A Dark Guru

  Previously in this series about my life in India during the 1980s I've written about Europeans we knew but not much about Indians except in passing. But, of course, we knew many and were friends with several. There was Krishnamurti the tailor who always wore a crisp white shirt and sharply pressed khaki trousers. Then there was Ali who ran the Yercaud Club and who looked (I thought) like a benevolent crocodile. Dilip and Ashok were two brothers who, with their father, had a geranium plantation that produced an essential oil used for perfume and skincare. Subramaniam was one of many coffee planters in the area and Ramalingam lived in the bungalow next to ours. He fell on financial hard times so leased the front of his house to the Bank of India and moved to the back. It seemed to work for him.

But our main friends, apart from the Matthews whom I have previously mentioned, were Mr and Mrs Neelakantan. He was a Brahmin and had been well off, but he was persuaded to invest his money in a film studio which went bust and lost the lot as a result of which he had come to Yercaud where his wife Prema found work at one of the private schools in the town, enabling their sons, Kumar and Prakash, and daughter, Sudha, to get decent educations. They were all very bright and took full advantage of the opportunities offered. Neelakantan was probably in his mid to late 40s but retired or, at any rate, no longer working, considering himself to be in the Vanaprastha stage of life which, according to Hindu teaching, is the third stage when one starts to withdraw from the world and focus one’s energies more on Moksha or liberation. He sought us out because he heard we were interested in spiritual matters, and we had many conversations, even debates, about Indian philosophy. He was a disciple of Swami Muktananda who was a prominent guru of the day teaching something called Siddha Yoga which claimed to be able to awaken the kundalini in its practitioners. Traditionally, this was a secret path only open to a dedicated few after years of spiritual discipline, but Muktananda offered the awakening to anyone, and Neelakantan said he had experienced it. It did not seem to have changed him in any significant way for the better though, and he admitted as much which was more than many others who have undergone this experience are willing to do.  

Neelakantan gave me Muktananda’s autobiography to read, and I could see that the man did have power of some sort, but it was also obvious that it was not true spiritual power. Like many Indian sannyasis he had tapped into a form of occult energy through his guru, but this energy appeared more demonic than divine. And rather like Sai Baba, you only had to look at a photo of Muktananda to see a darkness in his soul. When the stories of his sexual misdemeanours came out, as almost inevitably they did, I was not surprised.

 

There was a misconception of spirituality common at the time which many of the gurus flooding the West took advantage of as they preyed on the naive. They may even have been victims of it themselves. It saw the spiritual in terms of consciousness, experience and power, and believed that the self could be transformed before it had been fully purified, and that what was required to do this was technique regardless of motivation. They would have spoken of proper motivation as one must to be taken seriously, but it was not put front and centre as it should be and was often confused with aspiration. It was the old spiritual problem of the desire for heaven, even the greed for it, taking precedence over the love of God.

 

It could not be denied that Muktananda had been through some extraordinary psychic experiences under his guru, but these cannot be regarded as spiritual in the proper sense because in cases of genuine spiritual transcendence the self is not splintered and shattered as happened to him. It is more a case of the ego falling away as it is outgrown, or melting in the light of the spiritual sun. There may be an initial pain and sense of loss, but there is not the violence and terror described by Muktananda which indicate that something other than divine forces is in play. Many Indian gurus mistake the occult for the spiritual, and Muktananda certainly did. 

 

Neelakantan admitted he had not been changed by his experiences, but others were not so lucky. A commenter on this blog a few years ago wrote that he had followed an Indian guru (unspecified but obviously Muktananda) who gave shaktipat which is a supposed infusion of grace that opens the kundalini and sends the energy upward through the chakras. He said he had had many amazing experiences but even now long after he could not sit to meditate without being taken over by spontaneous pranayama and mudras, as well as the occurrence of strange mantras. He had left the guru’s organization years before when the stories of scandal and abuse surfaced, but the psychic experiences persisted. He thought they could be the result of astral forces and wondered what to do. My opinion was that they were undoubtedly caused by the premature opening of psychic centres in the body which, it cannot be emphasised enough, is an occult procedure not a spiritual one. The remedy is prayer and focus on Christ. This is the best way to cleanse the soul of the unhealthy psychic residues it picks up through these techniques. 

 

The moral of this story is that one should not be deceived by the spurious glamours, antinomian delusions and false promises of the lefthand path. The road to God is through purity and love, not magic in any form.

 

I would not have suggested focus on Christ to Neelakantan who was a proud Brahmin and not going to abandon his heritage for a Western religion, but fortunately he had not gone too deep so not suffered adverse consequences. He reverted to his traditional path and turned for inspiration to the Jagadguru of Kanchipuram, a genuine holy man who lived for nearly 100 years (1894-1994), spending his life travelling round India teaching the sanatana dharma or ancient religion of the Vedas. The Kanchi Sankaracharya was a traditional guru who was the 68^th in line from the famous advaita philosopher Sankara, and exemplified the best of his religion in contradistinction to most 20^th century gurus, obvious exceptions like Ramana Maharishi aside, who seemed to be promoting themselves. He made no grandiose promises but simply taught love of the divine for its own sake.

 

An amusing postscript to this story comes in the form of two young evangelical Christian missionaries who stayed at our guesthouse. They were sincere and enthusiastic but didn’t fully appreciate the richness and depth of the Indian spiritual tradition. On one occasion they were with us when Neelakantan came round for morning coffee as he sometimes did, and we introduced them before they left to visit a local church. A couple of days later we heard they had gone round to his house to try to convert him and his family, no doubt with the best of intentions, but you don’t convert a Brahmin to Christianity. Neelakantan, normally a very courteous man, had lost his temper and thrown them out. I tried to explain to them that it was very bad form to tell a Brahmin that he worships demons, especially when you are a guest in his house, but they were fired by missionary zeal and didn’t understand that Christ may be universal but Christianity, especially the desacralised 18th century form they promoted, is probably not which is why it will never catch on in India except in a limited form. It is too foreign.

