Straight from Guests!

The folks less travelled: Coonoor

I have a confession to make. More to myself than to anyone else. I'm not a travel person. I love the idea of getting away from it all, for sometime being someone else someplace else, who doesnt, but the actual details of when to go where to go how to go put me off. To top it off, the husband (who shall hereafter be called the dude) is the kind of person who needs all reservations signed in triplicate. And my meticulousness stops miles before that stage, i can take off on the promise of a bed and breakfast. In short, details are the devil.

I'd been toying around with the idea of going somewhere for a few weeks. More by accident than design, i'd been traveling every month since i got married and September was about to end and i hadnt gone anywhere! I couldnt just let that be. So i bought out my 52 weekend destinations in Bangalore and flipped through the pages looking for possibilities. I skipped past Ooty several times, i mean, such a cliche, but then i remembered Bhai (who shall hereafter be called Bhai) raving about this place near Ooty he'd been to with Black Swan. I called him for details and he got terribly excited and all i could make out was Coonoor! Jose! Kotagiri! He had Shishir call me some time later who was fortunately more coherent. He gave me a few options and then asked if Bhai had talked to me about Jose's place in Coonoor. I said he might have been trying to. Shishir said, its a homestay, one of the best. A bit over your budget, but unbeatable. He went as far as to say if you dont like it, i'll refund your costs! I called up Bhai, who was still not very coherent. For his sake, we decided to go to Jose's.

And ooh my God. Whenever anyone tells you about Jose's, they will probably tell you the same thing. Its a house on top of a hill. With a 360 degrees view. During the day you can see green hills all around. And during the night, you can see lights from 3 different cities - Coonoor, Ooty and Kotagiri, each on their own hill. But words dont do justice to the view. At least mine wont, so i'll just say its unbelievable and stop at that.

We reached there in the afternoon. After a delicious lunch cooked by Jose's wife Sindhu, we made big plans of what to do with our two days. We decided to go see the dam after a short nap and then go down to Coonoor. Right. Overnight journey followed by awesome lunch, short nap indeed! And to top it off, it started to rain a few minutes after we went into our room. I cannot tell you how much i love lying on a bed just staring out at the falling rain. Apparently not more than i love to sleep, though. When we woke up, it was evening. So we ditched the dam and went to Coonoor. Lower Coonoor was noisy and crowded so we escaped to Upper Coonoor. Walked around and had random things for dinner. Jose picked us up on his way back from somewhere and deposited us home. Where hot Ooty tea and roasted cashews were waiting for us. We stayed out for a very long time, enjoying the distant city lights, the silence, the night sky (this is where the dude introduced me to Google Sky and for the first time, i fell in love with an App), and each others company.

The next day was the day of the dam. We overslept. Again. But that didnt stop us from going on pre-breakfast walk down the hill. Got back and did full justice to Sindhu's appam and stew. And then we set off for the dam. Despite asking for directions from many people, we just couldnt find the damn thing. But everything was so pretty, we really didnt mind. Finally, following authoritative directions from some locals, we followed a track in the woods. And came across a clearing where a really tall tree had gone horizontal. There it was, lying across the way, welcoming one and all to sit on it. And we did. Well, the dude did. I lay down on it, looking up at the blue sky, at other gently swaying trees, who to tell you the truth, appeared slightly drunk. And i learnt that i need to learn to shut up at such moments. Every few seconds I'd get terribly excited, grin like crazy, shake the dude and tell him - this is so awesome!

We had to leave. Much too soon. We did see the dam and few monkeys but it was an anti-climax. We got back, picked up our stuff and said goodbye to Jose, Sindhu, their two boys and the star of the trip - their home. I wont tell you the story of their home, it is much more interesting hearing it from them, but i'll tell you this - it showed me the difference between constructing a house and building a home.

Quaint as Quintessentially Quaint Can Be...

Calling Atithi Parinay a ‘resort’ (or ‘ray-sort’ as it is often pronounced here!) is like calling Atul Kulkarni ‘The King Shahrukh Khan’!  We lose our soul watching the latter’s movies but find it at Atul’s.  I have used the word ‘movie’ very broadly here.  The King Khan’s movies are attributes of the celluloid (or the pixels): what moves is the film.  At Atul’s movies, on the other hand, what moves is us!  Our emotions, hopes, despairs, our sense of the right and wrong, our entire reference frames!

