Options

It was time to leave Ooty and return to Coimbatore. Although it wouldn’t take as long as it did coming up in the train, it would still take a couple of hours to get back to the city. The road followed the swooping, sweeping curves of the mountainsides, giving us stunning views out over the plain on which Coimbatore is sited, and more intimate views of the tea plantations which occupied every conceivable surface, and a few surfaces which one wouldn’t find conceivable. Every once in a while, little spots of bright colour could be seen moving in the fields of rich green, where workers were harvesting the tea leaves. I felt humbled and grateful – some people in this world have to pick tea leaves for a living, probably as their parents and grandparents did before them, while I sweep by in the back of a shiny SUV while on holiday from a place 6,500kms away, taking photos with my iPhone.

Back in Coimbatore, while we were unpacking the car, Mr Fixit casually mentioned that all of The Boss’s cars have the same number plate. When I observed that this seemed unlikely, even for a man of virtually unlimited resources, he clarified that all of the cars have the same last four digits on their number plates, while the first three or four are different. Apparently, whenever a new batch of license numbers are released, The Boss buys up all of them ending in these four digits, then has them assigned to his cars as needed.

And he needs a lot. Beyond the sextet of Mercedes, there’s the trio of top-of-the-range Skoda Kodiaq SUVs, identical except in colour (white, black and grey), that are used as our daily transport. Then there’s a pair of Skoda Octavias - one grey, one black - that are for the daughter and her family to use when they’re in town, and as such they haven’t moved since we got here, although they’ve been washed by the staff. Additionally, there’s a 90s vintage Toyota Supra and a Lexus that belong to the son, although he uses one of the Mercedes E-class sedans for his day to day business. Then there’s a couple of anonymous white Toyota Camrys for less favoured staff and guests, and a Suzuki delivery van.

This brings the vehicle count up to 14, although I could easily have missed a couple. Naturally, this doesn’t include the scooters, tractors, golf carts and other boring necessity vehicles.

When it came time for pre-dinner drinks, I decided to move forward with a plan I’d been fomenting to make some cocktails. Cocktails in this part of India don’t seem to run to anything more sophisticated than a G&T, but I got it into my head that I would spread the good word of fancy boozing to these people. When I’d noticed a bottle of maple syrup in a supermarket in Ooty, I decided I would start with a Maple Old-Fashioned.

It was not as easy as you’d think. For a start, maple syrup is virtually unheard of in India; the fact that a rural supermarket had even had it was a minor miracle. As such, it was perhaps unsurprising that this bottle was 1000 rupees, or just under $20, more than double what it would be in Australia.

The next issue that surfaced was the procurement of Angostura bitters, which everyone seemed to recognise but no one could actually produce. Eventually, Mr Fixit discovered that there was a bottle of it at The Boss’ sister’s house, and had one of the staff run over there to collect it.

They then sourced an orange from the kitchen, and a huge butcher’s knife to peel it, and a bottle of 12 year old scotch that wasn’t quite right for Old-Fashioneds but would do the job. As I cheerfully assembled my first drink, Mr Fixit and The Boss’s valet watch me intently, with a vague air of either irritation or hurt that a guest was intruding on their domain. Once I’d made one for The Boss, Mr Fixit made one for me: I had to get him to restrain himself with the maple syrup, and be a bit more assertive with the bitters bottle, but it came out fine.

Locals

We started the day with a visit to what was supposed to be a visit to a model village of the Toda, the indigenous people of the Ooty region. But when we got there, we discovered nothing but the burnt out ruins of their temple. It turned out that they’d moved the village somewhere else and ceremonially burned the temple to the ground. All that was left were a handful of normal Indian buildings on the periphery, some little kids and some sedate cows.

A little boy of about five came up to me and gravely informed me of something in Tamil, tapping my Italian leather shoes with a dirty stick he was holding, then glaring at me earnestly before wandering away.

“He was telling you you’re not allowed to walk in the remains of the temple,” Mr Fixit informed me, something I’d already surmised from the signs around the edge of the temple ruins.

