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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.