Unlike watching Shahrukh Khan (whom I have watched once and swore off forever) I actually LIKE going to lavish resorts… once a while.  After getting your soul battered in the daily struggle called life, it feels good to lose it once a while.  But then you go back to your life and find nothing’s changed.  Sometimes, however,  you serendipitously experience something you thought was long lost… and out comes along with it, your soul.  Not the battered one, but the pure, innocent soul that you were born with, that never bruised even in childish altercations, or that which became all lumpy thinking of your first crush.  Or the one that still remembers your parents’ tough love with an unexplainable miss of a few heartbeats.

Atithi Parinay is not easy to find.  Left to myself, plodding the wild west of online stuff, I couldn’t have found it myself.  But the amazing folks at Black Swann do precisely that.  I have no idea where they find these gems.  It’s so deeply hidden inside coastal Konkan that you feel only locals would know about it.  But that’s exactly the kind of stuff Black Swann finds: helps you travel to faraway places and experience them thru the eyes of the locals.
We arrived at Atithi Parinay on 20th August, after about 7 hours of driving and full of fabulous seafood consumed at a very reasonably priced Ratnagiri joint called Amantran.  The road to Ratnagiri thru Amba Ghat was another soul-moving experience.  No matter how many pretty, rolling, and undulating hillsides I have seen all over the world, the hills of Sahyadris etched in my mind are still breath-taking.  Especially after the monsoon, they can easily give any other similar other-worldly vista a worldly run for the money!  Wading thru one-car wide market lanes of Ratnagiri, we finally reached Kotawade, an utterly nondescript hamlet of a village, deep inside Konkan, 3-4 km off the Ratnagiri-Ganapatipule road.
Atithi Parinay does not bewilder you with its setting.  It does not moisten your eyes with sweeping vistas.  It does not take your breath away with its sheer beauty.  It doesn’t even evoke a sense of pregnant anxiousness thru meandering pathways.  You reach its non-gate and you feel as if you’re entering the private driveway of a retiree’s concretized life-savings.  And that’s exactly what it is.  It’s a home-stay with an unerasable underlining of the ‘home’ part.  Unlike other properties with heavenly settings, Atithi Parinay cannot win you at first sight.  Instead, it slowly takes you over like a temptress relying on her intrinsic motives, moves and moods more than the moxie of her beauty.  Over the gravelly crackle of your tires (your car’s tires, that is), you reach the little parking area charmingly paved with dried coconut fronds.  And you see the owner-hostess standing at the porch, a lovely lady, immaculately dressed in a delightfully crisp Fabindia saree, a broad smile on her face, and an honest welcome in her somewhat deep-set eyes behind the thick spectacles.  At a resort, you’d be welcomed by a salaried hostess in starched linen with a pad in her hand with a long list of the day’s “arrivals”.  And then clumsily balancing the pad, shifting the pencil from her right hand to her left, she’d shake hands with you with the trained smile of the hospitality industry, coupled with an almost robotic ‘Welcome Mr. Paranjape’ and then with a reverse shuffle of the pen from the left to the right, she’d tick your name off the list: ‘done’!  For her, you’d be a business statistic that need to be checked-in as part of the day’s job.  Not so at Atithi Parinay.  No forms, no lists, no awkward pencil shuffles, no mechanical movements of the lips, no business, no bull.  Instead: a simple namaste and behind that, an unspoken curiosity and a yearning to welcome someone new from a distant civilization (that’s how far off Atithi Parinay is from the daily drudgery of the big cities with their own urban civilizations!) to fill the sometimes lonely voids in the rustic village life.  At a resort, you’re a customer who wants to be really treated as a guest (as the resorts promise all over their literature).  Here, you’re a guest who has to decide whether you want to be just a customer, a guest, or even the host!  With that welcome, Atithi Parinay starts taking over all your senses, the way a great wine does (too bad, alcohol is strictly not allowed at Atithi Parinay.  If it was, the results could be simply super-toxicating!)

Refreshed with a homely cup of tea (with a lot of insistence to ‘have more’!), we finally proceeded to our quaint cottage with two adjoining rooms.  The rooms are very well furnished: spartan but with spotless white bed linen and cow-dung floors!  The semi-open-air bathroom is well laid and well lit with all the modern amenities such as instant hot water, spotless showers, floors, designer sink etc etc.  Changed, we went back to the main house which also accommodates two rooms for guests which are bigger than the cottage rooms and have tiled floors and a huge terrace in front.  We started roaming the natural outgrowth of trees, shrubs and crops on the little property (a total of 2-3 acres only!)  The hostess accompanied us, telling us about the life in the village, various plants, their peculiarities, rarities etc.  Interspersed in that narrative were affectionate half-complaints about her daughters’ insistence on eco-friendliness, reverence towards her late husband who dreamt it all up and even a few questions about us: well balanced between a genuinely curious probing and respecting our privacy.