Meanwhile the Guardian of the Toda had walked up to one of the sleeping cows and was vigorously whacking it in the horns with his stick. The cow opened its eyes a crack, then moved its head and went back to sleep.

From there we walked down the hill through the Ooty Botanic Gardens, home to a surprising number of Australian native plants, including gum trees, bottlebrushes, cordylines and a very tall native frangipani. Then after a restorative coffee and some local chocolates, we set of on our main excursion of the day to the animal sanctuary in nearby Bandipur.

To get to Bandipur, one has to descend from the mountains along the Ooty-Gundlupet Highway. Unfortunately, this has been illegal for anyone except locals for the last five years after one too many idiot tourists tried to take it too fast and plummeted off the cliffs. As a result, the only way to get a car down the mountainside is to hire a local driver in Ooty and drive you and your car down, while your normal driver follows on the back of a motorbike. So that’s what we did.

About halfway down the mountain there’s a police checkpoint where they confirm that your driver is indeed a local, and your car is assaulted by a troop of monkeys looking for an open window and subsequent food. Fortunately we were on the ball and they could only glare at us through the glass.

At the bottom of the mountain, Mr Fixit resumed his driving responsibilities, and we continued on. The lush greenery of the mountains transformed into an arid scrubfield so quickly it was like somebody flipped a switch.

After another hour or so, we arrived at the Tiger Reserve for a tour of the bush in an open-sided bus, which seemed a little foolhardy, but that’s probably why there were also men with machetes and a rifle up the front.

The bus staff searched high and low for a tiger, but given that tigers can be invisible even in the limited space of a zoo enclosure, it wasn’t surprising that we didn’t see one. Instead, we saw a monitor lizard, a couple of wild elephants, egrets, an eagle, a wild boar, and a single, beautiful little bird, with feathers in every colour in the rainbow from its red head down to its indigo tail.

We also saw a new variety of monkeys. First the monkey thieves, now this pack of simian Justin Trudeaus. So problematic!

After leaving the tiger reserve, as the sun started to set and the light turned golden, we stopped at an elephant sanctuary to watch these huge, slow, stately creatures enjoy a much-deserved meal of rice, coconuts, sugarcane and vegetables.

I also encountered a wild peacock, who seemed deeply affronted at my photographing him. The very nerve!

We drove back to Ooty as night fell: fortunately there’s no laws against tourists driving up the mountain road, just down it, presumably because most cars can’t go too fast up roads that steep. Mr Fixit handled the hairpin bends with aplomb, while cheerfully regaling us with grisly stories about the horror crashes that occurred before the downhill drive was banned.

Foodies

We got up painfully, possibly illegally early for people on holiday, in order to be driven to a train station in a nearby town and catch a 7am train to a mountain town called Ooty. This was a tourist train, powered by a hundred year old steam locomotive, pushing carriages that were nearly a hundred years old, from a simpler time before computers, air conditioning or, apparently, toilets.

The train rattled and ground its way out of the city then slowly started its climb into the mountains, and the reason why this rattling antique is so popular with tourists soon became apparent. There were spectacular plunging cliffs, dense thickets of towering trees, cloud shrouded mountaintops and waterfalls. Every 45 minutes or so, the train would stop at a siding in the middle of nowhere to allow passengers to buy greasy snacks, or brave some outdoor toilets that refined the term “stench”.

It was at the second of this stops that we experienced the Monkey Swarm. Dozens of furry little nightmares descended out of the jungle, leaping through the open windows of the train and snatching anything food-related they could get their thieving little hands on. We had snacks, but they were inside heavy tupperware in a bag under the seat. However our cabinmates, a sweet Indian family of four, had their food sitting in a takeaway bag on the seat, and the bag was snatched up by a darting simian who immediately fled into the jungle with it. I hope he liked curry.

