Anglo-Indian Stories
Contributions welcome!!
*Please note:
Material on this page must not be copied, cited, or used in any manner whatsoever, without the written permission of the copyright holder. To obtain permissions or to contact individual authors, please contact the Webmaster
We kick off our Anglo-Indian Stories section, with Audrey Von Lintzgy's hilarious tale of India revisited...A Holiday To Remember. Enjoy!!
A HOLIDAY TO REMEMBER
By
Audrey Von Lintzgy
Shortly after my husband died, my closest friend, Paula, suggested that we have a relaxing holiday together. We had previously organised our own visit to Calcutta and Assam to carry out genealogical research, staying in cheap hotels and with distant relatives. It had turned out to be quite uncomfortable, not exactly restful, but certainly an adventure. This time we decided we would try an organised tour of the Golden Triangle – Delhi, Agra and Jaipur - and treat ourselves to some luxury.
Out of the blue, a mutual friend of ours expressed a wish to accompany us. Beatrice, known as Bea, is Swiss, larger than life, and very loud and Germanic in many ways, but with a great sense of humour. Everyone who heard that she was going to India with us thought that we had completely lost the plot! "She will hate India, they all warned us, and you will fall out with her before the end of the holiday."
On our arrival at Delhi, we found our so-called modern air-conditioned coach awaiting us outside the airport. It had wide-open windows, with rather grey net curtains swaying in the breeze. Not a good sign as far as Bea was concerned! "Huh, air conditioning means the windows are open," she announced loudly, "And the dust comes for free!"
As we each stepped into the bus, our tour guide greeted us with a gracious Salaam and hung a garland of the ubiquitous marigolds round our necks. When it was Bea’s turn, she screamed in a horrified voice: "I’m not having one of those on me – who knows what leper has picked the flowers?"
Paula and I hung our heads and slunk to the back of the bus.
The journey to Jaipur was fascinating and our hotel was modern, built to a traditional Jaipur palace design, with the windows looking inwards onto a formal garden with marble paths, bougainvillea, canna lilies, and tinkling fountains. We were all enchanted. Except for Bea:
"I did not come to India to look at a garden. I have a garden of my own. I want to see the life in the streets."
Our gentle guide offered to exchange his outward-facing room for Bea’s, which she accepted, and she spent half the night and the early morning gazing out onto the street, watching bodies being taken to be burned in the early hours, and elephants going down to the river to be bathed. It seemed she was happy at last.
So we thought.
Our first full day included visits to the exquisitely beautiful pink palaces of Jaipur but after the first one Bea announced that she wanted to go shopping, and that one palace was much like another! The guide promised that we would find time to go to the market later on. Paula and I did our best to stay with Bea and point out interesting sights to her, but she was really only interested in shopping.
That evening, the guide cornered Paula and me and apologised profusely for Bea having attached herself to us, and said that he would try and steer her away from us. We didn’t have the heart to tell him that we had actually brought her along with us.
Our visit to Jaipur coincided with their annual Kite Festival, where everyone took part and there was vicious war between kite flyers, as they each tried to cut the other kite strings with their own. It was a beautiful sight, the kites all in pastel rainbow colours. Bea, of course, decided that she wanted to buy some kites to take home, and the driver was asked if he could stop the bus if he happened to see a kite shop. We stopped and Bea and the guide went to a tiny shack from which she emerged with one hundred kites bundled under her arm. Everyone asked her what on earth she was going to do with them. At the equivalent of 3p each, they were definitely a bargain!
At the Taj Mahal, Bea was singularly unimpressed by this romantic and exotic building, but found a friendly Sikh who insisted on being photographed with her because he liked her blonde hair. Obviously he wished to impress his friends on his return home, as he became quite flirtatious with Bea, who thoroughly enjoyed the attention.
We stayed at a 5-star hotel, very much in the Raj style, with pockmarked old mirrors and lots of cane furniture, dark panelling and large stiff floral arrangements. Bea, who has a flair for floral decoration in a rather flamboyant and natural style, announced loudly in the foyer that if these Indians wanted to attract wealthy Europeans, they should learn to arrange flowers better. A sari-clad Indian lady begged her to show them what she meant, and whisked Bea off to the bowels of the hotel, where she gave the management an impromptu lesson in flower arranging.
We sat outside by the hotel pool, chatting to the other members of our group, and Bea arrived, hot and angry, claiming that Indians had beautiful things to sell and no idea of how to market them. “Where is the Madras cotton?” she demanded. In unison, Paula and I answered: “In Madras!” Bea strode off in a temper, calling out to us: “You two are so sharp, you will cut yourselves….”
Bea found Indian gardens too formal for her taste, with their regimented straight lines of marigolds, and declared that yellow and orange were horrible colours in any garden. "Why don’t Indians learn from Europeans?", she asked. I tried to explain that you could not expect India to look like Europe, and that I would not want to travel all that distance only to find it looking like Switzerland. Huh! she grunted, apparently unconvinced.
In Delhi on the day before our departure, I decided to go to the Imperial Hotel for afternoon tea as this was where my parents had stayed during their honeymoon in 1937. A group of us found rickshaws and off we went to experience afternoon tea as it might have been during the days of the Raj. Bea, however, decided that she had not done enough shopping, and she wandered off into the city on her own.
When we returned to the Hilton, there she was, looking extremely pleased with herself. She had found a shop which sold everything she could wish for – Indian rugs, Indian puppets, Indian bangles, Indian carvings, Indian decorations, saris and Indian jewellery. She was in shopping heaven. We asked how on earth she had managed to bring all her purchases back to the hotel. “Oh,” she said airily, “I bought a new suitcase and I collared a put-put driver and held out a bunch of notes which I knew I would not be spending before we leave in the morning, and said if he could get me back safely to the hotel, I would give them all to him.” She laughed loudly. “He went like the wind!” Apparently he was still standing outside the hotel several minutes later, in a daze, staring in wonder at this fortune in his hands, probably enough to keep his family for a couple of months.
We were told that night that all our suitcases had to be outside our hotel rooms by 4 a.m. and that they would be loaded on to the bus, which would leave at 5 a.m.
At just before 4 a.m. Paula and I were both in a state of undress in our shared room, when we heard loud and frantic banging on our door. We draped towels around ourselves, opened the door, and in fell Bea, clothed in nothing but a pair of knickers. She had put one suitcase outside the door and the door had swung shut behind her. She had not known the number of our room, but had made a lucky guess.
We phoned Reception and explained what had happened, and in what seemed like a matter of seconds, three handsome young men appeared at our door, grinning inanely at the sight of three middle-aged European women dressed in nothing but hotel towels. They escorted Bea back to her room, with her loudly declaring: "Now they think we are lesbians!" Every door in that corridor seemed to open as residents wondered what the commotion was about.
By the time we had settled back to life in England, Bea was a declared Indo-phile, praising every aspect of the country, defending it from criticism with a “you haven’t been there – I have”. Her curtains were removed and replaced with saris, draped artistically from poles above her Georgian windows. The hundred kites decorated the upstairs landing of the Old Vicarage where she lived. She even planted marigolds in her garden!
And before you ask – yes, we are still friends! But I will never share a holiday with her again. Never!
© 2007 Audrey Von Lintzgy
