Monday, March 27
Goubert Avenue, Pondicherry, 13:38
This morning we had breakfast in an almost empty dining room. The weekend visitors had almost all gone home. Afterwards Irma went for a session of reflexology to a place we saw yesterday twenty metres from the hotel, while I updated this website.
When we looked yesterday I spotted some photographs of a treatment that I wanted as soon as I saw it. Irma went onto the roof to see it in action and came down to say that she positively forebade me to have it. I thought about it for a moment and acquiesced.
The treatment involves lying on the ground on giant banana leaves. Someone then wraps you in them very tightly and ties the parcel shut with ropes. The wrapping goes from head to foot although you allegedly have a small gap to breathe through. You then lie on the roof in forty degrees centigrade, bound tightly, for thirty minutes or until someone unties you.
I didn’t actually fancy doing it. More realistically I fancied having done it. I accepted that I might regret this and didn’t press the issue.
When Irma returned we took a rickshaw to the far end of the French corner, planning to walk slowly back. We walked along the promenade, pausing for a hand-made Italian ice-cream, and an abortive trip to the only 24 hour coffee bar in town. We passed the planetarium, paused in the information office to get a better map, and then crossed the road to the sea side.
We look at the large and imposing statue of Gandhi that stands on the beach in the middle of Goubert Avenue. People lay and sit in the shade it casts. Children climb up and down the struts.
In a few moments we will cross back onto the shady side of the street and walk into the Promenade Hotel to have a look at it. We will end up staying for a two course lunch there.
We will continue walking down some very quiet little roads until we come to the Sri Aurobindo ashram, which we will wander around in the required silence.