Travelling on to Satara, the nearest railway town to Mahabaleshwar. I didn't intend to be here more than a day but the call of cybercafés and a wedding kept me here. The wedding was the first of many I'd be invited to in India. I made two blog entries about today.
Well, I've just lost an hours's typing when this bloody Windows 98 box randomly closed my 'update journal' window so I'm hoping I can recall the nice ways I phrased everything.
I'm in Satara, staying for a couple of days in the faded grandeur of the hotel Rajathadri on Shivaji Circle, Powai Naka, Satara 415001 (tell [don't know the code ] 33818). Satara is the 'county town' for the Taluka ('county') in which Mahabaleshwar nestles. For Rs300, I get a room big enough to contain the lounge of Mycelium Mansion, fresh sheets put on the bed by a flunky as I watch, a clean towel, a new bar of ayurvedic soap, an en-suite, flushing squat toilet and tepid and cold running water!
There's nothing in my diary for this day. I recall being woken at 7.30 by the hotel receptionist to ask if I had any problems. (I did - being woken up un-necessarily to be reminded of the check-out time!) I went back to Kashmiri Arts Palace to say 'au revoir' to Wahid and Mr Shah then to Haji Kwajabhai's shop to say goodbye to him. He and some other men were dealing with some photocopies so he asked me to wait for 5 minutes (which turned into an hour) while they finished their business. It appeared to be some local council business so I was quite interested to hear about it but they couldn't really explain. While I was waiting, I heard some loud Indian/techno music which apparently was part of the start of celebrations for a wedding. I was invited to come in and dance but embarrassment/shyness (and a desire to move on) made me politely refuse.
Having said goodbye to Haji Kwajabhai, I just made the 10.30 bus to Satara. It descended through the usual mind-boggling gradients and overhangs to this town, which appears to be quite big. (It was also a lot hotter than Mahabaleshwar.) I sat in the bus-station, recollecting my thoughts from wherever they'd been shaken to on the journey and then walked across the road to a diner-style hotel for breakfast (idly sambar and a bottle of thums up [the local 'coke']). I also asked around for a cybercafé and a hotel and was directed towards the hotel Rajathadri where I'm now staying.
On the way, I stopped at a street stall and spent 3 hours talking with the man running it. We talked about language origins, local and national politics, the differences between Europe and India and the differences he's seen in Goa since India took over. (While the portugese ruled there [they still owned it until the 1980s, long after the rest of the country was independent], you'd be arrested for spitting or any other such offense and so the place was neat and well-kept. Now anything goes!) He had a lot of time for British rule, saying that it had kept the country mostly on the straight and narrow but that now politics (in fact the whole state apparatus, including the police) is so corrupt that there's probably no cure. Several times I was reminded of western corruption and food waste and the conversation rubbed me emotionally quite a lot.
I wondered why an obviously educated (we could even talk chemistry, albeit he knew no organic chemistry and I've forgotten almost all I knew of inorganic chemistry [I never really saw the fascination in it anyway]) and cultured man was running a street stall - he had so much more potential - and he told me that he was retired from a fairly senior position in a bank but saw sitting at home all day as morally wrong and physically harmful. Anyway, this work was in lieu of the state pension UK folk are used to. He worked there during the day while his older son was at his main job. Then his son would come to work here while he went home to eat and unwind.
Since my hotel was on his way home and he was going there by autorickshaw, he offered to take me but wouldn't take any contribution towards the cost of this journey. I have to say that yet again, I've been wonderfully treated by most folk I've met here. So long as I speak slowly enough, I get along fine and people have spontaneously volunteered help many times.
At the Rajathadri, I asked for direction to a cybercafé and whether I could get some clothes washed (they're being done by hand just now!) and then came here to blog. I ate masala and sadha dosa at a restaurant the owner recommended (it cost under Rs60 rupees for another delicious meal), returned for more blogging and then crawled back to the Rajathadri to sleep.
© (except the blatantly ripped-off bits) Random Bozo 2006