On a Shoestring to Coorg

by Dervla Murphy

  At a given signal the tempo of the music, chanting, clapping and swaying quickened dramatically. Then, as it reached crescendo point, the preacher suddenly threw back his head, roared like a wounded tiger, thrust his clenched fists into the air and stood shaking them at the ceiling, and sweating and panting and heaving, and screaming in a voice that had become curiously shrill while his congregation went berserk.

  Poor Rachel was so terrified by this Scene from Clerical Life (Tamil translation) that I had to take her in my arms. By now the women – shrieking like witches at a Sabbath – were gyrating cross-legged around the slippery floor, working themselves into a frenzy in which sexual excitement was unmistakably interwoven with religious hysteria. Meanwhile the ‘clergyman’ (by now I felt he had qualified for inverted commas) continued to scream, tremble, sweat and shake his clenched fists, never once taking his eyes off the ceiling. Several women now began to foam at the mouth and a few soon slumped into unconsciousness, overcome by the intensity of their emotion. I have twice witnessed Tibetan shamans going into trance, but that was merely uncanny. This morning’s session had a nauseating aura and when two women leapt to their feet and began to loosen their robes I decided it was time to go, before Rachel witnessed something not suitable for 5-year-olds.

  When I asked Ernest to explain our experience he said we had attended the last half-hour of the regular two-hour Sunday morning service at the local chapel of the Pentecostal Church of Ceylon. I inquired if ‘service’ could be assumed to have a double meaning in this context, but he would not commit himself. It seems this sect is quite popular, chiefly amongst young women whose husbands belong to other Christian sects in the remoter regions of South India. The Pentecostals wear only white, eschew jewellery of every sort and condemn all fun and games except those involved in their weekly receiving of direct messages from the Holy Ghost, on the hot line described above. No doubt there is a link between the predominantly female attendance and the repression of Indian women. Whatever else may be said about this morning’s service, it certainly took the lid off everybody’s repressions.

  Incidentally, Ernest has been enlightening me about the sexual morals of the local Harijans, Sudras and toddy-tapping Christians. Apparently pre-puberty intercourse is freely indulged in by both boys and girls, and tacitly condoned by their elders. But this means the girls have to be virtually imprisoned between the times of their reaching puberty and being married, since the majority do not revert with ease to chastity. The marriage age is often illegally low in this remote region, yet unmarried mothers do exist. However, contrary to the custom in higher castes they are treated leniently and ‘a little error’ – even of indeterminate paternity – is not considered a serious obstacle to matrimony.

  This morning Rachel produced the Saying of the Week, if not of the Year. Having listened attentively but unprofitably to a breakfast-time discussion on the Bhakti movement in South India, she suddenly announced, during a lull in the conversation, ‘I think I’m too young to understand Hinduism. Will you explain it again when I’m eight?’

  11

  Fever in Madurai: Wildlife in Periyar

  30 December. Madurai.

  The seven-day break in this diary is attributable to a nameless fever.

  On Christmas Eve morning, when we left Tisaiyanvilai, I felt slightly peculiar but thought nothing of it – until suddenly, as we waited at Tirunelveli Junction for a train to Madurai, I became really ill. We were waiting for a train because we had just missed the bus; and we had missed the bus because we were waiting at the post office for a delivery of foreign mail that again failed to come; and, as a final complication, I had also missed the bank, which on that day closed at noon by way of celebrating Christmas.

  This was the first time I have ever been literally penniless – our last paise had gone on the train tickets – and I found the experience interesting. It underlined the extent to which even the poorest of us depends on what little money we have as an essential prop to our personalities; and I began to see the begging type of hippy, who has voluntarily made a vow of poverty, from a new angle. Not for nothing do most religions regard poverty as a pre-requisite for the perfection of sanctity.

  Our train, marked EXPRESS in giant lettering up and down its sides, left Tirunelveli at four o’clock and took five-and-a-half hours to cover ninety-five miles. It was almost empty because the railwaymen had been on strike up to that morning and the general public had not yet realised the strike was over.

