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 encourage 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.