Perfectly accurate and beloved Venn diagrams,
It’s March 31st and an arbitrary deadline I have imposed upon myself to send this newsletter to you. For, if I send it out today, then I’ll have sent two newsletters in March, which means all the shameful neglect I’ve been showing The Internet: Personified recently might be slightly assuaged. This is a very old school way of beginning a post, it reminds me of blogs in Ye Olde Days. There was always a person who wrote enthusiastically (and twice weekly) for a few weeks and then got bored of the project and abandoned it, but not quite, there’d be a few last gasps. “Sorry I haven’t updated in so long,” they’d tell their audience of two or five, “I’ve been really busy.” And these “sorry!” posts would eke out, maybe once every two or three months until they died out altogether. These blogs would always be called something like Random Ramblings of a Rambling Rambler. And since I’m making fun of them, I must also make fun of myself. Not that I think you’ve noticed my long absence from your inbox, but I have. And I missed you guys.
I want to talk about the rest of my India travels in this letter, but first I must note that I’ve been back in Berlin for a week, and it’s been on its best behaviour. The sun is out in a wild passionate way, so warm that we’re down to t-shirts under jackets. Trees have begun putting out baby leaves. The clocks went forward this morning and we didn’t even notice because the 31st of March was very kindly on a Sunday—and a long weekend. But you don’t need my notes on spring this year because the seasons they go round and round and the painted ponies they go up and down and here are my musings on the same subject (clocks, time, spring) from this time last year.
Hampi
If you get a chance to go to Hampi and you look up weather, and it says “perfectly nice between November and February” do not believe this and book for December, because it is BOILING HOT in February. It’s this bizarre geographical landscape, lots of rocks set around a shallow plateau, almost like the old receivers for satellite television. (Okay, I don’t actually know if it is a plateau but it FEELS like a plateau which should be good enough.) Anyway, these rocks reflect the heat so it’s bouncing around this plate of a place and you are so warm with no respite. This is bad because if you’re only spending two days in Hampi, you want to see the temples and so on and those are built amongst the rocks, so you have to magically turn into a morning person and go before the sun beats down on your head, reducing you to your lowest self and your partner keeps calling you an NRI because you can’t handle the heat and you can’t even tell him that it’s actually a very RI thing to do, complain about the heat because you’ve had air conditioning in Delhi and not in Berlin.
Looking on the wikivoyage page, you think it might be a good idea to book yourselves into a hotel in an area called “Hippie Island.” It looks fun! Like Pahargunj! You’re not a great one for temples, you’re okay to look at them from a historical point of view, but to live right next to them? Overkill. Maybe you can have some fun in the evenings in Hampi. You imagine it like Baga beach before it got super crowded. You look at a couple of hotels recommended by Wikivoyage, they all say “permanently closed.” That’s fine. Maybe COVID hit Hampi tourism hard and the newer hotels haven’t found their feet yet. The important thing is to be on this side of the Tungabhadra river, the cool side. You find out only when chatting to a friend in Bangalore, much after the reservations have been done that Hippie Island was demolished on some sort of Government of Karnataka drive. Something about agricultural land? Hippie Island no longer exists.
You find a hotel with cute little huts on this side of the river. You book a cute little hut. The cute little hut is literally made of straw matting and nothing else. In the (hot) afternoons, the (hot) wind blows right through it, leaving you feeling like you’re standing outside, right next to one of those rocks. The nights are cool, but the cute little huts are not even a little soundproof. You hear dogs barking all the time and when they stop, your next door neighbours snoring. You run into friends staying on the temple side. Their room is in a house. Their room has walls. Their room has an air conditioner. Their room is cheaper than yours. You look at them with wistful envy. Never again will you be fooled by a cute little hut. (Spoiler: you are often fooled by cute little huts.)
