Mon 15 Feb 2010
After much shaking of hands / hugs of affection we wave farewell to our Rotary friends. They will take the “Moving Palace” to Trivandrum airport and thence flights to Bangalore or Delhi and on to Europe. We four are met by our driver, a man called Thomas, with a smart, white air conditioned car. He is ours for the next three days as we spend a while with John Philip’s family in Maramon, a small village in eastern Kerala. There we shall visit friends and relatives and rest awhile. It is hot (38oC) and very humid and quite unpleasant to move around much. It is what David’s American colleagues call three shirts per day weather. Our journey takes three hours and en route we stop at a small town for a cold drink and some shopping at another grand department store dedicated to the sale of cotton and silk fabrics.
Silks and satins a-plenty
Indian ladies’ attire has undergone a small revolution in the last 20 years and Christine and Sue are determined to buy some local styled togs. De rigeur for ladies in central and southern India was hitherto the Sari, which comprises a tight fitting cotton blouse (or piece) which must be tailored, a draw string plain underskirt and a 5m length of cloth which is wrapped around as a skirt, gathered into pleats and secured at the waist (by tucking and faith or more commonly with a safety pin) and the remainder thrown over the left shoulder, toga style. It is a most elegant but somewhat cumbersome dress to wear for work, shopping, riding pillion on motorcycles (they do it side saddle) etc. – and it is that which has driven our small social revolution.
Ladies of northern India more commonly wear the Salwa Kameez – also a three piece rig comprising a tailored tunic, drawstring trousers and a shawl, thrown backwards over both shoulders. Both these attires, as I am sure you have seen, are made in an enormous array of colours, prints and embellishments. Well nowadays more of the youngsters are out to work and fewer marry only into domestic management and the Sari is being replaced in favour of its more practical and easier to wear trouser suit. It is now relatively uncommon to see the under 30s in Saris except for weddings, and other formal occasions. So our girls want to buy some Salwa Kameez sets which are sold, in cotton or silk, as three colour matched pieces in a bag, two of which must be tailored to fit, the shawl being ready to wear. What a curse is choice! We spend another hour in the theatre of apparel sales in which seemingly every available packet is opened and its contents spilled along the counter for closer scrutiny and comparison. Eventually our girls are satisfied with colours, patterns, linings and so on and we negotiate discounts (honour must be satisfied) make our purchases and depart knowing that we are in for a tailors visit to get them “stitched” in quick time, while we are in Maramon.
3 gerenations: Neetha + Bijoi, Annie holds baby Laurel
We arrive at the family home – recently extended, re-floored, new plumbing, new bathrooms etc. – though the resident Geckos still live behind the wall clock and hoover up insects during the evenings. They (the Geckos) are free-range, organic, pesticide free and environmentally friendly (except to insects) and even green. Must get some!
Maramon is a rural, large village that straddles a pair of rivers and is built among the groves of coconut palms, rubber trees and banana plants that are most of the flora of Kerala. Rice paddies abut the rivers and the whole place has a lush and fertile air to it. The family house is occupied by John’s younger brother, Thomas-Kutty and his wife Annie (she is a great cook). Their oldest daughter, Neetha, is staying too, with her cute 42 day old baby boy, Laurel (her husband, Bijoi is working away at present). Laurel seems to command the most attention and affection of all. How do they do it, these little mites, reducing adults to giggling jelly by the wave of a little finger? Clever or what!
Our Billet, Chez Gracie
The house becomes our base, though we are billeted out for sleeping with John’s cousin Gracie who has a five bedroom house close by. Gracie is the local Mayor and is much concerned with righting wrongs and encouraging good works generally. From the interruptions to her private life that we witness, Mayoral duties are a round the clock job. I should love to call our local burghers at 6am to moan about speed bumps or whatever, but I fear I wouldn’t get very far. Such things are a way of life here. We spend the evening, for it is cooler to walk, visiting neighbours, drinking fruit juices and chatting of lives, children, health, fortunes and so on. It is a neighbour who enthusiastically recommends a nearby tailor and even calls her to forewarn her of our requirements. As night falls (and the insect population sparks up) we retire to our billets and lie down. It is so hot with no air conditioning and we are wafted to sleep by a rapidly rotating ceiling fan.
Tues 16th Feb 2010
After a series of breakfasts – Gracies’s first, then Annie’s , we are allowed out to play. This morning is dedicated to shopping in the nearby town of Tiruvella. We need to visit the tailor and a local bank and yet another haberdasher to buy Neetha a birthday present (guess what, a Salwa Kameez set). Sue and Chris have to deliver their purchases to the seamstresses to stitch.
