pondicherry, 5-8 aug 07

pondicherry was i think just what we needed at that time, after a rough start in chennai and mahabalipuram. white town all cool and serene and painted up and down the streets in a clean white, broad avenues and beautiful houses, set on the sea. a place to just be, wander some pretty streets, see some pretty churches, hide away for a few hours in this cafe or that under the whirr of fans overlooking a courtyard strewn with potted plants, breathing. dawns fading into lazy mornings into sleepy noontimes into slow afternoons into soft sunsets...

true, not much to see exactly, a few churches simple n elegant, a rambly botanical gardens, the streets of white town, the seaside with its piles of stones boulders guarding against the rough sea, a scattering of hindu temples with their classic domes crowded with brightly-painted statues... but still, atmospheric and calming for a frazzled schmemma and schmabil...

our first night we spent in a place called the ajantha guest house, right out there by the sea and promenade. there we managed to create a bit of drama and disapproval, i think it is safe to say. first by giving the guy who carried our suitcase up the stairs a measly ten rupees (he gaped at us in disgust and marched out of the room in indignation), then by creating a scene with the manager, claiming we had a reservation there and a printout that showed rates for the room at half of what this guy was asking for, only to discover the online reservation thing had been a total hoax, the ajantha guest house that we had booked at was in fact called something completely different, no relation, not even nearby. after that embarrassment we tried to keep a low profile, and planned to get out of that place (a bit too costly for us anyway) soon’s we could. so the next morning after breakfast we got ourselves together, ready to set out for the ashram-affiliated guest house across town, on the canal that was the dividing line tween white town and everything else. porter dude again brought our luggage down the stairs and schmabil doubled his previous tip, pressing a twenty into the outstretched hand. in response this guy gave us the ugliest face and went over to the manager and waved the twenty in his face, shouting something in tamil before giving us one more angry backward glance and storming out.

what a relief to find our new accomodations, half the price, lovely, and with an elevator. no porter problems here. maybe lacking the terrace looking out on to the sea, but clean, large, airy. with a courtyard full of mostly potted but a few planted plants... rather like the mission back in kolkata.

the next few days floated by, sitting in satsanga restaurant drinking the best coffee i’d had in i don’t even know how long a year maybe just letting our minds wander sighing and talking tough to the cutest puppy who kept coming by and putting his pointy head soft against my leg and looking up hoping and so sweet, this puppy had his game down for sure, and i gave him a firm talking to, no human food for puppies! schmabil messed with the camera while i wrote and we both teared thru more than a couple crepes, more than one basket of brown bread... one afternoon into evening in a gorgeous hotel the dupleix sipping fruity champagne cocktails (and in schmabil’s case a cucumber martini, which at least he liked, weirdo) our planned brief stop for a drink turning into hours, talking about i don’t know what, the world, the future, lotsa nonsense there too, then moving into the courtyard to leaf thru old fashion/travel magazines and giggle, before again back into the dining room for a fancyschmancy dinner, all of this of course way beyond our means but after this it would be 20 rupee thalis and 7 rupee idlis all day and all night so we let ourselves be a little ridiculous... brick oven pizza n fresh lime sodas at au feu de bois cozy and rustic and especially so in the sudden downpour outside... tho was freaked out after a certain point that at most of these restaurants the bill was invariably given to me, what do they think, that schmabil was some kind of kept person? weirded weirded out.

but yes there were other things beside endless food and coffee and wine, and all of our walks, there was a sad little museum, some peeks into the aurobindo ashram, and then there was a trip out of town to a beach, our autowallah was mean and dropped us off at some random point at the seashore claiming it to be serenity beach and us having no proof either way we got out paid him and walked only to discover fishermen’s boats and nets, determined however to find a proper beach we walked on thru the scorching sand til we reached some small set-up, a sun-shelter and a clean-ish beach, peopled by some unexpected foreigners in bikinis along with a couple dudes in lungis. an interesting pairing of beachgoers. we sat there under the shelter with them reading, before schmabil decided it was time to play in the water, which was fun til it caught us unawares and soaked me up to my waist...

