More of Pondicherry... Now, the Botanical Garden!

I first came to know of the Pondicherry Botanical Garden while reading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. But a visit to this ‘heritage site’ of Pondicherry turned out to be a huge disappointment. Apart from the graceful entrance and a few boards that spoke of the garden’s history and ‘Importance of the Botanical Garden!’ (every sentence on the board ended with a !), and a sculpture of two bulls, there isn’t really anything worth seeing here.

The Pondicherry Botanical Garden is 181 years old, and the only one on the East Coast. According to one of the boards, it houses several tree species… Evergreen, semi-evergreen, tropical dry evergreen, deciduous, ornamental trees, fruit-bearing trees, and trees of medicinal and economic value. The board also claims that the rare and endangered Cynometra ramiflora is found exclusively here, and nowhere else. Apparently, one can also see specimen of Khaya senegalensis (native to Africa) and massive forms of Pittosporum floribundum, Spondias pinnala, Enterolobium cyclocarpum, Pterocarpus marsupium and Alstonia scholaris. We saw tamarind, teak, mahogany, palm and cannon-ball trees. We looked for Cynometra, pretty much scoured the botanical garden for it, but couldn’t find it.

In Life of Pi, there is a mention of a toy train that stops at two stations, Roseville and Zootown, whose name I have forgotten. There really is a toy train that runs through the botanical garden, but it has more than two stations, one of them being Fernhill. And I were somewhat surprised to see the train full of college students, roughly our age, hooting and whistling whenever the train passed through a tunnel, making an unbearable din even otherwise.

But oblivious to all that noise, under almost every tree, there slept a person (sometimes even a small family). Wherever we looked, we saw homeless people dozing in the afternoon heat, the trees providing some respite from the relentless sun. It’s really not the sight one expects to see at a botanical garden. There was an information centre, filled with sleeping people. Some families have set up home and are living in the botanical garden… we saw mini-kitchens and clotheslines where we should have seen exotic trees.

There’s a greenhouse (it was locked), a rose garden (we didn’t see any roses) and a ‘musical dancing fountain’ (which hadn’t played for years, by the look of it). As we walked past each ‘attraction’, not the least bit interested but still clicking away on the camera, a small gang of guys followed us around, muttering in Tamil and wolf-whistling. “Zoology students, da… Can’t you see how interested they are in plants?”, one Whatte asked another (what is a Whatte, did you ask? I shall explain in the end). I was tempted to turn around and tell him that a botany student would very probably be more interested in plants than a zoology student, but I wasn’t about to start an argument with a bunch of Whattes when we were outnumbered 3 to 1.We scooted out of there as fast as we could, and found better sights to see.

By the way, I went through the history of the Botanical Garden. There’s no mention of a zoo anywhere there :P

Soon after our rather sad tour of the Pondicherry Botanical Garden, that too on an unbearably hot day, we found a nice ice cream parlour on Nehru Street and gorged on delicious Choco-mint Sundaes. That, I believe, was the best part of the day!

Now, what a whatte is:

The word is derived from “What a (guy)!!!”, pronounced rather badly. A Whatte is essentially a wannabe dude… The look-at-me-I’m-so-cool type. The kind of guy who swings his arms with excessive energy as he walks (or struts) and holds them at a rather odd angle, away from his body. The kind with chunky steel accessories and overgelled hair of an unbecoming colour. The kind that ogles. Get it?