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.