet and, as my brochure explains, ‘When the Lake was formed, tree-growth from the water-spread area was not completely removed and therefore a large number of dead tree trunks still exist within the lake. They get submerged or exposed by the fluctuating water-level. These dead trees, though sometimes a hazard to navigation enhances the scenic value of the locality and allows the nesting and roosting of several water birds.’ I am not sure that I agree about the enhancing of the scenic value; the cumulative effect of so many dead trees is slightly depressing and they serve as a nagging reminder of the lake’s artificiality. However, if they solve the water-birds’ housing problems they are well worth keeping.
Our two-hour tour was good value for Rs.4 and the enthusiastic pilot identified many birds for us as we chugged slowly along, enjoying the warm sun sparkling on the water, and the cool breeze, and the faint yet thrilling possibility of seeing some big game. At the edge of the water in the near distance we eventually saw a herd of elephants; but obviously touring by motor-launch is not the most efficient way of animal-watching, though this trip is well worth taking for its own sake.
After lunch I left Rachel playing in the jungle near the hotel – where there were two tame elephants and lots of non-shy langurs to entertain her – while I walked half-way back to Kumili in search of the Wildlife Officer, a pleasant young man who readily agreed to our spending two nights at the Manakkavala Forest Rest House, six miles away. The Government of India Tourist Office in London had provided me with an excellent sketch-map of the sanctuary, on which all rest houses and footpaths are clearly marked, so I argued that we needed no guide, only the key. But the Officer thought otherwise and in the morning a trainee Wildlife Officer is to meet us outside the hotel at eight o’clock.
2 January. Manakkavala.
The trek here perfectly illustrated how one should not travel with a small convalescing child. All would have been well had we been able to go at our own pace, devoting the whole day to the six-mile walk, but our unwanted guide arrived three hours late, which meant that when we started Rachel had already expended a considerable amount of her at present meagre store of energy and I was in an occidentally bad temper because I detest unpunctuality. On being asked ‘Why so late?’ the smartly uniformed guide, who was accompanied by a barefooted 14-year-old, replied that he had been looking for a companion as he would be afraid to return alone to Thekkady – an excuse which did nothing to raise him in my estimation. Then it transpired that our guides were in a hurry, and Rachel was not equal to hurrying over the roughest terrain she had ever encountered. In brief, the whole thing was a disaster, not enjoyed by either of us.
However, to be on our own in this remote rest house compensates for the day’s tribulations. It stands near the top of a steep, jungle-covered ridge, overlooking one of the lake’s many narrow arms, and about a hundred yards away, across the still water, is a tree-covered peninsula with a long shore of grassland between forest and lake. There, at sunset, I saw seven gaur (the Indian bison) coming to drink and then quickly melting away into the shadows under the trees. These splendid creatures, with their spreading upcurling horns and massive sleek bodies, are aggressively anti-human and by far the most dangerous animals in the sanctuary; but because of their shyness the visitor is extremely unlikely ever to encounter one at close range. There are said to be sixteen tigers and many leopards here though these are rarely seen.
3 January. Manakkavala.
Today we did some serious convalescing. My original plan had been to trek out from here, but this morning neither of us was up to it. However, as we lay around on the near-by lake shore we probably saw more than if we had been on the move. Scarcely thirty yards away a gaur cow and calf crossed a grassy glade between two patches of jungle: lots of wild pigs and piglets dug vigorously for their lunch during the forenoon: bonnet macaques and lion-tailed macaques swung and screamed in the trees above us: two flying-squirrels played tip and tig for quarter of an hour: a fiercely handsome fish-eagle caught and ate his prey on the opposite shore: darters dived frequently into the water, looking like something out of a fossil museum – and towards sunset eleven elephants, including two young calves, strolled down to bathe in the lake. But alas! – to our great disappointment they turned a corner before submerging, and because of the calves it would have been unwise to follow them.