After an hour or two the landscape started to change, flattening a little into sub-alpine meadows and the first of the famous local tea plantations. A little while later, we arrived in Ooty, a colonial resort city favoured by the British Raj because of the cool climate. And, of course, the proximity to plenty of tea. We were collected from the railway station by Mr Fixit, who had driven up in the car while we were ogling views and being attacked by monkeys. While we gushed about the views and recounted our narrow survival from Monkey Attack, he drove us to The Boss’ guesthouse on the outskirts of town.

The Boss loves Ooty, and for years the guesthouse served as his family retreat during savage Coimbatore summers, but in his old age he finds that the climate exacerbates his asthma, so he hasn’t been there since 2020. From his description we were expecting some modest little holiday chalet, basic but functional, sufficient to act as a base for us to explore Ooty and its surrounds.

Of course it was no such thing. The house is a sprawling, beautifully restored Edwardian bungalow, nestled in an immaculate manicured English garden filled with roses and flowering cherry trees. While our modernist mansion in the city is like an art gallery, the guesthouse is much more personal, with framed photos of The Boss’ family, favourite books, charmingly worn antique furniture, and, in my bedroom, a framed photo of his late but beloved pet leopard.

Once we’d settled in, it only seemed appropriate to drive into town and have a late lunch at the Savoy Hotel. Ooty’s branch of the Savoy was built in the 1850s and was originally a school, although it was quickly decided that it was far too nice for gross sticky children, and it was repurposed to serve long boozy lunches to rich people, who may also be gross and/or sticky, but have deeper wallets. I elected to have a club sandwich and a gin & tonic, in honour of the elite colonial bastards who have come before me.

After lunch we drove up to the top of Doddabetta, literally “Big Mountain”, the highest point in all of Tamil Nadu, to take in the views and marvel at the hideous plastic tat that was being sold to tourists – to reach the actual peak from the carpark you have to run a Gauntlet of Tacky Capitalism, presumably to prove your worth to the great spirits of the mountain.

Later, for dinner, we were taken to a fancy mountaintop restaurant with huge plate glass windows overlooking the valley. It was international in tone, and had a cocktail list, so I decided to order a martini. The beaming waiter took my order, but came back a few minutes later to inform me that the martini was not available this evening.

This seemed odd – a martini only has two ingredients – but maybe they were out of Noilly Pratt. I asked for an Old-Fashioned instead.

A few minutes later the waiter returns. Old-Fashioneds – which only have three ingredients, one of which is just sugar – were also not available.

When I fixed him with an unimpressed stare, he encouraged me to accompany him to the bar, and maybe the barman and I could work something out. I did so, and after gazing at the bottles on the shelves and nodding politely at the smiling barman, I asked him for a negroni.

He continued to smile, but it was now fixed, and his eyes darted between me and the waiter. He clearly had no idea what I was talking about.

I sighed, and ordered a glass of white wine instead. And to be fair, it was quite good.

After a restorative sip of booze, I ordered the Greek Fish, which was allegedly flavoured with olives, capers and wine. And this is what I received:

Instead olives, there was sambal. Instead of capers, there was turmeric and chilli. Instead of wine, there was coconut cream. However under all that there was indeed fish, so that’s something, I guess.

My theory is that the restaurant had been in the process of being robbed by a gang of thieves when the first dinner guests arrived, and in a panic they’d thrown on the clothes of the staff who were tied up in the back and were trying to keep us unawares until they could make their escape.

Positions

We started the day with some shopping, primarily for my sisters and mother. Every time we go shopping, there’s a sort of dance we have to do with Mr Fixit. Often, after we’ve selected some items after carefully considering our budgets, when we go to pay he will swoop in, order the staff about in Tamil, then put our purchases on The Boss’ credit card. We will protest, he will protest, and eventually he may allow us to buy one or two smaller items ourselves, and pay for the rest.

If you are an unscrupulous person, you might be thinking, “Awesome! To the Lego store! Or the Prada store! Or whatever store has crates of Veuve Cliquot!” But that’s the trap of the dance. Every once in a while Mr Fixit will be hovering near the cashier desk, but then as purchases are finalised he suddenly has to take a call, or make a call, leaving you with an expectant cashier and a 5000 rupee bill. Whether this is by design or just a coincidence is unclear, but it nicely tempers the temptation to treat yourself on a demi-billionaire’s dime.

