The Regent Guest House

It was set in a time and place and with a cast of characters that could have stepped off the pages of a road novel. There were volunteers throwing frisbee and playing touch football in the dusty courtyard. There were street performers, snake charmers, magicians and beggars looking for a handout. There were backpackers staying in bare bones rooms for ten rupees a night and Haroon scooting in out on his Jawa motorbike or giving orders to the cook Mr. DiCosta in the kitchen. We might all remember it differently, but what would a selection of anecdotes from our Peace Corps years be without some memories of The Regent Guest House? The saying goes, "if you return to a place from the past it will never be as you remember it." Things change and The Regent Guest House was no exception.

If you didn’t know that The Regent Guest House was tucked into a back lot off of Brigade Road, you could have easily missed it. There were no signs or advertisements that lead you to it. The Lonely Planet Travel Guide for India was still twenty-five years distant and the internet was science fiction.

Travelers heard about The Regent on the jungle telegraph and every Peace Corps Volunteer, and most American and European backpackers that passed through Bangalore, found their way to Brigade Road and down the alley alongside of Nigiri’s Grocery. All of the India 89ers stayed there when they came in to Bangalore for a weekend of r&r or a visit to the Peace Corps office in Richmond Town. The Brindavan or the Rex, a short walk from the Regent, were acceptable substitutes with a similar standard, but lacked its personality.

Haroon Sulaiman was the owner of the Regent Guest House and its essence. He was cordial and helpful to all of his guests, but I think that he had a special affinity for the Peace Corps people that stayed there, and formed bonds with some that lasted a lifetime. Haroon was trim and dashing back then with intense, lively eyes, an easy smile, and with a passing resemblance to the photos of the leading men that were on the billboards outside of every movie theatre.

I remembered him as always being on the move, probably because running the Guest House required it, but mostly I suppose, because it was his general disposition. One guest described him aptly as an object in motion and said, "objects in motion tend to stay in motion”, and that description was still applicable when I met him again many years later.

A bed at the Regent cost a bit more than a dollar a day, if you changed your money on the black market. It was the right price for a volunteer’s limited living allowance and for the world travelers and “dharma bums” who lived on a shoestring. Judging by its name the Regent promised lodgings a little more elegant than they were in reality, but its dozen or so rooms were on a wavelength that let its guests feel at home.

It seems shabby when I look at the photo from 1971, but I didn’t seem to notice it then. It was relatively clean and not different from any other small Indian hostel or hotel, and as a seasoned Peace Corps Volunteer, I was used to spartan accommodations. In our villages, we were weaned off comforts like toilets and running water, and the Regent had the luxury of both. For the rest, volunteers had a flexible attitude as to what were considered necessary amenities.

In late 1971 the Peace Corps was nearing the end of an era in India because of the diplomatic turmoil fueled by U.S. support for India's arch enemy Pakistan in the Bangladesh War. As a result of these contentious relations, and a growing mood of nationalism, the Indian Government canceled future Peace Corps projects and would not consider new ones.

It was about that time that The Regent Guest House evolved into the Only Place, and I noticed that it began to change from a laid-back hang-out for Peace Corps Volunteers and foreign workers to a stop on the Southern leg of the "Hippie Trail”. Volunteers became a minority, replaced by backpackers and the acolytes of Satya Sai Baba, whom many Indians, and a growing number of Western followers, considered an incarnation of the God Shiva.

These spiritual seekers came to the Regent to take some time off from the asceticism of the ashrams in Whitefield or Puttaparti. I guessed that they visited Bangalore to have a beer and eat something other than lentils and rice. Some of them wandered around the Regent with hand-lettered cardboard signs hung on their necks that said, “I am observing silence”, and many seemed as though they were always in a state of dreamy contemplation, looking as though they had just found some profound cosmic truth.

It was most likely “Bombay Black” that gave them that look because I noticed that they were groggy in the morning and had a buzz on in the evening. They scurried into hiding when the police came to check visas and passports. Because of the ongoing diplomatic strife caused by the Pakistani War, the authorities considered all Americans and long-haired foreigners an invasive species and wanted them out of the country.

Haroon never asked to see a passport or visa, as was the law regarding Indian hotels. He welcomed everyone, and when it happened that some guests stumbled on the road to Nirvana or became ill, or got too much of a good thing, be it self-awareness, salvation or gangha, he was there to help them.

Everyone has heard the expression “You can’t go home again” .You can of course physically, but there is a price you pay for it. Sometimes we change and places remain the same, sometimes places change, and remain the same only in our memories. Thirty years after I left the Peace Corps I wanted to take a step back and relive that time, and went looking for the cool and green Bangalore that I remembered.

Instead, I found urban sprawl, tech yuppies, traffic chaos, and unbreathable air. I also went looking for the Regent Guest House, in some version of how it was in 1970, and instead of the old, rambling villa on an unhurried Brigade Road, there was a bustling, kitschy, shopping mall.

However, when I stepped inside, the first door I saw led to the new Only Place Restaurant, where I found our friend Haroon, sitting at a desk in the back directing operations. His once thick black hair was speckled grey, and gravity and time had played its tricks on his physique, but when he removed his reading glasses to get a better look at me, I got a glimpse of the Haroon I remember, with the same contagious smile and charming manner.

Hanging on the wall behind him was a framed photo of some of the volunteers in our group. Looking at it was like stepping into a time machine and I felt a pang of nostalgia as he reverently took it off its hook. In an instant, we were back, wrapped in the brightness of those times with all its volunteers and nomadic guests passing in review.  

I thought that I had no expectations as to what I would find when I returned to Bangalore, but I was projecting the past, looking for vestige of the city that existed only in my imperfect memory. In a curious twist of fate, the restaurant, that many years earlier was the province of Peace Corps Volunteers seeking temporary respite from the arid Kolar plains, or a cheap eatery for scruffy travelers in tie-died kurtas and T-shirts, was now the domain of conservatively dressed businessmen dining on steaks, fries and apple pie.

I realize that logically, there is no other reality than the present. My head understood that, but part of my heart was elsewhere.

 And...

The Regent Guest House holds a special place in my heart for another reason. It was there that I met Kersti,  a Swedish volunteer who was working in a Bangalore orphanage. We ate lunch together one afternoon in the autumn of 1971.

That was almost fifty years ago. Since then Kersti and I have traveled life's roads together, made our home in Sweden, raised three children and are grateful for the good karma that steered us to the Regent Guest House.