It feels strange to be the only humans in a world of animals, knowing that every movement and sound is caused not by a member of one’s own species. Periyar must be one of the most satisfying game sanctuaries in the world. It is totally uncommercialised – apart from Thekkady on its fringe: and even Thekkady has not yet been spoiled – and when you walk off to a forest hut there are (pace that sketch-map!) no discernible paths, no tiresome little signposts, no fussy picnic-sites, no concessions of any sort to mankind, until the hut itself is reached. It is just you and the animals, in a setting of incomparable natural loveliness, blessed by silence. But of course silence is the wrong word; what I mean is the absence of artificial noise. Except during a couple of noon hours there is very little silence, day or night, in an area that teems with bird and animal and insect life. Even when one can see nothing, it is fascinating simply to listen to the complex pattern of jungle sounds being woven against the stillness of a region undisturbed by man.
4 January. Thekkady.
The return trek on our own was an unqualified success and when Rachel said, ‘It seems to me you’re a better guide than those other two’ I felt bound immodestly to agree. Not that it was easy to negotiate either the uncomfortable elephant-bogs or the steep, slippery slopes that in places rise straight up from the lake and had been the main cause of Rachel’s alarm on the way out. The latter hazard we avoided today by leaving the lakeside and cautiously following animal paths through the jungle, stopping at intervals for sustenance under a gooseberry tree. The elephant-bogs, however, were another matter. These are swampy stretches of land at lake level, dotted with huge clumps of tough grass which act as stepping-stones, and the penalty for missing one’s footing is partial immersion in gluey black mud. To Rachel’s delight I soon slipped and, being weighted with a rucksack, sank so fast I lost both shoes. (They were falling to bits anyway, so this was not the economic disaster it might have been.)
It was interesting to observe the impact of animals on the environment in an area where man never interferes. (Though the fact that he deliberately never interferes is itself a form of interference with the balance of nature.) Many of the trees had recently had branches and bark ripped off by elephants, whose gigantic droppings were all over the place, and several grassy ridges looked as though newly ploughed by the wild pigs, of whom we saw dozens today, some quite close and not particularly nervous. We also saw fresh gaur droppings and passed a few of their resting-places, where the undergrowth had been trampled down and shaped. And to Rachel went the glory of noticing a tree from which much of the bark had been scraped by feline claws – a leopard, judging by the height of the marks. But to me – luckily – came the shock of seeing a long, thick snake just in time to arrest my bare foot inches from its back as it crossed our path.
‘Why do you look so queer?’ asked Rachel, staring up at me. ‘Is that why you won’t let me go first?’
‘Probably it was harmless,’ I said briskly. (I notice one always tells oneself this immediately afterwards, doubtless by way of counteracting the shock.)
‘How soon would you die if it was harmful?’ asked Rachel, indefatigably athirst for scientific data.
‘I don’t know,’ I said shortly.
All day a strong cool breeze sent small white clouds cruising across the sky and stirred the golden elephant grass; and the warm sun sparkled on the lake – from which we never strayed too far – and glistened on the fresh green grass by the water’s edge; and all around were powder-blue mountains, rising just beyond the splendour of the forest – a pink-brown-green expanse of noble trees, their colours vivid in the clear air, with the fiery flowers of the Giant Salmalias blazing like distant beacons.
We got back here at two-thirty, having made the six-mile walk last for seven hours, and I shall remember this Periyar interlude as one of the highlights of our journey. The feeling of remoteness, the beauty of jungle, lake and grasslands, and the novel awareness of being a mere visitor in a world of animals, add up to something very special.
After a late lunch I left Rachel playing near the hotel and hitched a lift into Kumili to replace my lost shoes. By the time I had walked back the only available pair were lacerating my feet but as they cost less than Rs.6 I can afford to replace them tomorrow. Trying to shop in a tiny place like Kumili – or even in a bigger town like Tisaiyanvilai – reveals how little cash circulates in rural India.
At supper I got into conversation with a family from Delhi – parents, two adolescent sons and paternal grandmother. Despite their staying in this modest hotel the husband must be a government official of some importance, as they have a State car and a retinue of liveried minions who travel in a jeep. The whole family spoke rather patronisingly about South Indians, as North Indians are wont to do, yet they were charming to me and I found myself talking to them with a freedom one does not normally feel amongst South Indians, however fluent their English.
