In Bangalore

 After a few weeks in Bombay (see previous Indian Story posts), we took the train to Bangalore which we intended to use as a base from which to explore the south of India, our idea being to buy a property to run as a small guest house. The journey took about 24 hours, and we arrived late at night with no plan as to where we might stay. Somewhat misguidedly, we put ourselves in the hands of a taxi driver at the station and, given we were Westerners and not hippies, he took us to what was obviously one of the most expensive hotels in the city. Being too hot and tired to go anywhere else at that time of night, we booked a room there but the next day after making a few enquiries, we transferred to a place called the Shilton Hotel which was in St Marks Road, and this was to be our home for the next month.

The Shilton was an old fashioned hotel which had rooms in small individual buildings spread out over a compound which is what you call a garden in India. The trees and flowers in the south were all new to me. The main tree, which lined roads all over the city, was the Flame of the Forest which puts out bright red blooms when it flowers so that the tree really can appear, especially at sunset as though it is on fire. There was one of these in the compound, in flower when we arrived, and there were also several beds of canna lilies which are also red though there are orange and yellow varieties too, all very different to the more subdued English flowers I was used to. 

Bangalore was favoured by the British because its elevation on the Deccan Plateau at nearly 3,000 feet above sea level gives it a relatively cool climate, cool for the South of India. The British established it as a cantonment town, meaning an army garrison, and from that beginning it became a Civil and Military Station, developing into one of the more attractive cities in the country with many fine buildings, both state and residential. The cantonment was established in 1809 for a mixed civilian and military population and comprised bungalows, gardens, race courses, clubs and parade grounds. It stood apart from the main Indian city with a definite colonial air and there was still a trace of that remaining in 1980. All of these colonial houses were attractive and some were really quite grand. Alas, most of them have been pulled down now in the usual acts of cultural vandalism to be replaced by ugly modern buildings, but in 1980 there were still a large number around the city, with many in the area where we were staying.

Michael had been a captain in the Guides regiment of the Indian army in pre-independence days when it had British officers, and he dressed accordingly, favouring khaki shorts with long socks and heavy Afghan sandals which he called chappals. All topped off with a solar topi, the pith helmet that the British wore during colonial days. I certainly wasn't going to dress like that but he did insist I wear a hat while in the sun for which I am grateful as many Westerners in those days didn't and suffered the consequences. I wasn't going to wear a topi but a cotton cricket hat offered sufficient protection. I never wore sun cream the whole time I was in India. People didn't in those days, no doubt unwisely.

After a short period looking for properties we found a bungalow with enough rooms for a few guests in the small town of Whitefield, about 15 miles from the centre of Bangalore. We fixed on this as Whitefield was the site for one of the main ashrams for Satya Sai Baba so there was a constant stream of Western visitors. At that time it was just a small village with some old bungalows and a few modern houses, a sleepy little place where nothing much went on except for the ashram. Now, since Bangalore has become the IT capital of India, it has been completely transformed. See here. One can either admire the industry that affected this transformation or be horrified at the wholesale destruction of a pleasant rural village with no building more than one floor high, and its conversion into a giant temple to Mammon.

Before we left the UK we had visited the Indian High Commission to ask if foreigners could buy 'immovable property', as it was called, in India, and we had been assured they could. All that was needed was the appropriate permission, and that was just a formality. Consequently, we didn't anticipate any problems in buying the Whitefield bungalow. We were wrong. We hired a lawyer (always a risk in India) to make the application, and were told the necessary permission should be granted in a couple of weeks. The two weeks turned into a month and then 6 weeks and then we were informed that permission was refused. The formality had become an impossibility.  We re-applied, wasting more money on the lawyer who was probably just stringing us along, but permission was once again turned down and we had now wasted 3 months. Later we found out that if we had greased enough palms at the ministry in Bombay we might have been successful, but either through naivety or integrity that did not occur to us, even to Michael who was familiar with Indian affairs and knew you could basically trust no one. Indians are generally very kind and friendly but the fabled spirituality of the sub-continent rarely extends to the moral sphere. Actually, the owner of the property we had been hoping to buy was an exception to this rule. He had kindly taken his house off the market while we were waiting for permission to buy, and we felt we had let him down but he was philosophical about it, and held no ill-feeling, even inviting us to dinner. The moral of the story is that generalisations are generally true but one can't assume them always to be so. I met many kind and generous Indians while in the country. On the other hand, we were ripped off and cheated several times. This was just the first. 

Back to square one. While waiting for permission to buy the house in Whitefield we had moved out of the Shilton to somewhere cheaper. The costs mount up when living in a hotel, even in India.  In fact, we only moved a few hundred yards to a guesthouse called the Bombay Ananda Bhavan which means Bombay Bliss House. This wasn't what you might think from the name, being a perfectly respectable establishment run by an old gentleman by the name of Mr Gupta. It was situated down a side street called Grant Road just off the main strand on which the Shilton stood, and was a two storey bungalow with a dozen or so rooms. I found some pictures of it on the Internet from about 10 years after we were there but it looks exactly the same.

The entrance

A bedroom with mosquito nets

The first floor balcony

The guesthouse was used by devotees of Sai Baba and they would take taxis twice a day to his ashram 15 miles away for darshan which is when the holy man graces his disciples with his presence. Michael and I were the only people in the guesthouse who were not devotees. For those who don't know, Sai Baba was a popular guru in the 80s and beyond who claimed he was God incarnate in human form. He had a large afro and wore a long orange dress which was peculiar to himself, not traditional garb. His main claim to fame was that he had magical powers. He could produce objects out of thin air and regularly did so, often holy ash but also sometimes small religious artefacts etc, even gold. I don't doubt that he really could do this. He wasn't just a sleight-of-hand prestidigitator. I am equally sure that he was not a genuine holy man. For one thing, no true holy man indulges in this spiritual showing off of miraculous power. The siddhis, as they are known, are regarded as diversions and stumbling blocks to the seeker, and to display them is spiritual vulgarity on a grand scale. Then there was his claim to divinity. This is another sure sign of inflation and inauthenticity. But most of all, as far as I was concerned, the vibration he gave off was decidedly unholy. I am not going to include a picture of him but look it up if you are interested and see if you don't agree that this is not the face of a holy person. There were scandals that surrounded him even at the time but I won't go into those here. 

Having said all that, the Western devotees we met at the guest-house and elsewhere were all good and decent people, sincere, albeit naive, spiritual seekers. Sai Baba was obviously an exceptional individual but a good example of how you must exercise discrimination while on this path. The devotees were constantly asking Michael and me to go with them to a darshan, and eventually we did. I have to say that all my suspicions were confirmed by the sight of Sai Baba coming out to the awe-struck crowd and, in lordly fashion, accepting their love and unconditional adoration with benevolent condescension. He produced some vibhuti or holy ash, took a few letters with requests for blessings or whatever, and then after a brief period went back inside. That was enough for the devotees who had taken a round 30 mile trip for a 15 minutes mass audience, and were prepared to do the same again in the afternoon. "He cured my diarrhoea!", one young lady told me excitedly. I was only 24 at the time and somewhat concerned that my feelings about this man were totally at variance with what most other spiritually inclined people thought of him, but Michael told me to trust my intuition and go by what I felt, and I have to say this is excellent advice for anyone whose instincts point them in a certain direction, even if good opinion is against you.

To be continued.