Usually the maharajah’s palace night lights are turned on on Sundays. On Christmas, it is lit up with 97,000 light bulbs. He is the palace on Christmas Eve and on Christmas.
Crowds gathered to look before fanning out to the various restaurants, dhabas and street carts to eat. For the second night in a row, I went to the Parklane Hotel for dinner. It’s a little upscale for me, but the food is good and there is live music every night.
75% of India’s 25 million Christians live in the south. In Mysore they are a significant fraction of the population. The Parklane, like other places frequented by westerners, put up a Christmas tree and lighted paper star lamps. I got there on Christmas at about 7:30, an hour before the music starts because the night before I arrived a half hour early and there were few tables free. Fortunately, I was dining alone, and four choice tables were vacant right in front of the musicians platform. They were available because singles are something of a rarity in India in a nice restaurant. Even most travelers travel with someone. Tonight, however, the place didn’t fill up till about 9.
A young Canadian asked if he could sit with me. His story is that he’d finished his freshman year in college and was unsure of his direction, so he hit the road a few months ago. We chitchatted about our lives and had beers. He had tummy trouble and ordered fried eggs. I mention that because he got the best sunny side up eggs I’ve seen since I got to India. Nice and soft, with runny yolks. Usually they cook them to death on too hot a frying surface. They cook them on the same ones they cook chapattis on. I almost wanted that to eat but, I don’t know, for me fried eggs is dinner food only in an emergency. Probably it was an emergency for him. I ordered the fried rice with mutton, chicken and fish from the Chinese column. Chinese is traditional on Christmas in some Jewish circles. Maybe with the Chinese too.
Around 8:30, the music started. What a hoot! On Christmas Eve there was the very authentic Indian music of a kind of mandolin and tabla.
This night, the mandolin player switched to tabla and this kid about the age of my dinner partner came in, put his motorcycle helmet on the platform in front of him and whipped out a Casio keyboard. “This is going to suck”, I said to myself. It did. But it was funky in it’s own little way. Here’s a place about 1/4 filled with tourists wanting a taste of India. Mysore is having a huge international conference of anesthesiologists now, and most of the patrons looked like doc types. Wife-of-doc types have been all over town alone during the day. Now they are together. So what do we get? Electronic pulp folk. At one point they did “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”. Wry smiles and head shakes everywhere. The Indians don’t generally have a fond impression of the British. The history books don’t treat the colonial period as much more than a time of suppression, corruption of a magnificent ancient civilization, exploitation of India’s resources, people, and artwork theft. Never mind the complexities of history. I expected Christmas carols but, after that, it was back to the corruption of ancient magnificent music. Irony can be fun.
On Christmas Eve, I hired an autorickshaw to take me around for the day. He took me too the big temple on the hill. Being Sunday, it was a swarm of humanity. There was no going in for me, as the line was about an hour long and I’ve seen a lot of nice temples in the past 3 1/2 months. I amused myself people watching. Except for the poorest, who barely have anything to wear at all, people show up for an outing like this in their best clothes. The women are especially good looking in their saris and jewelry. Their hair is perfect. The Muslim women who, like me, are sightseers at this Hindu temple, have on their finest pashmina shawls.
There are always vendors of every sort at these places like this. It’s like a little bazaar. Indians really like kitch. They will handle and haggle over the cheapest Chinese bauble you ever saw. Remember Silly Putty? Remember the plastic eggs it came in? I saw a family getting excited over some of these eggs, so the oldest guy, presumably dad, negotiated for about five minutes and proudly presented them to his family. Mom loved it. She beamed like the kids. Indians love to shop. Sometimes they haven’t got the money for much, but they love what they can get. I think it doesn’t matter what for. It’s the experience.
Boy, I’m on a roll. I better knock it off. Most of you haven’t gotten this far. If you have, don’t you have something better to do? Just kidding. Thanks for reading it.