So I'm sat at a restaurant in Chennai, being spoon-fed chilli sauce. Practically. My are they keen on it in this place, I've got more sauce on my plate than onion masala in my onion masala dosa.
Just something I might have omitted from my previous ramblings, about that word; masala.
You can indeed get a tikka masala and not be thought a terrible British curry slob (they don't seem to have any notion of disdain for British curries, at least up until the point you barge into the kitchen and tell them to put down the assorted thousands of interesting spices, and that all they need is some Tesco's curry powder and a few bay leaves) and although I've not seen a Madras dish which would be rather appropriate for me sitting here in Madras right now, you can readily get Kormas (Kurmas) and Rogan Joshes and Jalfrezis too, as well as many other things.
What you wont get is what you expected, but that's all part of the fun.
Funny thing you notice though, if you order just a chicken tikka it is dry, nothing more than chunks of spiced meat, but if you get a chicken tikka masala you get it in the classic adopted British fashion with sauce (gravy) enough to smother small mammals. If that's your idea of fun, you sick, wrongheaded young man.
Now if you get a masala chai instead of a plain old chai it comes with added spices in the drink. Chai is very very sweet tea; made with condensed milk and then sugared further into unfathomable depths of sweetness, by the way.
And if you get a masala dosa instead of a regular dosa it contains the usual spiced potato innards (and lovely innards they are too - a dosa is a very thin pancake made with rice flour, naturally, and is generally rather massive so it gets folded over the filling once, twice, or even more times depending on the ambitions of the chef when he bought his pans. The filling always revolves around the theme of potatoes.) but these `masala` potato innards are spiced just as much as regular 'tatty innards, but in a different way that I, being a mere mortal and not in the queue for reincarnations, can't quite grasp.
Masala means `mixed` or as close as a translation will allow. Next time you get a tikka masala, don't say I never told yerr nuffin'!!
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Another note I leave you as I leave India, is what to interpret from the head wobble.
The answer is: nothing. Ignore it completely - it does NOT mean no, it does NOT mean yes, it does NOT mean that anyone either understands you or not - the most useful answer I can divine from it is that it quite often, but not always, means "Yes, okay, I either get it or I don't but what this wobble means right now is I wish you'd stop going on about it, whatever it is."
This much I can happily assume to be true from how people have talked to me and moved the conversation on with a head wobble and a conclusive remark, and how I have seen plenty of Indian couples obviously having small arguments of some kind, and one of them starts wobbling away trying to drop the whole subject.
But sometimes it means no. Sometimes it means yes, maybe, I don't understand, okay I get it, and possibly even "Marmosets; aren't they an interesting life form?" for all that it affects matters..
In short, it is best to completely ignore it lest you get mislead, as I have been doing for about 4 months.
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So as I leave the country, feeling a little sadness about leaving Kochi and Kerala behind, but a lot less (in fact, none) about departing Chennai later on today, I feel like making mention of some things I may have forgotton, skipped over or simply not impressed upon you strongly enough, my dear long-suffering audience, that really ought to be noted, for better or for worse.
I am going to seperate these out though and post them up some time after the fact, because i) I don't want you getting too bored and ii) I won't have international-networky access until Monday at the earliest, respectively.
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Seeing as I am here and have relocated to a bar for a bit (yes, I know, this means I'm having a couple of drinks. Just a couple, as a farewell to India and to let me be terribly weak and succumb to that most treasured old thrill of mine: going somewhere brand new and finding places to drink) I can get the first of these little runaway trains of thought down in writing.
According to the old LP, the licensing laws in Chennai are stricter than most, and the only places technically allowed to serve the sauce are hotel bars, which generally gives boozers nice views with their pint because they tend to be rooftop bar/restaurants, although this one is on the 3rd floor and has a motorbike hanging from the ceiling on wires which looks pretty awesome.
It's called the Bik and Barrel, a literal if slightly erroneous take ont he English pub naming tradition, and as well as an excellent pool table and the aforementioned two-wheeled conveyance (a Royal Enfield, predictably enough) is boaats much classic memorabillia signage and posterwork all over the walls, fancy staff in appropriately over the top costumes uniforms and a notice on the door telling people like me that photography of any kind is strictly prohibited.
This hotel here is amazingly plush all over, really quite over the top. The grandest hotel I've ever soiled the threshold of, Grander than even the Woods Manor back in Kochi.
The Woods Manor was the nicest setting for a restauarant you might ever think of, and it was an amazement(?) to me that when I mooched in looking for a posh meal instead of Pizza Hut yet again the food was universally mediocre, although with some interesting choices I have to say.
The prices were totally average to match (I was expecting the cost to be about triple that of other places) and the general ambience of the restaurant was totally normal, average, mediocre, nonplussing and bland.
Which is strange because the hotel entranceway and lobby, with its grand sweeping staircase and vast indoor rock wall with cascading waterfalls and a sizeable pool at the base full of large, koi-carp style fish was something quite amazing. It seemed engineered to look awfully impressive and comfortable, which it did very well.
As you enter, sweaty and bedraggled, the precisely-calculated temperature of the air is thrust down your facial cavities, blissfully cool after the Indian city street temperature of too-fucking-many-for-comfort degrees Celsius, yet not anything so traumatic as the arctic chill many places assault the innocent with, possibly in the vain belief that "everywhere these white people come from is cold so let's make 'em feel at home, eh Vijay?".
