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After another long, painful flight on Scoot, we landed in Singapore with just enough time to have a coffee and make our way on foot and by skytrain to the next departure gate. We got on board without issues, and sank into the comfortable Singapore Airlines seats with audible sighs – after the plastic rigidity of the Scoot seats, proper upholstery felt like sitting on a cloud.

When we arrived back in Perth, I was almost surprised to find our luggage actually sitting there on the baggage carousel, slightly more battered that before but still, you know, there. We’d been concerned that Australian Customs might have some issues with some of our loot (the wooden mallets that came with the singing bowls, bags of chocolate and coffee, etc), but they took one look at us, surmised that we weren’t the sort of people trying to smuggle a live duck in our carry-ons, and waved us through without investigation.

We had to find and board the correct shuttle bus, load the bags into the car in the long-term car park, drive ourselves back home, all without having Mr Fixit organise any of it. Even after only a week and a half, it was disconcerting. How am I supposed to go on with my life without having a hyper-competent individual to do all of the boring stuff for me?

As for Delaware and Maryland, they were good about sharing their tuk tuk with the other minifigs.

So I rewarded them with an upgrade.

Send-off

Our final day in India was overshadowed with illness. The previous night, one sister had to retire during pre-dinner drinks, claiming nausea, then the other one had to leave mid-dinner, feeling faint. When my mother and I returned to the house we discovered that the first sister had diarrhoea and vomiting. During the night, my mother and my other sister had the same.

I had a little diarrhoea but nothing extraordinary or debilitating, and I felt pretty fine. We wondered if there’d been food poisoning, but it may have been something as simple as heat exhaustion from Cochin’s savagely hot, humid weather. Even Mr Fixit, when he turned up, admitted that he’d been so tired he hadn’t even had dinner the previous night, which is about as big an admission of weakness as he’d ever be prepared to make.

During the day we rallied enough to take part in a farewell Australian-style barbecue. Just like at home, this involved sitting in the garden with our alcoholic beverages of choice, chatting while a select male (in this case Mr Fixit) grilled various meats on the barbecue. The only real difference is that we didn’t serve ourselves, but instead engaged in one final battle with the servants as waves of chicken and fish and lamb and prawns and pork came off the grill and they took affront if we resisted any of it. At least we could blame the lingering fragility of our digestive tracts for our recalcitrance.

Meanwhile I took some photos of Delaware and Maryland in the garden, exploring the water lily troughs and the 300 year old Chinese bonsais.

Finally it was time to head back to the airport, with fond and slightly tearful farewells to The Boss and his staff, although in the case of the staff the tears may have been due to having to haul our extremely overloaded bags into the SUVs. At the airport, even the stony Mr Fixit teared up a little and hugged each one of us goodbye, but not before invisibly organising a couple of airport porters to push our luggage carts for us all the way to the check-in desks.

There was some sort of issue with our reservations, and the check in agent asked us to stand aside for half an hour while he investigated. Ten minutes later, one of our porters noticed us standing around and asked what the problem was, then, once we told him, scurried over to the check-in agent and within a few minutes, our issues were solved and our bags were tagged and sent for loading. The shadowy hand of Mr Fixit is at work even when he’s miles away.

Culture

While very modest and obliging, Mr Fixit can be quite insistent when it comes to managing our itinerary. So today, while we would have been happy just doing a little more shopping, he suggested that we visit Jewtown’s 450 year old synagogue, and then the Dutch Palace next door, and pretended not to hear any of our weak protestations.

We’re glad he did. The synagogue included a small museum, which revealed that Jews have been in this part of India for nearly two thousand years, having fled to India’s west coast from the Mediterranean due to persecution from the Roman Empire. The synagogue itself has beautiful, ancient tiled floors and dozens of haphazardly designed antique glass chandeliers, making it simultaneously awe-inspiring and charmingly cosy. There were signs and live announcements asking for silence in this place of worship, but tourists being tourists, this was ignored. I gave the stinkeye to a British tween who was clapping, for absolutely no reason, on top of babbling with his mother, but I left any other enforcement to the Jews.

