The Lion, The Witch & The Rucksack
by Lynn Kilcline

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - PONDI.

On the train from Madurai to Villapuram we agreed that Madurai was by far the best city we had seen. It was how I had expected India to be and we had thoroughly enjoyed our stay there.
As we were chatting away I was inspecting our bill from the Chentoor. Bugger, damn, blast. They had not deducted the deposit they insisted we paid on arrival. I was furious, with myself and them. I had the receipt for the deposit in my purse when I went to reception, but with all the messing about I had forgotten about it. This did not absolve the hotel who should have had a record of the payment on their system.
Again my anger was fuelled by the knowledge that this was more than likely just another scam, and I vowed to telephone them when we were settled in Pondicherry. In sterling terms the amount wasn’t great, but it represented two nights’ accommodation in a reasonable hotel and, more importantly to me, it was the principle.
It was a six-hour train ride to Villapuram and it was lovely and cool on board. I used the time to read the guidebook and learn about our ultimate destination of Pondicherry.
Pondicherry was the first real stab in the dark that we had made.
It was deviating from our route and taking us back out to the coast, but we had almost four weeks in which to reach Madras before our flight out and not too many places of interest to visit in between.
I had looked at the possibilities of travelling beyond Madras and then returning for the flight but there was nothing of note within easy reach. We had time on our hands and the name Pondichery seemed familiar to me, perhaps from an old film. For some reason I associated it with tales of the Raj.
How misguided can you be? We were soon to find out!
The guide book told me that ‘’ Pondi was a former French colony and was a charming and enduring pocket of French culture set beside the sea.’’ It went on to say that many houses between the waterfront and old canal were very chic and gentrified, and their gardens were ablaze with bougainvillea and flowering trees. The overall impression was one of gleaming whitewashed residences and a concern for maintaining standards rarely encountered elsewhere in India but beyond the canal Pondicherry was as Indian as anywhere else.
May I live to curse my over active imagination. I sat on the train imagining St. Tropez. What an idiot.

The other overwhelming influence in Pondi was the Sri Aurobindo Ashram which is going to have a chapter of its own.
We arrived at Villapuram at mid-ay and it was scorching. The next train to Pondicherry wasn’t until 6 p.m. But we knew that this might happen and that we may have to find alternative means of transport.
I volunteered Brian for that job and he set off to find the local bus station while I took it easy on the platform. It was quite a strange sensation to sit feeling very cool. My feet were actually cold, and then gradually I was aware of my body temperature rising until, without having moved one muscle, I was dripping with sweat. That is how hot it was.
Brian was an age, and when he eventually returned he looked as if he had been swimming as his clothes were drenched with perspiration. He said that the town was much bigger than he had thought and the bus station was much too far for us to walk. Rickshaws were available over the railway bridge and so was the train ticket office, where I also needed to make a call.
We crossed the bridge and tried to find some shade for Brian and the bags while I went to the ticket office to change some tickets. Being extremely efficient, I had already booked train tickets from Delhi to Jodhpur, but now we had changed our flight from Chennai to Delhi, I needed to change the train tickets as well.
Booking train tickets required a great deal of form filling and queuing. There were women only queues and there were queues for Foreigners, War Veterans and Terrorists. [Always such a comfort to know that terrorists pay rail fare.] But the queuing system rarely seemed to work and it was a free-for-all.
I explained my request to the man in the ticket office and showed him my ticket. I did not speak again during the following monologue.
‘’No,no,no, you must be going to platform two; here they will be doing this for you, oh yes. No, no, let me see the ticket. Yes, yes, go to platform two. Yes, yes, there is nothing they can be doing for you there, go to Pondicherry.’’
I walked away laughing like a drain.
Pondi was 28km away, and Brian had found that buses left every five minutes. The rickshaw dropped us off at the bus station and by the activity there it would have been possible to believe that it was the central bus station for the whole of India.
The noise was deafening and buses were screeching in and out of an enormous dusty square one after the other. Each bus seemed to belong to a different company and each offered to take us faster than the next.
Conductors were dragging people up on to their buses aided by young boys, and the drivers were hanging out of their windows blasting the air horns and shouting ‘‘leaving now, leaving now.’’ It was like a giant heaving anthill.
As we stood amid this mayhem I had to make a terrifying admission to myself and then tell Brian. There was something I had to do. The prospect scared me and filled me with loathing but it had to be done. I could go on no longer. I needed the toilet.
I was right to be afraid.
This is the last toilet experience I shall relate. Others were on a par but none was ever worse.
The toilet was a small square block of brick walls about 7ft high and mercifully had no roof. The main door led into a square area with a drain in the centre. To the right were three doors hanging off their hinges, with a squat-down toilet behind each. I walked through the main door like John Wayne, kicking it open with my foot, not wanting to touch anything.
There is no genteel way of putting this. The entire place was covered in shit. Heaps of the stuff everywhere. What was the matter with these bloody people? Couldn’t they even get as far as the hole in the floor?
I did what I had to do, went outside and rejoined Brian. I looked up at him and said: ‘‘Don’t ask!’’ Men are so lucky. All they need is a wall or a tree.
We were really sweaty now and once we had crammed into the bus the driver started to moan about all our luggage. There wasn’t much we could do about it and after a few moments a youth climbed on top of it and went to sleep. How I do not know.
Valapuram introduced us to the worst toilet and the noisiest and most manic driver. For the next hour we were subjected to continual air horn blasts and Indian radio music turned to full volume and still the youth managed to sleep on top of our two lumpy rucksacks. The driver was either having a very bad day or he was a homicidal maniac.
We were not having one of our best days either. Although we took everything in our stride, this day was giving us a number of very large strides.