It had started raining heavily.  So we skipped our earlier plan of going to Ratnagiri (about 14 km away) to eat seafood (Atithi Parinay is a veggie-only property) and opted for the homely veggie dinner on the property.  The dinner comes from a nearby family, relatives of the owner.  It was absolutely delicious, wholesome, hearty and true to the ‘home’ part of the home-stay, the hostess and the cooks insisted we eat more.  She even scolded our fussy-eater daughter, exactly how her grandmother would.  Atithi Parinay had started slowly creeping into our consciousness with simple things such as these and by the time we retired to our cottage, we had forgotten we were guests and started feeling as if we were family!  A testament to this is the fact that for the first time in my living, post-marriage memory, Urmila did NOT test the cleanliness of the bed with her microscopic vision!  We just assumed it’d be clean!  After all, you don’t suspect cleanliness of your own bed linens, do you?!?!

The morning of the 21st August brought on my 47th birthday.  Special birthday kisses from my two girls and a well-composed poem by Sunskriti brought happily gushing tears to my eyes.  Sunskriti was somewhat confused: did I write something wrong?  A long hug was needed to reassure her that she hadn’t.  Back at the house for multiple cups of well-brewed tea and sumptuous breakfast of Pohe and we were ready to take a dip into the charming little seasonal river flowing next to the property.  Gingerly at first, I entered the refreshingly lukewarm water and then everyone poured in.  For Sunskriti and Shravani (niece), it was their first experience swimming in a little river, along with little fish all around us.  And for me, it was my second experience, almost 38 years after the first, which I had when I was their age.  That river started onion-peeling layers of adulthood from my soul.  Shubhada (sister-in-law) brought fishing lines from the hostess and we had a blast trying to lure the finger-long fishes with balls of wheat-floor mixed with turmeric.  Whoever said you needed expensive bait to fish?

Before we got out, we had spent 3-4 hours in the river.  Then off we went to Ganapatipule for lunch.  This was the first time I went to such a divine place of worship with the sole aim to eat seafood and drink beer.  After copious amounts of ingesting both, we were sufficiently buzzed and stupefied to not mind the filth around the famous Ganesha temple, a definite plus of imbibing the ‘holy water’ BEFORE visiting the God rather than after it.  The Ratnagiri to Ganapatipule road was simply breathtaking with the ever changing vistas, those of hills and the ocean.

Back at Atithi Parinay, we all had vowed to skip dinner.  Some roaming around, chitchat and a few cups of teas later, the little temple next to the property came alive with high decibel chants of songs in praise of Lord Krishna, who apparently is just a day younger to me, a fellow Leo!  No wonder he’s such a great guy!  The songs and the sometimes torrential rain seemed to try to drown each other out.  For us, the rain provided some much-needed dampening of all the high-decibel devotion congesting the already-damp air around us!  We went to the main house, more to escape the noise but ended up gorging on the fantastic dinner!  As the ‘Birthday-Baby’, I got specially treated with sweet ‘Ukdiche Modak’ (steamed dumplings with coconut and jaggery filling), a famous local treat.  As always, the hostess and the cook ensured we ate much more than we should have!  After the dinner, over small talk, it felt as if we were at home in a joint family: the hostess, my family, my cousin Shantanu’s family and another unrelated guest family!  It’s truly a testimony to the way Atithi Parinay epitomizes ‘home-stay’.  You get all the good things about ‘home’ without having to carry any of them and with the freedom to simply walk away from any undesired fallout of being in a home-setting (such as doing the dishes!).  At Atithi Parinay, as in any ideal homestay, you are given an invisible remote control.  Press the button and you feel at home, press it again and you can distance yourself whenever you want.  While sitting there after dinner, I pressed the button a few times.  Then I saw the grandmotherly hostess squatting down on the floor to play cards with our daughters and I never realized when and where the remote control disappeared altogether!


The devotional noise thankfully stopped sometime in the middle of the night.  Unfortunately it was morning of the 22nd.  Time to leave.  A few more cups of tea and another sumptuous breakfast later (with an unexpected treat of Jalebis), we found it very difficult to leave.  Every gravelly crackle of the tires on the way back thru the driveway seemed a soulful cry of parting, of not wanting to overcome the sticky friction between us and the grandmotherly earth of Atithi Parinay and the quintessential quaintness that it epitomizes.  As a kid, I used to look forward to visit grandma’s home every summer.  And instead of going stale, it seemed to nourish my soul.  Years later, I feel I have found another place that once again has that long-lost potential!