This takes us into a not very savoury labyrinth. How much thicker is blood than water? Why am I aware of being with my own people – in the most basic sense of that phrase – when I am talking to fair-skinned, Aryan, North Indian Hindus, and aware of being with strangers when I am talking to dark-skinned, Dravidian, South Indian Christians? I suppose the short answer is that blood is indeed a lot thicker than water.
Yet this is not simply a shaming confession of racism: something a good deal more complicated is involved. The expressive cliché ‘on the same wavelength’ is needed here. One does not always approve of, like or wish to be with those of one’s own race, but one understands their emotions and thought-processes by some primitive system that seems not to operate with other races. This lack of instinctive understanding must be at the root of racism, though in itself it is not racism; people fear what they cannot understand, and dislike what they fear.
The Hindu caste laws could be described as an elaborate contrivance for making colour prejudice look respectable and the immutability of the Aryans’ disdain for Dravidians is very striking. Whatever anti-discrimination laws may be passed, and however rapidly India may become a genuinely secular state, I cannot see Indian colour prejudice ever being eradicated. Throughout history it has been a dominant factor here and it does make one question the wisdom of having a single, unwieldy, politically united Republic when a number of smaller independent states would be more manageable from a practical point of view and culturally more realistic. Even in this E.E.C. era no one suggests that Italy and Denmark should be parts of the same nation because they both have a Christian tradition and belong to the same land-mass.
However, I must admit that on the whole I find South Indians far more likeable, outgoing and friendly than North Indians. Just as I find the Tibetans and the Ethiopians far more congenial than certain notoriously pure-blooded European Aryans I could mention.
5 January. Munnar.
In Kumili this morning everybody denied the existence of a Munnar bus so we had to stand shivering for over an hour beside a faded little signpost saying ‘Munnar: 110 km.s’ and pointing up a steep, rough road not marked on my map.
‘Why are we standing here?’ asked Rachel, her teeth chattering pathetically. ‘The men said there was no bus.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I replied confidently. ‘There’s a bus to everywhere in India if you wait long enough.’
An Indian street-scene is rarely without entertainment-value and to divert us this morning we had the spectacle of some 200 Alleppy pilgrims doing battle for accommodation on three decrepit forty-seater buses. These men had come up from the coast yesterday, to attend a festival at a famous local shrine, and they looked a wild lot. Despite the bitterly cold morning air most were naked from the waist up, with sandalwood ash streaked across their dark torsos, bulky marigold garlands around their necks and bed-rolls slung over their shoulders. On their heads were balanced sacks of Shiva-knows-what, topped by a couple of cooking-pots and another garland. Their struggles to fit the human quart into the pint vehicle were at last successful, as such struggles normally are in India, and with much chanting of prayers, clapping of hands and blaring of horns the three antique buses swayed slowly off to tackle an extremely tricky ghat road.
Our own bus, when eventually it arrived, looked no less decrepit but was not unduly crowded. It was going most of the way to Munnar and took four and a half hours to cover forty miles through the Travancore Hills – Kerala’s highest mountains. I was so cold for the first two hours that my numbed hands could not find my handkerchief in my pocket and I was unable fully to appreciate the grandly beautiful ranges we crossed, and the dark, densely forested ravines that sometimes dropped away for 500 feet from the edge of our narrow road.
The surface was so rough and the tyres were so worn that we had two convenient punctures, which allowed us to stretch our legs and admire the view. This is such a thinly populated area (by Kerala standards) that we passed only one town and three large villages – each sporting several pairs of nuns and an array of neatly painted hammers and sickles on the walls of huts and houses.
At one-thirty we were deposited outside a tea-house at a crossroads and told the Munnar bus would come soon. It did, but was so crowded I had to stand and therefore missed the approaches to this enchanting town, which lies in a green bowl of tea-plantations, rimmed by soaring blue mountains – including Anaimudi (8,841 feet), the highest peak in India south of the Himalayas.