In the spirit of yesterday’s veiled comments about tigers, I bought a shirt block printed with little tigers. Or rather, Mr Fixit bought it for me. I am learning the dance.

After shopping, it was time to go to lunch at the home of The Boss’ sister, a quiet, gracious Indian lady in a matriarchal grey bun and a mustard yellow sari. We had biriyani in her old-fashioned dining room, where the chairs were arranged around the periphery with little inlaid tables between them. She proved herself to be a considerate hostess, and allowed us to serve our own portions; ah, the luxury of being able to eat what you want rather than engaging in a battle of wills with a servant hell-bent on drowning you in chicken tikka masala!

After lunch, we drove out to inspect The Boss’ racehorse stud, because are you even a demi-billionaire if you don’t own a racehorse stud? There we had coffee on the verandah while the staff paraded choice horses past, allowing my younger sister, the only one of us to inherit our father’s obsession with horses, to appraise them and make approving comments about their stances or temperaments.

While the racehorses are the stars of the show, the stud also raises dairy cattle, sheep, ducks, chickens, an army of incestuous white and ginger cats who keep the mice out of the horse feed, and a pack of rescued dogs – The Boss loves dogs and will pick up any abandoned puppy he finds and bring it to the staff to raise.

When I asked him how many staff were at the stud – including onsite horse vets, stablehands, trainers, gardeners, handymen, and gate guards – he shrugged slightly and said, “About 120.”

We returned late to the city, for pre-dinner drinks (best consumed slowly and carefully, to prevent overzealous servants from swooping in when your glass gets close to empty and replacing it with a brimming new one), and my mother caught up with The Boss’ sister-in-law, whom she befriended on previous visits. This sister-in-law is a forthright, modern woman who works in a male-dominated field (clinical psychology) and doesn’t tolerate the patriarchal expectations of Indian society for one second. And as she has wealth independent from The Boss’ companies, which is a rarity in their circles, she doesn’t have to compromise any of her attitudes.

From her, we got the Dark Side of Isha. The guru/swami who created it is a crook and possibly a murderer, they use psychological tricks and manipulation to lock people into their cult, and they steal people away from their families and empty their bank accounts. At least, according to her. Indians of a certain disposition do seem to run to hyperbole, so I took everything she said with a grain of salt, but it certainly meshed with the culty vibe I was getting from the place, not to mention the incongruity of a haven of spiritual enlightenment being so willing to shove pilgrims out of the way when our party splashed their rupees about.

We repaired to dinner in the formal dining room at around 10.30pm. I’ve loved every single thing I’ve eaten so far in this house, but I think I’ve already incurred the ire of the cook, who interprets my reluctance to carb load in the middle of the night as a calculated insult against his cooking.

As we were leaving dinner, The Boss, expressing concern that we might feel cold in the evenings, presented my mother and sisters with beautiful pashminas to wear. Then, archly noting that a pashmina wouldn’t be suitable for me, he gave me a thick, soft scarf with a very specific pattern.

“Wait, is this Burberry?” I asked in astonishment.

“Yes, do you like it?” Mr Fixit replied, beaming. “I selected it for you myself.”

“It’s amazing,” I said in wonder.

So yeah, now I have a Burberry scarf worth more than some of my suits. Nice.

Everywhere

I came down the grandly curving, Venetian plastered staircase in the morning to find the rest of my family in the dining room, being served breakfast by the house staff. It was there that we met my parents’ friend, an elderly but vigorous, booming gentleman whom I’ll refer to as The Boss. Escorting him was one of the drivers from the previous evening, a softly-spoken, somewhat intense man who I’ll call Mr Fixit, for reasons that will become apparent.