Arriving at Pondicherry bus station was a relief, but only in some respects. We had probably been very lucky so far in that flies had not really bothered us, but now we had arrived in fly heaven. We hoped that it was only the bus station but it wasn’t. The dirty beasts were everywhere and in vast numbers.
The guide book had recommended a café on the sea front and it was quite close to the tourist information. We thought it best to head for that and have something to eat and drink. Then I would try to find us a bed for the night.
A grumpy miserable rickshaw driver took us to the café and we struggled with our bags and took them inside. The place was very busy with other back-packers so we grabbed a seat on the breezy terrace and ordered some food. I think we had been lulled into a false sense of security by seeing other westerners eating, and it was only when we had to send the tea back because it was cold that we took better stock of our surroundings.
To our right and sticking out at eye level from the rocks of the sea wall, was a large metal pipe. Intermittently stuff would flow out of it. Food, rice and dirty water seemed to be the main content of the effluent but we chose not to look too hard, as it was not conducive to maintaining a hearty appetite.
After eating a very small dish of vegetable rice, very gingerly, I decided to take a walk to the tourist office. As I walked out of the café I looked into the kitchen and the place was swarming with flies. No amount of exaggeration would cover the numbers of flies.
We hadn’t seen anything so far that made us feel that we wanted to stay in Pondicherry. I had walked along Marine Drive in the French district, and the Cote d’Azur it was not.
I enquired at the Tourist Office about clean beaches and hotels. The man in charge seemed helpful and I was given a map and four recommendations of accommodation along the beach. With a big brown smiley face and a wobbling head he said: ‘’Ma’m, you can swim and run and dance if you wish on these beaches, they are very good, very good.’’
Yes, well, we would see.
I made my way back to the café and saw across the road, conveniently parked, a rickshaw. Before collecting Brian I bartered with the young driver for an agreeable price to transfer us the ten kilometres to the beach area. It was only when we climbed aboard and tried to cram everything inside that I realised I had just hired the original rickshaw. It was the most ancient battered thing imaginable and it phut-phutted its way along the road with it’s cargo at the speed of a brisk walk.
Eventually we arrived at a village called Chinna Mudaliarchavadi. This was not so much a village but a few shops on either side of the main coast road to Madras. Between the main road and the beach was a narrow lane with peasant houses and shacks to either side. The rickshaw turned down this lane and into another and pulled up outside the recommended guesthouse. It seemed days since we left Madurai. I suggested Brian pay the driver and lift the bags out while I booked the room.
I walked through the gate into a garden and asked a young girl for a double room with bathroom. No rooms with bathroom were available but there was a double room. I could live without a bathroom for one night. We could always move on the following day. I went to have a look.
Did Mary and Joseph know how lucky they were with that stable? If Jesus had been born in India he would never have survived in this stable for more than an hour without dying of some disease unless his father had stepped in. The girl had to be kidding; I had come for a room for two humans, not my bloody livestock!
It was not only filthy, with the two window shutters hanging off, but the two mattresses had come from a slave ship in the 17th Century. I shot out of the room as if I had a red-hot knitting needle up my bum. I had to catch that rickshaw before it left.
Brian was still unloading. In answer to his quizzical look I said: ’’Put it all back in, that was the pits.’’
We tried the other three options on our list. They made accommodation in Gokarna look good. Was the man in the tourist information a joker or did he live in a sewer? This was terrible. We were hot, tired, and I was really pissed off.
The rickshaw driver kept saying: ‘’I’ll take you to Auroville, I’ll take you to Auroville.’’
All that I knew about Auroville was that it was a big semi-religious settlement, all love and peace, and unless you had an active interest in the work there you would not be made very welcome. Right now, I was feeling that the bus station and a bus to anywhere was the best option.
It was getting late, soon it would be dark and I wanted a clean bed. It was the closest I came to a panic attack in the whole four months.
I wanted my mum, I wanted to go home, and I didn’t want to be in India any more.
We told the driver to take us to Auroville.