Overnight In Ootacamund

“Stop, please…give me your story..I’m with the Ooty paper…a reporter…I need this story…please talk to me…please…..PLEASE”   The young reporter ran alongside the tractor, pleading with Rod to slow down and talk to him.  Rod was driving.  He shouted “ Get away..we’re not stopping…get away from the bloody wheels before I run you over”    We were driving down a main street of Ootacamund in the high hill country of the Nilgiri Mountains in southern India.

Standing by the open door of the caravan, looking down at the reporter running along beside us, I felt sorry for him, he seemed so desperately anxious to get the scoop.  Frankly, I didn’t see why we couldn’t stop and talk to him but Rod was a stubborn man –  a man with a strange chip on his shoulder.  Just the fact that the reporter was so desperate seemed to make Rod more determined not to accommodate him.  It was stupid.

The town of Ootacamund, known in it’s heyday as “Snooty Ooty” was one of the summer towns of the English during the British Raj period.  When the temperatures on the plains below became unbearably hot for the English, they all trundled up to the high mountains to cool off for those summer months.   Up on the mountain tops, they built roads and  houses ,administrative buildings,  churches, shops, galleries, clubhouses, and halls,  all set in beautiful gardens, which became towns of repute and considerable elegance – English living away from home.  They imported roses and lupines  and so on from England, intending to make “Ooty” as much like an English village as they could manage. They even had a Hunt Club, and dressed in traditional riding habits they hallooed ( one supposes) across the countryside following the hounds.   The quarry that the hounds followed, in lieu of the red fox, was the golden jackal.   It’s very curious – but there it is !

The town was certainly beautiful, high as it was, giving the feeling of being on top of the world.

We had driven down from Bangalore and arrived in Ootacamund  fairly late in the afternoon .  We needed to find a place to stop for the night.  Looking at the map, Tom said “There’s some sort of a park on the outskirts of town…it looks like a good bet.  It’s called Mukurthi National Park. “   Off we drove to find it.

We found only one road, a dirt track wide enough for us to drive  into the huge reserve and this, it was perfectly obvious, was jungle terrain with nowhere to park that was off road.   Rod drove slowly forward along the track and we came to a stop, surrounded on both sides by deep woods.  Night was almost upon us by the time we got settled.

Since it was my turn to cook dinner, I got out a peeler and a knife,  half filled a saucepan with water and asked Tom to get me a few potatoes from our food cupboard.  Rod was fiddling with the radio and over the static we heard the sound of men shouting and the noise from an engine in the pathway outside.   It was two young men and a motor bike.

“ Hello, you people…..Hello…You cannot stop here” one of them shouted, “This is very dangerous…you must move…absolutely, you must not park in this place.”

“Why not?”  Rod shouted from the front step of the caravan.  “Why not?”

“Because this is the road the elephants take to the waterhole” they answered, very excitedly “Every night they walk along here…And they won’t think twice before pushing right through …they just go where they want to go…they are elephants,  for goodness sake…and it’ll be too bad for you…that’s quite sure”.    Indian people who have learned to speak English have a very precise and charming way of speaking.  It’s almost formal…sweet.

“Well, it’s not going to be easy to back out of here “ Rod shouted back “Especially in the dark…I think we’ll risk it… we’ll stay and risk a set-to with the elephants.  It’s too hard to back out in the dark, man”

That really got the Indian boys upset.  “I’m telling you…We are both telling you… to move on.” They each climbed back onto the motor cycle.  “You must instead go on ahead and keep going until you find a little space where you can turn around…We will wait for you…then we will take you to the British Club.  Those old boys will let you park.  We are university students…we are very trust-worthy…we will wait here…and hurry, please”.

And so we did.   And, a little later,  followed the boys across town and right into the company of the last remnants  of the British Raj.

The British Club was a long white building with a tarmac driveway and parking area along the front of it.  We parked the tractor and caravan to one side of the building, careful not to get wheel marks on a lawn that looked, even in the lamplight, to be meticulously groomed.

The Indian students, mollified, having delivered us safely, asked whether we wanted to join them for a trip into the jungle the following day.   “Absolutely, it sounds like fun”, we said “What time?”

“We will pick you up at ten o’clock tomorrow morning…Good-night”  and they were gone.

The main door to the British Club clanged open and a man, silhouetted against the lights, shouted “I say…What’s  this , eh?  What the bloody hell’s  all this…a mobile NAAFI?..Hah”  He sounded friendly enough to side-track any fear we had of intruding upon the company.    Two or three other people , glasses in their hands, joined him in the open doorway.

We four shuffled forward and introduced ourselves.  We could see the club members surging towards the door.  “How absolutely marvellous “  one of the men said, and to us, loudly “Come in… Come in… Come in… Come in… for God’s sake…Have a drink  ”  He yelled at the Indian barman behind the long counter.  “ Harri,  Four large G&T’s – Pronto…and don’t be stingy with the Gordon’s…these intrepid children deserve a decent drink!”

