Wayward thoughts in this cataleptic winter

These winters of no discontent

In December and January I will not leave Bangalore, for I cannot have enough of this gentle chill in a cocktail with the warm sun, capped by this clean blue sky. The dreariness of the daily commute is somewhat muted, and sitting in the back seat of my car I can laugh at the traffic than rage at it, with music in my ears, which this week has been Metallica and Neil Young and Feist.

And so my thoughts regarding the new posters that are splashed on my path to work are more charitable than they'd have been in another month. Sreeramulu is again elected, and his victory is not a matter of who won, but what won. With him, several things have won again, and the things that are defeated are beaten to near-burial. But I am far from Bellary, and those who elected him took what he gave and gave what he wanted, and they are at peace with each other, and these thoughts of someone like me, for whom politics is no more than a piece for conversation, are a bitching waste of time.

Thinking so, on a morning this week, I decided to join the posters, and welcome with them the triumphant hon'ble re-elected Member of the Legislature to Bangalore. And I quickly realized that this man from Bellary owns Bangalore significantly more than I, and I can no more welcome him than he can tolerate me and the category of the electorate I belong to. So now I see the posters in respectful silence, and I am not at all peeved at myself, or at the world, thanks to this lovely December.

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The don's den

With such thoughts regarding the state and strongmen, I watched The Godfather today, Saturday, for the third time in my life. The Godfather died outside in the sun, while playing with his grandson, and with his death Michael was free to take the revenge the Godfather had in a brilliant move put on pause, having pledged with enemy dons that he wouldn't be the first seeker of vengeance. Until the end, in every meeting in his dark study Don Corleone had shown no love for the drugs business, each time he was offered it, whereas he held out a whole lot of love for his family and, among them, the most partial love for Michael. I was moved and inspired by the Godfather, and when he danced with his daughter at her wedding I envied him even, for Don Corleone was so much a man, and such a father, and such a don, and he was so noble in the way he moved and spoke and danced, and in the way he gestured to people with his hands.

How is life in the inner coterie of the Bellary brothers? How moving a movie would their life make? But the brothers aren't the silent type like Corleone, if you consider the shouting they've done in the legislature, and the gross abuses they've traded on the floor of the house. They cannot have a Brando or an Al Pacino playing any of them, even in an Anglicized version. Still, I wonder, how deep does a meeting get in the study of Janardhana Reddy? Would it move my heart, watching the play of long loyalties and the alleged honor among men in his business? Would I draw inspiration from some part of it?

Such wild thoughts! But they say that it is normal for the mind to be choppy on a day like this, when the moon is in eclipse.

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End note

On the street before my house, the magnolia are falling. They were a flaming red in November, thick in a canopy over their tree. Now when I step out for a stroll at night they squelch beneath my feet and pull at my soles, like they want me on the ground with them. After I pass the tree the fragrance from my neighbor's sampigé is so sharp, I look to see the smell that has hit my nose. Every day.

The moon has been out and about all week.

death in the evening

His skin was the color of night, washed down a shade by the moon. I’d been reading, using a clip-on LED light, and I raised my head when Sujaya exclaimed in a way I’ve never heard from her before. Did he rush across the highway? Was he loitering in its middle? I saw him just when the taxi went into him, the driver cursing in his breath. The moments after that are a daze. Did the driver back up? What motion caused the multiple knocks I heard? I got off and rushed to the rear, expecting the body there, run over, and lingered a few moments looking around in the dim of the tail lights; but he was lying ahead of the car, curled up, foetal, and the volume of rich blood in the pool of light was disproportionate to his emaciated body. He was young. A soiled green piece of underwear over his privates was his entire clothing.

It happened on the Bangalore–Hassan HighwayVehicles began to stop, and a driver in whites called an ambulance, and some young men urged me to tie a cloth round the wound. A portion of the cloth, a cleaning cloth that my driver handed me, fell over his eyes and the crowd recoiled and asked me testily to fold it back. Except for that moment of tension, they spoke in hushed tones. But the truth is that neither they nor I knew how to handle a man who had bled like that, and I wondered as I fumbled with him whether I was getting anywhere. When a burst of fresh blood gurgled from his mouth I knew I’d lost him, even if he was still warm. I lost my mind as well, I think, because I tried to feel his pulse in the pit of his chest. There was a thick film of sweat in it.

The ambulance wasn't coming, so we took him to the hospital in a rickshaw that has stopped to inquire. We were four men in that little thing. The ambulance passed us when we were two minutes from the hospital, its beacon and its siren both surprisingly loud.

