"I came to India to retire in 1999. It hasn’t worked. Not at all. It’s a stupid idea I had.”
Isla Van Damme has had quite a life. Sorry, that is the wrong tense. Isla Van Damme is having quite a life. She was once a VIP hostess at the airport in London (“very boring”), then ran Santosh, a boutique store, selling Indian art, artefacts and fashion for decades in Belgium (“most difficult country to sell to women, they are very classical”), created a cafe on an almost deserted beach in Goa (“people loved it, but never again, I worked 12-14 hours a day, seven days a week”), built herself a beautiful beach house (“but it wasn’t actually legal so I demolished my own house”) and then found a new career designing houses and interiors (“I told one man I can’t work for you. He wanted everything to look expensive. I said it’s not my style. Also he was stingy. A stingy rich person.”)
When Van Damme, or Loulou as everyone calls her, left the madness of Goa for the quiet green hills of Tamil Nadu, one would have thought she was finally retiring. Instead she built a homestay. She fell in love with a plot of land with a sweeping view of the hills and valleys—16 acres that had once grown coffee and pepper and were now overgrown, abandoned to gaurs, macaques and giant Malabar squirrels. There, during the covid years, she built herself an English-style bungalow. And a guesthouse next to it—Isla’s Ridge, leased to CGH Earth Saha but very much her baby. The decor is hers. Much of the menu comes from her recipes. And she often walks over to scold them for not making the coffee strong enough.
My partner and I didn’t go to Isla’s Ridge to meet Loulou. We actually thought we were going for a weekend in Kodaikanal in early July. Only after reaching Isla’s Ridge in Palani Hills did we discover that Kodaikanal was about 2 hours away. The lovely boutique hotel with its five rooms was unlike any I’d been to, a new property but with an old heart. The dining room tables were piled with old books (just like my own desk at home). The bathroom in our room had no door, only curtains. “Madam insisted,” the manager said with a shrug. “Just practise your bathroom singing if you want privacy.” There was art everywhere, eclectic and eccentric—a white marionette from Myanmar perched on top of my armoire. “Madam’s art,” said the manager. The driveway was lined with drooping bell-shaped datura flowers, white, pink, mauve. They were poisonous but apparently Madam loved them. There were, for no discernible reason, two ponies on the property—Potluck and Blue Diamond. Both of course belonged to Madam. Even the swimming pool had its quirks. “Be careful, the gaur sometimes come to drink,” warned the manager.
Madam, of course, is Loulou Van Damme. When she invited us to tea, I was intrigued. She sounded like quite a character. I was not sure what I imagined—some kind of dowager countess of good taste, a grand old collector queen left over from the Raj (she was born in India, Kodaikanal in fact, to Belgian parents right before independence) having tea and cake in her garden.
I was wrong. She was the living embodiment of someone who didn’t follow any rules. “I was a junglee, I had a little tree house, I didn’t go to school until I was 9,” she said with a laugh. “I was left absolutely to myself, untrained, uneducated.”
Her parents had left Belgium after their picture frame business went bust after World War I. They settled in India looking for new beginnings. One day in Mumbai while her father was fixing a tyre puncture himself, a gentleman in a Panama hat with a big cigar approached him and said, “Young man, perhaps my driver can help you?” They became friends and partners in a business making picture frames. That business still exists—Chemould Frames.
Loulou was sent away to school in England but got expelled for smuggling in a radio. She fell in love with a young man with a sports car in London and left home. A Danish lady who used to own an iconic boutique called Malabar in the Taj Hotel in Mumbai gave her a job as a salesgirl at her shop in London. There she started doing windows and designing clothes. “I had big shoulders, so I was a good mannequin and then this lady said ‘Loulou go back home to Brussels and open a shop.’ And I said ‘Oh what a good idea.’ I had that shop for 30 years.”
But she knew she would come back to live in India “because my roots are in India.” After her parents who had returned to Belgium passed away, she came to Goa and opened Olive Ridley Cafe in Morjim, serving up couscous and grilled fish and mentoring the sons of local fishermen, her “beach boys”. She is proud one of them became a hotelier himself, opening Jardin d’Ulysse in Morjim. Then she built herself a house because she could not find the sort of house she wanted. She had never designed or built a house. “But I rolled up my sleeves and did it. People wanted to know who the architect was. I said well there wasn’t any.” A woman visiting Goa from New York asked her to build her a house—six months and an unlimited budget. That led to another and another. “Things go very fast in India,” she chuckled. “Much faster than Europe.”
It sounded like a charmed story, and as she poured tea, sitting in her garden, the shadows gathering over the valley stretching out before us, it did have a fairytale feel to it. “I never calculate, karma does the work,” she said. But it’s not just karma. What surprised me is how this woman, who has spent her life collecting beautiful objects, had so little attachment to anything. She left Belgium because India called. She left Goa when she hated what it was becoming. She ended her marriage after 40 years not because it was a bad marriage, but because “I think I was made to live alone, so I can control my life.”
She admitted she has many acquaintances but only a few friends. She can tell stories about everything she owns, from a priceless Magritte lithograph to a chandelier she got for ₹1,000 at Mumbai’s Chor Bazaar to a copper shoe moulded from her first childhood shoe, but is done collecting. “I have nowhere to put it. And I don’t like being pushed, pushed and pushed to consume all the time. I’m going against the tide. Maybe I have done so all my life.”
We do not grow up learning to go against the tide. I grew up in an upper middle-class family in India being groomed to success by following the rules. Someone like Loulou Van Damme, who seemed to follow her heart, would surely have alarmed my parents. But the more I spoke with her the more I realised how much hard work it is to remain true to your heart. “I fought for living this life,” she said simply. “I have some good angel with me. But I worked a lot.” Even Isla’s Ridge was a struggle. She said she was on the verge of cancelling the contract if CGH could not be persuaded to run it as the kind of guest house she had envisioned, rather than yet another luxury hotel.
But now that’s done and she can sit on her bed that faces the bedroom door which faces the hills and dream not of retirement but of more things she can do. Like building a lotus pond.
As we left she said watch out for the gaurs. “They are quite peaceful. But they are wild animals. But my God, they are superb.”
Not unlike Isla Loulou Van Damme herself.
Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.
Sandip Roy (@sandipr) is a writer, journalist and radio host.