Puducherry: Bon Jour India

On reaching for our toothbrushes, the first morning back in India, I found a huge cockroach had made his bed upon the damp bristles during the night. I wonder what the French think of their old colonial town now, fifty years after the hand back? We were curious enough to make the five hour bus trip from Chennai after touching back down again in ‘Incredible India’, had the French treated the place differently then the British?

Puducherry, formally Pontichery, isn’t much different to the rest of India, but along the promenade was nice. Walking it reminded us of home, Salthill, Galway more specifically, on a summer’s day – hosting an Indian convention! We walked along with all the Indian tourists, surprised by the amount of international foreigners actually the most we’d see gathered together since the Taj Mahal. Turns out the annual International Yoga Festival was starting the next day. Presumably also why accommodation was so scarce and we had to settle for a crawling room in a crappy guesthouse.

On our second morning Mal awoke to the carnage of his night’s molestation. In the dark hours we sensed the creepy crawly presence and continuously purged the beds, finding strange black bloody (on squashing) bugs. We hardly slept and they loved Mal, he was covered in bites, I also had a few.
Sick and disgusting.
This was a very low point in our trip. We questioned was it worth it, stretching our budget for months staying in latrine-esque rooms where we could just have a few weeks of niceness? But the problem as experienced is that the mid-range places aren’t much better than budget. To stay anywhere nice you have to hand over a lot of money. Should we skip the next part and head straight to Goa? We’d have taught of heading straight for the airport only that Malachy’s dream of hand making his own guitar lay in Goa. On sleep depravation, hunger and crawling skin the best decisions are not made, so we headed out for some food and antihistamines.

After some tea and real French croissants Puducherry seemed slightly brighter. In the French quarter there are some lovely European buildings, fine restaurants and bakeries but the streets are consistently Indian in their squalor.

After seeing a watching pair of eyes follow us from restaurants, shops and doorways, we invariably had to investigate. They belong to The Mother, and like Big Brother, she is always watching, best to do as mother says (even if we’d already spent the night in room 101). She was a French woman who founded an ashram with Sri Aurobindo in 1926. The ashram seems a mix of yoga, religion and science. We did the obligatory walk around their shrine and were led into the gift shop and through to a photo gallery. Mother seemed to have a lot to say in her 97 years of life, with books of her opinion on everything from childrearing to science. She seemed incredibly intelligent breaking into the Indian and international psyche. They also set up Auroville a sort of 20 km commune with about 1800 residents of multi-nationality living in self sufficient peace and harmony. Sounds intriguing or cultish? We unfortunately didn’t have time to investigate.
We did however cross the divide from the French section (basically the tourist section along the beach front) to the more Indian side of town (everywhere else) to visit the botanical gardens; an extremely disheartening experience. It’s run down, over grown, dirty and the toy train circling the garden doesn’t run, although its little platform is scattered with as much litter as if it had been Mumbai’s busy CST station. A huge padlocked-at-night gate guards the gardens, but one of the back corner walls has been knocked down, leading directly to the river lined slums. Here we witnessed emaciated dwellers climb through and gather the rare species of trees they have previously felled for their fire wood! It’s an outrageous situation but hard to wear the environmentalist hat when the people aren’t fed, sheltered or educated. Conservation of a once beautiful botanical garden falls far behind their daily hard won necessities of life: all of which even further behind India’s space race.

I contemplated the irony of India on our door-less bus ride back to Chennai, thinking on one of my last sites of the town before leaving; a huge statue of Ghandi on the prom where rich kids ran between his legs, while their parents swat the beggars away like flies.