The Dutch Palace was similarly interesting, demonstrating that collusion between India’ s aristocracy and colonialist European elites has been going on for half a millennia. Here I learned that the local maharajahs were always men but that the royal lines of succession were matrilinear: if you were the king, your own sons were barred from succession in favour of your sisters’ sons. One wonders what happened centuries ago to make them latch onto this oddly convoluted arrangement, but it would certainly keep the leadership from becoming complacent.

There were full length oil paintings of some of the maharajahs, including this one, helpfully renamed by me.

‘The Life of the Party’, artist unknown, circa 1900

The building itself was nearly five hundred years old and clearly built by a pre-industrial society, but what they lacked in precision construction equipment they made up for with over-engineering – metre-thick walls, heavy hardwood floors from trees of a size that no longer exist, and densely detailed frescos coloured with natural pigments rather than paint.

We paused for a restorative frozen coffee slushy, since 16^th century synagogues and palaces don’t have airconditioning and the day was already unpleasantly hot and stiflingly humid, then put our collective foot down with Mr Fixit and made him drive us to the local hypermall. There my mother and sisters scattered to all points of the compass and only returned after adding to their handbag and dress collections. Mr Fixit registered his disapproval by staying with me, so that the ladies had to pay for their own goodies. At this stage, where we’ve paid for almost nothing except when we strongly insist, it seemed fair enough.

With the shopping bug firmly squished, we hit the road for the long journey back to Coimbatore, pausing only twice: the first time so that we could try chai lattes from a genuine tea wallah, the second time because Mr Fixit saw a roadside animal vendor selling fancy breeds of chicken, and The Boss loves a fancy breed of chicken. He bought a fancy chicken and also a fancy turkey, but fortunately organised for some unnamed minion to pick them up, rather than stuffing them into the back of our already crowded SUV.

On the way home there was a epiphanal moment when the traffic chanced to bring us alongside a gaudily painted bus blasting Hindi pop music. It felt deeply Indian, and I realised that I haven’t felt that much on this holiday. I’m staying in a house that could be in LA or Dubai. I get driven around to upmarket shops, modern hospitals and grand houses, only seeing the people on the streets through the tinted windows of the SUV. I barely even speak to ordinary people, as the house staff don’t speak English and The Boss’ family speak and act no differently than Indians I know back in Australia.

I’m not complaining – I came on this holiday for reasons unrelated to the country itself. But it seems odd to be in a different country and not getting any flavour of it apart from in the food.

Purchasing

After a leisurely breakfast at our hotel, we drove a short distance to go shopping in Jewtown… which sounds like some sort of obscure slur, but it’s just the traditional home of Cochin’s Jewish population and now its historic tourist precinct.

It’s also the site of The Boss’ favourite antique emporium. If you want giraffe-sized brass oil lamps, a 500 year old palanquin, ornately carved ceiling panels and a hundred different yellow clay idols, it’s your one stop shop!

Meanwhile, in groundbreaking theology news, I discovered proof that the ancient Indians worshipped Ned Flanders. Hey, they could do worse.

While Mr Fixit flitted about with his phone, sending pictures of half-ton stone statues and ten metre long hardwood tabletops to The Boss for his consideration, I bought an antique brass oil lamp (giraffe-foetus sized) and an antique brass pan. I haggled a bit with the owners, then got an extra 10% off when Mr Fixit swept through the room, shot them a price 1000 rupees less than they were insisting as their absolute best price, then swept out again, all without pausing his phone conversation with The Boss.