 

The Last Europeans in India

 Michael and I were not the only Europeans living in Yercaud. I mentioned Sofie de Mello from Germany in a previous Indian Story post but there were a few other European residents there as well. One, an Englishman, Vic Tate by name, had been born in India around 1915. I say he was an Englishman because all his ancestors had come from England but he had only visited the country once, for a short holiday in the 1950s. Otherwise, he had lived his entire life in India, having stayed on as a coffee planter after Independence in 1947. He was an Indian citizen but thought of himself, as he was, as an Englishman. Vic was a widower when I knew him and a hale and jolly fellow with a bungalow stuffed full of Victoriana. He was more English than most English people because his Englishness was defined by the Englishness of the 1940s and was unaffected by the internationalism of the following decades. He may have lived through those decades but he remained culturally where he had been in 1947 because although he mixed with Indians on perfectly friendly terms he did not regard himself as Indian so the normal societal influences and changes a person experiences as time goes by had no impact on him.

Another resident was an Italian of about the same age as Vic. He was as Italian as Vic was English though he too had spent all his life in India.  His name was Tito Simonelli and his father had been chauffeur to the Maharajah of Mysore before Independence. Thus, Tito had grown up in India. He was an engineer and took great pride in his Alfa Romeo as well he might, given every other car in Yercaud at the time (and there weren't many) was an Ambassador, the ubiquitous Indian car of the period based on the Morris Oxford. Tito upheld the romantic reputation of his nation by having an Indian mistress over 30 years younger than him though whenever we went to his house she was presented as his housekeeper, a fiction everyone politely observed.

Both these men were Indian citizens who had been born in India and lived there throughout their entire lives, but they thought of themselves, and were regarded by everyone else, as English and Italian respectively. They knew what people nowadays seem to forget that blood and ancestry count for more than your passport and where you happen to live.

Me, Tito and Vic in front of Vic's bungalow after church

There was one other European from pre-independence days who lived in Yercaud at this time and this was a very old English lady called Connie-Mae. I forget her surname. Ostensibly, she ran the Yercaud Club, a colonial era establishment where planters gathered to drink, play cards and snooker and generally relax back in the day and still did although now they were Indian rather than British planters. Connie-Mae had been the daughter of an English planter and she had stayed on after 1947 but never married. She had come to the point at which she had had to give up her bungalow, and the club committee said she could live out her days at the club where she was given a small bedroom. For appearance's sake, she was described as the secretary but she didn't do anything. She still had a devoted servant called Walter, almost as old as she was, and he and his wife looked after her even though she couldn't pay them much. Michael and I visited Connie-Mae at the club quite regularly where she would give us a cup of tea and talk of the old days. 

At one time we had a guest in our establishment who was called Samir or Sammy for short. He was a well-spoken and apparently well-educated Muslim in his mid thirties  He said he had come up to Yercaud to convalesce after a car accident. He was witty and entertaining and as he was with us for several weeks we got to know him quite well. He would come up to our bungalow for coffee and conversation and all went normally until one week when it was time for him to pay us he said that his brother hadn't sent through his money for that week and would we mind waiting. We didn't mind but then it stretched over to the next week and he said his money had still not arrived. Could we lend him something until it did? Again, we didn't mind but when the same thing happened the following week we said no. Then his money seemingly did arrive and he paid us.

We had introduced Sammy to Connie-Mae and he became a regular visitor at her club, the two of them apparently getting on well. But then Sammy vanished, owing us a couple of weeks' rent. It was a disappointment but not too serious. However, the next time we went to Connie-Mae and told her of Sammy's disappearance she began to look alarmed and then burst into tears. It turned out that she too had lent Sammy money and not just some money but the entirety of her remaining savings. He had charmed the lot out of her and what in a way was worse she had even borrowed a large sum from her servant's savings to lend to him. Such was his devotion he had given it to her without question. We had actually warned Connie-Mae to be careful of Sammy after our earlier experience but she had ignored us because of his smooth reassurances that his brother was just about to send the money. 

A couple of weeks after this Michael and I were down in Salem, the town in the plains about 20 miles from Yercaud where we did occasional shopping for luxury goods such as tinned cheese. We had gone there because Muthu our gardener had fallen down and broken his leg while drunk on bootleg arrack laced with battery acid and strychnine, apparently added because in low doses they are stimulants. There was no proper hospital in Yercaud so he had been taken down to Salem. We were in an auto rickshaw on our way to the hospital to visit him when suddenly we saw Sammy walking along the roadside. We shouted at the driver to stop and jumped out. Michael grabbed Sammy by the arm and told him to turn out his pockets. He protested and said he didn't have much but Michael took his wallet and emptied it. It wasn't much. We then told him we would call the police unless he gave us some more money at which he said he had some back at his hotel. So we marched him back there and went up to his room where he had a briefcase with some money in it. A reasonable sum but nowhere near the amount he had stolen from Connie-Mae. We took it and he swore he was going to pay Connie-Mae back but we knew he was lying. So we left and did report him to the police but by the time they got to the hotel which was a few days later, of course, he had absconded as we knew he would.  Michael gave the money to Connie-Mae and she gave it to her servant though it wasn't enough to reimburse him fully but it was something. I still feel angry when I think of this. To steal an old woman's entire life savings, which may not have been much but was all she had, and then get her to borrow from an old and trusting servant with seemingly not a twinge of conscience is inexplicable. He wasn't starving. He dressed well and was quite chubby as in well-fed chubby. He was simply bad. 

The only good thing to come out of this was that the club members made up the deficit to Connie-Mae's servant and told her that she could live there, board and lodging free, for the rest of her life. She was still alive when we left Yercaud, but I heard that she died shortly afterwards. 