The attendant brought out the wheelchair first, took it back upon the rickshaw driver’s advice, and brought out the stretcher. He and I fumbled with the body, and he announced as we loaded it on the stretcher that the man was dead. The doctor on night duty came from a ward somewhere and he too confirmed that the man was “no more.” I went out and sat on a plastic chair. After a few moments I called the rickshaw driver from the corner in which he hovered and paid him and asked him to go. A policeman arrived and asked me and the taxi driver to go with him to the police station. The doctor asked me to take a shot and then changed his mind and asked me if I have any cuts or bruises and said it is okay, I don’t need a shot, and so I washed and went out with the policeman who was alert but also at ease. The driver followed me. He was so struck by fear he was pooped. I noticed that his uniform whites were as spotless as when we had started the journey.

The Inspector in the police station was already reporting our accident over the phone to his boss. He asked the driver a question without cupping the phone, and, when the driver took a second longer to reply he shouted the question at him but cooled after that. He was rough when he asked him for his driver’s license but he changed his tone immediately after I interrupted and told him that the driver was a good man and that he was not driving fast, and we all saw the man too late.

The inspector’s boss sent a message asking that I should call him. He consoled me after I finished the story: “Accidents happen. You did well to bring the man into a hospital, and not run away.” I told him I had to go to Hassan right away, because I had a wedding to attend tomorrow morning. He sent a separate message asking his men to arrange another cab for me.

I hesitated to give my contact details to his staff. The hall was brightly lit, but in the lock-up cells it was dark. One of the two cells was for women and was empty. In the cell for men, the prisoners sat on the floor with their legs spread out before them, bored and lost. They had done a dacoity some days ago and had been quickly apprehended. Two children who seemed like prisoners huddled outside the lock-up in a corner, shivering in the warm night, though they didn’t seem afraid, only they were huddled too tight in the corner. They had clear faces, fair, and they looked at no one, and none of the many policemen were alert to them either.

The office-maid was talkative. “That man was a thikla,” she said of the dead man, meaning he was deranged. “And he has no relatives.” That was the assurance the men on the highway had given our driver. “Go to the police station,” they had told him. “He has no relatives, and he is loose.” He had followed my rickshaw into town in his car.

When I continued toward Hassan, in another cab, I asked someone if I shouldn’t go back and inquire about his funeral. “No need,” I was assured. “The government will take care of that.” I wondered if I’d be able to sleep, but I shouldn’t have worried because I was sleeping even when the harsh morning light had flooded my hotel room, until eight o’clock.

I didn’t tell anyone at the wedding of what happened, fearing they’d see an omen in it. I’m still arranging my emotions of that night, sifting them to see how much was a show of grief, how much was real, and what kind of a man I was in that incident.

another look at that divine smile called Hassan

The stadium in Hassan TownHassan appears abruptly on NH48, without an arch, without an announcement, with no landmark at all. Arriving from Bangalore, you turn right from the highway to go into town. The train delivers you into the same street, which is named the Bangalore-Mangalore Road. You cannot yet fly in—birds still command the airspace over land allotted for an airport. No one is missing an airport in Hassan. There is a wish for a direct train to Bangalore, about which if some people are vocal they are speaking in whispers.

Hassan is a quiet town. You must count out the recent aberration.

The street runs into the town square with the typical buildings of small-town India flanking it. For a town which is the headquarters of the district which covers the Hoysala heartland, there isn’t anywhere a serious attempt at architecture. But there is a strange, becoming air to the town, to the wide main street, and the pleasing, sprawling town-square to which a statue of the great Dr. Ambedkar points from the government offices, without actually meaning to.

In the line of sight of that illustrious man, a leisurely policeman sometimes guides traffic which mostly manages itself.

Bars line the street, some of which open at six in the morning after having closed at eleven last night. I have watched a show in a movie theater in their midst. There were enough mosquitoes for each person to have their own private swarm to torment them, but when the movie commenced and the speakers burst into peak-volume, no one cared about the mosquitoes: the star was Shriya, and with Rajanikanth’s voice at its desired depth, everyone put up with every suffering, ignored even the smell of sweat, and the moist heat and cool that blew from hefty fans on the walls.

Hassan is as agrarian now as in the time of the Hoysala—it was agriculture that powered the art and architecture of his golden age. Today’s farmers may be seen in town, in shops that sell farm implements, fertilizers, and tractors and tillers. The furrows on their faces seem to me the deep lines of fortitude, and I have admired their inner and exterior strength. They are often in Hotel Hassan Ashhok with executives from Pepsi and such, who are helping them to grow potatoes for chips, and I have marveled at their enterprise.