The saloon was a long room with a row of windows on one side and a narrow polished wood-topped bar along the length of the inside wall. “ Harri,”  the Indian bar-tender , wearing a starched white uniform and a red fez , snapped to attention behind the bar.  He gave an exaggerated salute , his white teeth flashing in a wide grin– Harri was in on the joke.   The shelves on the wall behind him were adequately although not amply stocked with liquor bottles, as if the customers were not in the habit of requesting anything fancy in the cocktail department.  Gin and whisky bottles predominated.

Looking rather grotesquely large on the walls, since the ceiling of the room was not lofty, were stuffed animal heads, antelope, etc   The heads had certainly been there for decades, the dust of one hundred years settled , along with ancient beetles and beetle larvae , into the fur and hides of them.  They were moth-eaten and nasty.

It was not a large gathering of regulars…perhaps fifteen or sixteen…they were all old, or old to us at any rate.   They were leathery and tanned and most of their hairlines had receded or ceased to be there at all. Some were scarecrow thin and some, from a different diet or gene pool,  corpulent and jowly. They were all, without exception, expansively welcoming.  They gathered round us, slapping the shoulders of Tom and Rod, gallantly steering Joan and I to the bar,  talking excitedly.  This was theatre to them.  Something to talk about in the days to come.  This was a welcome change in their routine…fresh meat…it didn’t come along that often, any more.  We were delicious diversion and happy to be so.

We had a marvelous time.   The noisiest of the lot was “Jumbo” he was rotund and jolly, with a belly half hanging  over the belt of  the knee length white shorts he wore.  They all wore  short-sleeved white shirts and white shorts, de rigueur dress, obviously, for the daily boozing bouts.  There were only a couple of women in the club crowd.  One was “Nurse” – formidably busty and  dressed in a white nurse’s uniform.  The Nurse had grey hair and, curiously, a thermometer sticking out of her uniform’s breast pocket – as if she could be called upon, and ready at any time, to plunge it into a prospective patient.

It wasn’t long before the tall tales, the sad tales and the saucy tales started leaking out of a few of the heavier drinkers.  Memories, regrets, misadventures, lost loves, lost opportunities, nostalgia…ah, nostalgia…India how it used to be…good natured gossip about each other.    Jumbo and The Nurse were having an affair…”Been at it, for years, those two”  one of them said to me, breathing hot, aromatic fumes in my ear.

We answered their questions about the trip we were on to Australia and, almost to a man they enthused “Marvelous…bloody marvelous…what a lark, eh?…wish I was twenty three again…”

These people, left over in Ooty, from the independence day in 1947, were the last hangers-on. They were aware that transplants like them had been so long in India that there was no going back to England anymore.  India, at her best, is a powerful aphrodisiac – the dark beauty, the tinkling bell sounds of her, the spicy. sexual smell of her…ahh…And they had, besides,  become so used to being Sahib’s and Memsahib’s, at least before partition, that the thought of being just plain old Mr. Brown in Cheltenham,  England was impossible to contemplate.  Everything and everyone they knew was in Ootacamund.  They would, they knew, be buried soon next to old former compatriots in the English cemetery on the hill.

Dinosaurs they were, wonderfully kind to us and I have never forgotten what fun we had with them.

The next morning an open truck-load of Indian students arrived to pick us up for our promised ride  through the jungle.   We had been told that we might see tigers, elephants and other exotic fauna  but we saw nothing moving except a few birds and a troupe of monkeys high overhead.  The truck driver made a great show of stopping the truck once and, upon spotting a big mound of elephant dung in the path, getting out to pat it –to feel if it was still warm. “Yes..An elephant has definitely passed this way…But you people are not going to see any animals” he chided the Indian students in the truck, all of them chattering loudly, excited to be there.   “Not if you don’t shut up and stop that incessant noise-making…you frighten everything away…what do you think, a beautiful and huge tiger is going to just come sauntering by so you can snap his photo and get his autograph?…NO…he isn’t.”

Sighting’s or not, it was a beautiful ride.  The sun slanted down through breaks in the canopy overhead in long shafts of light in which clouds of gold colored insects were like minute slow moving fish.  Very high we saw a troupe of monkeys, black and outlined against the green of the leaves, clinging to branches, immobile and watching us clatter past far below them.

Back at the British Club, urged by Jumbo to have “One or two for the road” we were in time to see an old man, in a frock coat, climb out of a vintage Rolls Royce.  The car was driven by a tall and elegant Indian servant wearing a chauffeurs uniform and a pale blue turban..  The driver half lifted his decrepit passenger out of the Rolls, steadied him, straightened his coat and, holding him by the elbow,  steered his totter through the door of the club.  Right on time the driver  was, apparently, for the old man’s afternoon “Chota peg”  – drinks and conversation with his chums.

Noting the ceremonial arrival, the scene right out of the distant past, I asked one of the members to tell me who the old man was.  “Oh him, the Major… yes, been here forever…the old boy just lives down the road, half a mile if it’s a foot…turns up every afternoon…you can set your watch by him…the Major, no longer galloping, I’m afraid…spit and polish in his time…now?…well – he’s a darling old thing”.

They were each of them, without exception,  “a darling old thing”.

We trundled on to Gampola.  And south to Madurai.

Judith G. Kane

January, 2014