Later, at a shop down the street, I found some beautiful brass Singing Bowls that chime like angels moaning, got the price down by 5000 rupees, then was advised by the shopkeeper that if I wanted to use my credit card, we’d have to go to his friend’s shop since he didn’t have a machine. We walked to a gem shop two doors down, then made our way into a windowless back room, where my shopkeeper and his colleague chattered in Tamil as they reset an old Eftpos handset. I was a little nervous about using my card in this context, but I really liked the bowls, and just resigned myself to staying alert and closely monitoring my card activity… then Mr Fixit hustled in, established the scenario in a few seconds of terse Hindi, and slapped down The Boss’ credit card instead. Any minor risk of credit card theft dissipates when you have The Boss’ resources to deal with it.

After an exhausting few hours of shopping we were allowed to return to the hotel. My sisters swam in the pool while I presented Delaware and Maryland with a vehicle that I’d picked up from the harbourside stalls yesterday. The minifigs that come to Italy with me get Fiats and Vespas, but as we’re in India we get a different local icon.

Love

Today we drove down to the historic coastal city of Cochin, about 145kms west of Coimbatore. In Western Australia, such a drive would take an hour and a half at most, but here in India it takes a good four hours, as even the smooth new toll roads are cluttered with slow-moving scooters, sputtering tuk tuks and overloaded trucks, all crawling along as fast as their tiny, dilapidated engines will take them, which is to say, not very fast at all.

After checking in to our very nice resort hotel (paid for by The Boss, naturally), we walked along the harbourfront, taking in the sunset, with a thronging mix of tourists and locals. There were stalls selling the usual tourist junk, but also others selling street food, and fish freshly caught from the ramshackle little fishing piers, with their iconic net casting frames.

The main thing that made it differ from similar harbourfront walks across the world was the garbage strewn across the beaches, bobbing in the water or laying in dense drifts formed by the waves. It was a jarring reminder that this is India, where the roads rules are ignored, the water supply isn’t safe to drink, and there’s no functioning garbage collection service – the one thing missing from the harbourfront walk was a single trash bin. There’s no point in installing trash bins if there’s no one to empty them and nowhere to put the emptied trash.

As twilight closed into evening we returned to the hotel for an evening cocktail, only to make an unpleasant discovery. The hotel had recently changed its management/ownership structure, and in the process has accidentally lost their liquor license.

Unable to deal with the thought of an evening without booze, we turned to Mr Fixit for help. He drove us a couple of blocks to a different hotel for our gin and tonics. While our booze-free hotel was lovely, this one was stunning, with the sort of grand, immaculate sleekness that only comes from ridiculous amounts of money. Mr Fixit apologetically explained that The Boss had intended for us to stay at this hotel, but the entire resort was booked out due to it being Valentine’s Day, which was why we could only be here for drinks.

Two rounds of gin and tonics for the four of us (Mr Fixit doesn’t drink) came to almost $150AU, so I shudder to think what rooms would cost. We returned to our inferior but still better than we deserve hotel to have dinner in the restaurant, which was expansively decorated for Valentine’s Day but almost completely empty, as most couples insist on a little wining with their dining on the most romantic evening of the year.

Jobs

Because I work in medical education, The Boss took it on himself to organise a tour for me of his family’s hospital. Not the hospital that his family attends: the hospital that they own. His grandfather built the first wing in the 1950s, then his mother built another wing in the 1970s, and now he’s built an entire five storey inpatient facility which just opened last year. Since I was a guest of The Boss, the hospital’s senior directors themselves gave me a two hour guided tour of the campus.

Not gonna lie; I was struggling a little with imposter syndrome as I, in my shorts and my colourful new tiger shirt, was lead about by a trio of executives in smart officewear, men so important that ordinary staff visibly flinched and scuttled out of their way as we swept down the corridors, or relinquished the elevator they’d just called, or pressed themselves into the corners of stairwells as we descended. When we wandered into an open plan administration office, the dozen or so people working there leapt to their feet and remained almost at attention until we wandered out again. Even doctors in the middle of consultations stopped what they were doing and stood up as we passed by. If they discovered how unimportant I actually am, I’m sure they would have broken their Hippocratic Oaths and thrown me off the roof.

