Incredible India 4

If one looks at the following two photographs from 1944 and 2008, just about the only identifiable feature linking the two is the flowerbed in the foreground.






This is my favourite shot of the auld place, taken from down in the coffee drying terrace



And this is the beautiful view, 3,500' up in the clear air, looking northeast towards Mysore.



India was a crazy mix of first and third world, the notable firsts being mobile signal EVERYWHERE, unlike this creaking country, where one struggles to have uninterrupted calls driving up the M1, and the obligatory satelite dish for enjoyment of Bollywood. This beauty is attached to the estate worker's cottage immediately adjacent to Dalquarren Bungalow.



Next door to the satellite dish is this Buddhist shrine.



These are the sheds where the dried coffee beans were stored



This is the back of Dalquarren Bungalow, with Jules acting as a useful perspective



And finally, the roof line of the storage sheds and Dalquarren Bungalow beyond



After the tour of the coffee processing plant and poking around the estate, we were treated to Coorg coffee and cakes by the very welcoming and helpful staff of Mr V Alaggapan, who is the incumbent proprietor of Dalquarren and had very kindly granted us permission to visit our ancestral home. Three hours had elapsed unnoticed, and it was time to leave. The place looked fantastic in the low evening sun as we bade our farewells and climbed into the cars to descend to Chethalli, one mile distant.

We were very keen to find the Post Office in Chethalli, where our mother called daily to collect letters from her beloved Gerald, who was away enduring some pretty rough times in Burma. They wrote to each other daily, but each had the frustrations of a fractured postal service piling up six or seven letters at a time, followed by a week's famine. What was apparent was that the there was no Post Office in Chethalli, so Jepu ascertained that it used to be this building



One interesting fact is that Jules has had more names than Prince, TAFKAP or whatever he is called these days. She started by being Juliana Toffny in the 60s, largely due to my inability to pronounce 'Dorothy' (ha ha, Jules!). She then started the 70s as a woman of the people as 'Julie', but had upgraded to 'Julia' by the end of the decade, only to revert to her birth certificate in swinging 1980s Hong Kong as the much more Empire-friendly 'Juliana'. It was only on marriage that she climbed to a seven syllable name, which is quite an achievement for a non double-barreled surname, but 'Juliana Uniacke' was just too long, so she sawed the legs off Juliana to become 'Jules' her fifth and hopefully final incarnation. She rarely acknowledges these facts, so this is a rare shot of regression therapy:-



As dusk fell, we wandered up and down the single street of Chethalli, the subject of intense local interest. Allix and Mary had some coffee ground in the local hardware store (?) and Jules and I bought some fruit and some lemonade, as we were tiring of our great invention of the trip, Gin and Mango. We then bade Jepu good evening and went back to the Bopaya's homestay.

The next morning it was off to Pollibetta. This was where our great grandparents had a coffee estate called Beechlands, so it was also of great interest to us. We met Jepu at the Anglican church where our great grandparents had worshipped, as our grandfather had until he 'turned to Rome'.



However, he was rehabilitated enough to have hsi adored son included on the war memorial in the church



From there, it was off to a meeting at Tata Coffee Limited, from whom Jepu had retired some years previously. Here we were ushered into the boss's office and had an interesting discussion on the Coorg coffee industry. Jepu had written this charming account that was hung in the branches of a preserved coffee bush that stands outside the swish offices of Tata Coffee Limited



From there we were whisked to Beechlands, and what an eye-opener that experience was. It is the third Michelin star of homestay, and before we had been there many minutes, plans were firmly made to spend Christmas 2009 there with a close nucleus of 25 family members. It is unique, largely down to the monumental snobbery of our maternal great grandmother, in that it is two storey, and as all the Brits thereabouts settled for the the Empire Bungalow, she insisted on an upstairs. It has been largely/totally rebuilt over the years, but we are lucky enough to have a before and after.



2008



1891 - The feminine-looking child is in fact George Parsons at 3 years old



Then we were away to the Bamboo Club, formerly known as the Pollibetta Club. Here we saw three interesting artifacts; the trophy cabinet, containing many well-known Indian and British names, the President's nameboard confirming that great grandfather had been president the year grandfather was born and some bits of rigging from the Zeppelin that Coorg man Leife Robinson VC famously shot down in WW1





Then it was back to Jepu's house where we met his beautiful wife Vani, and enjoyed a wonderful lunch. Looking through Jepu's photo albums of Coorg Coffee Planters reunions was simply marvellous, as previously witnessed. Jepu is a great Anglophile, and it was the only time on the trip that we heard classical music.



Jepu took me up to show me his coffee estate, of which he has 50 acres. Here is a really useful tip if you are suffering allotment damage from elephants. I noticed a heap of dried elephant dung, and asking what it was, Jepu broke open a dried Bismark and revealed that humans aren't the only species that is mad for coffee. He has had significant wild elephant damage inflicted on his estate, and he was trying a sure-fire deterrent - elephant dung and chili powder mixed together and burnt - the smoke drives elephants insane, and they scarper and never return to the source of the stench.



We said our farewells to Jepu and Vani, thanked them for a wonderful lunch and promised to return soon. He is one helluva bloke.

From Pollibetta, it was a longish drive back to Mercara, and I buried myself in an internet cafe whilst the girls did what women do and went shopping for clothes. Therefore the rest of the afternoon and evening was un-newsworthy, and we returned to the Chethalli homestay for our last night.

Next installment - Incredible India the Last - Snooty Ooty!