As we were extricating ourselves from the bus a slim man about 40 years old, who introduced himself as Joseph Iype, stepped out of the crowd and said we must have tea and biscuits in his electrical equipment shop. Soon we had been invited to spend the night with the Iypes and were being escorted to their bungalow by 11-year-old Chuta, at present on holidays from his Ooty school. We went part of the way by bus, as the Iypes live on a steep, tea-green mountainside some three miles from the town, overlooking the river valley and directly opposite the blue, rounded bulk of Anaimudi. There is a little colony of British-built bungalows here but few British residents remain. Yet the tea-plantations are still British-owned – which is fair enough, as our host remarked, since the British were entirely responsible for organising the clearing of the jungly mountainsides and building the local roads.
English is the Iypes’ first language and they are, as our host’s first name indicates, Christians. Their 17-year-old daughter is in her last year at a Coimbatore boarding-school and Mrs Iype laughingly admitted it is no coincidence that so many two-child South Indian families have a five- or six-year gap between children. In this part of the subcontinent there is such a strong boarding-school tradition that even not-very-well-off middle-class families send both sons and daughters away at 5 or 6 years old; and when the adored first-born departs – sometimes to a distance of several hundred miles – his or her heartbroken mamma naturally tends to think in terms of a replacement.
Leaving Rachel with Chuta, I set off after tea to walk along the narrow crest of the 5,000-foot ridge on which these bungalows are built. (Munnar town is at 4,500 feet.) On both sides I was looking straight down into dizzying depths, with fold after fold of soft blue mountains fading away into the southern distance and Anaimudi lying royally against the northern sky, dominating Munnar’s valley – which also holds a swift, tree-lined river and a cricket-pitch where tiny, darting white dots were just visible. I wish we could have accepted the Iypes’ generous invitation to spend a few days here, but the Thimmiahs expect us back on the 10th.
Before dinner the Iypes’ closest friend called. He is a most endearing and prodigiously well-informed Muslim whose wife – unexpectedly – is an Indian Christian. Recently he started a toy-factory on the near-by mountainside and to my horror he presented Rachel with a large, angular, heavy and beautifully finished wooden truck which will not make life any easier for the beast of burden over the next few months. Despite our non-Christmas, Santa somehow managed to function only too efficiently and I am now carrying, as part of our permanent equipment, three elephants, two large dolls, one tiger, one spotted deer, one kangaroo, the dolls’ dinner-service and a sketching-pad accurately described on the cover as ‘Monster!’
6 January. Udumalpet.
Today began badly for poor Rachel, who before breakfast had to have a minute thorn removed from the ball of her right foot. Overnight it had set up quite a nasty infection and I only hope I got it all out.
I spent the forenoon walking – and climbing a little – in the near-by mountains, while Chuta entertained Rachel. When I set out at eight-thirty an improbable light frost was glittering on the grass but the air soon warmed up and by ten o’clock I was sweating, despite the strong breeze that swept the heights. I hope some day to return to that Idukki District of Kerala, where one could spend weeks happily trekking.
By a pleasing coincidence, Mr Iype and the children were also travelling towards Coimbatore today: otherwise I might never have plumbed the mysteries of the regional bus service. Because of the state of the local roads Munnar is ignored by Kerala’s buses and depends on a few privately owned vehicles of infinite whims. Today the Udumalpet bus chose to leave at 2.40 p.m., but tomorrow it may leave at noon, or at dawn. And yesterday it didn’t bother to leave at all so its would-be passengers had to hire a truck.
The drive down to the plain, over an 8,000-foot pass, was magnificent – tremendous peaks, densely forested slopes strewn with colossal boulders, deep green valleys noisy with dashing young rivers and a few spectacular waterfalls. Mr Iype had ensured us front seats and as the driver never dared to exceed fifteen miles per hour we had time to appreciate the landscape; yet inevitably I resented being in a motor vehicle.
At the State border we had to endure a forty-minute delay because for some utterly baffling reason an old man was trying to smuggle one live rabbit into Tamil Nadu in a basket of oranges. Having completed our descent to the border by the light of an almost-full moon, the driver went much too quickly for safety over the level road to Udumalpet. It was exactly 8 p.m. when he stopped for our benefit outside the Dak bungalow, so the fifty-four mile journey had taken us five hours and twenty minutes.
