Food

 In his book Mere Christianity, first published in 1952 but deriving from lectures given during the Second World War, C.S. Lewis has a chapter entitled Sexual Morality in which he considers what the Christian approach should be to this vexed subject, and specifically the virtue of chastity. He was writing before the sexual revolution of the 1960s but that didn't come out of nowhere and really just meant that what had been going on, or at least discussed, in certain circles of society spread throughout the whole of it.

Lewis makes the point that the sexual instinct, good and natural in itself, has gone wrong, and says that Christianity does not believe that sex is bad, an accusation often aimed at it, but that the state into which the sexual instinct has got is the problem. It has become corrupted and that is what is bad. Something often forgotten is that the idea of romantic love only really developed in the Christian West, and if that love was idealised on occasion it could be said that this reflected the sense that the human love between a man and a woman could be lifted up into the Christian Heaven and, as a result, transformed into a divine state.

But this piece is not about sex. In the course of this chapter Lewis illustrates the degenerated state of the sexual instinct by the example of a striptease act where men gather to ogle a woman undressing. He says suppose you went to a country where you could draw a crowd by slowly lifting the lid off a plate of mutton chops or bacon, wouldn't you think there was something wrong with the people of that country and that the normal healthy appetite for food had become exaggerated and corrupted? He writes this in the sure knowledge that his audience would think it absurd.

But this is more or less what we have today! Our excessive preoccupation with food shows itself everywhere. The number of restaurants and fast food outlets on every high street, the constant advertisements for all things edible, the TV schedules with their endless programmes about food and competitions for those who cook or bake it, the lionising of chefs as though they were great artists. We have become obsessed with food, not so much from the point of view of our stomachs as from that of our tastebuds and the desire to stimulate them unceasingly. This is a sure sign of decadence. There is nothing wrong with enjoying food. One should enjoy it. It is one of the comforts God has given us to make life in the physical world more bearable. But there is a difference between healthy enjoyment and gluttony, and we have forgotten the age old truth that indulging the pleasures of the flesh deadens us to the spiritual. The body is part of what we are but if we give it too much prominence it will become all of what we are, and that is what our modern obsession with food is doing.

I'm not recommending we put on hair shirts and live on stale bread and water, even if that is a good practice sometimes. It's a question of priorities and proportion, and we have gone much too far down the road of physical indulgence. There is a decadent sensuality where food is concerned just as there is in the case of sex, and it too is spiritually destructive.

The pleasures of the body have their place but that place in a spiritually aware culture is a subordinate one. The more attention you pay to these pleasures, the more you try to cultivate them or seek to stimulate the desires associated with them, the more you lose all connection to the spiritual. Man is not an animal but if he indulges the animal side of his nature, something animals don't do, he sinks lower than the animal because he has sinned against both spirit and nature.

Food is good but a good exaggerated or given a place above its merits becomes an evil. This is what has happened with food in our world. There was an episode recently when a well-known journalist and 'media personality' opined that the pleasures of foreign cuisine was compensation for the indigenous people to effectively lose their country. The spiritual state of such an individual is pitiful.

Daily Life in Yercaud

(More on my life in India in the 1980s.)

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.

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.

God, the World and the Soul

 The three realities of human existence are God, the world and the soul which is to say the inner subject, the outer object and that from which both of these derive. These can be seen as three points of a triangle with God at the apex. The tragedy of modern man is that the apex point is either denied or, if accepted, seen in the light of some part of the base line. In fact, this point is the only thing that can give meaning and reality to the other two points. Without not just acknowledging God but seeing him as the root of the other two, these two, Man and the World, amount to nothing but confusion and chaos, hence the nihilistic state in which we live even if we cover that up with all kinds of distractions.

Man can only know himself through interaction with the world of objective existence. In his early stages he remains embedded in nature and does not know himself as a free agent. He is still in the arms of the Mother, subject to her moods and seasons. It is the great achievement of Western man that he broke free of Nature and began to master it. The initial phases of this are recorded in myth as the hero fights various monsters, many of these symbolic of the devouring mother that would drag him back down to the pre-conscious state of non-individuality. The rupture with nature brought freedom but also separation and loss. What humanity has achieved is extraordinary but it comes at a cost. When Odin, who can be said to represent Western man, memorably in his guise as Wotan as depicted in Wagner's Ring Cycle, sacrifices his eye in return for wisdom, this signifies the closing down of clairvoyant faculties as the intellectual mind starts to awaken and the free individual asserts himself in subjective consciousness. This is a necessary and vital stage in the evolution of the soul and it was achieved by Western Man more than any other grouping of human beings. However, although it is an evolutionary advance, it leads to eventual calamity, the Gotterdammerung suffered by Wotan and the gods, as individuality goes too far and mastery of nature leads to destruction. Man has conquered the world but lost himself in the process.

