The Fairlawn

As I mentioned in a previous post, we stayed at the Fairlawn on the way to Bangladesh three years ago. It is quite an institution. It has been a hostelry since before WWII. Run by a family for most of that time, now ruled over by Violet, a youthful 91 year-old. As I greeted her on this visit, she is doing well and not camped on her children's doorstep. Her staff are her family and by extension, ours.

The bungalow has rooms on the edge of large interior halls. Upstairs, there is a large sitting room and downstairs it is split between a smaller sitting area by the front desk and the dining room.
The walls are covered by years of momentos, family pictures and regional nicknacks, as well as many items brought by loyal guests from their travels. The ceilings are high with fans whirling. There are many layers of heavy paint on any surface, not just the walls, but old pieces of furniture. The paint dies it's best to keep away the mold and decay I'm sure.

Our spacious room was recently painted. Two single beds pushed together, another along a wall. There were various furniture pieces: a wardrobe, sitting chairs, vanity, cupboards and stands. The floors were tiles of marble. The fans were again on the high ceiling, a smaller window a/c unit kept us comfortable. We had a small refrigerator, which we really didn't use. They stocked insulated carafes of drinking water, an electric kettle and makings of tea. The bathroom had been recently redone into an open fully tiled room with overhead shower. We did have a TV, with a few English language channels, BBC, etc. We really appreciated that they had made sure that the room was sufficiently wired with multi-pronged plugs for all our electronic gear. And despite the warning that the wifi was only available in the public rooms, we were able to get sufficient coverage from the room. It was truly our retreat.

The room rate included breakfast, cut fruit, choice of cornflakes or oatmeal, eggs and toast. The coffee or tea was served with a cozy so that you could sit and sip as long as you wished. The first couple of days, the room was crowded with a group of h.s. students from Belgium with matching red T-shirts on a three week mission trip. They had breakfast at 8 and gathered to load a bus at 9, off ready for their work, always with guitars close at hand.

The Fairlawn was a great place to strike up a conversation. On a later day, I met a woman from the Netherlands who had recently relocated to Dhaka. Because of her visa restrictions, she had to leave BD and reenter the country every two months. We enjoyed swapping stories of trains to Dhaka and bus travel in the region.

The other end of the day at the Fairlawn was centered in the garden. Tables and chairs under trees and open rooms with overhead fans. It was a wonderful cool place to sit with a cool one after coming in from the Kolkata streets. It was definitely a gathering spot for tea time or happy hour or whatever your nationality does to celebrate the end of a day.

Here P and I met up with a middle-aged couple from Australia who were staying at the Oberoi, a fancy hotel around the corner for their anniversary. They seemed very interested in our accommodations I was proud when the next afternoon I saw them upstairs as paying guests. The following day we shared a table in the garden to swap stories. He was in town to interview for a headmaster's position at a local school.

We had noted it to ourselves and she independently proclaimed it enthusiastically, "Isn't this just like the Exotic Marigold Hotel?"