Distant Home Signal

Ooty is cold enough in the morning for me to see my own breath; there is no heating in my cottage, and the stone floor numbs my toes when I pull back the thick blankets and walk from the bed-sitting room to the enormous bathroom. I pull on a pair of jeans and a tee-shirt, grab my fleece, and walk across the garden to the dining room for coffee. The TTDC ( Tamil Tourist Development Corporation ) Hotel is a huge, rambling, tatty complex of 1960s concrete and dark wood buildings set amidst an equally erratic spread of lawns, flowerbeds, and towering evergreens. The main building has had bits haphazardly added over the years, and at some point in the mid 1970s, somebody thought it would be a good idea to put some cottages in the middle of the garden. The place is a warren of passages, corridors, courtyards, and stairwells that you could get lost in for hours; it is gloomy, run-down, faded, and worn, with unexpected dead ends and echoing of footsteps. As I walk down a dimly lit corridor around the edge of an overgrown courtyard, a monkey suddenly leaps through one of the open windows and tears off ahead off me, hotly pursued by its playmate. I hear them chattering and screeching as they crash through some unseen part of the hotel, and see them again from the window of the dining hall.
I sit at a small table in the vast dining hall; it reminds me of a school canteen, with its institutional green walls, high flat ceiling and woodblock floor – there is even a suitably austere clock above the serving hatch to complete the picture. It could easily seat 200 people. Even at this hour, a big, old-fashioned television set in one corner is playing a Bollywood movie. There is an Indian couple several tables away in the middle of the room, but nobody else apart from me for the four waiters and the cashier to serve, each of them bundled up against the morning chill. I order a coffee. The waiter writes out a requisition, one part of which is handed to another waiter who takes it to a third waiter posted at the hot drinks vending machine; the second part is lodged with the cashier, who transfers the details into an A4 ledger before spiking it pending payment. After a full five minutes, a small paper cup of black coffee is relayed to my table by the team of waiters, a curl of steam rising into the cold air of the hangar-like dining room. I throw them into complete confusion by immediately ordering a second cup; there is a lot of discussion, but they eventually manage to bring it to my table just as I finish the first and light a Wills Classic. They look longingly at my cigarette. What the hell? I smile at them, and push the pack across the Formica tabletop. Service is a lot quicker after this.
The two monkeys are chasing each other around the gardens outside the dining hall. They shoot up drainpipes, swing from window ledges, and leap from balconies; but their favorite pastime is tumbling around inside a large satellite dish that is mounted on the flat roof of the laundry. It rocks alarmingly as the monkeys roll around inside it, pulling each others tails and twisting their ears. The television picture flickers and rolls, snow clouds of interference blowing across the screen; the waiters take it in turns to poke at the controls, scratching their heads and rechecking cable connections. Over the waiters’ shoulders, I watch the monkeys jump up and down in the dish, using it like a trampoline; the television goes haywire, the waiters are baffled. It is hilarious.
The TTDC front desk was apologetic that they had nothing available for me apart from a cottage; they sheepishly pointed to the Xeroxed tariff pinned to the dark-wood veneered wall and said it would be 600 Rupees. By the time I had looked at it and returned to the lobby, the price was down to 500. A whole family could live in my cottage – although bungalow would be a better description; it has a long, monkey proof veranda, which leads into the bed-sitting room; a large bathroom with a hot water geyser; and a dressing-cum-dining room. The furniture is an eclectic mix of dark wood, Formica, plastic and vinyl, all of it truly dreadful, but perfectly suited to the spirit of the TTDC. Two 1970s bucket seats in bright orange plastic and a hideous Alpine print in a cheap, gold coloured frame are my favorite pieces. It is such an unexpected, endlessly entertaining and eccentric place that I cannot help but love it. There is a knock at the front door. One waiter and two porters are waiting outside.
“You would like coffee,” the waiter asks, “breakfast?”
“You would like laundry,” one of the porters enquires, “washing?”
“You would like anything, good sir?” asks the other.