I call these three people, Vic, Tito and Connie-Mae, the last Europeans because they were among the final generation of people born in India, probably in the 1910s, who were too settled to leave at Independence in 1947 and had stayed on. There were never that many British people in India. Even at the height of the Raj they only numbered around 150,000, civil and military, for the whole country, present day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh included. Most of them left in 1947 or shortly afterwards. But a few remained, people who had been born in India and made their lives there. By 1980 when I arrived in Yercaud the great majority of these people had died and with them a human type and way of life that was unique. They were not especially imaginative and it's easy for the modern sophisticate to make fun of them, but they were honest, decent people who believed in doing the right thing.

A Walk in the Jungle

  During the five years Michael Lord and I spent in Yercaud we met many people, both Indians and Western travellers, some through our guest house and some just chance encounters. There was Arati, a Parsee lady in her 60s from Bombay who stayed with us for a couple of months, supposedly for health reasons. Her husband delivered her, or that's what it seemed like, and then asked us to look after her telling us that she could be a handful at times, before disappearing for several weeks. She was rather demanding but we did our best. 

Then there was Evelyn. She has been living in the Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry but needed a break from ashram life which is not surprising since you get all sorts in that kind of environment, ranging from sincere seekers to lost souls and the occasional deranged person. For most people staying there for long is exhausting because you go in as an idealist expecting some kind of enlightenment but then find all the backbiting and petty jealousies you get everywhere else, magnified by the sometimes unbalanced types who end up in ashrams. Evelyn was in some ways typical of Western female spiritual seekers, a middle-aged unmarried woman searching for Oriental light, but, though she was a spiritual seeker, she was a practical one and had a lot of common sense. She stayed with us for 3 months or so, having a break before going back into the often chaotic world of the seeker after truth in India.

Someone who had been on that trail but had now retired from it was Sofie de Mello, a German lady in her late 50s who had come to the East in the post-Beatles hippie pilgrimage time, first married and then been deserted by an Indian and who now lived quietly in a bungalow in Yercaud making ends meet as a schoolmistress. There was something a little sad about Sofie as though nothing had worked out quite as it should but she was a caring and enthusiastic person, always positive. She was a firm believer in the all religions are one idea and for her that religion boiled down to love. That's not a bad code to live by even if it can descend into the bland and sentimental without something more solid to give it substance and depth. At one time it seemed she was setting her cap at Michael but that was never going to work which she realised after a while. We remained friendly though, and were occasionally invited to tea at her house where she gave us freshly baked cakes and little homilies about the universality of all religions. I recently found a note she sent us in an old book and I reproduce it here as it's just the sort of thing she was always saying. I must have cut it down to fit as a bookmaker which is why some of it is missing but it carried on in the same vein. By the way, I am sure that Sofie is long since dead so I don't suppose she will mind me doing this. It may seem I am slightly poking fun at her here, but I am not. She was a good, sincere and kind-hearted person though she had her eccentricities.

This is the front of the card showing Ramakrishna with his disciple Vivekananda on his right and his wife Sarada Devi on his left.

Some of Sofie's sayings. 
She got my name wrong here but not as badly as someone who once called me Mr Wheelbarrow.

On one of the occasions when Sofie was entertaining us for tea she and I formed the resolve to walk down the hills through the jungle to Salem. Michael declined to accompany us. Yercaud was 5,000 feet above the plains and only accessed by the loop road along which buses and cars travelled in order to reach the town. However, we had heard talk of a path that descended to the plains and which was used by travellers on foot back in the day. We couldn't find anyone who had used it more recently but apparently it still existed. We made some enquiries but everyone we spoke to about it looked at us in amazement. "Why would you want to walk down when there's a bus?" was the attitude. I wonder if what makes Westerners want to do this sort of thing is one of the factors that caused them to change the world. For the better in some ways and the worse in others. 

We eventually found someone who told us where the path started, and he said it was occasionally used but only to go to and from a couple of smaller settlements lower down the hillside. No one went all the way to the bottom by that route these days. One must remember that at this time hiking was not really a thing in most parts of India other than perhaps the foothills of the Himalayas. But elsewhere travelling on foot was probably too recent to be thought of as something potentially pleasurable. Nothing daunted, we made our preparations though as that only involved some water and a sandwich it did not take long, and early next morning the two of us set off.

This shows a similar looking path to the one where we started out.

The path started in a reasonable state of repair, just a track as in the picture above really but easily navigable, and it was delightful to walk in the coolness of the day before the sun had climbed high with the birds singing and the forest green and sparkling in the morning light. We were in good spirits and optimistic for the journey ahead even though we had no map and no certainty that the path we were on really would take us where we wanted to go. We passed a few little shacks and attracted some attention from giggling children playing outside to whom white people would have been an unusual and strange sight, and then the trail began to degrade quite quickly. I calculated that we had descended about 1,000 feet which meant there was still a long way to go. The sun was now higher in the sky and it was getting hotter. We had hats but there was no shade on the path. Still, it was there and still going down so we knew we were on the right track. To make things slightly confusing there had been turn offs but these were even rougher than the main path so easy to identify. But then, inevitably, we came to a point at which the path split in two and there was no indication as to which one we should take. We had passed the end of the settlements some time before so there was no one to ask. We deliberated a while and then took one of them hoping for the best.

We carried on along this path but it became progressively worse and then split into several smaller paths. We chose one because we had to and continued but after a while we were no longer descending and then the path, by now almost non-existent, simply petered out in some bushes. We went back and followed another path only to find that did the same thing. Retracing our steps again with the hope of finding the main track didn't work because we had followed too many false trails to know what was what. We appeared to be lost.

This is the kind of scrub jungle in which we got lost though the plains were not visible in our situation.