The Boss was welcoming, and chatted warmly with my mother, but I think my sisters and I were a little intimidated, as we sat under an 18th century oil painting of Jesus at the Wedding at Cana that was bigger than a car parking space, while silent servants quickly brought him coffee and cleared the breakfast things away. Having been appraised of the disaster of our lost luggage, he asked Mr Fixit to drive us over to the shopping mall so that we could buy some fresh clothes and toiletries. He then took his leave, promising to meet us again at dinner over at his house next door.

When we were ready, Mr Fixit loaded us into the same luxury European SUV that had collected us from the airport, and drove us down the congested and chaotic Indian roads to the shopping mall. Or more specifically, The Boss’ shopping mall. When my mother had mentioned that he owned a shopping mall, I’d pictured a little arcade on a largish commercial block. In reality, however, it turned out to be a sprawling complex across several acres, with aircraft hangar-sized clothing boutiques, a modern department store selling everything from cosmetics to iPhones, a supermarket, a gym, gift shops, coffee stalls and India’s biggest Starbucks.

There were guards at the gate to the complex, who recognised the car and immediately ushered us through, and Mr Fixit bypassed the parking lot to drop us outside the first of the clothing stores that met his standard – he dismissed the others as too cheap.

Inside, I grabbed a couple of undershirts, sleeping shorts, socks and underwear, along with some toiletries sufficient to tide me over until my luggage eventually turned up. When I went up to pay, Mr Fixit gestured for me to go to an unattended till away from the queue of people waiting to pay, summoned a startled cashier, and slapped down The Boss’ credit card. He then did the same in other stores for my sisters and mother, also paying for underthings, cosmetics and dresses to replace what they were wearing.

Back at the house, I asked my mother what Mr Fixit’s role actually was.

“He’s The Boss’ right hand man,” my mother said.

“So, like his PA?”

“Oh no, he has a personal secretary.”

“Like a butler or a valet, then?”

“No, he has a valet. You’ll meet him later.”

“So, what is he then?”

“I already told you. He’s The Boss’ right hand man.”

“No, I mean what’s his job title in The Boss’ company HR system? He must have one, otherwise how does he get paid?”

“Oh, some sort of manager, I guess. Things work differently here, dear.”

And that’s about as far as I got with that.

In the afternoon, Mr Fixit drove us out to one of the few tourist attractions in Coimbatore; the Isha Yoga Centre, which is, according to all of the marketing material, a giant bust of Adiyogi Shiva sitting in a field in the shadow of a beautiful mountain. When we got out there, we were to meet The Boss’ daughter-in-law, who’d organised a guided tour of the giant head. We wondered what could actually be learned about a giant head sitting in a field, especially what might take four or five hours to learn, which is the amount of time allocated to this activity.

Fortunately it turns out that the giant head is just the symbol of the Isha Ashram, and the rest of the ashram sprawls out behind it, with a temple, ritual bathing pools, shrines, and, because yoga is as much a business as it is a form of spiritual discipline, fancy shops.

Outside the temple area we met our guide, a mild-mannered musician from Berlin named Victor, who is an annual visitor to the ashram and thus in a good position to guide us around the campus. We never did learn quite who had volunteered his services, but he seemed happy enough to show us around.

Yoga is a weird phenomenon, especially in the modern era. It’s halfway between a cult, a scam, a religion, a social nexus and a wellness regime, and we saw all of those sides on our tour.

Victor showed us the male bathing pool, sunk deep in the earth with towering granite walls on three sides, with the three urns in the centre spotlit with such subtlety that it was almost possible to believe that they were just glowing slightly from within.

We then went to the women’s bathing pool, and while the ladies in our party entered, Victor, Mr Fixit and I chatted outside. Victor revealed that he will soon be doing a special ascent of the mountain in bare feet, as a sacred act of endurance. He was keen for Mr Fixit’s opinion as a local.

“Are there tigers in the hills?” Victor asked nervously.

“There are tigers everywhere,” said Mr Fixit, in a tone simultaneously nonchalant and ominous.

“Oh,” said Victor.