It is pleasantly warm as I walk down the hill to Commercial Road, past the strikingly colonial British secondary school, and find the Irani Coffee House. Inside, shafts of dusty sunlight poke through the gaps in the timber roof and fall across the old and scarred wooden tables; little silver pots of thick, strong coffee are served beneath verses of the Koran woven into silk wall hangings; the atmosphere is redolent of strong tobacco, incense, and Persian mystery. A white bearded old man in a skullcap welcomes and serves me with warmth and politeness; it does not matter that I am a English catholic, he an Iranian Muslim; and neither of us need to patronize the other to prove how tolerant and accepting we are. I wander through the maze of steep alleys and lanes of the Big Bazar, past shops full of cooking pots and sandalwood carvings, bags of tealeaf and bolts of cloth; past squalid yatri lodges and stinking mutton stalls, shops full of gold with shotgun toting guards outside and dingy little chai stalls. Further past the racecourse and the bus stand, I find Ooty’s railway station – the terminus of the Nilgiri Blue Mountain Railway – and buy a cardboard Edmondson ticket for the 12.15 departure for Coonor.
The train is waiting in the station’s only platform behind a metre gauge YDM diesel – almost identical to the ones stranded at Mysore Junction, except that ‘Powered By Bio-Diesel’ is painted on its cab side. Almost a scaled down version of the broad gauge WDM, the YDM works the upper part of the line, after which a steam engine takes over for the most steeply graded part of the route down to Mettupalayam, where its Rack-And-Pinion gearing is needed. I sit on a wooden bench-seat in the first coach and drop the window down on its leather strap; although the steam engines date from the line’s completion in 1908, I would guess that most of the coaches date from somewhere around the 1940s, along with a few others that are quite obviously much more modern. Built by Nilgiris tea planters and the colonial British, the railway’s 46 kilometre route appears in table 93 of Trains At A Glance, and nearly 100 years later, you can still get a train from Ooty and on to anywhere in India. There are few places left in the world where the national railway schedules century old steam locomotives in their timetables.
The tell-tale signs that the nation which gave the world railways built this line are everywhere; from the ground frames that control the points outside the station, to the old water tower at the end of the platform; from the station master’s Acme Thunderer whistle, to the block token signal machine in the porters’ office. And the semaphore signals that could have been plucked from the Great Central, or the erstwhile Great Eastern railway, and planted beside these tracks, high up in the mountains of Tamil Nadu. Different types of signals for different functions, like the one the train is approaching now, the growl of the YDM’s exhaust belying its size: a distant home signal, cleared for the run to the last section; perhaps a reminder for me, also, that I am approaching the end of my journey.
As I lean out of the window, I see the front wheels of the YDM suddenly jump and then crash back down onto the track; a second later something clatters off the underside of my coach and the drivers applies the brakes in full emergency. The crew walk down the train and pull a metal rail chair from between the carriage wheels; someone deliberately laid it across the tracks, and would have derailed the train had they chosen a curved, rather than straight section of the line. At Coonor, a steam engine waits under the home signal to take the train down Mettupalayam; the YDM drops onto the return service to Ooty, and after smoking a Wills Classic, I climb up behind the diesel for the slow, steep crawl back to the terminus.
I walk back to Charing Cross and go into The Blue Hills Hotel bar; they have no Kingfisher, so I order a Golden Eagle. The red and gold label reads De Luxe Premium Beer – Specially Bottled For Connoisseurs – Quite A Chiller! Quite a mouthful. I debate asking the barman if he has ever caught anyone posing as a Connoisseur to surreptitiously drink one of his bottles of Golden Eagle, but decide it is not worth explaining Mohan Breweries’ strange and slightly ambiguous assertion. I buy some chicken tikka and rice from the Hyderbadi Biryani House to take back to the crazy TTDC Hotel; the uncooked kebabs hang on skewers outside the shop, unrefrigerated since whatever time they were made, and are cooked in a pot of charcoal out on the street. The rice appears from somewhere in the back of the grimy kitchen-cum-dining room, and the whole lot is presented to me in a purple carrier bag that encourages me to Fly Emirates. I call down to the bar for a room service Kingfisher, and eat my dinner on the veranda while the monkeys do their best to wreck the picnic tables on the lawn below me. If the TTDC arranged an exchange program with the Hotel Akademia in Slovakia, it would herald a whole new era in adventure tourism – one that would remain Exclusively For The Connoisseur of such places, I hope.