Rock stars

In Tamil Nadu we found that we were exotic. Although there were some other western tourists around, in most of the places the great majority of visitors were Indian. My wife Josephine, who is tall and fair-haired, appeared to be particularly unusual-looking. As we walked around a temple, she would frequently be invited to pose for photographs with groups of sari-clad women.

Exoticism is one of those qualities that exists in the eye of the beholder. To western Europeans, this area at the tip of the Indian triangle has been the epitome of that quality for more than 2,000 years. The Romans came here, and some even settled — the Apostle Thomas for one. We saw his tomb and basilica in Chennai. Such was the classical appetite for pepper and the other spices that grow in abundance in this region that Pliny the Elder complained that all the gold in the world was draining eastwards to India.