Once the women were ready, we visited a shrine with a long queue of pilgrims waiting to enter, but it turned out that we could bypass the queue by buying a stack of offerings, an option that The Boss’ daughter-in-law took up without hesitation. Inside, we lit candles, tied an ochre string around a mass of other ochre strings, and slipped down to the shrine itself to symbolically wave the smoke from a row of candles over our heads. A couple of grouchy staff tried, momentarily, to control our movements, but Victor overrode them in a way that they had clearly never been overridden before, judging from their perplexed reactions.

But enough of the spiritualism – time for some shopping! Is all of this ritual a bunch of spiritualist bollocks peddled by a guru who’s making millions off this thing? Yes, it is. Did I buy organic cotton yoga pants at one of his fancy shops? Yes, I did. And they are sensationally comfy.

When Mr Fixit noticed a statue of a sleeping elephant god outside one of the fancy shops, he took several photos of it (despite the fact that we were in the temple area in which photography was forbidden), saying that it’s exactly the sort of thing his boss might like to buy.

“I don’t think it’s actually for sale”, Victor interjected.

Mr Fixit shrugged good-naturedly and said, “Everything’s for sale.” So that was that.

As evening fell we made our way back to the giant head for the daily “light show”, and were ushered into our VIP seating area as close to the head as it’s possible to get without actually being part of the show. Normally this area is where a handful of lucky, extra devout pilgrims get to squat on the ground in the shadow of the giant head, but they were shifted a little to the side and chairs for our party had been set up. Poor Victor seemed increasingly discombobulated that this party of guests were cheerfully steamrollering their way to the front of every queue, ignoring inconvenient parking areas and just parking next to the giant head, and getting seated in a private VIP area closer to the giant head than any of the genuine yoga pilgrims, all with the blunt but adroit use of money. I’m pretty certain that “throw cash at it until you get what you want” isn’t a central tenet of yoga, at least not officially. I felt for him.

The light show turned out to be a sophisticated projection system, which played intensely focused animations onto the giant head, drenching it in gorgeous splashes of colour and turning its hair into flames or its skin into glass. It was simple but spectacular, and the crowd of thousands, somewhere off behind us in a dusty field, went absolutely nuts for it.

After driving back to Coimbatore, we received an update on our luggage, as we sat in The Boss’ garden pavilion drinking gin and tonics. The news was… evasive. From what I could understand, the staff at either the airport or the airline were not being sufficiently certain that our luggage would arrive on the evening flight from Singapore, or if it did, whether it would be available that evening. Maybe there were going to be logistical issues? Or maybe customs issues? They were allowing for any eventuality.

This did not sit well with The Boss. In what I’ve quickly learned is an ominous gesture, he drew out his personal mobile (which is an extremely incongruous shade of iridescent pink) and made one or two brief, quiet calls. Then he suggested we go in to dinner.

Dinner in The Boss’ house is held late, has three courses, and is served by his valet, Mr Fixit and as many other house staff as needed. Guests are not permitted to serve themselves, but instead the staff move about the room dispensing huge portions of flat breads, rice, various curries, chutneys and yoghurts, then retreat to the edge of the room to watch like hawks for any spare space to appear on anyone’s plate so that they can rush in to fill it with more food. Resistance to their serves is ignored.

During dinner, it was reported back to us that our luggage had indeed arrived on the evening flight, so after dinner, just a little before midnight, my sister and I were driven out to the airport to collect it. We were met in the terminal forecourt by a gaggle of apologetic and slightly terrified airport staff, who refrained from the previous night’s grind of Indian paperwork and loaded the bags into the car after getting a single signature from my sister.

When a demi-billionaire talks, you listen. Or else.

Arrival

What do you do when you unexpectedly find yourself dumped in the centre of Singapore for a day with lightly smelly clothes and no forward planning? In my case, it was to walk out of my hotel (after a suitably bracing breakfast), pick a direction, and walk that way until I saw an interesting landmark then walk towards that.