Over dinner last week, Dr. Nagaraj, soil scientist with Hassan’s Krishi Vignyana Kendra, spoke with me regarding the challenges before Hassan’s farmers. He had returned from a field trip where a farmer had narrated his story before his wife, while his mother tended a buffalo nearby. Last year, he’d pledged his wife’s thali, and his mother’s, to raise money to grow potato, and the crop failed. “What shall I do now—anna,” he had cried. Nagaraj argues that there is no solution for the farmer save a strong intervention by the government.

I don’t understand how, but they enjoy this risky business in Hassan. You can tell that in the district stadium, where in the morning people walk and jog to radio broadcasts on the best methods to grow ragi, sunflower, rice. When I was there last month, the topic was uddinabele. Last Thursday, I listened to the incredible medicinal benefits muttidare-muni holds in every cell, and was filled with remorse at having so relentlessly teased that angel-shrub all through my childhood. The young in the stadium are unto themselves, and I cannot tell if the elders listen, but several of those I pass speak of gains from this crop and losses on another, of buying a tiller or bolstering a bund, of loaning some pipes and losing two valves.

McAuliffe is General Manager of Allana Coffee, and lives on its campus south of Hassan. At 70, after decades of sifting and processing coffee, he is a revered expert. Right now, he is short of labor at his coffee curing plant, but where are all the young going? “The women to the factories; the men to construction work.” But manufacturing jobs are not so many: Himatsingke Seide have employed several hundred women in their new factory in the Hassan Growth Centre. The National Textile Corporation has established a textile SEZ before Himatsingke. But two is not a large number, and in the remaining vast area only a few medium-sized factories have surfaced, for cold storage, automobile servicing, granite processing, hollow-block manufacturing.

Increased construction activity is visible, though: A new “high-tech” bus stand, almost ready; a spruced up train station; new government colleges for engineering, medicine, and agriculture; new hospitals; expansion and diversification among existing educational institutions; a large campus for training for the transport corporation; an institution for biofuels; windmills over low hills in the distance; and fresh activity at ISRO MCF. All these, happening simultaneously, suggest imminent change.

Is growth finally coming to town? There’s a place in Hassan where you can go for answers.

The Hasanamba Temple is on a spacious quadrangle in the middle of a tight maze of small shops and old houses, some pretty and well preserved. The deity is Parvathi, manifest as a hutta in this temple, and in the mind’s eye of those gifted with such sight, she is smiling. So she is Hasanamba, the smiling Goddess, and this hometown of hers is Hassan, after her divine smile. Her darshan is allowed for a two-week period once yearly, around Deepavali. Tradition has it that while closing the temple after Deepavali, they leave before her some rice, flowers, and a lit lamp. Next year, when they open, the rice is hot and ready to eat, the lamp is burning, and on the flowers there’s morning dew. Some say that perhaps miracle of the rice happened only in the virtuous past.

The Hassanamba Temple’s twin is in the compound, whose deity is Siddeswara, carved on a rock face, into which ten centuries of worship have infused a divinity whose weight is in the air. The rock face is plastered with a good number of moist flowers, and when they dry they fall, each in its time. When I entered, an old man had squatted before the deity, was speaking to it. Would something he’d planned succeed? Twice the flower had fallen on Siddeswara’s left, and the man wouldn’t leave without an amen: “So many times you have blessed me; you have given me everything; what happened now?” I closed my eyes for my prayer, and afterward, anxiously avoided seeing what fell, and where—one fall would damn, or delight us both, simultaneously. I left; his monologue continued.

Without new industries arriving, Hassan will stay a mere bed for a night or a place for a meal for those in transit to Belur and Halebid, or the coffee belt, the ghats, or Shravanabelagola. Even emperor Chandragupta came by Hassan, but only for sanyasa. What is it in the air now that signals that Hassan is astir, and will draw people who will stoke great enterprise in it?

They may know at Cafe Coffee Day, who have advanced until the twenty-seventh kilometer to Hassan. When will they arrive in the town square?

Hassan's railway station

trifling with history in Halebid

Two minutes before arriving in Halebid a farm came up, its house painted in pink and green fluorescent colors completely foreign to this region, but our eyes were drawn beyond the startling walls of the house to a mound shaped like the smooth top of a giant sarcophagus fifty meters behind the house. The mound, we went in and saw, is indeed a grave, a burial performed by nature, of what would once have been a temple, which you can guess from the pieces of granite sticking out of the mound: capitals, pieces of friezes, broken lintel, sections of columns. Some pieces are carved all round, some on one or two faces, and all of them are of the class of the Hoysala.

