Settling in Yercaud

It was now December of 1980. After 8 months in India Michael Lord and I had finally found somewhere we could run as a guesthouse which was our purpose for being in India. Or at least it was the way we intended to make ends meet. Our primary motivation was to lead a contemplative life for which at the time India was still more conducive than the West. And then, as we found out later, the Masters had taken us away from England because of the great cultural changes that were about to take place there and throughout the Western world in the 1980s. In the '60s there had been the feeling in many quarters that a new stage of consciousness was about to unfold. On the popular level this translated into the beliefs and practices associated with the so-called New Age movement, but everywhere there was something in the air, a sense that the old ways were passing and new, supposedly more enlightened, ways would arise to replace them. However confused, misunderstood, trivialised and, in many ways, ignorant this feeling was, it existed.

But every action sets up its own reaction. The world was not about to become more spiritual as many naively hoped. It was going to get even more materialistic. The positive energy of the time was captured and rerouted. In the UK the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher arose to deal with the excesses of socialism but the cure to that ill was equally detrimental to the spiritual health of the nation. I am not some rabid anti-Thatcherite because I believe in a free market and it is obvious that her brand of politics came about in response to the greed and corruption of the left, but it brought with it a materialism and corrupt capitalism of its own. From a societal point of view, it was every man for himself. The moral fibre of the country, already in freefall, took a dive. In different ways and to different degrees this happened all over the West. Living in India in the 1980s I didn't see it as it was was going on. I had very little contact with Western media and wasn't particularly interested. But on my return I could see the changes that had occurred. The descent into deeper materialism, now unchecked by the vestiges of a religious sensibility, the vulgarity, the coarseness. This wasn't just caused by the new form of right wing politics because the reaction of the left to those politics caused as much if not more spiritual degradation. In different but complementary ways each side did its own damage, and we are living with the results of that today. 

One could point to many other periods recently when things took a turn for the worse. Again in the UK which is what I know best, the election of Tony Blair (the abbreviation of the Christian name reeking of fake egalitarianism) was another and sharper arrow in the spiritual heart of the nation. But from the perspective of someone just setting out on the spiritual path as I was in the early 1980s it was better that I was removed from the increasingly materialistic atmosphere of the time until I more firmly grounded and better able to withstand it. We are all affected by our environment and adopt its behavioural patterns to an extent. A sapling often needs protective fencing around it while it is in early stages of growth if it is in an unfavourable environment. India was my fencing then though not because it was a particularly spiritual place. It wasn't but it did still value the spiritual and hadn't totally succumbed to materialism. I doubt you could say that now.

The property Michael had bought was on a hillside about a quarter of a mile from the town. It spread over three levels or terraces. Just to the right of the entrance on the lowest level there was the well which was necessary as there was no mains water in the town at that time. 

The well and lower bungalow

All larger properties had their own well and Yercaud itself had a big well in the centre with a few smaller ones here and there. Water was not usually a problem as long as one was sensible except in the summer when several wells would go dry. Ours only dried up once during a particularly hot summer when we had guests in the bungalow who insisted on washing their clothes every day and using a lot of water to do so. We asked them not to but they carried on. They also smuggled in over a dozen people to a bungalow that had three double bedrooms and was priced accordingly. When challenged they insisted that there were only 6 adults, the rest were servants and children who didn't count because they slept on the floor. We had to ask them to leave and as the head of this family was the police chief from Salem things could have got awkward, but since the well was about to run dry he was ready to leave anyway so there were no repercussions which, given how power operates in India, there might well have been. 

The entrance to the property with a wooden gate and one of the two side pillars we added

The stairs leading to the main bungalow on the top level

The bungalow we ran as a guesthouse was on the same level as the well. It had a verandah that ran along two sides of the house, a large central area with a high ceiling for coolness and three bedrooms. There were bathroom areas rather than fitted bathrooms meaning there was just a lavatory, a tap and a space to pour water over yourself with a six inch high ridge around it to stop the water sloshing everywhere. The water ran out through a hole in the wall that led to an external open drain. The idea was that the water would evaporate in the sun which is what generally happened. The drain ran for a few yards and then stopped so any residual water would just seep into the ground. Initially there were no lavatories in this lower bungalow so we had to install a couple and put a septic tank in to deal with the waste. After a few years this tank had to be emptied and believe it or not there was a man who climbed in and did the job by hand. He was a very jovial fellow. I suppose if you do a job like that you have to be able to look on the bright side. If you work in an office and are bored by your 9-5 existence always remember, it could be worse.

The lower bungalow from the road

The entrance to the lower bungalow with a mulberry tree

The lower bungalow viewed from the level above with a large poinsettia bush

We had bought the property from a lawyer who administered it on behalf of the estate of the previous owners. These had been a couple of English spinsters who had died a few years before. They were daughters of a missionary and had lived their entire lives in India. It must have been a lonely existence after most of their compatriots had gone back to the UK but they knew nothing else. Neither of them had ever left India so it was their country though I imagine they had always been outsiders and their isolation seems to have made them increasingly eccentric. Apparently they would take books out of the local library and cut out pages which contained anything of a remotely sexual nature. As this library was housed in a club which had been the social centre for the British coffee planters, most of whom had left by the mid '50s after which no new books were bought, the controversial elements would have been innocent by today's standards. I was actually grateful for this library because the lack of up to date books meant I read a lot of 19th century literature that I never would have done otherwise. These books were the only form of entertainment and information I had for nearly 5 years. I read modern works before and I have done afterwards, though practically no fiction, but I do think those years of only reading books written in a less spiritually corrupt age served me well.

We lived in the bungalow on the upper terrace. Behind this the hill extended further for several hundred yards where it was a kind of scrub jungle. At the back of the house the hill had been cut away to leave a natural wall about 12 feet high and this had grown over with various plants including morning glory and wild pomegranate. The kitchen looked out onto this wall and instead of a solid door just had a wooden frame about 5 feet wide by 6 feet high lined with a wire grill. We usually left this open during the day for air and light and this was responsible for a little adventure I had. I was cooking lunch around midday when I heard a commotion coming from the wall behind the house. Then there was a crash and a lot of vegetation tumbled into the kitchen. This was immediately followed by the cause of the commotion. A python around 10 feet long whose momentum carried him up right up to my feet. He looked at me and I looked at him and then we both turned round and shot off in opposite directions, me into the house and him out of it. But after the initial shock I turned back and followed him. It's not every day you get a 10 foot python in your kitchen. He was going down the waste water gulley at the back and going so fast that he disappeared into the jungle before I could catch up with him which was probably just as well. I wrote about this encounter more extensively a few years ago. https://meetingthemasters.blogspot.com/2018/06/my-snake-stories.html