  By the time we arrived here I was too feverish to articulate and Rachel also was sickening fast. However, in the Tirunelveli waiting-room we had met a kindly young Swiss couple – our first foreign fellow-travellers since leaving Goa – and by some means these guardian angels got us installed in Madurai’s Travellers’ Bungalow, just beyond the station yard. I dimly recollect stumbling across row after row of railway sleepers in pitch darkness under the noses of gigantic steam engines (c. 1910) which hissed menacingly while Rachel vomited over my legs. Then I was on a bed and she was on a couch in a high-ceilinged room well furnished with rosewood pieces – and haunted by generations of I.C.S. officers on tour to inspect their Empire.

  I had heard our Swiss friends urging the pudgy, puzzled little caretaker to get us a doctor from somewhere without delay – the irony of it, hours after leaving a doctor’s house! – but this man proved more than slightly obtuse and from 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve to 11 a.m. on Stephen’s Day no one even put a head around the door to see if we were still alive. Mercifully our gallon water-bottle had been almost full when we arrived and I suppose Rachel helped herself; she tells me she slept most of the time and never had a headache. Meanwhile I dosed myself with fistfuls of codeine which had no effect whatever on any of my symptoms. The worst of these was a headache so excruciating that at times I half-believed myself to be dying of meningitis. And the noise off-stage did nothing to help.

  Indians love noise and habitually amplify their degraded cinema pop music to truly diabolical proportions. In this case I have no idea where the original sound came from, but an amplifier had been attached to the roof directly above our window and it is no exaggeration to say that during the first two days and nights in that room I was driven almost insane. Only those who have personally suffered Indian pop music at close range will be able to give me the sympathy I deserve. Occasionally there was a lull in the inferno and I almost wept with relief, but no lull lasted longer than it takes to change a record. Perhaps Richard Lannoy was right when he commented in The Speaking Tree – ‘Indian pop music … pervades the lives of the Indian masses as does no other form of entertainment … Here is a people … distracted from the human predicament by the highly organised mass media. The pop arts of India merely block individuation, alienate people from personal experience, and intensify their moral isolation from each other, from reality, and from themselves.’

  By 11 a.m. on the twenty-sixth I had realised that if I were not to die of neglect some action must be taken. Leaning on the wall I made it to the veranda and tried to persuade three passers-by that I genuinely and urgently needed medical attention; but they all insisted that I must go to a clinic or hospital as no doctor would come to me. However, I knew it would be suicidal to go doctor-hunting in a steady downpour of cold rain with a high temperature, so I tottered despairingly back to my sweat-sodden bed.

  Then Rachel appeared beside me, in a rather genie-like way. ‘I’m better,’ she said, ‘and I’m hungry. May I go out to look for food? Why don’t you get a doctor? You look terrible. Have you no medicine? Why am I better?’

  I mumbled that no doctor was available, whereupon Rachel said, ‘Why don’t you write a letter to a doctor and get a servant to take it?’

  ‘What doctor? What servant?’ I muttered muzzily.

  ‘Any doctor and any servant,’ said Rachel, impatiently.

  I raised my head and began to take her seriously. She brought me pen and paper and in shaky capitals I appealed to a ‘Dear Doctor’ while she trotted off to fe
tch ‘a servant’. Moments later she was back with a young cycle-rickshaw-wallah she had found sheltering on the veranda. His English was unintelligible but he seemed to understand when I explained that if he returned with a doctor I would give him Rs.5 before I left Madurai. Pocketing my note he disappeared and less than fifteen minutes later showed an elderly Indian woman doctor into the room. She was from a Christian maternity hospital scarcely five minutes’ walk away and she assured me that had we gone there on Christmas Eve we would have been given a very warm welcome and appropriate treatment.