We are all sharing the one room that was vacant here, but whereas the Murphys intend to sleep comfortably, stretched out on the floor, the three Iypes have uncomfortably squeezed themselves on to a single bed. I never can understand why most people imagine a bed – some sort of bed: any sort of bed – to be a pre-requisite of sleep.
7 January. Ootacamund.
On the subject of Ooty I am afraid I disagree with Murray’s Handbook to India, which observes that ‘The astonishing charm of its scenery seems likely to survive modern developments, which include extensive hydro-electric projects, a vast new Government factory for the manufacture of cinema film and a population that now tops 50,000. Its climate has long been famous. As early as 1821, Europeans began to build their homes there.’ To my mind, no scenic charm can survive this sort of development.
In 1974 the keynote to the whole Nilgiri region is nostalgia. Around Ooty, in every direction, rise Christian churches of various denominations, and enormous boarding-schools and military barracks, and the innumerable handsome homes of retired Indian Army officers or senior Civil Servants – with neat signposts pointing up steep paths to individual houses and saying ‘Col. and Mrs This,’ ‘Brig. and Mrs That’ or ‘Mr and Mrs T’other’. During the late afternoon many residents may be seen with the naked eye, wearing heavy overcoats over their saris if female and thick tweeds if male, and carrying shooting-sticks or (inexplicably) umbrellas. Those also carrying dog-eared books are obviously on their way to the palatial Ootacamund Public Library, which stands grandly in its own spacious grounds opposite the main church, St Stephen’s. The average age of these senior citizens seems to be eighty and when greeted they usually smile at one a little sadly, a little vaguely. This of course is Ooty’s closed season; when the hot weather comes to the plains there will be an enlivening infusion of children and grandchildren.
To me, the library is Ooty’s most exciting feature. There are now only ninety-six subscribing members and the wistful, veteran librarian who gave us permission to browse cheered up no end when I went into ecstasies about the fabulous collection of nineteenth-century first editions which just happen to have accumulated on these shelves, where one finds few volumes published after 1939.
Also near St Stephen’s are rows of enormous shadowy shops that must have done a roaring trade forty years ago and are still pretending to operate with mainly empty shelves. Their ancient, dusty owners peer listlessly from unpainted doorways across the rooftops of the bazaar to the lines of fir-trees on the highest crest of the Nilgiris. If they lower their eyes to observe a scruffy white woman and her even scruffier child walking down the otherwise deserted street they bow obsequiously and I am overcome by gloom. Then to cheer myself I reflect that, depressing as Ooty is now, it must have been even more so when infested with mem-sahibs who enjoyed being fawned on by ‘niggers’.
Yet I am glad we came here, because of the journey up from Coimbatore. We left Udumalpet early this morning – still with the Iypes – and for two-and-a-half hours drove straight across a densely populated, dull plain where many bullocks were ploughing poor soil. Then we said good-bye to our friends and took another bus, heading for the tremendous blue wall of the Nilgiris. The road soon began to climb gradually through plantations of palms, which are oddly unattractive when grown en masse. Then suddenly it was climbing so steeply that within minutes the air felt chilly and the plain we had just crossed looked like a view from an aeroplane; no wonder the Nilgiris were almost deified by the heat-demented British! Again we had front seats, which gave Rachel a good view of the scores of half-tame rhesus monkeys who sat by the roadside cheering the bus on, as it seemed. Every acre of these precipitous slopes is heavily forested and I have never before seen such an extraordinary variety of gigantic trees.
When at last we emerged on to the grassy, treeless highlands I could have fancied myself back in the Himalayas had this whole area not been so built-up. Ooty is at an altitude of 7,440 feet so even at midday, in winter, it is quite cold when one is out of the sun, and now, at 7 p.m., it is perishing. As we carry no woollies I have had to wrap both my flea-bag and a blanket around me. We are staying in what is absurdly called a ‘Tourist Bungalow’, run by the Tamil Nadu State Board. In fact it is a multi-storey hotel, opened in 1963, and it compares very unfavourably with similar establishments in Kerala. When we were shown into our Rs.10 single room there was no water either in the carafe or in the bathroom, the latrine was filthy, the wardrobe door was broken, the sheets were dirty and there were revolting stains on the wall over the bed. All these seemed unnecessary drawbacks in a place that advertises itself far and wide as the ‘Ideal Tourist Home’, but to give the management its due a brigade of servants appeared within moments of my complaining, to rectify matters.
