From Whitefield to Yercaud

During our time in Whitefield Michael, who was a great animal lover, bought a strange looking creature in the Bangalore bazaar. Obviously some sort of primate, this is what it looked like.

I think you'll agree this is not a thing of beauty, but Michael bought it to save it. Despite the Hindu reverence for the cow and the doctrine of ahimsa (non-violence and respect for all living things), Indians do not treat animals particularly well. This one had been captured from a tree and was being used as an object of sport in the bazaar. Michael paid a few rupees to rescue it from its captors, and then decided to keep it as a pet. This was probably unwise as it was a wild animal but it seemed harmless enough. We fed it bits of fruit and rice, and Michael bought an old bird cage to keep it in at night. During the day it ran around the house except when Michael went out to the local shops when he took it with him wrapped round the back of his neck. The sight of an eccentric Englishman bicycling around the village with a furry scarf soon became a source of amusement for the locals, but it was affectionate amusement because Michael was a popular figure there.

This carried on for a while and in that time we learned that Montrose, as Michael called him, was a slender loris which is an arboreal primate that is, as one might have guessed from the eyes, nocturnal. And that became a problem. During the night Montrose would whistle constantly so we let him out to roam around the house. I was having severe doubts about keeping him and wanted to release him back into the wild but Michael had grown attached to him. Then things got worse. Montrose discovered that he was a carnivore. He caught insects and that changed his character. From being quite mild and gentle he became aggressive and would bite. Not me because I was now fed up with him and left him alone but he bit Michael enough to draw blood and shortly afterwards Michael became quite ill. I decided enough was enough and took Montrose into the jungle where I put him in a tree, back where he belonged. Some South African Sai Baba devotees who lived locally showed a forgiving spirit and brought Michael restorative soup to get him back on his feet. I say they were forgiving because I had met one of them a short while before and, not realising he was a devotee, had spoken critically of Sai Baba. When I finished he calmly told me that he was a devotee, a lesson in think before you open your mouth I have subsequently learned.  But, as I said in a previous post, the devotees were all good people even if, in my estimation, they were spiritually naive.

When Michael had recovered we were invited to dinner by an Anglo-Indian ex-army officer who lived in Whitefield with his family. Whitefield had originally been set up as a retirement colony, so-called, for Anglo-Indians who worked on the railways as many of them did in British times. We had first met this person through some rather extraordinary ladies we had known in Bangalore. These were four Parsee sisters, probably in their seventies, who lived in a beautiful but rundown old bungalow in Grant Road near the Bombay Ananda Bhavan, the guesthouse that we had stayed in for several weeks before moving to Whitefield. There was something a bit Miss Havisham-like about these sisters. They were all spinsters, very aristocratic with pale paper thin skin covering boney features. They lived surrounded by the souvenirs of yesteryear with an equally elderly servant looking after them. Their father had been a rich lawyer and probably they had not married because there was no one of their caste and class and religion available in Bangalore. But they were very sweet and kind, and Michael and I were often invited to tea, on one occasion meeting the ex-army officer who now had invited us to his house.

Colonel De Souza turned out to be the solution to our problem about what to do after our attempt to buy a property in Whitefield fell through. He asked us if we had heard of Yercaud, a hill station in Tamil Nadu about 150 miles south of Bangalore. At 5,000 feet of elevation he thought it offered an ideal climate for Europeans and also presented opportunities to run a guesthouse as people went there in the summer to escape the heat of the plains. He knew of it because he had been to school there at Montfort, a Catholic private school, and he gave us the name of a couple of contacts. A week later Michael went off on a reconnaissance trip. I stayed behind in Whitefield because I was helping some visiting Christian missionaries redecorate their little chapel. They had come to our house because we were the only Westerners in Whitefield who were not Sai Baba devotees. They soon realised we were not going to be converted to their brand of Christianity but we remained friendly.

When Michael came back from Yercaud he was full of enthusiasm. He liked the town and its surroundings and had actually found a house to rent. I was happy to go along with this because the time felt right to move on, and Yercaud seemed a good place for us to go, both climate and area wise. We started to make arrangements to pack up and move.

 Before we did move though we had to find someone to take up the lease on the house we had rented for a 6 month period, all paid for in advance. We had only been there for 4 months and assumed the landlord would reimburse us the 2 months outstanding if we found someone to take up the lease. We soon did through the devotees we knew and arranged to meet the landlord with the new tenants to sign the relevant documents. The landlord accepted a cheque from the new people which included payment for the 2 months at the end of our tenancy but then, having given us to understand he would reimburse us those 2 months, declined to do so. The incoming tenants were embarrassed and we were angry but there was nothing to be done. This was not our last bad experience of Indian business practices but there was no use fussing over what could not be changed so a couple of days later we loaded everything we possessed into a small truck and headed south to Yercaud.