The mound is overgrown with grass, prickly and hard now in this hot, dry season. There are short trees over it and around, and in their shade you can take relief offered by an occasional whisper of a breeze. What is the right action regarding the dead thing that is buried there? Exhume it and put together the members that have been smashed by man and crushed by nature? Put back into the garbha one of the many idols that are strewn everywhere in this capital of the Hoysala, and consecrate it, and begin prayers? And have the Nikon and the Canon and the Leica arrive with their owners to cock a look at this photogenic art of nine centuries ago? Or is it best that bygones be bygones, and so leave alone the grass and the trees and the teasing breeze and let them soothe the body and revive the soul of the rare visitor in this small, private property?

The owner thought we were from "the department" and wouldn't change his reading even when we assured him that we weren't, wishing not to worry him. But he wanted us to be from the department, with the hope that there lurked an omen in our visit. He has arranged a daughter's marriage for later in the month.

We went to the quieter Jain temples behind the Hoysaleswara temple, where the carvings are fewer, and the austerity of the Jain religion prevails. Before Shanthinatha, an old lady with her saree and blouse rumpled, her hair mussed up, swayed as if in a trance, and sang with the great Meera's fervor. Her song wasn't melodious, yet it was pleasant. But she didn't know the thirthankara before her was Shanthinatha. Another visitor told her whose statue this was, and also that the next temple is for Adinatha, and next to that, facing the main gate, for Parshwanatha. In all the time we were there no more than ten persons visited, and two of them arrived with us, and retired to a corner and the man laid his hand on the woman's lap, and she cut his nails.

The Jain temples in Halebid

Prayers are offered daily to the three thirthankaras by the two Jain families in the village at the feet of the temple terrace. When they were new they'd have been terribly important, with Queen Shanthala their patron, and the completion of the Parshwanatha temple coinciding with a great victory for King Vishnuvardhana against a northern enemy.

The manicure done, the couple left along with us, only a few steps ahead.

The State has no doubt regarding the benefits that it can pick from the past. To add color and shine to itself, it has installed a huge hoarding before Halebid's Hoysaleshwara Temple with pictures on it of the principal political actors in the ruling party, and of their favored guru, all arranged with due attention to protocol. The State recently celebrated the 500th anniversary of the ascension of the great Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara, whose portrait is alongside the other pictures, but quite apart from them. Krishnadeveraya’s dynasty assumed power some distance north, in Vijayanagara (Hampi), soon after the last Hoysala fell to the Turk. I tried to take a picture of the sweeping view of the Temple complex, but the hoarding hogged the foreground.

Down the street from the temple, a white lady had discovered a better opportunity. Under the noonday sun, in the summer's heat, Halebid’s women had lined the entire embankment on the town’s side of the Dwarasamudra tank that the Hoysala built nine-hundred years ago. They were doing their daily chore of washing the clothes of all the ones at home. There were enough colors and depth and width to challenge all the cameras on the white lady’s person—she had three of them, I think. Her only problem was the harsh noon-light, but she seemed to know how to handle it, so intense was her focus. I wanted that picture, too, but I hadn’t the courage to raise my camera at women who had lifted their dress to the knee, and were quite wet. So I went a distance on the bund and took aim with my Leica X1 with its 24 mm fixed lens and got no color and no story in any of my many shots.


I turned left and a vision of the splendor of the place when it was a capital appeared to me under the blazing sun. There, across this lake, on the promontory, the thin veneer of trees dissolved to reveal the Hoysaleswara Temple and, behind it, the Jain temples, and next to the Jain temples, by the lake shore again, the Kedareshwara Temple. Behind the temples, near the Royal Bath, the Hoysala's Grand Palace floated in rarefied air, but the man-made lake that lay before me began to glitter and I blinked and blinked and fell back to my time.

a coffee-table story of Angadi

There isn’t an outlet that serves a decent cup of coffee in Malnad. The little shops that make it use instant-coffee powder; but if you are desperate for good coffee, knock on the door of the coffee-planter. His woman will serve it with a fluff of froth with a wee bit of powder on top, in a cup larger than for espresso, smaller than for cappuccino. Fine South Indian coffee, the very best cafe au lait in the world. The coffee planter is a friendly guy, and immensely hospitable. Go on, knock boldly. It is possible he’ll also treat you to some akki-rotti. The real problem is how to reciprocate on his scale in your turn.

That is how you get good coffee in Malnad, where almost all Indian coffee is grown. Of course, the planter would rather spend the evening with you, to share with you some good whisky.