We are at that twilight of the gods stage now and all the remedies proposed are useless because they come from within the system. Remaining where we are is alienation and death, but restoring past religion is no good either because it was religion for the herd not the full individuals we have become.  A return to nature is not feasible for the self-conscious beings we now are, and if we try that it will be fake, performative. We cannot go back to the mother and the embryonic bliss of unselfconsciousness. We cannot go back, we cannot stay where we are, we must go through and on. The only solution is to reach for transcendence which means to acknowledge God, but this acknowledgement needs to be twofold. We must see God as the transcendent Creator but also as the ground of our own being and we must align our individual self with that ground. In this way, we eventually become gods ourselves. Not in the way promised by the serpent which offered the temptation of the perfectibility of the separate self, but in and through Christ who raises the self sacrificed in his name up to his own divine state.

The world as we know it is coming to an end. The soul can follow the world or it can follow God. It can identify itself with the world and take the path the world is taking or it can start to identify itself with God and so move out of this world into divine being. This is the choice of our time.

The Spiritual Failure of the Boomers

I was born in the mid 1950s so am a Boomer as these things are defined, but I would like to think I am not typical of my cohort. I certainly absorbed some of the Boomer mentality while growing up in the '60s and '70s but I consciously rejected a lot of the more overt liberal/leftist and anti-traditional stuff though some of it will undoubtedly have rubbed off on me. But I understand why many people in the generations that followed despise the Boomers for trashing Western civilisation, an accusation which I regard as a fair one even if previous generations cannot be exonerated. Nothing comes out of nothing and the Boomer generation was merely the blossoming of a seed that had long been germinating

The Boomers thought they could change the world and they set about it, in their eyes as practical idealists. However, there were generous helpings of selfishness involved and even narcissism. They were the first generation who were spoiled and cosseted in their youth and did they ever take advantage of it. They had the material goods and developed a moral/spiritual superiority complex, but they completely misconceived the idea of love, reducing it to a pleasurable emotion and expunging it of any sense of sacrifice. Sacrifice is the essence of love but the Boomers turned love into indulgence.

Boomer self-centredness is one thing but where this generation really failed is where they thought they were at their best. When I lived in India in the 1980s the caste system was officially disowned but in reality it was still operative. As a Westerner, I was supposed to condemn caste but I understood the reasons for it even if it had been abused in the practice as any hierarchical system will be in a fallen world. Nonetheless, life is hierarchical and if you destroy hierarchy, you simply reduce standards to a lowest common denominator. Tradition which knew this was wise. Modernity which denies it is ignorant.

Ignorant, you might say, but well-meaning to which the obvious answer would be that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But that aside, is it really well-meaning to have this attitude or is it just weak, a symptom of that spiritually corrosive desire, the desire to be liked? I was warned by someone of the higher castes that I should not bring my liberal Western prejudices (and they are prejudices) to any relationships with Indians of the lower castes because if I did they would just take advantage. In words which struck me then and stay with me now he said, "Don't try to be kind. They will take your kindness for weakness". 

Now, this has to be unpacked a little. It doesn't mean, don't be kind. Kindness is good and right - obviously. What it means, and what the Boomers have missed, is that often what you tell yourself is kindness is actually weakness and, in the Boomers' case, it is weakness supplemented by a misplaced sense of guilt to which they have succumbed partly because of indoctrination but also because of their own spiritual failings which include the lack of acknowledgement of the transcendent reality of God or, if God is acknowledged, his demotion from All Father and Creator to impersonal universalised compassion. The self-perceived victim and underdog classes see this weakness and exploit it, and this is leading to the downfall of the West.