i shouldn’t skip tho the whole ashram thing, seeing as the aurobindo people are rumoured to own half of pondicherry and really were a subtle but ubiquitous presence. an order founded by a bengali former freedom fighter sri aurobindo and built largely by his chosen partner, a frenchwoman with a penchant for the most bizarre headresses to be worn over the end of her sari which she pulled over the top of her head, termed only ‘the mother’. pondicherry is the location of aurobindo ashram’s headquarters, as well as the place where sri aurobindo himself is buried. it is all pretty low-key, it seemed; we visited the ashram to eat one meal and it was just room after room and quiet folk overwhelmingly indian shoveling thru bowls of the blandest food, and at the sight of sri aurobindo’s burial it was also rather quiet, the faithful and the only interested alike silently passing through... maybe the main action of the ashram is at their city auroville some ten kilometers or something outside of pondicherry, where thousands of foreign ashramites along with thousands of native ones live together...

we did get a chance to attend some film screening that was supposed to give more information, be a set of short doucumentary films on the mother and the aurobindo ashram. half of the films seemed rather less strong on the informational side of things, and to amount ultimately to a kind of audio-visual puja. the first especially, fade-ins and fade-outs of flower upon flower, in fields, in solo close-ups, interspersed with images of the mother, music of her own composition playing in the background. in fact, this film was termed an ‘offering’. other films followed, a couple attempting to impart some amount of information perhaps but the sound track was so scratchy it was hopeless... the worst was the final in the series, which was a loop of the same exact footage of the mother giving blessings to the masses, five minutes long, shown four or five times in a row, it was moments like these when we wondered if one had to be on drugs to appreciate this (the films were after all done up in psychedelic colors and produced in the early 70s) or else truly be swept up in some devotional fervor, truly believing this lady (who seemed really a little crazy) was god (as she claimed to be, at moments).

altho the aurobindo thing was interesting, and i wished we could have gotten out there to auroville and all that, the overwhelming impression i was left taking with me of pondicherry was mostly that of the colonial city, not of some spiritual center. its cafes all charming and open and airy, all these cutesy-wutesy boutiques with their soaps and incense, blouses and scarves and broad-legged pants in light south indian cotton... all the eeriness and all the guilty pleasure of a city still half colonial, from what we saw.

we were surprised and somewhat weirded out in fact by the dominance of french folk, it felt almost as if in these old colonial ‘white town’ areas that most of the people on the street were non-indian, and in restaurants it was as if the empire had never ended, tables occupied by foreigners gregarious over glasses of wine or pots of good (praise the lord!) coffee, barely a brown face to be seen but for the occasional except of course for the servers, chefs, guards, etc. it really struck us in the boutiques of the town, they were all over... for instance the place casablanca, whose tagline was ‘the world is yours’ (eek!). it felt like some kind of ex-pat pottery barn cum anne taylor or somesuch thing, full of classy cunning home furnishings, here and there a touch of the indian, along with fine leather bags, designer jewelry, stylish clothing for the westerner finding his/herself in these tropical climes—an exquisite balance found in these wares between environmental conditions and cultural imperatives (of both cultures, the indian, to be modest, the french, to be stylish). this seemed to be a store for the ex-pat yearning perhaps here and there for the touch of the exotic, but basically not willing to compromise on anything fundamental to their sense of aesthetics and/or lifestyle. for their fine, manicured lives, all the luxury of india without any of the dirt, without the cheap stitching and fall-apart fabric.

an interesting place, and we stayed longer than i thought we would. but finally one day we decided it was time, to the relief of our bank accounts and consciences but with a bit of wistfulness in our hearts, at leaving the comfort and calm that we had found there. we had other cities to get to, trichy, tanjore, madurai, so we bundled up our things and set off for central tamil nadu.