At the tailor
They are speedily measured in all the necessary dimensions. Details of sleeves, trouser widths, blouse lengths are specified and we leave them to manufacture four sets of Salwa Kameez within 30 hours.
At the bank
David has to change some more Sterling into Rupees and needs a bank with a foreign exchange till and John has to transmit some Rotary cash to several clubs in Lucknow. You’d think all this to be quite straight forward wouldn’t you. No. You cannot “pop into” an Indian bank. You enter a Kafka –esque world of dusty ledgers, serried ranks of clerks writing in them under the stern supervision of the “Under Manager”. Large wooden booths with high counters and thick glass windows with hooped holes in them contain the “Savings Teller”, the ”Junior Cashier”, the “Senior Cashier” (for more than 50,000 Rupee (£7,000) transactions), the “Loan Arranger” – no Tonto jokes please – each of which has a queue / minor throng craving the attention of the bank employee. Side offices house important sounding “Senior Clerical Supervisor”, “Assistant Manager” and, of course, “Manager” – who wears a smart black suit and striped pants. Each of these important people have large, clutter free, Mahogany desks and appear to do nothing except nod (sideways, Indian style) to the requests of more junior employees. So much for the dramatis personae .
Act 1 scene 1: Enter David clutching two crisp £50 notes.
D: Good morning. I would like to change some Sterling into Rupees please.
Forex teller: You must sit over there. You will need your passport, Please fill in this form. How much are you wanting?
D: I don’t have my passport, only a driving licence.
FT: Please show (disappears with driving licence for at least 5 minutes. Returns looking grave)
FT: I am sorry that will not do. You must have a passport
D: I haven’t got a passport, but my sister has hers. Will that do?
FT: Is it her money?
D: No. It’s my money
FT: Then I need your passport
David thanks him politely, leaves, hands money to Christine who joins queue.
Chris: Good morning. I would like to change some Sterling into Rupees please.
Forex teller: You must sit over there. You will need your passport, Please fill in this form. How much are you wanting?
You get the idea. These people run on rails and are seemingly incapable of what we call adaptive thinking. It is small wonder that the call centre industry, which is now Bangalore’s largest employer, has driven to madness more Europeans than the plague.
I wait quietly while Christine’s (two) notes are counted, annotated by writing on them, counted again, their serial numbers laboriously copied to the three part flimsy which is stamped with a big red stamp, passed to another booth to be checked, stamped again with a smaller green stamp, the passport information copied into a ledger, checked and countersigned, the conversion computation calculated, checked by a junior, the whole docket (notes, chitties, stamps etc) is passed to the junior cashier who types, slowly, into a computer (wow) such data as is required, checks all the paper again, stamps it with a square purple stamp with today’s date on it, signs across the stamp, counts out the Rupee notes, counts them again, hand them to the first chap who counts them for a third time and (YEEEEEES!) hands them to my sister. David, meanwhile has read two more chapters of his book and probably developed DVT from sitting still for ages.
It is fascinating but if you are in a hurry, mildly maddening. The one redeeming feature is that we are sitting in a cool air-conditioned hall as we are driven slowly mad. I will spare you a similar account of John’s tribulations with bank transfers, save that we emerge, two hours later more or less complete in our requirements.
Commerce in all its glory
Signs, signs and more signs
Indian commercial streets are fascinating. They are mostly a series of small booth type shops with frontages of no more than 5m. Often they are in two storey, rough reinforced concrete developments with balcony access up top, and ground access-well, from the road. For the average Indian shopkeeper, getting your wares into the eyes and minds of passers by is a real challenge, hence India is a sign writers bonanza. There are the normal over the shop lintel signs e.g. Madathil House Wares Ltd., There are flag signs – like our For Sale boards – sticking out, there are frames on roof tops with mini hoardings attached, there are fly posters on every vertical structure every spare unglazed part of the shop front and most garden walls. The senses are bombarded with brightly coloured and completely haphazard signage – often in two languages. Unless you know the area or know what you are looking for, the only other way is to inspect the wares as they tumble onto the street. This is OK for cooking pots but not so good for Short Term Loans or Chiropractors. It all makes for a fun experience, accompanied as it is by the cacophony of car, bus and lorry horns in the alto, tenor and basso profundo ranges. It is very tiring. We retire, tired and seek the quietude of our billet, fans and all.