I suppose I should talk about the temples (old), the architecture (grand), the thingie that’s on the fifty rupee notes (chariot-y) but all I can think about is how we stopped for filter coffee at a small roadside establishment and there was this older Indian man there with grey hair and very dark skin who nevertheless was colonising the younger white woman sitting at the table, trying to read her book. And when we sat down next to them (only one table) he told us all about himself, a tantric guru, it seems, who lives in Amsterdam and makes his money leading workshops in India. And he shot us a glance when he said “tantric,” a sly sideways glance so we all knew we were all thinking simultaneously about sex. He was really unbearably pompous, explaining what my name meant to me and when I asked for an ashtray, he asked for one again and I said, “It’s okay, I already asked him” and he said, grandly, “You ask, I order.” And I said, “Well, it’s good to be polite.” And a little repressive silence fell across the table before he started talking again.
But maybe it was his age and travelling without anyone to talk to because at lunch, when we just wanted to lie still with our fresh lime sodas salted at a cafe with large mattresses instead of chairs, encouraging you to take a nap, an older Italian lady began spouting off about all things Indian and how she loved to come to India because there was no pizza or pasta or parmesan and she always lost ten kilos. Then—chain-smoking— “I’m going to see my Ayurvedic doctor in Goa, he stops me from smoking for ten days.” Where in Goa, I ask, to be polite, because she is chain-smoking and looking me in the eye. “Baga,” she says, and I offer some tips for restaurants and she tells me about what Goa is really like and I say, “We used to live there for a bit,” and she looks pissed off, almost cheated and says, “Well, you don’t need me to tell you then.” Which I think is all, but then she wants to talk about the train to Goa and how smelly it’s going to be because once in Sri Lanka she took a train and the people stunk, and I want to tell her about a very hot train I took in Italy which also smelt of sweat after a while but I can’t be bothered, so I tell her that the bathrooms are awful on trains and at last, at this final bit of information, she is quietened.
All this to say I did not find Hampi redeeming. I thought it was very pretty, nature everywhere and these stark, middle of nowhere complexes of temple architecture and palaces, but I found it catered too much to that sort of white tourist. The modern day hippie, I suppose we’d call it. People who come to a country and stay in it and yet get nothing out of it. People who therefore walk around sounding angry and resentful and barking orders at service staff or restaurant owners like they own the world. It didn’t seem like a real town, it felt like it only operated because of the people who passed through it, if you know what I mean. I felt the same way about Venice when I was there a few years ago.
Oh and they have two warring auto rickshaw unions so you can’t actually take an auto from one side to the other or ride your rented scooter on a side you didn’t rent it from. This makes getting around weird and also expensive because one fellow can’t take rides from the other side so you have to pay him for the journey back as well.
Goa
What is there to say about Goa I haven’t already said a thousand times. I still love it. Majorda is a good beach in South Goa that also has good food, something I can’t say for everywhere else. My best part was seeing friends: two close friends came from Bombay to stay with us for a few days and when they left, two close friends drove up from North Goa and whisked us off to Galgibaga, way further south than us. Once again we were in a “cute little hut” because I was trying to save money and not take the sea view rooms at our usual resort, which I instantly and deeply regretted but by the time I changed my mind, the rooms were fully reserved.
Lucknow
Listen, you’ve gotta eat at Naimat Khana, you’ve gotta eat at Tundey Kebabi, but don’t go to the one at Aminabad, go to the one at Chowk, where they sell the tenderest, almost-like-pate kababs made out of unmentionable meat for Rs 5. Five rupees! What else is going in it, I wondered, but I still ate more than my fair share. The food is rich, and all the kababs, every single one of them, were so good that it’s hard to think of eating them anywhere else, like when we went to Bangkok last year and it ruined us for Thai food anywhere else, but now it’s been long enough, the flavours I find here are not exactly the same, but at least they’re close and if I eat them often enough, these flavours are the ones that will replace those, since my mouth’s memory is fickle and what is a good meal if not a good time? I still remember one holiday my ex’s family took me on, to Cornwall, and on the way we stopped in this tiny pub where they had really excellent Indian food, like really specific coconut chicken curry with flavours that were genuinely authentic, but now I think about it, was I just hungry and homesick and was the meal just a meal after all, an Indian meal, sure, but not deserving to be fixed in my memory as the best Indian food I’ve eaten in the UK?