Kindness is weakness when it ignores reality for the sake of being, or appearing to be, nice. In line with the general feminisation of the West it is largely a feminine failing (of both sexes). When counterbalanced by masculine authority it can help mitigate any resultant severity, but when that authority has been as undermined as it has been it is purely destructive of any higher order. It opens the door to attack from below and societal dismantling as the structures that have built that society and culture are torn down in the name of equality and fairness. Fairness to what? To those that want what others have or to the truth?

The Boomers are like the decadent progeny of an aristocratic class that consumes what its ancestors have built up with no thought for its descendants. They will have a spiritual bill to pay. But this doesn't let subsequent generations off the hook. They may complain about Boomer selfishness but is that because they want what the Boomers have or are they prepared to suffer and sacrifice to put things right? Not that things can be put right. The momentum of dissolution is too far advanced  for that to happen. This cycle is coming to a close. But the effort to turn the tide and redress past failures will pay spiritual dividends on an individual level and maybe even mitigate what is traditionally known as the wrath of God, an outmoded but evocative term for the consequences of wrong thinking and wrong actions.

Kingship

 On some level every man feels himself to be a king and every woman a queen. Potentially so, at any rate. Is this just egotism or psychological compensation for felt inadequacy or is there something real behind it?

We are created in God's image. That means we are individual. An individual is a unique and complete being. A whole and, in a certain sense, perfect being. Ultimately, no individual can be compared to any other even if in the manifested or created world individuals are very similar, not very interesting for the most part and decidedly imperfect. But in an ideal state and at root each one is perfect. Life is to bring that perfection out into full expression.

This is what a king is. The crown of creation. We all have it in us to become that. None of us are that but we are all working towards it. Our destiny and goal is to become lords of all we survey. Under God, of course, but all worldly kings also know they serve under God.

God is the King of kings. Pilate said to Jesus, “So you are a king?”, Jesus answered, “You say correctly that I am a king. For this purpose I have been born, and for this I have come into the world: to testify to the truth." A king exists not just to rule but to manifest God in the world. All kings believe in divine right which means their right to rule comes from God and God has invested them with his power. The first quality of Divine Being is Will and a King manifests this divine will in his person.

When Christ was in this world he appeared as a humble servant but as Pilate recognised he was a king really. The image on the Turin Shroud is the most regal image I know of which points to its authenticity. Christ is the King of Heaven, and he said that what he did we can too. This means that we too are kings, or will be when we have reached the end of our spiritual journey. 

Note the stillness in this face. It is the face of a man of power who is in perfect possession of himself, completely centred in the true reality of his being. That is what a king is.

To be a king is to reach the point where you can manifest God's glory, where base metal has been turned into gold. It is what the soul was created to be, the male, a king, the female a queen.

Spiritual Sleeper Cells

I believe that in these end times the spiritual powers that be have installed what you might call sleeper cells around the world which are lying dormant until required to act. These would be souls born with this particular mission who, for the most part, have no public image or importance and who, in most cases, have no direct knowledge of their mission in their earthly minds. They have been prepared for this before birth but they still have to go through the normal human experiences. When the crisis comes about they will be awoken to their task which will be in the nature of a salvage operation.

They have been prepared, and even now are undergoing preparation, but are not usually aware of this in their everyday minds. They may have an intuitive inkling that they are waiting for something but as yet they know not what. Their higher selves will know but in their conscious minds only some of this knowledge comes through. They may experience frustration in their ordinary worldly minds because of this disconnect between what they inwardly truly are and what they can outwardly manifest, and sometimes this may cause them difficulty in functioning in the world to their full potential. They must learn not to be concerned by this. Their mission is of greater importance than any worldly success or achievement. The values and judgments of the spiritual world are not those of this one.

We really do live in unprecedented times. Everyone can sense this in different ways. Not everyone realises that it is a spiritual crisis but the consequences of centuries of wrong thinking are making themselves apparent. Not to put too fine a point on it, this will only get worse. This is not a case of pessimism. When the sun is setting it is not pessimistic to say that it will soon be dark. The sun is now on the horizon and when it goes down we will be left with the results of our denial of light. For we have denied light for a long time. We have substituted our own pitiful imitations of it but these will be shown to be the hollow shams they are. Then choices will have to be made. Will we turn to the true source of light in repentance or will we continue with our mental and spiritual rejection of the light? When the sun goes down this is the time that these spiritual sleeper cells can serve as guides in the darkness. If you feel you might be one of these make sure you are prepared and can serve as needed.

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 nearly 20 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.