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CLEANING, IRONING
& DOMESTIC HELP
Ananda
References available
0774 319 8806
At night cities look enchanting from the air. With its cabin display pointing back to Mecca, our Kuwait Airlines Airbus reached Indian airspace at midnight. From a window in scum class, as it is known by cabin crew, I could see for hundreds of miles up the coast the faint sprinkling of luminous orange dust - the street lights of innumerable towns.
Perhaps this should have prepared us. I imagined that an airport at four in the morning would not be at its busiest. But Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu, has a population of seven million; the airport was heaving. In the two weeks we were in India there was scarcely a moment when we were not aware that the population is over a billion.
We took an Ambassador taxi with the body of a 1960s Morris. Warm air laden with oil, spice, dust and moisture blasted through the open window. Even at that hour the heat made sweat explode from every startled pore of my body. The city was bursting. Bikes and motorbikes were weaving in and out of the paths of farty two-stroke autorickshaws and burly four-wheel drives. Tiny shops, two or three metres across, were spilling pools of light over people stopping for an early breakfast of fruit or sweet tea. Later that day, when we saw Chennai in smiting daylight, we were overwhelmed by its colour and exuberance. Everywhere there are people. The saris of the women are eye-popping fireworks of orange trimmed with gold, or exquisitely subtle purples, greens and lilacs.
Sue and I were staying with our old friends, Timeri - Tim - and
his wife, Maureen, a handsome and supremely competent Aussie. Maureen is the unpaid head of a local Cheshire Home orphanage
for disabled children. It was through her that we saw something of the
aftermath of the tsunami, and learnt of their plans to provide a new boat for one of the affected villages.
Our glimpse came on a day of paradoxes and contrasts - something we came to understand was characteristic. In India you get two countries for the price of one - urban and rural. Tim had arranged lunch at the Park Hotel, an air-conditioned American style extravaganza boasting an atrium with an internal waterfall.
Around the bar elegantly turned out Chennai sophisticates were networking urgently or talking on tiny 3G mobiles to which they seemed surgically attached. In the evening the hotel disco provided the venue for outrageously sexy young people flirting as if they had Karma Sutra advanced studies in mind.
Tim, a cultured man and a talented writer, comes from a family with local roots going back to the seventeenth century. He knows everybody, and had gathered a collection of clever, metropolitan pals. There were journalists, a historian, a TV presenter, a teacher of classical dancing. Of course, they spoke English, as does all the large educated élite in India, for it is the lingua franca in a huge country with many languages. A more urbane or better-informed lot would be hard to imagine. We could have been in a smart bar in Manhattan, though I doubt that the New Yorkers would have been so well read. After lunch Tim drove his Bolero jeep with nerveless skill through the sprawl of the burgeoning city, past the mirror-glass buildings of the ever expanding software companies (Indian engineers are world class), until we got to the East Coast Road - and entered another planet.
'Driving', I should explain, is too passive a verb. The traffic is a kind of video game best endured if you persuade yourself it is an hallucination. The technique is to occupy every available space while ignoring the rear view mirrors. If there is any possibility of overtaking, you sound your horn and go for it.
Other drivers, apparently confident of a higher incarnation next time around, cut you up. Motorcyclists are especially tired of life, and not just of their own, for sidesaddle on the back you'll often see a mother or a grandmother clutching a child. Occasionally an even smaller infant balances on the fuel tank between his father's arms. (My wife reported spotting a condom ad advocating the virtues of having only two kids on the grounds that you could get the whole family on a bike.)
In Chennai itself there is no sign of the tsunami. With casual cruelty the wave snatched children off the beach, but it never reached the esplanade. Fifteen miles down the coast, however, fishing villages, their huts starting where the mockingly perfect sand meets the tree line, were not so lucky. There were poignant posters with pictures of missing children. Nearly the entire fishing fleet was smashed or swept out to sea.
The villagers we were visiting had very little, but were generous and hospitable. We were plied with the traditional coconuts, decapitated and fitted with a straw. The light was so brilliant that I was not sure my eyes could stop down to F.22. I paddled for a while in the Coromandel Sea. Eventually the new boat arrived, preceded by the game and affable chairman of Cheshire Homes, a retired banker suffering from MS. He was lifted into the boat in his wheelchair, tied down, and launched into the turquoise ocean with an excited freight of fishermen, children and Maureen. Afterwards, with no grandstanding, he and the head of the village council made simple speeches. Hard-bitten ex-publisher though I am, I was absurdly moved.
There is no space to write more. Despite the heat and humidity (rising now to weapons-grade levels) and the mosquitoes (which saw my large, pink surface as a challenge), India was a wonderful experience. And yes, we enjoyed a long train journey and rode on an elephant.
Nick Webb is a regular contributor to N16 and author of the official biography of Douglas Adams. He lives in Stoke Newington.
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