Pondicherry to Periamudaliarchavadi
December 25th 1995
I woke up at about half past six the next morning, to hostel staff stripping sheets of the other beds in the dorm. It was a good time to wake up, i felt like an early start that day, although i didn't really know what i was going to do. The hostel staff told me the banks would be closed that day as it was a public holiday. That was a bit of a worry as i was down to my last fifty rupees due to a lack of foresight which mainly came from my desire to completely ignore christmas, combined with an excess of wishful thinking.
Fifty rupees was enough to eat for a day, but not really enough to do anything else. And i wanted to do more than just eat, i wanted to get out of the youth hostel and find somewhere else to stay. However i knew i'd change some money somehow. I still had thirty five quid which i'd kept in notes for just that sort of emergency.
I walked into town, which was two or three kilometres away, and began to follow my nose. I found one little shop which didn't sell anything and where apparently you could change money, but the person working in there told me the boss wouldn't be in for half an hour, so i said i'd come back. Walking down the same road a few minutes later, a man on a bicycle asked me if i wanted to change money. He told me i'd get fifty rupees to the pound, which was two rupees less than the normal bank rate, and i said ok. He took me back up the road to a barbers shop, not far from the first place i went, and i changed a twenty pound note. The only problem was i got two five hundred rupee notes for it, which i thought i'd never be able to change - one hundreds are are usually hard enough. However, i managed to change them both for hundreds within a couple of hours.
After that, i had a wander around the town. It was a small city right on the coast and unlike most of India it had been a french colony. The French had only left a couple of decades before and a lot of the street signs were still in French. But, apart from a few obvious signs of french influence, the general layout and feel of Pondy was very different to the other, British influenced, towns. It was kind of hard to define quite what the difference was, but somehow it wasn't quite as ugly as most cities.
The geography of Pondicherry seemed to somehow revolve around what was called a canal, but in reality was just a large open sewer. This ran from north to south in the central area of the city, parallel to the coast and two or three blocks inland from it. Between the "canal" and the ocean was the old french colonial area, where all the posh houses and administrative buildings were built. The area on the other side, known as the "Black Town" was where the Indians lived and carried on their businesses. The architecture hadn't changed and the eastern part of the town looked very european while the western part was a fairly normal indian city, although possibly slightly cleaner and less chaotic than most.
The seafront was quite pleasant in an unpretentious way, with a long esplanade running along the edge of the water with a gigantic statue of Mahatma Gandhi in the middle and a cafe over the waves a little bit further on. Apart from that, there was nothing else there, but the fresh sea air and the long view to the horizon made it a nice place to walk along to escape from the city.
After wandering around a bit, i decided i had to find a room somewhere and get out of the youth hostel. I couldn't face another night there - it was far too weird for me! I didn't particularly want to stay in town either, as there didn't seem to be really any need to or any benefit from imposing the noise and pollution on myself. I knew there were some guest houses about half a dozen kilometres up the coast near Auroville, so i jumped on a bus and went to have a look.
I ended up at the Palms Beach guest house at Periamudaliarchavadi, a small village on the main coast road north from Pondy. The road to Auroville turned off that one at this village, so it was a handy place to base myself while i tried to check out that place. It was also very close to the beach, and that was something i needed after the dry inland parts of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, where i'd been for the last couple of weeks.
The Palms Beach was a pleasant place, although too close to the main road for comfort. You came in the gate into a largish garden, with lots of trees and shrubs surrounding half a dozen tables. On the left there was a block of half a dozen rooms with their doors opening onto the garden and large bougainvilleas growing up the front and covering the roof with their beautiful violet, pink, red and orange flowers. Opposite this block was the kitchen and at the far end of the garden there were half a dozen circular buildings with thatched roofs, all different sizes, including one with two floors. Three of these were double rooms and the rest were covered public spaces. The overall feeling of peace and a kind of natural beauty was only disturbed by the roaring engines and honking horns on the road outside - although that certainly wasn't constant.
However, despite the basic tranquility of the Palms Beach, there was one major problem. Every morning and every evening at about five o'clock the peaceful sea air was ripped into a million shreds, as sharp as broken mirrors, by a horrible, deafeningly loud screeching sound that went on and on for at least an hour. Some power-crazed bastard had decided a good way to totally destroy any chance the local residents might have of achieving any kind of spiritual enlightenment or inner peace would be to set up a sound system on the roof of the local temple and subject them to a twice daily sonic attack. The hideous noise sounded like indian film music played with scalpel-blade treble and mountain-shaking volume through the public address system of a large and acoustically deranged railway station. Through the distortion you could hear that it must have been music of some sort when it was recorded, although the final resemblance was only very slight. It made the worst indonesian mosque muezzin pale into pleasant easy listening by comparison.
Religion truly is the cause of all the evil in the world!
It's harder and more dangerous to criticise other religions than it is to criticise the one you were brought up with, because people are always less tolerant to attacks that seem to be coming from outside. But if i'd lived near a catholic church that rang its bells frantically and tunelessly between five and six every morning, the first thing i'd have done would be to brick all its windows and if that didn't work, i'd have set fire to it.
However, Indians seem to like to suffer even more than catholics do, so i guess they welcome the opportunity to not only go deaf very quickly, but to gain a few brownie-style karma points every morning and evening. Jesus! every one of them in that village should have achieved nirvana after just a few weeks of suffering that obscenity!
Anyhow, i didn't realise this until after i'd moved in there, of course, otherwise i would never have taken the room in the first place.
At about four o'clock that afternoon i decided to walk up to Auroville and see if the information centre was open. It took me about two hours to walk there and when i arrived it was closed, which was a bit of a drag. But it was a really nice walk and i began to feel that i'd definitely come to the right place.
In fact the route i walked went along the edge of Auroville land mostly, rather than through the place, but it was enough to inspire me and to make me feel happy to be there. For a start there were lots of trees all the way along the road i was walking on. And after the places i'd been so far in India it was like wandering into an oasis after being lost in the desert for a month! And even before i'd got to India i hadn't seen much in the way of trees for a while either. Five months in deforested Europe and two months in fairly treeless Mexico had starved me of the closeness of trees which i'd been so accustomed to for so long. The last time i could remember being surrounded by any quantity of trees was at the organic farm in Penang, eight months before. Eight months was an incredibly long time for me to be without lots trees in my life, although i hadn't been conscious of how long it had been until i walked along that road in Auroville and felt an intense relief and happiness - it was like coming home again.
And it wasn't just the trees that made me feel at home, although there were quite a few eucalypts and familiar australian types of wattles. The place reminded me a lot of Australia, particularly northern Australia. The soil was the same bright red colour that i'd never seen anywhere else before outside of that continent. And the atmosphere, the climate and the general feeling of the land all seemed totally familiar. I wasn't quite sure how my visit to this place was going to go, but i felt i'd finally arrived in the right spot.