My Southern Sojourn

My Southern sojourn 

I had never visited southern India until the age of 23. This changed overnight when my Jewish boss, all of 30 years old himself, called me one day at 3 pm to say something like 'go to Madras and call me from there. Thus began my Southern sojourn. 

He did not care if this meant taking a night train from Ahmedabad to Mumbai and then Dadar-Madras express or Madra Mail, all without a reservation. 

He did not care about the social life of a young man or the fact that I had a steady girlfriend. Reflecting on this now, I recognize that this is how you develop people, push them to perform no matter what the circumstances are. 

My job was to buy handloom clothes for our garment business from southern India. We had two agents, Sashikant bhai in Cananore and Mr. Menon in Madras. These gentlemen taught me everything about the handloom trade and became my gurus. We paid 50 paise a meter as a commission to them. 

The frequent travels to unknown places I had never heard of changed many things in my life. A wider world suddenly burst open before me. These travels became my compass and beacon. 

For two years, with painful regularity, I visited towns like Erode, Salem, Pochampalli, Cannanore, and many others besides Madras (now Chennai), Bangalore, and Hyderabad. I reconciled that this is how I was to earn my livelihood, learn real-life lessons, and fight my way ahead.

Journey by Dadar-Madras express was an adventure for a young lad. I had just then learned to read English books so my two companions for 36 hours' journey in the first-class compartment - non AC- were Arthur Hailey and James Hadley Chase. I looked forward to the rice plate served at Manmad station and developed a taste for curd rice, sambhar rice, Idli-Vada, filter coffee on these journeys. 

I enjoyed the facility of a shower in the first-class compartment, a relic of the British era. I would then hang my towel outside the compartment window. It will flutter like an Indian flag merrily all the way to Raichur.

I started staying at the Gujarati Samaj in George town in the old part of Madras. Later, as my business picked up, I started staying at Hotel Dasaprakasha, then Hotel Woodlands, and yet later at the Taj, Coromandel. The first time I ever slept in an actual bed was in Hotel Dasprakash in Madras. At home, I always slept on the floor. 

I learned the joy of drinking on train journeys during these trips. The bearer attached to the first-class came in jauntily by 5 pm with ice and soda and snacks. He would provide a quarter bottle of whiskey or rum in grateful anticipation of decent tips at the end of the evening. 

Among the Indian states, there is no better place to drink than Southern India. Bars are clean, prices cheap, and food hot. There was this ‘Ayesha’ bar across Hyderabad station that gave me the luxury of drinking till the first whistle of Hyderabad-Bombay mail at 10.30 pm. The kindly owner usually packed a biryani dinner for me to relish abroad the train.

Hotel Victoria in Bangalore had a garden bar, and I always stayed there. After a grueling day of traveling to interior Karnataka in a three-wheeler to buy handloom clothes, I would be in the hotel garden before 6.30 pm waiting for white-coated bearers to start the service. There were no TVs in those days, so no one wanted to go back to rooms. The drinking continued till past midnight.

One of the most fascinating places I discovered was a lobby bar at Dasprakash Hotel in Cannanore in Kerala. The bar gave a fantastic view of the ocean and the view was as intoxicating as drinks. Once when the air tickets were not available and railways were on strike, I had to take a 39 hours bus journey from Cannanore Bombay. The barman thoughtfully packed a basket containing half bottle of whiskey, two sodas, an opener, two glasses, and an omelet sandwich. The journey to Bombay became much bearable with that basket. I recall I carried 20,000 meters of handloom clots on top of the bus because of the transport strike.

So how did my tryst with Southern India shape me? 

I learned to strike a conversation with strangers. I remember getting in an argument over something silly with retired General Cariappa, who was in the next compartment. He nearly court marshaled me for my affront.

I learned to use a western bath and toilet, how to tip waiters, and when not to, how to negotiate with cloth vendors, how to find out a meal in Madras that did not serve the only mounds of rice.

These trips honed my survival instincts and transformed me into a man with skills. It made a man out of a boy, developed resilience for rough travel, made me hold my alcohol responsibly. 

After all the tripping & falling I did in my business there, these travels taught me how to get up and keep going. 

Such was my Southern sojourn.