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. Traditionally, Indians led lives that were almost like works of art in their simplicity and elegance, but that time has passed 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. Tharayan Matthews is the mafioso-like figure at the front. He was a tremendous egotist and did sometimes behave like a godfather, but I liked him because he was a larger than life character. 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.