From the Window, the Convalescent World

 (Coonoor)

This small hotel in Coonoor was originally a British-owned hotel called Hampton Court, built in 1857. When I first visited it in 1968, it was owned by a Parsi couple. At that time it was still a bastion of British/English colonial culture, adjoining All Saints Church with its old cemetery, filled with mostly young English men and women who had failed to acclimate to what they called pestilential India. The hotel subsequently changed hands several times, and was later owned by a British executive of what was then known as Imperial Tobacco Company (now ITC), and his wife, Mrs. Das. Mrs. Das, who doled out breakfast marmalade and pats of butter very frugally, and locked up the bar at 6:30 p.m., expanded the hotel a little, and eventually sold it to the Taj group. It was renamed the Taj Garden Retreat, but now it is simply the (Taj) Gateway Hotel, Coonoor. Film crews and actors, who lip-synch songs, and dance in and around the trees and gardens of the area, regularly stay there. Its small restaurant is now much more liberal with its butter and marmalade, which, along with the lovely views of tea gardens and hills, make it my favourite place to visit in all the Nilgiris.