The best part was the Residency. It’s abandoned and feels haunted. It was so quiet. I found UP in general very loud compared to Delhi or perhaps it’s because in Delhi I’m always in a taxi with the windows rolled up. But no, still it feels quieter. Our Airbnb was on a particularly noisy street and this sort of compensated for the fact that the house had no windows, which you didn’t notice immediately. It snuck up on you: what’s wrong with this house? Oh weird, it has no windows. It was pretty big though. The caretaker provided breakfast but that meant she also stopped to chat and she had two small children who also came in with their mother. It seemed the price to pay to ask her, for instance, how we could get more drinking water. “They just love guests,” she said of her children, “The people here before you couldn’t get enough of them.” I felt the reproof.
But I liked Lucknow. It’s a cool city. Worth spending more time in. Good shopping (I only bought food-related things: a bunch of pre-ground masalas and pickles from a famous shop), good food, generally friendly people. They are proud of their mixed Hindu-Muslim heritage, this makes the city more tolerant than most in the North. It felt nice. Like an Idea of India that we nurse so carefully, despite the real thing being right in front of our noses.
Benares
What I liked about Varanasi is that it felt like a real city in which people were also conducting their lives. I mean, at any given time, the city’s population is probably about 50% travellers, of which 35% are likely pilgrims, visiting a temple or coming to burn their dead, and 15% are tourists “discovering India” or similar but besides the people who cater to tourists, the city also has actual real people living in it, unlike, say Hampi. But maybe it’s unfair to compare the two. Benares has a university, for example, and a silk industry and classical music coming out of its ears, and all Hampi has is an old temple complex built hundreds of years ago.
What I didn’t like about Varanasi is the constant unending honking, no, I mean, you can’t imagine it, you’re thinking, “What’s the big deal, a few car horns” but it’s everywhere. You’re walking down a narrow road and suddenly a scooter blarts in your ear, you’re in traffic which isn’t moving at all, and all around you people are honking. For what? Maybe just to say hello. I was constantly tense, my ears hurting, my body primed to move out of the way but eventually I used earplugs and felt much better. Which is why we should’ve stayed at the ghats instead of a homestay about a kilometre away. It was a nice enough homestay though. We bought some silk from the owner who had a large calendar of Modi praying in the Ganga.
Death is… I don’t know. Everywhere. People are okay with this. It’s weird. For me, anyhow. I don’t like thinking about death, although I do. Every day, perhaps. And to be faced with it as just a part of the city, like the alleyways, like the temples, like the honking and the pilgrims, you couldn’t turn your face away from it, it was something.
Everyone we met on the road in Varanasi when learning we were from Delhi wanted to talk about Kejriwal and how it was a pity he wasn’t running from there. That sentence has a sad irony now, in the future when I’m writing this, but with widening the roads and destroying some old homes and ways of life, I don’t think Modi has made himself very popular which I enjoyed because in this super-Hindu temple town (his constituency, in fact) I thought I’d meet fanboys every step of the way.
Now my darlings, I must adieu because my allergies are acting up (spring! cats shedding their winter coats!) and I can barely concentrate on these sentences. I have some Easter tulips from Lidl in a jug I found by the side of the road which are slightly opening up. They’re a gorgeous shade of lavender and go beautifully with the little wooden Kali doll I bought in Varanasi who sits on top of a terrarium and offers me inspiration to tap into my female rage when I’m writing. Although I don’t feel very rage-y today, she’s still a good reminder that behind the flowers, the anger still remains.
Did you like this post or any of my others? Then buy me a coffee! The Internet Personified runs on your tips and support.
xx
m
Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.
Follow me on Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)
Forward to your friends if you liked this and to people who seem to travel without really seeing anything if you didn’t.
Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.