On a Shoestring to Coorg

by Dervla Murphy

  17 December. Tirunelveli.

  Because of Rachel having been up so late last night we just missed the 6.06 sunrise and got to the bathing-pool as the pilgrims were performing their important morning pujas. Against the sombre background – a grape-dark sky, black rocks and a jade ocean – brilliant saris were fluttering like so many silken banners in the gale: or ‘cyclone’, as they melodramatically call it here. The oceans were churning around the Cape as though being stirred by a thousand giants and a group of pilgrims, having decided discretion is the better part of devotion, were simply pouring water over their heads from brass jars; so again I was alone in the pool. To east and south the sky had become a solid-seeming mass of dark purple and above me I could see towering, bottle-green breakers rushing towards the smooth, glistening rocks to send giant columns of pure white spray leaping into the sky. It is years since I have enjoyed a swim so much; but these clouds were not there for nothing and at nine-fifty the storm broke.

  Within seconds everything and everyone in sight had been saturated so I simply put my shirt and shorts over my bathing togs and left Rachel as the good Lord made her. Yesterday’s experience taught me that here it is futile to attempt to dress modestly. There are lots of corners, and relatively few people, yet a crowd of men, women and children pursues one to the farthest corner of all and stands staring, with pathological insensitivity, while one attempts, if one is fool enough, to cover one’s nakedness. Last evening, being without a towel, I made no such attempt and the sight of my bare bottom provoked cyclones of laughter. It is nice to be able to cause so much innocent amusement by the use of the most basic raw material.

  We got a tourists’ luxury coach to Tirunelveli (spelt Tinnevelly in British days), where I hoped to find an accumulation of mail from home. This coach cost almost twice as much as our usual peasants’ bus but was by no means twice as comfortable. Before we started, a richly dressed lady in the front row (the purdah quarter) raised hell when the conductor tried, most politely, to persuade her to tolerate an equally richly dressed gentleman in the adjacent seat. The conductor then tried to persuade Rachel to sit beside the lady, so that the gentleman could sit beside me. But on the basis of the lady’s strident rejection of the gentleman Rachel had already deduced she was not nice to know and refused even to contemplate sitting beside her. So I moved, and Rachel beamed delightedly to find herself with a male companion instead of boring old Ma. The gentleman proved to be a Professor of Sanskrit from Benares University who entertained her with innumerable Rama stories told in immaculate English. But I could discover nothing about the lady, who was plainly appalled to find herself beside a filthy foreigner and resolutely pretended I didn’t exist.

  In South India one notices many young couples of all castes separating on buses or in restaurants and affecting not to be acquainted until the journey or meal is over. No wonder Indians are so deeply shocked by hippies kissing and petting in public.

  Yesterday, coming from Trivandrum, we passed the end of the Western Ghats – extraordinary hills of dark rock, scattered with patches of earth and scrub. They rise sheer from a level plain, creating a most dramatic effect, and the narrow valleys that run between them made my feet itch. We passed them again today, as our road returned to a little junction town some ten miles north of the Cape, and then forked right to run along their eastern flanks. They are superb, rough, chunky mountains, with an atmosphere about them that is still tantalising my wanderlust. If Rachel were a little older we would be sleeping up one of those valleys tonight.

  Perhaps, however, it is just as well that we are not doing any such thing, for soon after we left Cape Comorin the heavens opened again, in true monsoon style. Visibility was immediately reduced to thirty or forty yards and the flat land on either side of the road became flooded, as we gazed at it, to a depth of two feet – the water perceptibly creeping up the trunks of the immensely tall palmyra palms. Our bus, despite its exalted status, leaked like a sieve. As water went sloshing around the floor everyone took their bits and pieces on to their laps and several passengers who were sitting under roof-leaks raised umbrellas, to Rachel’s huge amusement. The richly dressed lady and myself were sharing a leak but she made sure her most superior umbrella would not become polluted by giving shelter to the mleccha. As the drops splashed down my neck the bus trundled hesitantly on through an unnatural twilight, with sheets of water spraying out from the wheels. Then suddenly, half an hour before we got here, the rain stopped, the sun shone and excremental odours arose so strongly from the countryside that one almost expected to see them.

  Tirunelveli felt very humid and its streets were mini-lakes. When I asked the way to the post office of an amiable-looking man – tall, slim and dark – he offered to guide us and introduced himself as Mr Luke, a Christian. According to him this is the most Christianised district in India, with a C.M.S. that was established in 1820 and an Anglican Diocese founded in 1896. But I wonder if he is right; the 1971 Census says there are almost 4 million Christians in Kerala and only about half that number in Tamil Nadu. However, it may be that most Tamil Christians are concentrated in this area.

  Mr Luke made consoling noises when the postmaster explained that no air-mail has been coming in from Europe recently, because of a strike, and advised me to call back next week. It seems worth while remaining within reach of Tirunelveli until Christmas Eve, if necessary, since Rachel is expecting all her birthday and Christmas cards. But we cannot remain beyond the 24th as she has long since been promised a Christmas visit to Periyar Game Park in lieu of the hectic seasonal excitements she is missing. Actually this delay could have happened in a much worse place; Tirunelveli was put on our itinerary because Ernest Joseph, an old Indian friend of mine, now lives some thirty-five miles away in a village called Ittamozhi.

