Bedlam And Botany

I open the cottage door on my way to the dining hall for breakfast and find one of the porters asleep in the porch; he opens his eyes and clambers to his feet, apologizing profusely.
“Good morning, good sir,” he greets me, pulling up the collar of his greatcoat against the post-dawn chill. “Can I be of assistance?” From the corner of my eye I see one of the waiters hovering beside the path to the main block. I ask the porter to find someone from the laundry and send them over after breakfast, and he gratefully accepts a Wills Classic in return; the waiter intercepts me halfway across the garden, takes my order for coffee, and then dashes off ahead of me so that it’s waiting at a table when I arrive in the dining hall, which, for some unknown reason, has been strung with brightly coloured bunting since yesterday morning. I order toast and a masala omelette, which takes the waiters by surprise; the paper trail brings out a previously unseen chef, who examines me from the kitchen door before approving the order and disappearing again. My toast – which actually seems to be fried bread – arrives via one waiter, and a second coffee by another; there’s no sign of the omelette, but I am joined by two sparrows, who hop through one of several windows that are left open regardless of how cold it is, or how many insulating layers the waiters are as a result forced to wear. The sparrows perch hopefully on the chair back opposite me, and then hop onto the tabletop to peck at the little pinches of fried toast I leave for them. The cashier watches disapprovingly from behind his 1960s mechanical cash register, but is suddenly distracted by the arrival of a large party of Indian tourists; the dining hall is thrown into a state of chaos; the waiters watch in horror as families and couples file in and settle across a dozen separate tables; the sparrows fly up to the bunting, twittering and craning their heads to watch me with bright, glassy eyes.
My omelette is dumped on the edge of the table by a speeding waiter; he passes on his way back to the cashier with a wad of requisitions for dosai and sambar, a look of alarm passing between them. The dining hall echoes with the animated conversation and bright laughter that only Indians are capable of making this early in the day; somebody turns the television volume up, and the jangly notes of a sitar rises above the bedlam; in the background, it sounds like someone else is destroying the kitchen and murdering the chef. Breakfast in the Hotel Akademia, on the other hand, whilst equally as unpredictable, would be a somber ritual, conducted in the fearful silence of a Soviet era Party funeral. And the hottest paprika in Slovakia would be laughed out of the TTDC’s kitchen: my masala omelette, along with diced onions and tomatoes, is studded with chunks of fresh green chilli, seeded and uncompromisingly hot. A sheen of sweat breaks out on my forehead, even as the cold morning air puckers and goose bumps the skin on my arms. The monkeys cling to the window frame behind me, bouncing up and down, mooning in at me; a pigeon glides beneath the bunting and lands on my table, much to the disgust of the sparrows who drop down and take up their positions on the chair back. None of them is fooled by the large piece of glistening, dark green, searing hot chilli I slip into the pile of toast crumbs.
The porter tells me the laundry man is “coming ten minutes, sir.”
I sit on the veranda and work out how I am going to get back to Delhi for my flight to London next week. Trains At A Glance tells me it’s 2700 kilometres and 60 hours via Chennai Central from Combiatore Junction, which I can reach by taking the Nilgiris Railway from Ooty; or 2500 kilometres and 40 hours direct from Bangalore, via the bus to Mysore, and then the Bangalore Passenger train. Allowing for connections and delays, and if I can get a reservation, it is going to be a grueling, three to four day journey.
After half an hour I give up on the laundry man and go to find the porter. I give him my bag of washing, 20 Rupees, and a Wills Classic, and tell him to make sure he brings the cleaned clothes back to my cottage no later than six this evening. I walk through Charing Cross and the Big Bazar to the reservations office at Ooty station. Train number 2615 – The Chennai-New Delhi Grand Trunk Express – has two hundred people Wait Listed for the day after tomorrow; the Bangalore-New Delhi Karnataka Express only has berths in Sleeper Class: two uncomfortable days on hard wooden seats, and two sleepless nights. I book it and try not to think about the promise of being packed into a torturously small space, surrounded by strangers and noise, and being suffocated by the enveloping odor of filthy toilets. I decide to take my mind off it with a visit to Ooty’s botanical gardens, and as I walk back along Commercial Road to find an auto-rickshaw, I notice a poster in the window of Blue Mountains Tours And Travels for Spicejet flights to the capital. I find an internet café in the jumble of shops behind the Hyderbadi Biryani House and buy an e-ticket for the three hour Bangalore-Delhi flight for little more than I paid for the Karnataka Express. Ten minutes later, I am back at the railway reservations counter and filling out a Reservation/Cancellation Requisition for a refund on my redundant Sleeper Class ticket. I call the Mayura Hoysala in Mysore, reserve a room for tomorrow night, and ask them double check the early morning Bangalore Passenger train times, the ‘Peoples Trains’ that aren’t listed in Trains: I can leave Mysore at 5am, and be in Delhi by 5pm. I breathe a huge sigh of relief and barely complain about the absurd fare the rickshaw wallah demands for the short ride to the botanical gardens.