The first recognisable structure I saw was the Marina Bay Sands building. I got as far as the waterfront next to the Esplanade Theatres, but stopped there as I would have to divert a long way to find a bridge to take me closer.

From there I wandered northish, until I stumbled across the famed Raffles Hotel. While I would have loved to pop in for high tea, this is not the sort of thing you can do without booking ahead, preferably by a couple of months, so I just wandered along the crisply painted white verandahs and ogled tchotchkes in their gift shop.

By now it was early afternoon, and Singapore’s infamous humidity was starting to take its toll, so I went back to the hotel to sit in my airconditioned room for a while. But the siren song of exploration was too much for me, so I walked over to the Fort Canning Park, virtually next door to the hotel, to take in the lush greenery and the heady scents of their spice garden. And then, after half an hour, it was back to the hotel to lie on the bed with the airconditioning cranked as high as it would go, as marching about Singapore in the mid-afternoon is about the dumbest thing a humidity-sensitive person can do.

By the time I’d recovered, it was time to grab my carry-on luggage and take a taxi back to the airport for our evening flight. There was even enough time to explore Changi a little, taking in the butterfly house, drinking a Singapore Sling in a bar, and generally being a mature, sophisticated individual who would never stoop to juvenile sniggering.

After our experience the previous night, we were absolutely scrupulous about presenting at the departure gate at the posted time. After some opaque shuffling, with uniformed staff wandering back and forth with no apparent aim, we were allowed to push our carry-ons through the security scanner and then board our flight as, from what we could see, the only white people interested in doing so.

Singapore Airlines doesn’t fly its aircraft to Coimbatore, our destination in India, but delegates the task to its budget minion Scoot. Judging by pleasantness of the flight, or rather the lack thereof, Scoot is named after that thing that dogs do when they have itchy anal glands. The seats are hard and cramped, the refreshments are extra, and the only entertainment system is listening to a baby screaming from across the aisle.

At least when we landed four hours later we were finally in India! Tired but relieved, we walked into the terminal and got into the immigration queue, noticing that we were still the only white people in the entire airport.

Indian bureaucracy is globally notorious, and Coimbatore’s airport was proof of that. Where Changi had online arrival paperwork you can complete on your phone, in this airport it was on little slips of paper… with no pens. While Changi had seamless biometric scanning that was almost invisible, at this airport they had an old webcam taped to a partition which had to be rebooted several times. And where Changi had professionally aloof immigration staff who all but silently ushered us through their stations, this airport had staff who struggled to even deal with us on a conceptual level.

“What is your purpose for visiting India?” one asked me.

“I’m on holiday, visiting some friends,” I replied.

“What friends?” the agent asked, slightly incredulously, as if to imply that I had no business having friends, least of all in her city.

“Family friends,” I responded, in a tone that I intended to remind her that the name and contact details of said friends where on the arrival slip I’d had to complete with a borrowed pen not five minutes earlier.

“And where are you staying?”

“With the friends,” I replied, now with a very pointed look at the arrival slip in her hand.

After a little more back and forth, with me being blandly inoffensive and her being mildly irked, I was allowed to pass through to the baggage carousel.

Which was empty.

It was now after midnight, and my sister, who’d made it through before me, was politely hovering while the baggage officer dealt with the three or four parties who were also missing their luggage. Once she’d reached the front of the little queue, she had to assist the officer to laboriously complete the lost baggage form (again, on paper, because India), providing answers to reasonable questions such as, “What brand is the luggage?” (Mine is from Kmart! It doesn’t have a brand!) and “What colour is the luggage” (I don’t know, I didn’t pre-identify the Pantone code! Grey? Silver? Pewter?), all while ignoring the fact that every bag was barcoded in Perth and should be instantly trackable through the Singapore Airlines system with the press of a button on the elderly computer that was sitting ignored on her desk.