I would like the record to show that I do not live inside a deep freeze, nor are my neighbours called Santa or Frosty. I do not appreciate frostbite at the best of times, let alone when I'm supposed to paying and smiling for it.
But Woods Manor Hotel managed immediate and blissful comfort, and the food was attractively priced to the cheapest of wallets (such as mine) so I ended up with a three course meal for the same price or less than a pizza delivery. I even had dessert, and taking dessert in an Indian restuarant is something like taking your life into your own hands because they have a real sweet tooth - and that phrase does nothing to convey the sumptuous depths and giddy heights that the India palate willingly soars to and from every time they even think about sugar.
One of the national favourites is, let me see if I've go this straight: little bright orange wheels of confectionary, comprised entirely of dozens of tiny rings of spun sugar, which are then caramelised slightly, then coated in an exceptionally concentrated glucose syrup, then fried in a little sugar - caramelised again - then left to cool and dry and coated with icing sugar to finish.
That's somewhere close to a lethal dose, by my reckoning.
The real shame about the Woods Manor was that this kindly attitude towards the frugal and the cheap didn't extend a millimetre outside of the restuarant. I checked the prices after my meal, feeling satisfied, full, pleasantly chilled and smug at finding somewhere so nice, and a single room with AC and TV (well, duh. With a lobby like that it wasn't gonna have any rooms without AC/TV, was it?) was just a fraction less than 2000 rupees. Plus tax which in Kerala is punishing in the extreme.
A luxury room was almost 4000 rupees and you could have a suite, if you just could not get a handle on your shoppig habit, for a mere 7000 rupees per night, which made it approximately 21 times my own accomodation budget. Shame, because I really wanted to have a suite of rooms in a posh hotel.
Oh well, there's always Indonesia...
But back in Chennai; this place, woah! The central lobby is bigger than most houses, and manages to cheerfully and opulently exist without any clumsy walls or pillars anywhere for an area about the size of a small carpark. It has bloody cloisters outside of that, and the distance to the roof might well be measured in tenths of a mile. If I wasn't so sure that the prices would be just as bad as the Woods Manor I might feel bad about not staying in this East coast city a couple of nights and exploiting this lovely place to the full.
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As it is, Chennai has not impressed me at all so I don't care to stay on principal. The taxi drivers are the worst yet, I've been in two rickshaws and both have tried to extract far more than they should have, bloody cheek.
The first guy who hassled me asked for 100 rupees for a drive of about a mile - almost thrice the rate even in an expensive city! Like those who test the sanity of the inimitable Bryson, he received a hollow laugh in reply rather than my custom.
I've seen one pretty much certainly-dead woman on the streets (no-one has gotten round to clear up those who didn't survive the night, I suppose), dozens of homeless and destitute who aren't far off it themselves, and the smell is the worst yet in India, I believe. I have been here for 4 hours.
I'm not even slightly moved about the dead woman, I fear I have become a little indifferent to woe and misfortune 
That smell: it's not that it's there any more frequently than in, say, Mumbai, but it has a certain penetrating quality I've not run up against before. Maybe there are more dead people in the rivers - that certainly seems to be where the smell is coming from, and it is so noxious I could well believe almost anything could be behind it..
One river I crossed must have been entirely composed of the result of the near-terminal incontinence of several million people, and to cap it all off some of them also seem unable to restrain themselves from pissing on the pavements, such is the evidence of huge damp patches and terrible fishmonger odours on passing them.
The streets are crowded, people are cheekier than ever, there isn't space for the tens of millions of people on the streets and the queuers for the left luggage counter at the train station seemed unable to show any patience at all. The guy behind me was pushing his suitcases over the top of my bags trying to get the staff to take his stuff before mine which is frankly just about as fucking rude as you can be without speaking to someone, and when I moved about to push my stuff forwards he began knocking my bag to the left and right in a way that simply could not have been accidental, as he did it about 20 times in 2 minutes. I was getting pretty irritated with it by then, so
I twisted spasmodically after a little while and I think I clipped him in the face. Only once, unfortunately, so to thwart him fiuther I used my laptop to deflect his baggage advancement maneuvreings the next time he tried to stack all his cases on top of my rucksack.
And I hope he misses his train, loses his job and his wife gets pregnant, the pushy bastard.
Overall Chennai had better pull something out of the bloody sack in the next *checks* 6 hours, or I'm never coming back to distribute my hard-earned wealth amongst its rickshaw drivers again 
*After the fact* It never did much but irritate me, so I swooped down to the train station and collected my bags, then taxi'ed to the airport for a fairly easy check-in and departure. Chennai airport was efficient and pleasant, if still typically relaxed in the Indian style when it comes to reminding stupid foreigners like me that you have to get your bags checked, scanned and labelled under your own inertia before checking in, and there are no signs or handy filtered passages to tell you this is so just a large, open hall with no queues or paths outlined but a crowd gently besieging the checkin-in desks at one end, and bag scanners arrayed in a well-spaced line at the other, but it gets sorted out quickly enough even when dealing with me 
If only I had managed to spend all my remaining rupees I wouldn't now have about 16 quids-worth of wasted funds that I'l never be able to use. No-one in Bangkok or Laos can change rupees and I suppose no-one outside India can, at all.
Hey ho; I can set fire to them or make paper planes out of money and discard them from tall buildings to pretend I'm just soooo recklessly extravagant, I guess
