Homes and Gardens

Day Four of Ghee. 

Day One it had been 30ml; by Day Three it was a full 100ml tumbler; Day Four was more than one and a half tumblers. I retched but managed to control myself and quickly washed the taste down as best I could with tumblers of warm water, then slowly chewed my ration of sultanas, savouring the taste as intensely as I could to counteract the slippery greasiness of the ghee. I muttered a grateful prayer that this was the last treatment of this stage of Panchakarma. Tomorrow – and for two subsequent days – I would be on a diet of rice porridge with milk and sugar instead of rice porridge with salt and water, and tomorrow there would be an oil massage followed by half an hour sweating in the steam box. Plenty to look forward to.

To celebrate the changes, I decided to take a different walk and explore new areas. A few hundred yards down the road there’s a turning up to the left. Usually I go straight on, towards the farmland, but before reaching the agricultural land there’s “Pepper Green Resort.” I was intrigued by this stockade estate which seemed to contain a collection of hotel rooms built up on stilts and into the trees, in the style of the Treetops Hotel in Kenya, but without the Elephants. I asked around and managed to unearth some if its history. Apparently, it is open mainly at weekends and caters for the yuppies of Bangalore (India’s Internet Capital) who want to get away for a weekend to drink, crash out and party. The hotel never really promoted itself and never developed much in the way of facilities apart from those that this particular market demands, namely bars and beds. Sadly, it’s currently closed, as I would have loved to explore... maybe next weekend. Such an eclectic and original location might make an amazing film-set.

Today I didn’t go as far as Pepper Green, but instead turned up the hill beside a coffee plantation which had irrigation sprays sprinkling the bushes. This part of Kerala is poor, but far from destitute. 

The women at the well

 Some people have to use standpipes for their water supply, some, like the ladies in the photo, prefer to draw their supply from the well even though the standpipe is only a hundred yards away. Many homes have piped water, tiled roofs and even satellite dishes. I was fascinated by the neatness and tidiness of many homes, and the brilliant colours some owners have chosen.

I walked up the road, and after a hundred yards the rocks and dust were superseded by smooth tarmac that was a joy to walk along. After a mile or so I came to the local school, opposite which was a row of small shops. These are the equivalent of the corner shop in UK in the way that these are the shops people rely on for basic essentials and bits and pieces. There’s never just one shop, because of the basic rule of retailing – customers, anywhere in the world, don’t trust a lack of competition. I remember being taught this on the Bata Marketing Course in Canada and the U.S. back in 1969. We were taken to what was then one of the largest shopping malls in America, just outside Chicago, and it was pointed out that there was Sears  department store at one end of the mall and Macys at the other, because malls with only one major store simply did not pull in the customers.

Here in rural Kerala there were two little shops, each selling basic foodstuffs in small quantities, together with spools of cotton, tubes of superglue, plastic combs and hairbrushes and single-use sachets of shampoo (for less than 2 UK pence each) So there it is – American shopping mall, two competing outlets; Indian country lane, two competing outlets.

I needed soap and washing powder, and picked up a couple of other novel items before my eye was caught by a group of men squatting together on the ground. They were quite animated and rolling two rectangular pieces of wood instead of the dice. Each length of wood was marked on its four faces with 1, 2, 3 or no stripes. By rolling the pieces and counting the stripes (to total between zero and 12) you achieved the same effect as rolling 2 dice.

Playing for money

 The players had chosen different counters from what was lying around; one played with cigarette ends, another with scraps of foil, and another with slips of paper.  As they made a score, the players moved their markers in a mysterious route on the board, and from time to time a winner was declared and received stake money from each of the other players. I would have loved to understand it, and watching it took me back to watching men playing similar games in the African bush. In the part of Kenya I visited it was called Kiothi, and I have seen versions in UK toy shops. This gambling game in Kerala was clearly addictive and I wonder if some bright spark will mass-produce it in bright plastic colours and persuade Toys ‘R Us to stock it. You never know!