It's near-impossible to get a room here, so you might as well know about this little tip of Tamil Nadu.
Six dogs, two cats - one a tomcat called Gladys! - a troupe of theatre artistes, writers in residence raising conspiracy theories, possibly the largest collection of percussion instruments in any green room, visitors each with irreverent or impossible stories, coconuts fresh off trees, dialogues and discussions and debates (or not): you’ll find them all at Adishakti where on an evening, your hostess, the founder of both the theatre company as well as the guest house, will summon all the courtesy of a countess to ask, “I do hope you are being looked after.”
When Veenapani Chawla found peace in Auroville, and was given the gift of land in nearby Tamil Nadu, close to Pondicherry, she seized the offer because here was a chance to do something she had always wanted to: to combine Western theatre with Indian aesthetics and practices.
In January, though, there are neither performances nor rehearsals, for her troupe of resident actors will be put through a gruelling regimen of massage, the traditional treatment reserved for those who practice the skill and self-defence art of koodiyattam and kalaripayattu. A fortnight of massages — some of them more painful than relaxing — will be followed by an equally long period of abstinence and meditation to cleanse both minds and bodies, though, really, any abuse is self-induced for, here, far from urban stress, there is only that much damage you can inflict upon yourself.
The guest house is something low-cost architect Laurie Baker, who adopted Kerala as his home, would have approved of, with its exposed brick and mud walls and tiled roofs, cooler inside than its surroundings. Here the motley artistes meet (or not) with the temporary residents who come calling. Chawla prefers long-stay guests, and then those whose inclinations are intellectual, or creative: walk-ins are not encouraged, and recommendations are useful.
Trapped between French Pondicherry and spiritual Auroville, Adishakti’s Tamil enclave is vibrant with flowers in women’s hair and rangolis and lamps that light up festivals every other day, or so it seems. Their sarees vibgyor-bright, their conversation nuanced like a son-et-lumiere, the women who work at Adishakti are unfailingly polite, and (for India) inexplicably efficient, though the laundry sometimes takes longer than promised. But then, when it rains, it is in sleets, and as you huddle indoors and wait for the sun to peep through the darkening clouds, the lightning is primeval, and you’re grateful for their chatter, for human sounds, for warm food.
In Auroville, at the visitors centre, they smother the chicken in basil sauce, though the bakery in the nearby market is superb, but it is Pondicherry which has the nicest food you could want: prawns — lobsters really — smothered in garlic butter and flambéed at your table; or steak; fish and chicken and mutton, though they’re taken off the menu when they run out of fresh ingredients, so you know nothing’s coming from the freezer.
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Not that Pondicherry doesn’t have its tourist traps in its quaint French quarter — there’s Ajantha, which has mediocre food but a spectacular view of the sea; or LeSpace, where the waiter carries the billboard menu to your table but where the mojitos are disappointingly watered down and sweet.
This is where the local boys come hoping to get lucky with the tourists. When we sound off to the resident actors, they smirk at the visiting townies and direct us to Qualithe, which would make a dhaba look tony. But the drinks are honest — you can’t go wrong at those prices, and there are no cocktails, so you get what’s in the bottle, and not much ice. Not much atmosphere either, but then you go to Qualithe to get pissed.
At Hotel D’ le Orient, delightfully Oriental-French, the Neemrana owners have invited us to lunch with their families. Francis Wacziarg is a local celebrity, for once French rather than Indian, greeting guests in his mother tongue — the Governor wants to meet him, he’s invited to tea and cocktails and dinner by the townspeople who travel with flashing, wailing beacons on their cars, or so says co-founder Aman Nath, who also takes great pleasure in his hotel guests. “This is the centre of the world,” he declares, and he might be right for every guest who checks in, or walks in for a meal, greets someone or the other with exclamations of surprise and joy, “Everyone who comes here knows everyone else.”
There are more statues of heroes, politicians and literary figures in Pondicherry than in any other town I have visited, and they face in different directions, prompting a visitor to ask if there is some method to the madness of their placement. On the marina, Mahatma Gandhi relaxes under a canopy, while for decades a battle has raged in New Delhi about the impossibility of placing a statue of Gandhi under an imperial canopy near India Gate.
But Adishakti is not Pondicherry — here, the day begins with the regulation of a drillmaster as the actors prepare for their run-throughs with breathing exercises, soon enough giving way to voices raised in dialogue, lilted with accents at odds with the old-fashioned language of Ionescu, or Samuel Beckett. But then, Adishakti isn’t your everyday place. Here, owls screech through the day instead of merely hooting at night, and Veenapani Chawla, spotting you on the gravel path, asks, “Have you come to see me?” like someone granting an audience — and conversation with her is deeply thoughtful when you lie that yes, you would like a chat — and Gladys pretends that he is a dog and not a cat at all. It is that kind of place.