I well remember the feeling of being lost in the jungle. It was not pleasant. At this point we had descended enough for the more temperate vegetation of the higher elevation to give way to scrub jungle (compare and contrast the two pictures above) so there were no large trees but there were thick bushes, many of human height. It was now getting very hot and we only had about half a bottle of water left each. Sofie was becoming nervous and I had no idea what to do except keep walking in hope. The sun was too high for me to be able to tell which way was south west, that being roughly the direction we should be going, but I made a guess and we took one of the crude tracks that seemed to go that way. Of course it only did so for a short distance, and then it too ended. In that part of the world, what with the tropical heat and monsoon rains, the vegetation grows very quickly so any path that is not constantly renewed soon becomes overgrown. That was obviously what had happened to most of these. I wondered why these paths had existed in the first place since, crude as they were, they were something. We had not seen any people for well over an hour and I didn't think there was anyone living in these parts of the hills. Luckily we found out the reason for their existence.

It was probably only around half an hour after we had realised we were lost, though it seemed longer, when we saw two men coming towards us. I felt a wave of relief but Sofie actually gave a little scream. The men were carrying a long pole over their shoulders on which was strung an obviously freshly killed, since the blood was still dripping, wild boar. They were carrying long knives with curved blades and wearing simple loin cloths with nothing on the upper part of their body or their feet. They were obviously tribals of some sort as it was clear from their manner and appearance that their contact with civilisation was minimal, even compared to the villagers and coffee plantation workers around Yercaud which was at least a town of some description. These men were certainly not town dwellers of any description. Their eyes had a kind of wildness to them which was midway between human and animal, and their responses were strangely emotionless. I realise that it is not the sort of thing we say nowadays but it's how it seemed to me and Sofie was definitely  alarmed by them. They weren't threatening but nor were they unthreatening if that makes any sense. Subsequent research revealed that there was indeed an indigenous tribal community living in the Shevaroy Hills from long before Yercaud was established in the 19th century. They were called the Malaiyalis which means mountain men and they have their own customs and religious practices separate from regular Hindu society. They are regarded as socially and economically backward but, like other Scheduled Tribes of which India has many, given certain protection by the government though what that amounts to in reality is hard to tell.

 I have found a picture of members of this tribe and include it here to give an idea of how they looked. It dates from the 1860s but our two were very similar to the fellow on the right.

The two men stopped and stared at us as well they might since we did not belong in that world. They knew no English but between us Sofie and I could muster enough Tamil to ask if they knew the way to Salem. They understood and indicated that we should follow them which we did for about half a mile and then they pointed to a track which evidently was the path down to the plains. We gave them a few rupees in gratitude which they took without response which again was slightly unnerving. Normally in India if you gave anyone money they would either react with fervent thanks or exaggerated disappointment because you had not given them enough. These men didn't react at all.

However, they had rescued us and we were lucky to have found them. The path they had put us on was well marked and we had no more problems in our descent though it did take another 2-3 hours making the whole trip around 5-6 hours in total. Sofie was going on into Salem so we split up and I got a bus back to Yercaud where I arrived just as dusk was setting in. I felt fine then but the next day the backs of my calf muscles were very sore. I discovered later that poor Sofie who was in her late 50s had been laid up in bed for a couple of days.  I have walked down mountains and up them and going down is always harder on the legs.

A Trip to Ootacamund

After Saroja and Krishna, our first maid and gardener, left we employed Muthu as a new gardener but didn't bother with a maid as there really wasn't enough work to warrant one. The only reason we had one in the first place was because it was expected of us. However, when the guesthouse was ready to open we did need a cleaner and general house servant and so we hired Jane, a spinster in her forties. Jane had the advantage of speaking English but the disadvantage of being very bossy though she was also kind-hearted. She regarded it as her job to make sure no one took advantage of us, and many people tried. She herself was honest but had a low opinion of most of the rest of humanity whom she regarded all to be on the make in one way or another. When Michael's cousin came to visit us in 1981 he described her as a female cockerel which was a little cruel but not inaccurate. Even so, I liked her and she liked me. She called me Chinna Durai which means little master in Tamil, Michael being Periya Durai or big master. Here is a picture of Jane and me. It was taken when I returned to Yercaud briefly at the end of 2003. I was just walking through the bazaar and she came up and greeted me. She hadn't changed much in 18 years. I was pleased to see her even if we had eventually had to sack her for reasons I will come to at some point.

I look like a giant here but that's because Jane and the woman behind us were very short.

Here is a picture of Muthu on the top lawn with what I called his snake charmer's basket, actually to collect grass cuttings. We had no mower and he cut the grass with what was effectively a pair of scissors. Those were the days.

I mentioned Michael's cousin. This was Hugh Christie, a retired army colonel 12 years older than Michael so aged 73 when he came out to visit. Michael and Hugh were both only children of two sisters, one of whom, Hugh's mother, had left her husband, while the other, Michael's mother, had been abandoned by her husband after he had an affair with the actress Gladys Cooper when Michael was only about a year old. Neither of these two cousins had known their fathers, and because there were no other family members they were closer than cousins normally are. I liked Michael's cousin but he was unsure what to make of me at first which was understandable. Once we got to know each other he was friendly enough even if he clearly could not comprehend what Michael and I were doing together. But then nor could most people, and even I found it odd on occasion. On the face of it, it made no sense. The Masters told me it was intended for a while in my life but they only said this after I had made the decision to do it and it had become a settled thing. There was no coercion. I could not expect anyone else to understand the rationale behind it, and although I tried to explain it to my family they didn't believe my explanation that there was a spiritual justification for it and I couldn't blame them for that. In the context of a human life being about worldly achievement and success it seemed a terrible waste. Meeting the Masters goes into this in greater detail.

Colonel Christie, as I first called him or Hugh as I was permitted to call him after a while (he was, after all, 15 years older than my own father), came out to India to visit us in the spring of 1981. He had been in India for several years during and just after the war, but when we met him in Madras it had been 34 years since he was last in the country. It had still been a British colony then though was about to gain independence. To put it mildly, he was not comfortable with the changes. The noise, the smells, the dirt, the chaos, all the usual things. These had been there before but, according to him and I'm sure it's true, they were controlled by the British presence. Now they had been let loose. While we were in Madras you could see he was questioning the wisdom of his visit, but once we left the big city and went to our bungalow in the hills he could relax as the assault on his mind and senses abated somewhat. Here is a picture of him in our garden in Yercaud.