  Amongst the pile of Indian mail awaiting me was a letter from Ernest in which he gave the address of a friend, Mr Mathew, with whom we were to stay the night before catching the morning bus to Ittamozhi. I read this letter in the ironmongery-cum-printing works of Mr Luke, where we had been invited for coffee, and it only slightly surprised me to find that Mr Luke knows both Ernest and Mr Mathew quite well. This sort of thing is always happening in India, despite those teeming millions.

  We are now installed in Mr Mathew’s home, a decrepit little bungalow on the outskirts of the city. I have never before stayed with an Indian Christian family and it is a most interesting experience; no one would suspect this household of not being Hindu but for the fact that on the walls biblical texts replace oleographs of the gods. Most of the attitudes, routines, prejudices and customs are indistinguishable from those of middle-class, conservative Hindus. Even beef-eating is frowned on, ostensibly because one cannot buy wholesome beef locally. (Possibly this is true, but I get the impression some good excuse would be found for not eating even the best Irish beef.)

  At sunset the rain started again and ever since has been coming down in torrents. The roof leaks so badly it is impossible in this tiny parlour to find dry spots for our flea-bags and Rachel’s is already sodden, though she continues to sleep peacefully. As the latrine and bathroom are in the garden I got soaked through when nature called me out just now. Most Indian white-collar-workers live in what seem to us slum conditions and amongst this large section of the population there must be a painful degree of frustration: perhaps more than amongst the millions who have less to eat but no ambitions and no special abilities.

  There are two children in this family, a 19-year-old son and a 17-year-old daughter. The boy is in his second year at Madras University and was picked last week for Tamil Nadu’s State hockey team. He is bitter because the frequent university strikes seriously hinder his work. At present the Madras students are striking to have Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister dismissed and, while it may well be that the gentleman in question deserves dismissal, it does seem absurd to have students involved in politics to this extent.

  In the past month I have talked to several so-called graduates who could not po
ssibly pass the eleven-plus in Britain. (Probably I couldn’t, either, but we won’t go into that.) Many Indian graduates simply bribe their way through and others get by because professors do not wish their own ineptitude to be underlined by a high percentage of failures. The son of this house admits that when he graduates he will almost certainly have to take up some menial job totally unconnected with his studies. I can only suppose the Indian’s paranoid determination to acquire worthless degrees is some sort of spin-off from thousands of years of Brahmanical idealisation of learning: a most commendable notion, but unfortunately India has a flair for so radically distorting commendable notions that they breed serious social problems.

  I hardly saw the daughter of the house, who is studying hard for her university entrance examination. Her brother told me she will never be allowed to mix with the male students and soon after graduating will be married to the young man of her parents’ choice. When I asked what would happen if he himself wished to marry a girl not of his parent’s choice he found it difficult even to imagine this situation. After a moment’s silence he shrugged and said it would be impossible to do such a thing ‘because my mother would cry and put pressure on me until I gave in, and for me the most important thing is not to upset her’. A typical Hindu answer from a Christian boy; what Indian women lose on the wifely swings they gain on the motherly roundabouts. Even when they appear to be demure, timid, characterless or positively down-trodden, their influence within the home is tremendously strong.

  Yet the convention of deference to the male has to be carefully preserved and this evening no one ate until Father came home from work at eight-thirty – two hours late because of flooding on the streets. Then, to my embarrassment, I alone was fed in the tiny bed-sitter in which we had been talking, while the family – plus three visiting relatives who had called to meet me – hovered around urging the guest to eat more and more of this and that. Very good it was, too: a typical South Indian meal of rice, dahl, hot vegetable curry, curried fried sardines, omelette, plantain and excellent Coorg coffee.

  I suspect the Mathew family treated us as V.I.P.s because we had been introduced by Ernest Joseph. Ernest is a distinctively Indian phenomenon, although brought up in Burma and educated at an English public school. Born of a South Indian Christian father and a Rajput mother famed for her beauty (an elopement, surely, since such a marriage would never be arranged, or even condoned), he has evolved a personal religious synthesis which seems to suit him admirably. His father – a teak millionaire – went bankrupt when Ernest was a young man; there were complicated political overtones and the case caused something of a furore. By then Ernest had already established himself as a painter of widely recognised talent whose pictures give many people an uncanny feeling. To me they seem like messages from another world, rather than human creations, and I am not sure that I could live with them.

  Ernest is a bachelor in his early sixties. When I first met him he had long since decided it would be immoral to use his artistic gifts to make money and was living in a one-room shack in a Delhi slum without visible means of support. I myself feel he is wrong not to accept gracefully and use honestly the gift with which providence has endowed him, but that does not lessen my admiration for the steadfastness with which he upholds his curious principles. He is a truly patriotic Indian – of whom there are not a vast number – and his refusal to paint for profit may well be an illogical emotional reaction to the gigantic cesspool of Indian corruption. Also, of course, he is an eccentric of the first order. Every day he shaves his head, he habitually wears a monocle (and in hot weather very little else), he believes firmly in telepathy, astrology, palmistry and graphology and under no circumstances will he speak to anybody about anything on Saturdays – ‘my day of silence’. As I have said, he is distinctively Indian.

