Ooty: a sad, old queen

The sky was a deep uncompromising blue, completely cloudless. From the top of the hill I had climbed, the world was open sky and wave after wave of terraced hills. For a city slick, Ooty is still a queen. The panoramic view from the hilltop held me in thrall for several blessed minutes before I remembered the Ooty I knew; and more disturbing, before I got a glimpse of the many old and new Ootys my companion knows.

The view may be spectacular, Ooty may still be a queen, but she is a sad old queen with too many names. Like many old queens, she has a chequered past; skeletons spill out of her closet. The woman standing by me as I looked at the sweep of hills could have been this dispossessed queen in flesh and blood. She’s a Toda woman in her fifties, dressed in a traditional stark white shawl embroidered with red and black buffalo horns, hill flowers, and even, perhaps, some of the lost tales of her tribe.

Her name is Paksin. Sin, she tells me, means gold in the Toda language.

Paksin and her husband live in a traditional Toda hut; there are three of these curved huts in this mund, the Toda village on top of the Ooty Botanical Gardens. Two of the huts are homes, and the third, which sits alone at some distance enclosed by a low brick wall, is a temple. A government-type sign stuck on the brick wall says “No inside permitted”. The government is everywhere in and around the mund. It’s there in the caricature plaster-of-Paris Toda standing like a desolate saint in his grotto on the hillside as you make your way to the mund. He has wisps of black wool stuck to his chin; his back is hunched as if he has not quite learnt to walk upright yet, so wonderfully primitive is he. And once you’re in the mund, the government’s there in the bleak barrack-like houses that have been built for the villagers. The two ‘real’ Toda huts are for tourists to see. Paksin and her husband are Todas who live ‘like Todas’ so the government can preserve and protect and sell heritage.

It’s not tourist season, and most of the Todas in the mund have gone to a wedding. Paksin takes me into her hut, and we sit on the single cot there and talk. Unlike many of the other munds, she tells me, there’s not much land here that has been allotted to the Todas for cultivation. At any rate, she and her husband do not have any. She looks toward the open door from where we can see the framed stretch of hills. “They gave it all away,” she says. “All our lands, all the slopes you can see from here. For an anna, even half an anna.” She’s talking of colonial times, but she makes it sound like it happened yesterday. For a minute I can almost see John Sullivan, ‘founder’ of Ooty, discovering the ‘Neilgherry’ hills with his friends, dreaming of sanatoriums and lakes, stone houses and churches, in a cool air almost like home. I can almost see Paksin’s pastoral ancestors, considering the swathes of forested land about them, taking it for granted because there’s so much of it, enough for everyone. No one at the time — not the most benevolent or visionary of the Englishmen, nor the shrewdest of the Todas — could have had an inkling of the melancholy that would henceforth weigh down this mountain air.

But Paksin and I cannot stay too long in the times of our ancestors’ follies, innocence and defeat. The present — personified by two ubiquitous creatures, the government and the rich outsider — intrudes into our conversation.

Paksin has four daughters and two sons. Not one of them finished school; and not one of them works the land. Two of them are tailors; the rest work at any job they can get, in the hundreds of small shops scattered across the hills for example. Her husband is sick, she doesn’t know with what. The government has been of no help with her children’s schooling or jobs or her husband’s illness, she says. All they have done is built the houses in the mund.

Maybe Paksin is beginning to feel guilty about this sorrowful litany of complaints. Maybe she’s remembered she’s supposed to be showing visitors the Toda way of life. But strangely, the ‘cultural’ details she chooses to share with me make up another roll call of deprivations. Women are not allowed to step into the Toda temple; in fact, they are not allowed to leave the enclosure around the hut from the front gate. They have to use the side or the back to keep up this tradition. The Todas wore all kinds of silver and bead jewellery at one time; but now those skills have more or less died “with her grandfather”. The outsiders, she says, design them, make them and sell them as souvenirs.

Paksin’s husband does not say a word to me. He sits outside the hut, a doleful old man trying to warm up in the sunshine. He’s not exactly old; he’s just retired from his job as a gardener in the Botanical Gardens. I try to imagine him at work as I make my way down from the mund through the Gardens. This isn’t difficult to do. Not far from the place where I admired the dragon tree from the Canary Islands and the monkey-puzzle tree from Australia on my way up, there’s a small pond, and several gardeners are hard at work on the borders of foliage. Keeping them company is a plaster-of-Paris crocodile lying at the edge of the pond, its jaws wide open in devilish glee. And to balance this jungli specimen there is a statue standing in the middle of the pond like an overweight and badly dressed goddess, pouring imaginary water, perhaps the blessings of civilization imagined by officialdom.

But on the road leading away from the town, there is a trendier sign of contemporary civilization: a board that says Toda Café. The government may be dull and thick-skinned, but only the rich outsider, the real centre of power in these hills, can set up a Toda Café where there’s no room for Todas. It’s a multi-cuisine restaurant with five-star prices. But the Continental, Mughlai and Chinese food is served with the “warm hospitality of the Todas — the tribals the Nilgiris are renowned for”.

Later that evening, I went for a long walk on the outskirts of Ooty. The sun was about to set; I could hear cowbells somewhere behind me. Ooty remained a palimpsest of loss and greed, but for the moment it was wearing its beautiful face again. Just then, the cowherds and their cows caught up with me. There was some discussion among the three cowherds before the oldest asked me if I was trying to decide where to buy land. I assured him I was only admiring his hills. We then walked down the road in companionable silence as the sky turned dark and the hills turned a deep mysterious blue.