And here's one of Michael and a bit of me taken at the same time. Michael is in a planter's chair which has extendable arms on which you can put your feet which might seem a good idea but is actually very uncomfortable.

Here is one of Hugh, Muthu, Jane and me.

There was no point in Hugh coming all the way to India just to sit in our bungalow for a couple of weeks so we planned a trip to Ootacamund as it was then known. Now it's been renamed Udagamandalam but everyone calls it by its traditional abbreviated name of Ooty. Ooty was one of those hill stations developed by the British as an escape from the heat of the plains. It had a racecourse, a golf course, an artificial lake and there was even a hunt with imported hounds chasing local jackals. The cream of Indian society visited it in the season which would have been during the hot weather, and it is still popular though down on its luck from its British heyday. Situated in the Nilgiri Hills (Nilgiri means Blue Hills) and around 7,000 feet above sea level, it is also known for its extensive tea plantations as well as eucalyptus and pine, all introduced by the British.

Hugh hired a car and a driver and we drove the 150 miles to Ooty. The climb up the hills was similar to the one from the plains up to Yercaud though grander with 36 hairpin bends as opposed to a mere 21 and with tamer monkeys who would come to be fed bananas when we stopped at one of the rudimentary halts along the way. As always when ascending, the air became fresher, the temperature dropped and the light acquired an intellectually invigorating clarity. Michael and I had been to Ooty before so knew what to expect when we arrived at the town but poor Hugh was once again disappointed, having been raised on the idea of Ooty as the Queen of the Hills and a shining light of civilised elegance. Now much of it was little more than a shanty town but there were bright spots such as the Ooty Botanical Gardens, still beautiful. However, our hotel, a recently built government tourist affair, clean but basic, was not to Hugh's taste, and on the first morning immediately after breakfast he went off on his own without informing us where he was going. He came back just before lunch with a triumphant look on this face. He had managed to get a room at the exclusive Ooty club. This was a members only place but he had talked his way in by flaunting his colonial antecedents which seemingly still carried some weight. He graciously invited Michael and me to dinner at his club that evening, and we grateful accepted.

The Ootacamund Club was founded in 1841 for the planters and convalescing soldiers who came to the more salubrious climate of Ooty to recover from whatever might have been ailing them and there was a lot to do that for Europeans in the tropics in those days. It's been described as a relic of the Raj and certainly was that in 1981. You still had to wear a jacket and tie at the bar which Hugh, being an English gentleman of a certain era, had no trouble in doing. Michael had a tie but no jacket and I had neither. But they let me into the restaurant which looked exactly then as it does in this recent picture from their website.

Below is a picture of the Club lounge, also unchanged since I was there and no doubt from long before then also.

The most famous story relating to the Ooty Club is that this was where the game of snooker was invented, and the Club Secretary kindly let me knock a few balls about on the very table it was born or so he said. Perhaps he was persuaded to let me do this by the fact that Michael too had been a Club Secretary, in his case of the Carlton Club in London between 1960-1969, and they could swap notes about difficult members.

I also remember visiting the old church of St Stephen's, now rather forlorn as though the tide had gone out and wasn't ever going to come back. It was heart-breaking to see the number of tombstones in the cemetery marking the graves of children who had died young, often very young. One forgets how illness and disease laid low the Europeans of those times who are now denigrated as exploiting colonisers but who made many sacrifices, including of their lives and those of their women and children.

Ooty is famous for its tribal communities. These were the original inhabitants and their remoteness left them untouched by general Indian culture from far back, never mind the more recent British incursion. The main tribe is that of the Toda for whom the buffalo is sacred. We went to a Toda village and Hugh chatted to an elder who spoke basic English. It was funny to see the two men together, chalk and cheese in terms of their human types but bonding by being of a similar vintage and getting on well. I wish I had a photo of the two of them but I don't.

I do, however, have one of me and Hugh on the steps of the Ooty Club.

and another of just me.

and one more of Hugh and the club servant who was assigned to him during his stay.

I think they appreciated having someone from the old days there.

After a few days we left Ooty to go to a nearby national park called Mudumalai which was (and still is) a wildlife sanctuary covering about 120 square miles, and home to a wide range of flora and fauna. There were leopards and tigers, elephants, gaur (Indian bison), chital and sambar deer with sloth bears and wild boar among the larger species. Then there were dhole (wild dog) and jackal as well as mongoose, pangolin and porcupine. Various types of monkey were also present, including langur and macaque. The list of birds is even longer, 266 according to Wikipedia. Having had a bird-watching grandfather these interested me as much as the animals. After a bumpy ride we arrived at the visitors' camp in the early afternoon, and at sunset did the first of our two trips into the jungle. For this excursion we went out in a jeep and saw mainly deer and monkeys, with hornbills and eagles among the birds I can remember.

The next day at sunrise we went out again but this time on an elephant which was much better. The three of us sat on a howdah with the mahout perched just behind the elephant's head guiding the animal by pushing on its ears with his bare feet. Hugh sat on one side of the howdah with Michael and me on the other and off we went moving in a slow and stately fashion through the forest. This was a far superior way to experience the jungle as you became part of it. With no engine noise you could hear the sounds of the forest undisturbed, and sitting on the back of an animal that was a natural product of this environment you too became attuned to it in a way that wasn't possible in the artificial confines of a motor vehicle. You didn't even need to see any animals to feel a sense of participation in the natural world around you.

