Pondicherry
December 30th 1995
On Saturday morning i felt so sick of the shit food and instant coffee that was served up at the Palms Beach that i couldn't face eating breakfast there. So i jumped on the bicycle and cycled the three or four kilometres to Muthialpet to go to a coffee shop where i'd eaten on the night i stayed at the youth hostel. I knew they did good coffee and the normal good quality south indian food i'd become used to - idlis, dosai etc.
After breakfast i decided to carry on cycling down Mahatma Gandhi Road and go into Pondicherry, which was only a couple of kilometres further on. When i got there i had some more black coffee and some more food in the Shiva vegetarian restaurant. Then i went to check out a bookshop which had been closed the last time i was in town.
It was branch of Higginbotham's, a large Madras bookshop, but somehow it seemed to have a more intersting selection of books than the Madras one. I bought a book on the Tamil language, which seemed to be a bit better than the one i already had - well, it couldn't have been any worse! I also got a sort of combined travel and guide book about Karnataka by the south indian writer R.K. Narayan and a very weird little book called "A passage to England" by Nirad C Chaudhuri, an indian writer. This last book was about a trip the author did to England in 1955 and it looked like it could be interesting as a view of history, if nothing else.
Then i went for a ride along the seafront before heading back on the long trip towards Periyamudaliarchavadi.
- - -
On Sunday night there was a new years party at the Palms Beach guest house. I wasn't in the mood for a party, and anyway i didn't bother celebrating the calendar new year as it was a totally meaningless day and celebrating it then was just a perversion of the winter solstice festival. Anyway, i lived in the southern hemisphere and southern hemisphere new year is at the end of June.
However, i didn't have a choice, i was living there and there was going to be a party. As it happened, it didn't affect me very much at all. I went to bed at about ten and, despite the loud disco music, i slept well... until five o'clock in the morning, that is, when the hideous screeching sound coming from the temple cut through the disco that was still playing. I was suddenly wide awake. Bloody bastards!