I am a little worried tonight about Rachel’s foot. This afternoon I had to carry her down from Elk Hill – she feels even heavier than usual at over 8,000 feet! – and I don’t quite know what to do next. I have a logical distrust of unknown Indian doctors, some of whom buy their degrees without ever opening a medical text-book, so if possible I would prefer to postpone treatment until we get back to Coorg. But at the moment Rachel is tossing and muttering in her sleep, obviously half-conscious of the pain.
8 January. Gundlipet.
This morning Rachel insisted that her foot felt better, but it looked worse. I was therefore relieved when the bearer who brought our sloppy tray of luke-warm bed-tea told me ‘a very smart doctor’ was staying in Room 87. Praying that this gentleman’s smartness was mental rather than sartorial I carried Rachel to him and he assured me the foot needed only a washing in salted water and a plain gauze dressing. Having given it this treatment I left the patient doing a jig-saw with the doctor’s 10-year-old twins and went off on my own to explore.
As one walks through Ooty’s less lovely areas a great deal of poverty is evident, and poverty always seems more harrowing in cold weather. Quite apart from the foot complication, I would not have wanted to spend more than twenty-four hours in this tomb of the Raj. But it does have a good Bata shop where I bought strong walking shoes for Rs.25. I also found a small bookshop where imported paperback porn stood shoulder to shoulder with austere tomes on Hindu philosophy and a fat collection of Radhakrishnan essays cost me only Rs.6.
After lunch Rachel limped the two miles to the bus stand without complaining, but despite her cheerfulness I still feel uneasy. Experience has taught me that she is incredibly stoical about personal pain, though she will burst into tears if I accidentally tread on the cat.
The descent to the Mysore plateau was no less beautiful than yesterday’s ascent and quite different: India’s landscapes are endlessly varied. But by now I really have had a surfeit of just looking at the countryside and never coming to grips with it. Beyond Ooty, to the north, stretched mile after mile of open downland with fine plantations of firs and eucalyptus. Then begins the descent, around a series of brilliantly engineered hairpin bends. As one Indian said to me recently – ‘It was worth having the British to stay, if only for the roads they left behind them.’ (Had the Indian Empire never existed, who would now be building India’s roads? China? Russia? America?) Far below we could see an immense brown plain stretching away to the horizon: Karnataka State’s wildlife sanctuary of Bandipur, which is 3,000 feet above sea level.
Bandipur cannot compete with Periyar; most parts are accessible to jeeps and it is a well-organised tourist centre. However, we enjoyed the golden-brown forest and saw a peacock strutting across the road and lots of monkeys, some of whom made Rachel’s day by climbing into the cab at octroi posts. We also saw several working elephants going about their Forestry Department business and a mongoose disappearing into the undergrowth.
The sun was setting as we left Bandipur and came to undulating, cultivated land where dark red earth glowed in the hazy golden light and the glossy green of palms, plantains and wayside banyans stood out against a deep blue sky. Then a purple-pink tinge dramatically suffused the whole scene as the sun dropped lower, and its last slanting rays burnished the classical brass water-jars that were being carried across the fields on the heads of slim women in vivid, graceful saris. At such moments the simple, timeless beauty of rural India can be very moving.
It was almost dark when we arrived in this little town and I felt dismayed, though not surprised, to observe Rachel’s silent suffering as she hobbled across the road to the nearest doss-house, where there was a vacant cell just inside the street-door. Mercifully, we are due tomorrow at the Hughes’s place in Sidapur, to which we were invited when we met Jane and David at Byerley Stud, and I know a good doctor works in the new hospital near Sidapur, which is partly subsidised by South Coorg’s coffee-planters.