Luckily though we did see some animals, and the first we saw after more deer and monkeys was a male gaur, a magnificent beast packed with muscle that paid no attention to us as it grazed on a mouthful of some vegetable substance. Looking at it you could understand why primitive peoples might have worshipped such an animal as a god. It exuded an imperturbable calm and grave dignity, as if it were an incarnation of archetypal male power and authority from the time when the bull was regarded as a divine being. Many early religions worshipped animals in some form which we now regard as superstitious nonsense, but we don't understand that both the world and the mind of man were different in the past. There may well have been some basis to this approach to the immaterial worlds on some level. Who, even now, would deny that certain animals carry a spiritual force of some kind, the lion, the eagle and the bull to name three of the most eminent?

As we proceeded into the jungle I noticed I was getting a better view of the canopy than the floor. There was a reason for this. Hugh was a big man. I was 6 foot 2 back then (less now), and Hugh was an inch or two taller than me. He was also quite a burly fellow whereas I was already slim and had lost quite a few pounds since arriving in India. Look at the photo of the two of us on the club steps. Michael was of average height and build but Hugh's weight had been more than enough to pull the howdah down on his side to the point where what should have been lying flat had tipped over to a sharp angle. The mahout jumped off the elephant and tugged it back into position before Hugh fell out and we carried on with him leaning back and Michael and me bending forward to balance the thing. I have to say if it had been attached properly in the first place this wouldn't have happened but that's the charm of India.

We didn't see any tigers but we did see elephants, lots of birds and more deer but the most exciting part of the trip was when a wild boar came crashing through the undergrowth heading straight towards us at speed and changing course only at the last moment. Even the elephant was alarmed by it and had to be calmed by the mahout. It was much bigger than any pig I had ever seen and its coarse hair, fierce eyes and prominent tusks gave it a savage appearance. British army officers in India used to hunt these animals on horseback with lances in the sport known as pig-sticking and, though it's easy to disapprove of such practices now, the fact is the wild boar is a ferocious and dangerous animal and the sport requires both great skill and courage. If you came off your horse you would be in trouble.

Pictures from Wikipedia which has a good article on the wild boar

Fortunately, despite the loose howdah, we stayed on the elephant and made it safely back to camp.

Daily Life in Yercaud

Our life in Yercaud was simple. We rose at 6.00 every morning, had a drink of hot lime juice and honey and then meditated for around 45 minutes. After that it was breakfast which was porridge and toast with a cup of tea. Then I generally worked in the garden or sorted out whatever needed to be sorted out in the guesthouse. After lunch, which I cooked and was basically the same every day, yellow dahl with a mix of vegetables such as onion, brinjal (aubergine or eggplant), tomatoes, potatoes, lady's fingers (okra) and a leafy green vegetable similar to spinach called keerai, all served with rice, Michael had a nap and I read for an hour or so before going back to garden and/or guesthouse duties. 

I flavoured this concoction with a teaspoonful of curry powder. Indians rarely use curry powder. We found a large black granite mortar and pestle in the bungalow when we moved in. This was what the lady of the house used to grind spices every morning, but it remained idle while we were its custodians. You might wonder how, if Indians rarely use curry powder, we got hold of it. The answer is we bought it from a spice shop in Salem, the large town in the plains below Yercaud, where it probably only existed for decadent lazybones like us. A spice shop in India is a lovely thing. Full of strange and exotic smells obviously, but the array of various fresh and dried and powdered plants and roots and seeds and leaves and fruits, either hanging on strings or in sacks or contained in glass jars, makes it a visual treat too. Many other shops were similarly aesthetically pleasing - see the photos below. Traditionally, Indians led lives that were almost like works of art in their simplicity and elegance though that time is passing now, a victim of modernisation and democracy. I may be accused of glamorising poverty to regret this but there is a spiritual poverty that is more degrading than any material poverty that is not absolute penury.

Later on in the afternoon I would go for a walk of a few miles in the hills and local jungle, and then in the early evening Michael and I went shopping at the village bazaar. There was a vegetable market which mostly involved the vendors spreading their wares on a sack while they sat cross-legged to one side. A few people had stalls but many just sold one or two types of produce, onions, tomatoes, whatever, all grown in the area. We caused much amusement by buying a single onion every day but it suited us to do a daily shop. We then went to the baker where we were the only people who wanted wholemeal bread. We would buy the wheat in unground form from a state government supplier and the baker would then grind it and make us a loaf every day. He only had white flour himself and could not understand why we wanted brown bread, but was happy to indulge the foreigners with their strange tastes. In similar vein, it was hard to get brown rice. For that we had to go to Salem to a wholesale rice merchant in the town. Food shops did not stock it.

Baker Street in Yercaud

The next stage on our regular shop was a trip to Mr Padma's. Mr Padma ran a general grocery store where we bought everything that wasn't vegetables, bread, fruit or eggs or a few other things I will come to later. So, items like tea, soap, tinned cheese (yes, tinned cheese, it wasn't bad) and Champion porridge oats. We would always have a chat with Mr Padma who would stand by the entrance to his shop surveying the scene outside as though he were above it all. He was of a higher caste than the other shopkeepers and he made sure people understood this. Not in an arrogant way but simply as someone who wished to preserve the necessary formalities of life.

The last call on our shopping trip was to buy eggs. Our dinner every night was the same thing, two boiled eggs with a couple of slices of bread followed by curds, banana and honey, all sourced locally like practically everything else. We made the curds ourselves from a culture we had been given. Each evening we had a delivery of milk from Major Manuel, an ex-Indian army man who had retired to Yercaud. He had one cow which was milked at 6pm precisely every day. His servant then brought us a litre or whatever it was for a couple of rupees. We knew that Major Manuel did not water his milk whereas if you bought milk in the village it would have had water added as a matter of course. We then boiled the milk to sterilise it and when it had cooled down to a certain temperature, still warm but no longer hot, we added half of it to a teaspoon of culture we had preserved from the previous day. You could do this for months until you had to get a new culture. When that had started to set we transferred it to a small clay pot which we put in the fridge.

