On the first day, my daughter gripped the steering wheel with both hands and checked her mirrors three times. On the last, she asked for the ghat road and drove it very confidently. In between lay four days in a thirty-acre coffee estate, a small shelf of left-behind books, and a question I am still carrying back to Bangalore.
A spring, thirty acres wide
My friend Dinesh Bez, who runs Three Friends Travel, arranged this one. I had asked for something quiet, not a resort. He said: “Jagadeesh and Chitra’s place, first floor, thirty-acre Chilumey Estate, coffee all around you.” That was enough.
Chilumey means spring in Kannada, and the name fits. I had assumed that only the coffee on one side of the house was his thirty acres. Jagadeesh corrected me with a smile: the whole estate, on every side of the house, is his. That changes the feeling. Not a property you can see the end of, but a small world you need a day to walk around. A spring, not a tank: water finding its way, quiet and persistent.
Jagadeesh and Chitra live on the ground floor and gave us the first floor: big windows and a balcony that looks out onto coffee. Chitra makes a dark roasted 80:20 coffee that I fell in love with, and all our meals were downstairs in their dining hall. Upstairs, in the drawing room, there is a small library, ten or fifteen books left behind over the years on stepped dark wood shelves, not curated. That shelf would give me Murakami one afternoon and Gandhi the next morning.
Day 1, Saturday 17 October: four drivers, one road
We left Bangalore at eight-ish, and for the first time all four of us were going to drive. My daughter got her license last year, but she stays in a hostel and hasn’t had much time to practise, so she was still a little hesitant: both hands on the wheel, mirrors checked three times, which is exactly how you want a hesitant driver to drive. My son got his license only this year, and he was full of enthusiasm. We negotiated the whole way: “you take this stretch, I’ll take the ghat.”
I drove the ghats. Coorg ghats need a familiar hand and the old rhythm. My son took a patchy stretch after coffee and vada on the way, the road still uneven from recent rains: perfect for new-license confidence without throwing him straight into the ghats. For lunch we were looking for a place where Khushi could join us and the toilets would be neat and clean. We found a newly opened restaurant at Keralapura junction, with brand new toilets. The food was okayish. Only later did I learn that Keralapura is famous for its non-vegetarian military hotels. Then smaller roads, coffee estates beginning to show, and we reached Chilumey around two.
Three dogs welcomed us, and they were friendly from the first minute. Two were free and moving fast across the yard; one was tied, pulling at his chain with great enthusiasm. Every time you crossed them, they came over for a quick petting demand, which was very cute. Their only concern was Khushi trying to capture their space. The tallest, a husky and Labrador mix called Orio, was so eager to meet her that he jumped up to reach Khushi while I was lifting her like Simba. An estate worker tied him again and we could finally take Khushi for her walk. She walked as if nothing had happened. I was still breathing fast.
From the first-floor balcony you don’t look at the estate. You are inside it. Coffee plants in tight dark rows. Pepper vines climbing every second shade tree, thick and ropey, leaves glossy; you can see why the pepper chicken later tasted the way it did. Palms shooting straight up, one of them wearing a wild sweater of money plant. A road winding through the estate, disappearing into green and appearing again. A white estate pickup. Red tiled roofs peeking through leaves. Dogs using the road as a highway.
That afternoon I went to the shelf and started Murakami’s “Drive My Car”, from Men Without Women. Kafuku, an actor who played Chekhov’s Vanya. The yellow Saab 900. His wife Oto, who told stories in bed that stopped unfinished. Misaki, his driver from Hokkaido. It seemed oddly fitting: a story about a man learning to let someone else drive, on a trip where all four of us were learning to share the wheel. The plantation hummed outside, and I fell asleep with the book on my chest.
In the evening my son, my daughter and I slipped out, because they wanted to drive, and stopped at Nandi Chaats in Somwarpet town. Bhelpuri, awesome. Masala puri. Panipuri carried back for my wife. We didn’t tell Chitra, and then we ate a full dinner anyway, because her cooking was that good: akki roti, soft and just puffed, with brinjal curry, averekai curry (a seasonal wonder), fried rice, and rice with dal made to glow by homemade ghee. Not a contradiction. Space gets made. Every dinner there ended with a homemade sweet, and the first night it was gulab jamun.
Day 2, Sunday 18 October: hills, temples and waterfalls
On Sunday morning Khushi woke up excited and wanted to go out. I was worried. What if the dogs were all around, the big one was loose, and Khushi started claiming their space? Then Jagadeesh came to tell me that Orio, their big dog, was tied up. So I took Khushi out.
Breakfast was served in the dining hall every morning, Sunday to Tuesday. That day it was idli, potato curry and poha, with two cups of that dark roast. Then we set out with Abdul Rahim in his Mahindra 4×4, and the day began to climb. Rahim is a local, and has been driving for more than three decades; in his early years he drove a truck.