But it has been a bad winter for him. It rained on consecutive days for a week in December and ruined a promising crop across the belt; weeds have sprung at the feet of coffee and the berries cannot be gleaned (on a decent scale) from the chaos on the ground; in the meantime the rain has confused the plants and they have sprouted white blossoms in odd patterns and on random patches of plants. The planters are woebegone in all the three coffee districts, Coorg and Hassan and Chikmagalur.

Last week I went to Angadi from Sakleshpur, arriving where the narrow road splits into three, at which point you know you have arrived even if you miss the unmissable large sign: there is a stone tablet at the base of a large dried tree on the edge of the cross, rooting the place to antiquity. If you have come looking for Angadi, your turn is left, and you go a hundred meters up in the shade of the line of trees that flank you, and you come upon the mounds that you've come for, which hold the relics from the time of the founding of the Hoysala dynasty, from ten centuries ago.

The first Hoysala with detailed records to his name was Nripakama. He ruled from Angadi. He began a mere hill chief, but he packed the audacity to attack the Chola, the Chalukya, and a powerful neighbor, all of whom defeated him. But he displayed such valor as to win respect in his region, and yet not ruffle the emperors of the north and the south. The defeats did not deter him. Soon he attacked Banavase, the capital of the Kadambas down south from him in the plains. He won. By 1047, the year of his death, he was lord of an area large enough to be called a kingdom and commanded an army of hardy people, and both fell to his son Vinayaditya to extend.

Vinayaditya ruled a long time, so his son and grandsons were martially active with him while he ruled. Vinayaditya’s son Ereyanga, together with Ereyanga’s son Vishnuvardhana, went far north and torched the city of Dhara for the Chalukya, whose feudatory the Hoysala had become. Ereyanga would scourge three more cities, all before he himself became king. By the time Vinayaditya died, father and son and grandson had established a good sized kingdom, the nucleus of the major empire that the kingdom was to become within the next one-hundred years. Vinayaditya moved the capital away from Angadi on these ghats to Dorasamudra in the plains, a short distance away.

Why did the Hoysala's sword—and the torch—travel only so far? His nemesis would arrive from such a distance. Did our peninsula, sealed by mountains, box our heroes within it? Were they denied the big bold dreams the grand terrain of Central Asia gave the Turkic men?



In Angadi, the monuments are small, and attest that what happened here was only a beginning. There are rises all round, hemmed in by coffee plantations. On the first rise I saw a modern temple and turned back. In a short while I was before two rises on either side of me. The one on the right had three Hindu temples on it, on which men from Hampi are working to a plan to restore them in three years. The rise on the left had a Jain basdi on it, its restoration quite advanced, the thirthankaras already standing in its garbha. Perhaps there are big plans for this small temple, now in the charge of Dharmasthala: the plan for this temple also extends three years.

If you’ve come searching for Angadi, you have the story of Sala in mind. The men on this site didn’t know where Sala performed his feat. A schoolboy who now tagged along with me didn’t know either. I drove back down the street and continued further, to the school, on another rise, broad like a short wide table. They were teaching on a Saturday, and in the classroom which I passed the teacher asked what happened in a substance (I didn’t hear the name) if four electrons fused with a single electron. His class gave him a rousing answer, all in chorus. In the next room I saw a dozen computers, of HCL, new under plastic hoods, and thought, maybe now, after ten centuries, the mind of even the commoner in Malnad is no more boxed, not by sea, nor by mountain, and who among these young—with the world open and inviting—might soar to the heights of a Chandrashekar or an Amartya Sen?



The teachers didn’t know either, where Sala had performed his brave feat. But they were helpful. One went into the library and returned with the monumental Kannada Vishwakosha, and found for me the short entry on Angadi. We read it, but it didn’t tell where it happened. Where did Sala kill the tiger? They directed me back to the new temple, the one I’d first skipped.



It is new only on the outside. The deities in it are female, with round, mother’s faces. They are of mud, and are ten centuries old. Sometime in their life someone has glazed their faces into a smooth-china finish, any woman’s envy. The rakshasa’s head is at the feet of Vasanthaparameshwari in the center; next to her, Varahi is on her haunches, and she has a sow’s sweet face—the only such face on a goddess that I've seen.

They are vanadevate-yaru, goddesses of the forest. In their early life they sat in the open, with the jungle canopy their shelter, and this, when it was an open spot, according to the priest, was the gurukul of Sala, where his Jain guru threw him the staff, and the exhortation, Hoy! Sala!

With that staff Sala killed the tiger that had come upon them, and gave birth to a name, and a dynasty.