Except we didn't have a fridge. What we had instead and what we called our fridge was another clay pot, large this time. It was actually two pots, one of which was placed inside the other. You put the item you wished to keep cool in the smaller of the two and then poured cold water into the larger before placing the smaller pot inside that and putting on a lid. This was surprisingly effective when kept in the pantry, a windowless room just off the kitchen with a tall ceiling and thick walls to keep out the heat. For a day or two anyway.

I was learning a bit of Tamil at this time though, as I discovered later when I tried to show off to a cultured Brahmin in Madras, the Tamil I learnt was of a very crude sort. It would come out as something like, for an English equivalent, "'ello mite, 'ow yer doin'?". I had bought a dictionary that used the Roman alphabet since I never got to grips with the Tamil, but my accent and sentence structure came from interacting with local villagers so left a good deal to be desired. Nonetheless, I thought my vocabulary was reasonable. So when I bought the eggs for dinner I would ask for nalu mittai which means four eggs. There were always several young men behind the counter and they would all laugh and smile before giving me the eggs. I thought they were just being friendly. This went on for several months until the more senior of the servers who spoke English decided to intervene. He explained that the reason they all laughed every time I asked for eggs was that I was actually asking for four sweets. Eggs was muttai not mittai. I no longer smile at foreigners who mispronounce English.

The milk for the curds came from Major Manuel. The honey we added to the curds came from a local cooperative. This was run by our friend Tharyan Matthews and he was the one who suggested that I should keep bees myself. As we had a garden full of flowers this seemed a good idea. I started with a couple of hives, just wooden boxes with rectangular frames in which the bees would make their honeycombs, and I was given a swarm to get me going. I've written about this before so won't repeat myself here except to reproduce the two pictures I have that relate to the subject of honey.

This is a photo of me with the beekeeper's cooperative. Major Manuel is second from the right in the front row and Tharayan Matthews is the mafioso-like figure at the centre which is generally where he liked to be. Tharyan was a tremendous egotist and did sometimes behave like a godfather, but I liked him because he was a larger than life character and full of energy and enthusiasm. He always wore a little woollen hat as in the picture, even in the hottest weather, presumably because he was completely bald. He had a loud booming voice which he employed in church to add a descant to hymns that practically drowned out the rest of the congregation singing the main melody. Tharyan and his wife Elizabeth were Syrian Christians from Kerala but they attended the Anglican affiliated Church of South India services which Michael and I also went to on most Sundays. He had worked for Nestlé and had travelled quite extensively in Europe during the course of his career so had a sophistication that most people in the area, even the educated ones, lacked. He and Elizabeth were always kind to us even if they did help themselves to quite a large sum of Michael's money when we left Yercaud, but that's another story.

Yercaud Beekeepers Cooperative 1982

This picture shows me in our garden in front of flowering coffee plants which produce a very distinctive flavoured honey. In the background are some banana plants. I am in my Sunday best because I had just come from church. The tie was a present from Elizabeth, not necessarily one I would have chosen myself. The trousers come from a suit I had had made in the village by the local tailor. I think it cost a few pounds, including material and a rather fancy blue lining for the jacket.

Me with flowering coffee plants.

I mentioned we bought wheat to give to the baker to make our wholemeal bread. At that time in Tamil Nadu certain items were rationed and we had to get them from a government store. These included wheat and sugar and also kerosene which was useful for cooking and to put in lamps when there were power cuts which was a frequent occurrence. We bought the wheat in the form of whole grain which we would have to spread out in the sun and then sift for the small stones there would always be present, whether to increase its weight or just part of the harvesting process I never knew but I suspected the former as we had to do the same for dahl and rice. Once we had sifted out the stones we took the wheat to the baker who made us a fresh loaf every day.

Roughly once a week we caught a bus down to Salem to buy those few things we needed that were not available in Yercaud, and also just for the pleasure. Salem was a bustling town, typical of South India and still largely traditional in temperament and appearance. There were very few high rise building and almost everyone wore Indian rather than Western clothes, saris for women and dhotis or lungis for men. It was not on the tourist trial as there were no particularly interesting temples there as in towns like Madurai or Thanjavur, but in a way that made it more interesting. I hardly ever saw another Westerner there and we were figures of curiosity.  Here are a few pictures to give a flavour of a South Indian town at that time. I believe they were taken in 1982 by Michael's cousin when he came out to visit us.

A street in Salem

A South Indian bull

Flower stall

Orange stall. 
I am carrying wood for a table I was making. 

When we got back from our shopping trip we had another 45 minute meditation which was followed by a light dinner, some more reading and then bed by 10. There was no TV or radio for the first couple of years though Michael did eventually get a tiny transistor so he could listen to the news on The BBC World Service each morning. I got quite used to the Lilliburlero theme tune and the announcement that it was 02 hours Greenwich Mean Time. The only TV I saw in 5 years was of some athletics at the 1984 Olympics which I watched at the Yercaud Club, an institution I shall return to in a later post.

Life in Yercaud

  Once we had settled in our new home it was time to get to work. The garden or compound, as gardens are called in India, was very overgrown and both the main buildings had seen better days. The basic structure of roof and walls was in good condition as they built solidly in those days, those days in this case being the late 19th/ early 20th century, and electricity had been installed but the wiring was old and needed to be replaced. The plumbing was rudimentary. There were no lavatories in the lower bungalow but the upper bungalow had three, each one with a cistern that comprised an elephant's head forming the water tank with the trunk becoming the pipe connecting cistern and toilet. I wish I had a photo.

We hired a local electrician and a plumber to sort out that side of things, and then got a painter for the interior and a gardener for the outside. We helped in both those tasks where not much skill was required. I spent quite a lot of time up in trees chopping off branches which we gave away for firewood. Few of the people in the village had electricity at that time and they all used wood for cooking. We would see women going off into the jungle early every morning with their big machete-like knives and then coming back around 3 in the afternoon with a a heavy load of wood which they carried on their heads, often for several miles. Only the women did this. It gave them the most aristocratic posture. Michael described one of them as looking like a duchess.