First stop, Kote Betta. The roads were rough, but Rahim and his 4×4 could navigate through any of them. Rahim knows these hills the way Misaki knows roads: not as a map, but as a feeling in the hands. Kote Betta is windier and quieter, the third highest peak in Coorg, and doesn’t boast about it. There is a temple up there. It was closed, but the place gives you a 360-degree view of the Western Ghats, which was reason enough to be there.
Before Pushpagiri, Rahim stopped at a small waterfall by the roadside, and we lost a lot of time there, happily. Khushi came with us onto the rocks around it.
Then Pushpagiri, the hilltop where trekkers go to collect their pass for the trek. Layered hills in monsoon light, and across them the waterfalls on Kumara Parvata shining in the sun, a rare sight, according to Rahim.
From there we went to the Shanth Mallikarjuna Temple, a peaceful Shiva temple in the Pushpagiri hills. I don’t want to over-describe it, because the point is that it didn’t demand description. Small, old stone, damp with hill air. No crowd. A priest, a couple of lamps, the lingam cool and dark, forest sound behind the walls. My body noticed before my mind did: shoulders dropped, breath slowed.
There is a huge banyan tree at the temple; Rahim told us it is more than 650 years old, and Jagadeesh later confirmed it. When I asked the priest how old the temple is, he said the Shiva linga is swayambhu, self-manifested, and nobody knows how old. We offered him some money and he smiled and asked us to put it in the donation box. He smiled the whole time, as if he had been waiting for us to visit.
I asked whether he stays there. He is from Bangalore, he said, and his son lives in Bangalore, while he lives here. His goodbye was so hearty that it felt like leaving a relative’s house. The temple definitely has some energy that makes you gentle and content.
When you visit a peaceful temple, you never are the same. You become a different person.
Lunch was the surprise of the day. Rahim took us to a small shop, but it was closed. He didn’t give up. He went to the house attached to it, and an elderly lady came out with hot tomato rice, telling us it was very good. My kids wanted Maggi or a sandwich, but she insisted we have the tomato rice, because it is good and healthy, and she made us omelettes as well. She was alone in the house that afternoon. Rahim had insisted we eat there, because food at other places is not healthy. That melted our hearts.
The tomato rice was bright and tangy, the omelettes were folded perfectly, and we ate on steel plates, in plastic chairs, with the jeep parked outside like a tired dog.
Last of all came Mallalli Falls, loud, white and wild after the rains, the opposite of the temple’s silence.
Dinner, again in the dining hall, was the pepper chicken, made with the estate’s own pepper, alongside butter chicken, ghee rice, chapati, plain rice and dal with that homemade ghee. Woody heat first, then sweet, and the sweet that night was sago payasam.
That morning I had read part of what remained of Murakami’s story at the homestay, and I finished it there in the evening. The line that stayed with me: his wife didn’t sleep with Takatsuki because she fell for him; it was something inside her, a place Kafuku could never reach. Love doesn’t hand you a master key. Misaki helps him see that by driving well and carrying her own grief without performance. And then the fifteen-minute nap, after which he wakes up different and decides to live a freer life. I closed the book. The shelf still had one more for me.
Day 3, Monday 19 October: Gandhi, and a golden temple
On Monday morning I picked up Gandhi. Same first-floor drawing room, same small library, and Chitra’s dark roast again. Saturday it had been Murakami from this shelf; now it was Louis Fischer’s Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World, an old Mentor edition (MQ1030, 95 cents), deeply worn. The cover shows Gandhi smiling, not the stern one but the soft one. Mist lay low over the thirty acres.
I read from page 1 and paused at page 22, in the chapter “From Birth to Greatness”, at the Maritzburg station of 1893. We all know the first half of the story: a 24-year-old Indian lawyer with a first-class ticket, thrown off the train because of his colour. What I learnt that morning was the second half. Other Indians in the same position quietly moved to the lower class and shared their frustration only in private. Gandhi sat in the waiting room, his coat and luggage left behind on the train. It was a chilly night, and he sat through it. He didn’t raise his voice immediately. Within a week he called a meeting. And that one night became twenty-one years, 1893 to 1914. He had come for one year.
Fischer sums him up on that same page: “There was not a single passive fiber in his character, and all his resistance was active.” Active, yet non-violent. Another sentence in that chapter stopped me:
Zeal for a cause dissolved his timidity and loosened his tongue.
Louis Fischer on Gandhi
A timid lawyer in London who could not speak in court; then Maritzburg, then a cause, then a loosened tongue. That one sentence explains twenty-one years.
I didn’t get time for full introspection, because we went to the Golden Temple at Kushalanagar: the Namdroling Monastery at Bylakuppe, and the Tibetan shops around it. Gold, a huge Buddha, prayer wheels, incense, tourists clicking. A different peace from Shanth Mallikarjuna: a loud peace against a quiet peace. Both valid. I bought nothing much and looked a lot.
My son drove the ghat section to Bylakuppe, so his turn on the ghats came on Monday, not Saturday. On the way back my daughter took the long stretch, confident now.