So it was the middle of the night, we’d just flown for four hours on an airline named after a gross thing that dogs do, we had no clothes other than the by now stinky ones we were standing in, and our bags, with all of our clothes, toiletries and medications, were missing. After pointedly taking photos of the paperwork with our phones (just in case it, too, went missing), we exited the airport and were greeted by a pair of drivers sent by my parents’ friend, who tutted sympathetically and only winced slightly as we smeared our greasy selves into their pristine SUVs.

Like many well-to-do Indians, both my parents’ friend and his daughter had houses within a single family compound, and as we pulled through the first gate, where a uniformed guard smartly saluted us, I started to get my first inkling of just how well-to-do these people were. It was a little hard to see much in the darkness, but I could see lush tropical gardens, big imposing buildings, and in an open carport, a row of six large cars: different colours, different body styles, but all Mercedes.

After two more gates, each with separate uniformed guards, we arrived at the daughter’s house. Or more specifically, her holiday house, since she lives in Singapore and only comes back to India a few times a year during school holidays so that her sons can see their grandparents. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this.

We were shown into a three storey mansion inspired by Ray and Charles Eames’ Case Study House No. 8, all polished terrazzo floors, glass walls, spectacular modernist artworks and Memphis School-influenced designer furniture. A polite housekeeper in a pink sari showed me up to my room on the first floor, which was bigger than all four of the bedrooms in my house combined, with a king-sized bed and its own ensuite bathroom. The magnificent modern oil painting hanging over the bed was larger than my car and probably more expensive.

I gingerly lowered my disgusting, sweat-stained body onto the exquisitely soft sheets and was asleep within minutes.

Hiccup

 

Our flight out of Perth was half an hour late in arriving, and subsequently late in boarding. As a result, it lost its slot in the take-off queue and had to wait on the tarmac for another forty-five minutes before departing. The flight crew managed to claw back half an hour during the flight to Singapore, but we had now missed our landing slot at Changi and had to circle until one became available. Consequently, we landed fifteen minutes after our connecting flight had started boarding.

We figured that, with the help of the ground staff, we could still just make our flight. However, we didn’t realise that some flights out of Changi run their security screens at the boarding gate, not at the entry to the departure area, and ours had already finalised security and packed up. The plane was going to be sitting on the tarmac for another twenty minutes, but we couldn’t get on it.

With a professional feigning of concern, the Singapore Airlines liaison staff advised us that, because there was only one flight a day to our destination in India, they would put us up in a hotel overnight and pay for taxis there and back. Our checked luggage would be held at the airport and loaded onto the new flight behind the scenes when we came back. For some reason, the airline uses a central city hotel rather than one out at Changi, so it took us half an hour to ride into the city and be ushered into our rooms.

The Penninsula Excelsior turned out to be a rather nice international hotel, and the airline was covering two twin rooms, the taxis, and all of our meals for the 24 hours before the next flight. By now it was after 10.30pm, so we just ordered some room service food and resigned ourselves to sleeping in our clothes, because all of our clothes and toiletries were in our checked bags back at the airport.

We were all fiercely disappointed, but this was softened by the unexpectedly swanky hotel facilities, and by Delaware and Maryland helping to make the coffee.

Legacy

Following my father’s death last year, my mother decided that she’d like to have her three children accompany her to visit one of my parents’ dearest friends, a wealthy Indian industrialist for whom my father had long done consulting work. Neither I nor my sisters had ever met this friend, but we’d heard a lot of stories about him. It was determined that we’d be able to stay at his daughter’s house, so we’d only need to pay for our air fares and incidentals, and as such it seemed like a very affordable yet exotic holiday. In fact, the only downside will be that, as I’ve already been to Italy and Bali recently, this jaunt to India definitely makes me Elizabeth Gilbert. Oh, the shame.

A voyage like this requires intrepid companions, and so I found two Lego adventurers worthy of the task. As they’re clearly modeled after a certain famous swashbuckling archaeologist, I decided to name them appropriately after US states with a solid Welsh surname. “Indiana” is kind of problematic (I think you mean “Nativeamericana”, bigots!), so I selected the two least controversial states I could think of. And so Delaware and Maryland Llewellyn are packed and ready to go!