9 January. Mylatpur Estate, near Sidapur.
This has been a day I should prefer to forget, though I am unlikely ever to do so. From midnight neither of us got much sleep, as poor Rachel tossed and turned and whimpered, and by dawn her foot was at least twice its normal size. No water was available in our reeking doss-house wash-room, so I decided it would be more prudent not to remove the bandage in such spectacularly unhygienic surroundings but to concentrate on getting to Sidapur as soon as possible. Accordingly we caught the seven o’clock bus and arrived at the big village – or tiny town – of Sidapur at twelve-thirty. The Hughes had explained that Mylatpur is five miles from the village so I tried to ring them, but I had no success because the Indian telephone system is one of the two greatest technological catastrophes of the twentieth century. (The Irish telephone system is the other one.) Rachel then volunteered to walk half a mile to a hitch-hiking point on the outskirts of Sidapur, and though her foot was far too swollen to fit into her sandal she did just that, hobbling on her heel. (If V.C.s were awarded to 5-year-old travellers she would have earned one today.) After standing for only a few minutes we were picked up by a neighbour of the Hughes, but we arrived here to find the family gone and my letter announcing the date of our arrival on top of their pile of mail. However, they were expected back at tea-time and their kindly old bearer did all he could for us.
I at once put Rachel to soak in a hot bath, boiled a safety-pin and scissors, punctured the menacing yellow balloon, squeezed out a mugful of pus, cut away inches of festered dead skin and was confronted with a truly terrifying mess. Not having the slightest idea what should be done next, I simply disinfected and bandaged the wound and at that point Rachel reassured me by announcing that she was ravenous. She added that her foot felt fine now, though a bit tender, and having eaten a huge meal she went to bed at five o’clock and has not stirred since. (It is now ten-thirty.) But of course she must have medical attention and Jane has said that first thing in the morning she will drive us the ten miles to Ammathi Hospital to see Dr Asrani, a U.S.-trained doctor in whom everybody has complete confidence.
10 January. Green Hills, near Virajpet.
Everybody is right about the inspired skill of Dr Asrani, but that did not lessen the shock when he said Rachel would have to have a general anaesthetic this afternoon to enable him to probe her foot fully, clean it thoroughly and dress it efficiently. We both still have the residue of our Christmas infection and he admitted he would have preferred not to put her under with a partially stuffed nose: but to do so was the lesser of two evils. At this point my nerve broke, though I regard myself as a reasonably unflappable mother where things medical or surgical are concerned. I hope I maintained an adequately stiff upper-lip, in relation to the general public, but Rachel at once sensed my inner panic and was infected by it. She herself has absolutely no fear of anaesthetics, having twice been operated on in Moorfields Eye Hospital, yet the moment her antennae picked up the maternal fear she went to pieces and a very trying morning was had by all.
As the patient had finished a hearty breakfast at nine o’clock she could not be put under before 2 p.m., so Jane volunteered to take us back to Mylatpur, return us to Ammathi after lunch and arrange to have us collected from there by the Green Hills car. She has been a friend beyond price today and I bless the hour we met her. When she had filled me up with a quick sucsession of what she called ‘Mum’s anaesthetic’ (rum and lime-juice) I began to feel quite sanguine about Rachel’s chances of survival and to marvel at the good fortune that had provided us with such a capable doctor in such an unlikely place.
It is not Dr Asrani’s fault that the local anaesthetic techniques are fairly primitive; when it came to the crunch I had to hold Rachel down while a beardless youth clapped a black mask over her face and I begged her to breathe in. No foreign body was found in the wound, nor was it manufacturing any more pus: so I felt secretly rather proud of my do-it-yourself surgery. (Had I not been a writer I would have wished to be a surgeon and I always enjoy opportunities to carve people up in a small way.)
To my relief Dr Asrani did not suggest any form of antibiotic treatment but simply advised me to steep the foot twice a day in very hot salty water, keep it covered with dry gauze and leave the rest to nature. His skill is such that Rachel came to – in an immensely cheerful and conversational mood – precisely eight minutes after the bandage had been tied. Half an hour later she was her normal self again and we set off for Green Hills where I found, as though to compensate me for the morning’s trials, my first bundle of mail since leaving home. There were ninety-seven letters, if one includes bills, advertisements, an appeal for the Lesbians’ Liberation Fund and a request for advice about how to cycle across Antarctica.