  But what was ‘appropriate treatment’? Despite heavy doses of fabulously expensive British-made drugs my temperature remained between 101° and 104° for the next few days, while my headache resisted every available pain-killer and I developed a strange racking cough – quite unlike bronchitis – which almost caused me to faint with exhaustion.*

  Obviously I could not be moved, but my faithful doctor called four times a day – no doubt she feared further ghastly complications – and ordered the caretaker to provide fresh bedding and two-hourly pots of tea. She also brought her senior partner, Dr Kennett, to examine me, which I gathered was a significant measure of her concern. Dr Kennett is an astonishing 80-year-old who has done so much for the poor of this city that a main street has been named after her. Following her visit, the attitude towards us of the caretaker and his staff changed from polite indifference to a respectful eagerness to please.

  Apart from all this professional attention, both these doctors were motherly kindness personified. They lent me Rs.100, regularly sent a servant with tempting little delicacies from their own kitchen, and provided Rachel with an abundance of Christmassy snacks, toys, games and balloons. Then yesterday Dr Kennett’s car took us to the hospital, where we are now installed in a two-bed cubicle amidst the howls of the newly born. Today my temperature is at last normal, and if it remains so we plan to go to Periyar tomorrow afternoon to convalesce in the depths of the wildlife sanctuary.

  31 December. Kumili.

  This morning I rose and shone. Fifteen watt, as you might say, but an improvement on the blackout of the past week.

  After breakfast we set off with our cycle-rickshaw friend to see what is perhaps the most impressive of all Hindu temples. The morning was a perfection of clear golden sunshine from an azure sky – after several dark days of non-stop monsoon rain – and the building that came into view in the distance, as we crossed the high railway bridge, seemed almost unreal in its alien loveliness. It is in fact a whole complex of buildings and one could spend days exploring and admiring – though that might overtax Rachel’s interest: she was happy enough to leave after five hours. Moreover, since the Madurai temple is one of South India’s main tourist attractions mlecchas are courteously catered for and racketeers of every sort rigorously suppressed.

  On the way back to the hospital we called at the bank – always a long-drawn-out procedure – and by the time we had packed, said grateful good-byes and caught the two-thirty bus I was feeling decidedly feeble. And so – I suspect – was the ever-uncomplaining Rachel, who is still suffering from that odd cough and has not yet regained her appetite. She has had no treatment for our nameless disease because I am very against children being stuffed with antibiotics.

  This afternoon’s journey took us south-west, through a region where the density of the human population was matched by a staggering number of cattle, mainly the much-revered humped whites. There were also hundreds of buffaloes and several herds of minute donkeys which are commonly used as baggage-animals and too often beaten savagely. Naturally none of these beasts looked well fed, yet even on this rather arid plain I saw no starving animals, as one frequently does in North India. Rachel was distressed on the donkeys’ behalf and not consoled when I told her that according to Hindu mythology the ass is the steed or vehicle of Sitala, the goddess of smallpox (one of the ten aspects of Kali), and so is regarded by most Indian peasants with a mixture of fear and contempt. Under the Mughals, no Hindu of the North-West frontier province – now Pakistan – was allowed to ride anything but an ass. I cannot understand why donkeys are universally scorned, despite their being so useful. Perhaps their voice is against them. Luckily Rachel did not notice that many of those we passed today had had their nostrils slit, it being the erroneous belief of Indians that this mutilation modifies the bray.

  For miles our narrow road ran between low, grotesquely shaped, rock-strewn hills towards the high blue wall of the Ghats. Then, having crossed the Tamil Nadu–Kerala border at the little town of Cumbum, we drove straight at the apparently sheer mountain barrier that here rises abruptly from the plain. ‘There must be a tunnel!’ said I to Rachel. But instead there was a dramatic road which I would have immensely enjoyed on foot though I did not greatly relish it from the seat of an overloaded Indian bus.

  When we got here just after sunset the air felt cold. Kumili is a single-street village, 3,300 feet above sea-level and four miles from Periyar, and in the larger of its two doss-houses we are occupying a cubicle in which I can only move crabwise between our cots. An icy draught is sneaking through a broken window and I have just come face to face with my first South Indian bed-bug (now deceased). I feel so exhausted the New Year will have to see itself in without me, but I daresay 1974 will be none the worse for my non-attendance at its birth.