When I got back to the house, I was relayed a message from The Boss that we were having lunch at his house. However as I was about to go into the dining room, The Boss beckoned me into his study, with the air of someone about to either ask one for a small favour, or to chastise one for a minor faux pas. As such I entered with a certain amount of trepidation, and he ushered me over to a table where his personal secretary was hovering.

“Which of these,” he asked gravely, “do you prefer?”

On the table were three silver bracelets; one with large, chunky links, one with medium-sized links, and one with sinuous smaller links.

“Uh, the smallest one, I think,” I stuttered.

“Really? Not the medium one?”

Was this a trap, I wondered? If I choose the wrong bracelet, do I get banished from the compound?

“They’re all beautiful,” I said, truthfully. “But you did ask me which one I prefer, and I prefer the little one.”

“Well, then it’s settled,” he said, and he gestured for his valet, who had materialised next to me, radiating disapproval as usual, to fasten it on my right wrist.

As he was doing so, my mother and sisters walked in, and after he’d seated them he drew out several elegant little bags, and gave them to my mother to open. Inside were ornate Indian necklaces, in golden metal, pewter, silver metal and mother of pearl, expensively intricate and delicate, each with matched earrings, rings or cuffs. He asked my mother to go first in choosing which one she wanted. She chose the gold, then one sister chose the mother-of-pearl, and the other chose the silver, with the pewter remaining for my mother to give to her only granddaughter back in Australia.

It’s fair to say that my bracelet is the first real piece of jewelry I’ve ever owned. Everything else has been fast fashion junk, homemade, or the brass thumb ring I found in the gutter in Amsterdam that may actually be a plumbing fitting, and the bracelet that I literally got from a Christmas cracker. The real thing is heavy and cool against my wrist.

After lunch, Mr Fixit drove my sisters and I down to Tiruppur, an industrial hub where The Boss’ textile factories are located, to take a VIP tour of a clothing factory owned by one of The Boss’ fellow industrialists. It was unexpectedly fascinating. We watched the stunningly complex giant looms that weave cotton, polyester and/or bamboo threads into cloth, each one made from a thousand tiny parts carefully put together to ensure perfect weaving. Once woven, the bolts of cloth are unspooled over a lightbox so that workers can check by eye for dyeing flaws, imperfections, rips or bugs that were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Then we saw the cutting floor, where the cloth is packed into 20cm thick blocks and carved by a CAD-controlled robot bandsaw into the panels of a piece of clothing. From there, the pieces go over to the assembly floors, where hundreds of workers sew sleeves, affix buttons, run elastic through waistbands, stitch in tags or construct collars.

Then it’s up to the embroidery room, where another CAD-controlled robot embroiders the little Nike swoosh, or Puma silhouette, or Lacoste crocodile onto the finished garment.

Finally, we were lead into a large room full of clothing racks, which, I learnt, were samples and end-of-run items left over from the clients’ orders. Given the nature of the manufacturing we’d just seen, it wasn’t surprising that it was all T-shirts, hoodies, polo shirts, tracksuits, leggings, fleece shorts and gymwear.

“Pick out whatever you want,” Mr Fixit declared with uncharacteristic effusiveness. “It’s all free of charge.”

So... there was to be no dance of payment with Mr Fixit today. He had basically told me to go hog wild, with only my sense of common decency and propriety standing between me and the biggest pile of free clothes ever seen.

Over the next half an hour I amassed an embarrassingly large pile, then allowed my dignity to winnow it down to a manageable hoard: a couple of polo shirts, three light track jackets, a tanktop, a pair of fleece shorts, and four T-shirts.

I discovered later that it wasn’t really “free of charge”. It went on The Boss’ tab. But The Boss gets an 80% discount, and that’s off the local price, not the retail price, so a Puma polo that retails for $110AU cost him less than $4AU, and a $75AU Tasc T-shirt cost him around $1.30AU: he got me maybe a thousand dollars of brand-name clothing for less than fifty bucks. You can’t say no to a bargain.

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 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.