  18 December. Tisaiyanvilai.

  At ten o’clock this morning the rain at last stopped and the sun came out as we got on the Ittamozhi bus; there was a strong breeze, instead of yesterday’s sticky heat, and water lay refreshingly in sheets all over the level countryside.

  The battered bus took us back some fifteen miles along the main road to Cape Comorin, before turning left for the east coast. It was full of peasants with flattish noses, thickish lips, remarkably low foreheads and near-ebony skins. Compared with Kerala, this coastal corner of Tamil Nadu seems to have dourer people, duller scenery and bonier cattle. Hundreds and thousands of palmyra palms grow tall and straight from pastures where the grass is a quarter of an inch high, and patches of thorny scrub support countless goats. The large cattle herds are devoutly decorated with bells and ribbons, and have coloured ropes wound around their carefully painted horns, but they look in miserable condition, as do many of the humans. This has always been one of the poorest areas of South India, scourged by almost intolerable heat for ten months of the year and inhabited mainly by primitive pearl-fishers, toddy-tappers, jaggery-makers and deep-sea fishermen, to whose ancestors St Francis Xavier devoted the best years of his life. Judging by the few villages and people to be seen, it is not over-populated; and yet I suppose it is, in relation to what its thin, grey, desiccated soil can produce. We saw only occasional small patches of paddy and it was hard to believe that Tamil Nadu now produces more rice from one hectare than any other rice-growing state and expects soon to have a surplus for export.

  It often happens in India that the poorer a region the more jewellery is displayed and on our bus were several women plainly suffering from chronic malnutrition but literally weighed down by their gold ornaments. Rachel was fascinated to see the elaborate tattooing on their necks and arms and the saucer-like ear-rings that hung from their misshapen ears. But then, true to form, she began to fret lest that weight depending from the ears might be causing – or have caused – some pain.

  As we approached Ittamozhi lakes of brown floodwater could be seen reflecting the deep blue sky. To reach Ernest’s hovel, half a mile from the village, we had to wade and slither through deep pools and sticky mud – an ‘adventure’ enormously to the liking of my daughter. The hovel was built by Ernest’s father as a medical dispensary for the local Harijans but it is many years since any doctor has been willing to work for such people in such a place. Recently, during Ernest’s absence, the structure was much depleted by vandals and previously it had lain empty for many years, being adversely affected by wind and weather, so it may not unfairly be described as an uninhabitable ruin.

  Ernest nevertheless finds it quite comfortable, though in view of Rachel’s age and – compared with her mother – fragility, he has decided we are to spend our nights with friends of his at this little town of Tisaiyanvilai, five miles west of Ittamozhi. (Incidentally, Ittamozhi is pronounced ‘Ittamolly’, for some reason best known to the Tamils.) Rachel did not at all approve of this arrangement, having fallen in love with Ernest at first sight. But when he invited her to spend the day painting with him tomorrow, while I explore St Francis Xavier’s village of Manapad, she was Ittamollified. (It was Ernest who said that – not me.) Small children seem to have a special affinity with a certain type of unselfconscious eccentric, and with people who are in any way psychic, or genuinely detached from the things of this world. Today, seeing Ernest and Rachel together, I knew that on some plane inaccessible to me they had at once established an exceptionally close relationship. Oddly, they seem to complement each other.

  In twenty-five years I am only the second non-related guest to have stayed a night with this Hindu family. Ernest of course is the other, and it is a mark of the family’s regard for him that his two wandering mleccha friends have been admitted to such an exclusive home. The household consists of a retired doctor and his wife, their eldest son – now the local G.P. – his wife and four shy children, and his equally shy unmarried sister who is his partner in the practice. The large, handsome house was designed by the old man and built only a few years ago on the outskirts of the town. We are in the spacious, never-used-before guest-room, which has been hastily but mos
t adequately furnished for our benefit with two camp-beds and a table and chair. The unglazed, heavily barred windows have splendid teak shutters and the door leads on to a wide roof from which one looks into the sunset over the neat yard with its cattle shed, or into the sunrise across a flat grey-green landscape broken only by straggling lines of palms. It would be impossible to exaggerate the warmth of our welcome here and the anxiety of the whole family to make us happy and comfortable, so I hope not to be misunderstood when I say that this evening I am very aware of having been thrown into the Hindu pool at the deep end.

  19 December. Tisaiyanvilai.

  Today a septic mosquito bite on my right ankle immobilised me, but I must be thankful it came to fruition within reach of a good doctor.

  I spent most of this cloudy, breezy day sitting out on the terrace roof with my foot up, savouring the quiet of my daughterless state and reading A History of South India by Nilakanta Sastri (O.U.P.). This is probably the best book there is on the subject but it makes no concessions to human weakness and read at home would seem tough going. Read in South India, however, it becomes positively entertaining. I find it a good policy to tackle such tomes while travelling through the country concerned.