  1 January, 1974. Thekkady, Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary.

  If the denizens of Kumili celebrated our Western New Year I did not hear their celebrations, or feel their draughts or bedbugs, or suffer any other interference with my ten-hour sleep.

  By seven-thirty this morning we were on the way to Thekkady, which is the administrative and tourist centre for the sanctuary. Near the lake the Wildlife Preservation Officer has his headquarters in a little bungalow, and an inconspicuous wooden landing-stage has been built for the small motor-launches that take visitors on game-watching expeditions.

  ‘How far is it?’ asked Rachel, as we walked away from Kumili through the crisp early morning mountain air.

  ‘Four miles,’ I replied.

  Rachel looked at me sardonically. ‘I thought we were supposed to be convalescing,’ she said. ‘I don’t call carrying your big rucksack four miles convalescing. Is there no bus?’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly – hoping one would not overtake us, for ‘The whole area of the Sanctuary abounds in natural scenery,’ as my tourist brochure puts it. Soon we saw a troop of Nilgiri langurs, and then that most lovely creature, the Indian Giant Squirrel, and Rachel forgot all about the snags of convalescing with mamma. At the sanctuary border-post an amiable young policeman asked – without getting up from his breakfast – if we were carrying any guns, and then made a sign that we could duck under the barrier and proceed.

  The Kerala Tourism Development Corporation owns both Thekkady’s hotels. One is the expensive, Western-style Aranya Nivas, where a bottle of beer costs Rs.9, and the other is Periyar House – clean, comfortable, spacious, efficiently staffed, teetotal, vegetarian and only Rs.10 for an airy, well-appointed single room overlooking jungle and lake. Tonight Periyar House is almost full and the guests include half a dozen semi-hippy European youngsters and a party of elderly Prussians with thick guide-books and severe sunburn. But the Aranya Nivas, not surprisingly, is empty. I have been told it depends almost entirely on rich Americans and the flashy, hard-drinking type of North Indian who is out to impress his benighted Southern cousins. A pleasing feature of Thekkady is that one can without difficulty avoid one’s fellow-tourists; even on the motor-launch this morning there were only four Madrassis and a camera-obsessed Japanese youth.

  Periyar Lake is twenty miles long and was formed in 1895 by the construction of a dam across the Periyar river to help irrigate large tracts of Tamil Nadu. Its maximum depth is about 140 feet and, as my brochure explains, ‘When the Lake was formed, tree-growth from the water-spread area was not completely removed and therefore a large number of dead tree trunks still exist within the lake. They get submerged o
r exposed by the fluctuating water-level. These dead trees, though sometimes a hazard to navigation enhances the scenic value of the locality and allows the nesting and roosting of several water birds.’ I am not sure that I agree about the enhancing of the scenic value; the cumulative effect of so many dead trees is slightly depressing and they serve as a nagging reminder of the lake’s artificiality. However, if they solve the water-birds’ housing problems they are well worth keeping.

  Our two-hour tour was good value for Rs.4 and the enthusiastic pilot identified many birds for us as we chugged slowly along, enjoying the warm sun sparkling on the water, and the cool breeze, and the faint yet thrilling possibility of seeing some big game. At the edge of the water in the near distance we eventually saw a herd of elephants; but obviously touring by motor-launch is not the most efficient way of animal-watching, though this trip is well worth taking for its own sake.

  After lunch I left Rachel playing in the jungle near the hotel – where there were two tame elephants and lots of non-shy langurs to entertain her – while I walked half-way back to Kumili in search of the Wildlife Officer, a pleasant young man who readily agreed to our spending two nights at the Manakkavala Forest Rest House, six miles away. The Government of India Tourist Office in London had provided me with an excellent sketch-map of the sanctuary, on which all rest houses and footpaths are clearly marked, so I argued that we needed no guide, only the key. But the Officer thought otherwise and in the morning a trainee Wildlife Officer is to meet us outside the hotel at eight o’clock.