The suburbs of Trichy, as seen from the Rock Fort Temple
It wasn't tricky to get to Trichy, just time-consuming. Trichy, whose full name Tiruchirappalli is never used by anyone outside of the railway bureaucracy, is an interesting and bustling town in the central south, and its sights were well worth the severe shuddering of the bus from Pondicherry.
Trichy's two main attractions are the Rock Fort Temple and Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple. The first one is interesting because it's perched on top of a huge hill of smooth stone, dominating the town centre much more convincingly than the nearby Church of Mother Lourdes (which would otherwise be the centrepiece of the town); and the second is famous for its huge gopurams (the pyramid-shaped towers that form the gates into Dravidian temples) and seven sets of concentric walls, all of which are open to non-Hindus except the very last.
The Rock Fort Temple
The Rock Fort Temple was fairly impressive, but after Golconda a rock fort has got to be pretty outstanding to merit more than a mention: the 437 numbered steps to the summit were more interesting for the groups of pilgrims and tired school children resting there than for anything else, but the view from the top was well worth the climb. Trichy lay around with its slums and sanctuaries, its sewers and shouting salesmen, and in the distance the huge gopurams of Sri Ranganathaswamy soared above the palm trees. If it hadn't been for the inanely invasive conversations of the stoned pilgrims hanging around the inner sanctum, it would have been a glorious place in which to sit and contemplate, but in India you simply can't expect peace, so I talked total rubbish back.
In fact, I have formulated a foolproof plan for dealing with confused and confusing individuals. They say something to me and I fail to understand, so I smile and quote song lyrics back to them. They look slightly fazed, but undaunted try something else, and back flies another lyric. This can go on for quite some time, and eventually they decide you're worse off than them, and wander off. The best thing is that they always think you're being really sociable, and compared to the usual brush-off, I am. Indians, I just love 'em.
Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple
The gopurams of Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple in Tiruchirappalli – beautiful but totally unpronounceable
Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple is another place where peace is but a memory. With seven concentric walls, 21 gopurams and a total area of 2.5 square kilometres, the temple shocks with its scale alone, and the fact that the biggest gopuram on the outside wall is a monstrous 73m high makes it hard to miss, and worth not missing.
Walk through this gopuram and you'll discover a whole city crammed into the narrow streets. There are bazaars, houses, election rallies, beggars, cows, dust, sun, more gopurams, smartly dressed women, barber shops, dhoti-clad men, flies, rickshaws, loud music, buses, deafening speeches: everywhere there are people, people, people, all doing something, even if it's just sitting on the wall, watching the world going by and spitting out half-chewed pan.
A magnificent gopuram at Sri Ranganathaswamy
We engaged the services of a temple guide, and it turned out to be well worth the money. With it being such a huge complex you could wander around for ages without really knowing what on earth was going on – even with a guide it was far from clear exactly what everyone was doing with their coconut-smashing and water-sprinkling, but at least we managed to glean some information. The complex is dedicated to Vishnu, so there are plenty of statues of deities like Rama, Krishna, Hanuman and other figures from the Ramayana, as well as characters from the legends of Vishnu's other avatars, and everywhere seems to have a little quirk built in.
For example, there's a niche in the wall halfway down the western side of the seventh temple, and if you shout your name there – or, more accurately, if the guide shouts an Inglish version of your name there – it echoes around the long corridor and is supposed to bring you good fortune. And there's a little stone slab inside the sixth wall with two footprints and, in front of them, five little holes; if you can put your feet on the prints, stick the five fingers of your right hand into the holes, and lean over to your left until you can see the statue at the end of the corridor, then you'll go to paradise. Having tried it, it's probably just a way of screening those who are too stoned from reaching nirvana... and there are plenty of people wandering aimlessly around the temple who couldn't even manage the five-finger trick, let alone the leaning.
Ancient Tamil writing on the walls of Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple
Take the resident fruitcake, who spotted us round the back of the sixth temple wall and decided we would be good fodder for a monologue. Staring through his one good eye, the other swirling in the murky milk of cataracts, he started an oration in Tamil that not only meant nothing to us, it meant nothing to our guide.
'Is he mad?' Howard asked our guide.
'No, his mind just changed,' the guide replied, shaking his head knowingly.
'Too many drugs?' I asked.
'There are many ways to change your mind,' replied our guide with a look in his eye that totally failed to clarify the issue.
Meanwhile the madman was warming to his theme, even as people gathered around us to laugh at his meanderings through the inner recesses of his confused mind. His monologue invited discussion, so I broke in with a wave. 'Words are flowing off like endless rain into a paper cup,' I said in the same way I would have said, 'Let's do lunch next Thursday,' and for a split second he seemed to understand.
A colourful door in Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple
But unfazed, he continued to rant, filling up the paper cup until it spilt. 'Never mind,' I said, 'a soap impression of his wife which he ate and donated to the National Trust.' For a moment Lennon's insights seemed to strike a chord and he looked slightly dazed1: but whatever he had discovered wasn't the answer, so he launched an angry tirade against something that obviously bothered him a lot. 'It's possible,' I replied, 'but I am the egg man, they are the egg men, I am the walrus, goo-goo-ba-joob,' and he snapped to a close, staring at me as if I'd just asked if he knew any good burger joints in town. I wobbled my head as we left him holding up pieces of half-eaten coconut and shaking them menacingly at the sky.
The other sights of the temple – amazingly carved pillars with clever designs that looked like both elephants and bulls depending on how you looked at them, with a few Kama Sutra carvings thrown in for good measure – were equally bemusing, and all around were bodies sprawled on the floor, though whether the inactivity was a result of mind-bending herbal remedies or a lack of effort, I couldn't tell. Whatever the reality, Sri Ranganathaswamy was a blast.
Drinking in Tamil Nadu
The Hindu gods are quite beautiful, even when reclining
So was Friday night. In time-honoured fashion we elected to pop out for a quick beer after our evening meal, ending up in the Bar Paradise, a downstairs cubby-hole where the only lights available came in bottles and the atmosphere reeked of schoolboy rule-breaking. As I've mentioned before, Tamil Nadu is fairly unimpressed with the concept of alcohol (as in most of India, marijuana and alcohol have the reverse roles that they do in Europe), so they make you drink it behind firmly shuttered windows and doors, preferably underground, and definitely not beyond 11pm.
The three bottles of Haywards 5000, then, went straight to my head, seeing as I haven't been drinking regularly enough to build up any tolerance. The conversation migrated to include a local Indian called Rajiv, who proved to be an interesting and very well-spoken find. A law advocate, he was a Muslim who was in love with a Hindu girl, but the affair was proving to be almost impossible to maintain, as the scars of the 50 stitches dotted around Rajiv's body proved. We rode back to our hotel on the back of his gorgeous Enfield, played cards for an hour or so, and he went back to his life of law and lawlessness. Chalk up one more intelligent and witty Indian whom the system is systematically battering into the ground...
1 This is not just an Indian phenomenon. There are plenty of westerners wandering around the continent who have spent too long in an ashram (an ashram being a retreat set up by a guru), and some of these people, though by no means all, can be a real handful. Ashram casualties come in a number of flavours, but they have one binding characteristic: they make no sense whatsoever. Most of them seem to be rejects from the sixties and seventies: indeed, a western writer I met in Chennai said that when he first travelled in India back in the seventies, people never talked about beer, backpacks or beaches, the only topics of conversation were which guru you were going to and which ashrams you'd visited. India in the seventies was evidently full of people who wanted to have their magic pie and eat it.