I admit to having maintained a studied ignorance of anything that grows, flowers, or blooms for my entire adult life, an admission made even worse by considering myself otherwise inquisitive, and trying to impassion others with my fascination about railways. I put it down to the seemingly endless chores in the family garden when growing up in Leicester, which didn’t sit at all well with the spiky hair and Doc Marten’s of my teenage years; the Walkman had yet to be invented, so I couldn’t even rebel by listening to The Buzzcocks singing ‘Boredom’ while I mowed the lawns or trimmed the front hedge. I buy a guide book from the shop near the Fern House and navigate my way along the paths that wind through the gardens, trying to identify some of the 1000 species of plants and trees without any success whatsoever – they all look identical, and the pictures in the guide could easily be of the same cacti or palms, photographed from different angles on different days. If it wasn’t for the fact that the place has the credibility of being laid out by a team from London’s Kew Gardens in the mid 1800s, I might have suspected The Emperor’s New Clothes had been rewritten in Hindi, and The Maharaja’s New Shrubs is being played out around the neatly clipped lawns of Ooty’s Botanical Gardens. But that’s ignorance for you. The gardens are undeniably beautiful, and immaculately maintained; and you don’t need any specialist knowledge to enjoy this peaceful escape from the hustle and bustle of the Big Bazar and the traffic of Charing Cross, much as you don’t need to know the difference between a Russian M62 diesel and an Indian WDM to enjoy a railway journey.
I buy some coffee at a roadside shack outside the gardens and drink it sitting on a wooden stool in the afternoon sun; even at an altitude of two and a half kilometers, Ooty’s spring days still reach more than 30 degrees. I cross the road to the Tibetan Market and wander around rows of identical concrete stalls selling cheap training shoes and badly made sportswear, fake designer labels and plastic houswares; there is no sign of Tibetan craft or culture, and nothing on offer that couldn’t be bought at any Bazar or Chowk from here to Lucknow. The stall holders aren’t doing any business; they sit next to their piles of worthless and uninteresting goods and watch the tourists drift by, a uniform look of utter boredom settled across their strong, Oriental features.
I catch an auto-rickshaw back to Commercial Road and order a Golden Eagle in The Blue Hills Hotel. A group of young Indian men are getting roaring drunk in one of the booths in the dimly lit bar; the stewards are lined up against the wall, arms folded across their chests, watching with obvious distain. A glass of beer is dropped and smashes on the floor; the waiters’ expressions don’t even flicker. One of the young men pulls himself to his feet and reels off towards the toilet, lurching from table to table, crashing into chairs, fumbling along the walls for support; there is a retch and a splash as he is sick on the floor outside the kitchen door. The waiters look at each other; they’ve seen it all before.
I walk back to the TTDC and book their private shuttle bus service to Mysore in the morning; it costs 20 Rupees more than the KSRTC bus, but it will collect me from the hotel and deliver me to the Mayura Hoysala within, I am promised, four hours. I ask them to prepare my bill and bring it up to the bar. As soon as I sit down the barman appears with a chilled Kingfisher and a little bowl of masala cashews, places them on the table in front of me and then backs away, bowing slightly, and smiling his brown, gap-toothed smile. The porter from the dining hall puts his head around the door: “Good evening, good sir,” he nods at me enthusiastically. A few minutes later he returns with the laundryman, and the clerk from the front desk; in exchange for 30 Rupees and three Wills Classics, I am given a bag of clean clothes, a tissue-paper thin Invoice For Rooms, and the dedicated service of the porter for my ‘evening’s requirements’. For some unknown reason, the front desk has decided to apply a 10 percent discount to my final bill; have they forgotten that they had already reduced the price of my cottage by 100 Rupees a night? I ask the clerk to check the amount again, and after borrowing the barman’s calculator, he manages to reduce it even further, rather than remove the discount; most of my bar bill, and the cost of my lift back to Mysore have suddenly evaporated.
I ask the porter to come up to my cottage at 8 o’clock with a menu, pay cash for another bottle of Kingfisher, and then sit on my veranda with my headphones on.
If only I’d had an MP3 player for the tedious hours spent working in the garden back at home. Half the size of a pack of Wills Classics, hidden among its three hundred files are some of the same songs I came to know then, half a lifetime and two continents ago.