In the evening Jagadeesh arranged an Ayudha Puja for our car. They helped us clean it, then kumkum and flowers on the bonnet, a small garland, incense. It felt very nice. We touch our cars every day and never thank them.
Dinner in the dining hall was chilli chicken, local chicken curry, neer dosa and sannas, with a different variety of ghee rice, more fragrant and less heavy than Sunday’s. Coastal and Malnad meeting on one plate: the chilli chicken crisp, the curry slow and earthy, the neer dosa lacy and thin, the sannas soft and steamed. Dessert was holige. Chilumey means spring, and the spring kept finding new tastes.
Day 4, Tuesday 20 October: the ghat road
Tuesday morning, same first floor, same library, the thirty acres misty outside again. I picked up Gandhi once more and went back to where I had paused, page 22, but now I knew what happens after Maritzburg. Fischer’s line felt different this time, because in four days I had watched timidity dissolve in real time.
My daughter, hesitant on Day 1, hands tight on the wheel, checking mirrors three times, asked for the first stretch. Not the plains. The ghats. And she drove them very confidently: smooth on the hairpins, braking early, not over-steering, talking less, focusing more. That is the image I am carrying home.
Breakfast on the last morning ended with coconut barfi, homemade like every other sweet of the trip. We packed coffee powder that Chitra gave us from the estate, and pepper, maybe from the very vines we had seen from the balcony. Khushi was already on a lap, supervising the packing. The Ayudha Puja had felt like quiet insurance for a safe return, and on Tuesday the blessed car seemed to know it.
We left Somwarpet at 10:30. My daughter took the first stretch, my son the next, and with a few breaks and different boots on the accelerator we reached Bangalore in the afternoon. Khushi, who supervised the entire journey, fell asleep the moment we entered the city.
So the circle closed: the ghats were mine on Saturday, my son’s on Monday, and my daughter’s on Tuesday. Khushi, who has no license, held full authority over the window seat, the AC, and whether a walk happens.
The quiet insult and the weapon that doesn’t tire
On Monday morning, while I read Gandhi, the Durga Saptashati was playing on Apple Music in the middle of a thirty-acre coffee estate. I kept thinking about the Maritzburg waiting room and a question I could not shake: when do you say, no more? And with what weapon, one that won’t tire you?
Life’s quiet insults are not shouted. They are overriding, ignoring, taking for granted. Small and repeated. They accumulate like pepper dust, invisible until you sneeze, or like coffee grounds in a filter, slow and then suddenly blocking everything. When does the accumulation become a tipping point?
Gandhi’s answer was neither a complaint letter nor a return to a comfortable practice in India, and it was not instant. That night he did not raise his voice; he sat in the cold. Within a week he called a meeting. Then he stayed: twenty-one years, not one. He found a method his conscience could support, and that gave him courage without tiring him, because anger tires and revenge tires, but a method your conscience supports sustains.
Kafuku’s answer, after a fifteen-minute nap, was to live a freer life: stop demanding to fully understand Oto, let Misaki drive the yellow Saab, trust.
Both answers need the same first move: deciding to become a different person. You visit a peaceful temple and you are not the same. You wake from a nap and you are not the same. You shiver through a night in a waiting room and you are not the same.
I am timid in many rooms, tongue-tied like Gandhi in a London court. What dissolves that? Not confidence tricks. A cause. When the cause is larger than the self, timidity dissolves and the tongue loosens. So that is what I am taking back to Bangalore: not more assertiveness, but a better question. What is my weapon that doesn’t tire? What is the method my conscience supports? Maybe I don’t need to fix the timidity directly. Maybe I need to find the cause that dissolves it.
And maybe, like my daughter on the ghat road, I can learn to drive the hairpins without needing to control everything. A hesitant, out-of-practice driver became a confident ghat driver in four days. That is zeal dissolving timidity, live.
If zeal for a cause can dissolve timidity and loosen a tongue, what is the cause that would dissolve yours? And would you recognise your own chilly waiting-room night when it arrives, as an invitation and not an insult?
Written on the first floor at Chilumey Estate, Somwarpet, Coorg, with Chitra’s dark roast, Khushi on my lap, Fischer’s page 22 still open and the thirty acres outside. Thank you, Jagadeesh and Chitra, Dinesh Bez of Three Friends Travel, and Abdul Rahim for the hills.
Reading, listening, eating
- Read: Haruki Murakami, “Drive My Car” (Men Without Women); Louis Fischer, Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (Mentor MQ1030), page 22
- Listened to: the Durga Saptashati on Apple Music; the estate’s crickets at six in the evening; one temple bell; Mallalli roaring
- Ate: Chitra’s dark roasted coffee, akki roti, brinjal and averekai curry, gulab jamun, sago payasam, holige and coconut barfi, all homemade, bhelpuri and masala puri, idli and poha, tomato rice and omelette, pepper chicken, chilli chicken with neer dosa and sannas
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