Day 86, Tiruvannamalai [Tuesday 26th February 2008]
Previous day: Day 85, Mahabalipuram [Monday 5th February 2008]
Next day: Day 87, Hyderabad [Wednesday 27th February 2008]
At breakfast in the hotel in Tiruvannamalai a sceeching old Indian woman is loudly telling the waiter exactly which order he should bring cornflakes and fruit juice in. We have uttapams and coffee then get the bus to Chennai, a 3.5 hour drive away.
Chennai is huge, sprawling and flat. It takes us half an hour to get from the suburbs to the bus stand, following which we still need to get a bus to Chennai Central train station.
We only have a few hours in Chennai as we have a train booked to go to Hyerabad. So we leave our bags in the cloakroom and get a rickshaw to the Government Museum, which I've heard is good. But first we get a chicken biryani for lunch, in a modern place which brings it on coloured plastic trays.
At the museum we go straight to the 'Chola bronzes' gallery, a fantastic display of high quality, well preserved Chola-era bronze deities. They have a perfect Shiva/Parvati sculpture, split vertically to represent the pair as equal parts of a greater whole. It's a large scultpture, but elegant and, unexpectedly, quite sexy.
Looking through the collection I am struck by the humanity, serenity and also the otherwordliness of these deities. Between the 9th and 12th centuries having darshan (sight) of these strange beings must have been a truly transcendental experience.
We take a quick look thorugh the architecture and zoology galleries — lots of rock carvings and animal bones, including a blue whale skeleton! But we have a train to catch, so we hurry through and get the bus to the station.
We stock up on samosas and halwa for the journey, then catch the train to Hyderabad. There are three Hyderabadi businessmen in our carriage, and we go through the usual conversation with them — where we're from, how long we've been travelling etc. But in common with many of the older men we've met, they're not really listening to our side of the conversation, preferring instead to make assumptions about how much money we have and talk openly amongst themselves about this. The conversation is thus not a conversation at all, merely a means for them to confirm their horribly narrow world view. I find myself asking them questions I know the answer to, just to move things along — is the food good in Hyderabad? Can we hear Qawwali music there? — but usually they don't understand the question or the answers are inconceivably bland. Between these three educated businessmen the level of conversation is surprisingly light — how many byproducts a banana has, for example — but they chat away non-stop in Indian-English anyway.
Next day: Day 87, Hyderabad [Wednesday 27th February 2008]
Previous day: Day 85, Mahabalipuram [Monday 5th February 2008]