A tale of toilet tissue

Today being another holiday Mike, Ali and I decided to have a day out and went to Jaypore, a much bigger town not far away.  We all squashed onto the bus like sardines, along with about 150 other people and a bag of chickens on the luggage rack, clung to the bars and handrails while going up the hills, round the bends and over the lumps and bumps in the road to arrive feeling a bit bruised and battered an hour later.   I don’t know how the chickens felt.

We wandered around the market and some of the shops which seem huge and really well stocked after the tiny stalls in the much poorer town of Koraput.  I found a stall where I could buy some fabric to make into tea-towels and some handkerchiefs to replace the ones stolen off my washing line by a cow.  One of the things that M and I really wanted to try to find was somewhere that sold comfy chairs, desperate to get away from the ubiquitous plastic chairs which are all we can get in Koraput.  I’ve seen some lovely cane chairs that I’ve taken a fancy to but had been told they were brought from Bhubaneswar, too far for me to travel for chairs.  A very nice man looking after another shop told us where to find a furniture shop then proceeded to escort us through a maze of back alleys to find it.  It was of course closed.  However, he insisted we take his phone number so he can help us next time we are in Jaypore.

Ali found a shop stocking decent tea – you’d think in India that it should be easy to get good tea.  Not in Koraput, all that seems to be available there is Tata tea.   I’m a bit of a tea snob and love good tea.  I usually end up throwing away half my morning cuppa here as it’s so disgusting.  I proceeded to risk getting 500gm of a tea that looked and smelled good but was as yet untested.   Ali took me to a fabric shop that sells fabrics using traditional tribal weaves and patterns where I bought a sari to use as a bedspread and a couple of lengths of fabric to have made up into copies of a lovely top that I had bought elsewhere in India. 

We found a little shop where I managed to buy myself a set of 4 knives, forks and spoons, 4 china mugs (small but better than steel or plastic), a can opener to finally open the can of tuna left behind in my house by Carol, a pestle and mortar for my spices, a tin caddy to keep the ants out of my new tea and a rechargeable emergency light to light my way when we have one of the many power cuts that are happening every few hours.  A good shop and we were still accompanied by our new-found friend and guide.   Our quest for comfy chairs thwarted, we trudged our way back along the main road to the shop we’d seen earlier that sells pillows and cushions and splashed out to a pillow and cushion each to try to make our plastic chairs more bearable.

The best find of the day was the shop that sold toilet paper.  This was about the 6th shop that Ali had tried, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to which shop to go to for anything in India, toilet paper being particularly awkward.  Our Koraput shop had sold out of toilet paper and this being something we like to keep in stock we were on the lookout for more supplies.  Ali found those supplies and Mike proceeded to buy up all his stock – all 17 rolls of it.  I asked him if he had a problem he needed to talk about which for some reason made Ali collapse with laughter.  What’s so funny about toilet paper?  Our guide looked somewhat bemused by the volume but the shopkeeper seemed to think it was a perfectly normal transaction and worked out how much to charge for the loot.  Mike was a happy man and promised to share out his goodies at home.  I stuffed all 17 rolls into a bag and off we went. 

Toilet paper is fairly voluminous and we were fairly laden down with other goodies and decided we didn’t fancy squashing ourselves plus shopping onto a bus.  We treated ourselves to a taxi back home, waving goodbye to our guide.  This was an extravagance at 400 rupees instead of 10 but shared between 3 of us seemed worth the cost to save the aggro of prising ourselves into the bus.  It also meant that we could see the landscape out of the windows which pleased me; it’s lovely and quite spectacular in places.   I wished I’d had my camera when we went past the cattle-market being held by the road just outside Jaypore, apparently around 1000 head are sold there every week.  This explained the larger than usual number of cattle we’d seen wandering along the roads with herders encouraging them on.  I made us a cup of tea en we got home and it was really good, the best tea I’ve drunk since I’ve been here. 

Off to my newly found friendly neighbours for supper combined with hugs and kisses on arrival and departure and being made comfortable on a bed, reclining on nicely arranged pillows – rooms double up as bedrooms and sitting rooms and beds become chairs during the day here – nothing is specialist here.  They call me Auntie.  Except for the loss of all mobile phone and modem signal for most of the day – 4th day running it’s been a successful day.