The gardener lived on the premises in servant's quarters at the back. He coated the floor of his one room lodgings with cow dung which, when dry, resembled smooth concrete and apparently deterred mosquitos. He came with a wife who became our house servant whether we wanted one or not which we didn't. But we were told it would look bad if we didn't have a servant so she did some basic sweeping and washed the floor rather more often than it needed. She was young and very pretty and it was clear that her husband did not like the idea of her being in the house with two males on her own while he was outside. One time she was in the kitchen washing up and suddenly gave a loud scream. Michael and I who had been on the other side of the house ran in to see what was wrong and found she had got an electric shock from the kettle. It was the old wiring which had not yet been replaced. We were comforting her when in rushed Krishna her husband brandishing his kukri knife and obviously suspecting the worst.

He had to be reassured by Saroja his wife that it was only the kettle, but from then on it was apparent he couldn't shake off his jealousy and soon after the two of them left. We replaced him with a man who had been a tea worker in Sri Lanka but had returned to Tamil Nadu when he was regarded as too old for the plantation work. Muthu (which means pearl in Tamil) looked about 70 even though he was in his mid-fifties but he was a good enough gardener. Here he is with me and Michael under one of the two avocado trees there were in the garden. I'd just come from the bathroom hence my strange apparel, an old towelling robe that had belonged to my grandfather.

Muthu kept the compound in good order and we planted tomatoes, potatoes and spinach to go with the avocados, guavas, bananas and mulberry tree already there. There were also a couple of orange trees and some coffee plants. The oranges were too bitter to eat as fruit but made excellent marmalade which was the one thing I missed from England and we got several pounds of coffee a year from our plants. Of no practical use but very beautiful were the jacaranda trees of which there were several in the garden. The jacaranda is native to South America but was taken all over the world in the 19th century - an early case of globalism. Every April our trees would burst (there is no other word for it) into the most glorious purple flowers and when these flowers fell to the ground they left a purple carpet that seemed to glow. Not having a camera at the time the only photos I have were taken by visitors who would then send me copies so this is the only record of that I have. Many of the photos were taken by my mother when she came out to visit in 1982, a couple of years after we had arrived.

A poinsettia bush with orange trees to the left and a banana plant behind

More bananas

It took about a year of hard work to get the guesthouse up and running. There was no way to advertise so we relied on word of mouth and we had a stroke of luck when a German woman from the Sri Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry (now Puducherry) stayed with us for a few weeks. Hildegard had come to Yercaud to escape the heat of summer and we met her in the bazaar while she had been staying at a local hotel. We told her about our guesthouse which was much cheaper than the hotel and she moved in, initially for a week but eventually for a couple of months. When she went back to the ashram she told her fellow ashramites (?) about us with the result that several came and stayed in our guesthouse over the next few years during the hot weather. Also, I suspect, for a bit of European calm as a relief from Indian chaos.

Pondicherry was one of the few towns in British India that had been administered by the French and even nearly 40 years after Independence it had a very different feel to it. I've written about my visits there before and won't repeat myself in this post. See here.

Over the years we had a wide range of visitors to our guesthouse, both Westerners and Indian. Some stayed for just a few days and some for several weeks. There were Europeans, Americans and Australians fleeing the heat of the plains or else taking a break from the guru trail, there were Indians coming for a family holiday and there were even people who wanted to study the local flora and fauna. Yercaud was fairly unusual in that it was in the tropics but had a variable climate due to its elevation. It was the proud boast of its inhabitants that they could grow both mangoes and strawberries in the same place. But it wasn't just the vegetation that drew people. We had a British geologist who came to study the local rocks which apparently were among the oldest in the world, and then we had a conservationist named Romulus Whitaker, an American who had lived in India for much of his life and who ran the Madras Snake Park and a crocodile sanctuary. He came with his family on a snake hunting expedition, and I went off into the jungle with him on a couple of occasions to search for specimens. This was not the sort of jungle where you would find tigers or elephants and though there was a place called Bear's Cave there were no bears in the area then. But there were snakes, iguanas and bats as well as plenty of monkeys who would sometimes come into our garden to steal bananas. 

On my expedition with Romulus Whitaker he found a few small snakes and some scorpions but nothing to match the nearly15 foot long python captured by local hunters a little time earlier. The story of this snake may have been what drew Romulus Whitaker to Yercaud in the first place as it caused quite a stir in the region. One afternoon Muthu came up to the house and asked us (he didn't speak English except a few words so we communicated in a mixture of basic English, some Tamil which I was learning and sign language) if we had seen the pambu (snake in Tamil) at the police station. Apparently, most of the village was down there. We knew where the police station was because it was near the baker and, strangely enough, directly opposite the village brothel run by a mother and daughter team. The mother, who was always heavily painted but still managed to look pretty ancient, would sit outside her house and hail passers by. Before we knew who she was and that the wave was to attract trade Michael would give her a friendly wave back when on his way to buy bread, but he was a little more reserved after he found out her profession.

When we got to the police station we discovered the python stretched out in front of the building and it really was enormous. Muthu had not exaggerated. There was a crowd milling about and chatting excitedly. The python was dead, shot by the hunters who had found it and who had then brought it back as a trophy. But the most extraordinary thing was that at the position of what you might call the python's neck you could clearly see the shape of a large dog. The hunters had been using this poor beast to scent out their prey, wild boar, and the hapless animal had chanced upon the python who had seized it and started to swallow it whole as pythons do. As it was about the size of an Alsatian this was no mean feat. When the hunters arrived on the scene they shot the snake but it was too late to save the dog whose hind legs and tail were still sticking out of the python's mouth.

In the next instalment of this series I will talk about some of the characters we met while living in Yercaud.