A Change in Plans

An English teacher told me that if you make yourself write, you make someone else read. Several times while writing the last chapter, I thought about what he or she said. Of course, I also realize that the teacher(s) were the main cause of writing in a student’s life. It was they who assigned work that caused the guilt that brought us down out of the tree house where life was more fun and from where one had a better view. So he or she made us write and we made them read but what does reason or logic have to do with the question?

Up to this point this story has been a travel tale. When you arrive and there’s nowhere on the itinerary, then what? Well, doesn’t one day follow another? Recently I read a quote that went, “Living on Earth is expensive but consider that once a year you get a trip around the sun.” We pay attention to calendars but not our daily space in space. The long and the short of all this is that I will make a change in plans.

Instead of a chronological tale, I’m going to tell you about Kodaikanal and how I live here. We switch to a Tlingit style of history. “It happened a long time ago.” No need for the Western cause and effect. I’m going to hold time down with my fork and cut it into bite-sized chunks with a dull table knife and serve it up to be chewed.

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From off the griddle of the plains of India and up into the “hills” is a jump that makes me wonder if I’m still in India. The country is rough as the Appalachians and people look for a bit of level ground where they clear and farm. I’ve yet to find why the British showed up here over a hundred fifty years ago but they did and the smart ones probably stayed on. These “hills” are in the far south of India. My latitude is somewhere around Puerto Rico or the Yucatan of Mexico. The foothills of the Himalayas in India’s north are about the latitude of Dallas-Fort Worth. Those hills are the sites of the more famous “hill stations.”

When you have failed to invent air conditioning and you are tired of urban dirt, you might look for somewhere else to live at least part of the year. Under the Raj, the first administration center of India was Calcutta. Later they laid out New Delhi and move to a more central location. Both these places are sweltering hot for most of the year. By this time the pukka sahibs had learned that it was not only cool in the mountains but once above a certain altitude, you leave malaria-bearing mosquitoes below. The idea of an annual migration began to hold promise. Therefore for about eight months out of the year they lived in the non-strategic but beautifully pleasant hills. Telecommuting was a century or more in the future but the bureaucrats packed up their files or a copy of them and took the train from New Delhi to Shimla. Like nearly everyplace in India the town has two names. If your atlas doesn’t list Shimla, drop the “h” and see what happens. While I’ve not been there, I’ve read that they’ve built an English village on the up and down. England is plains and rolling hills but one can use one’s imagination.

Someone, more clear-headed than I, would have simply flown from New York to New Delhi and taken the train north. Why fool around? I wanted to fool around because on the journey of forty years back, I knew that I was only seeing to the horizon line, that there was an ocean of India that I was missing. And what must that be like? The other thing that drove me south was that regardless of Global Warming the temperature in Sitka dropped an average of about five degrees Fahrenheit and that allowed snow to lie on the ground unmelted for the duration of the winter. Winter, unless you take advantage of it, that is drive dogs, ski, or skate, is a pain, more so after you’ve seen forty plus of them come and melt. I read and talked to Indian visitors, who came to the park where I worked, and heard that Kerala was about as close to heaven on earth as you can find. They say that God lives there. All this I missed on the first trip.

Goa, only a few miles closer to the pole than Kerala, was a shocker. Why did God keep the thermostat turned so high? I had never thought of Heaven as being hot. In Old Goa lies the bits and pieces of St. Francis Xavier. I’m told that the relic folks have removed his arm and shoulder and a thing or two more but they left most of him on public view at the cathedral. I sincerely felt sorry for somebody who had worked so hard for his faith to be spending eternity in an oven. While walking around the cathedral I seriously wondered if I would faint. This has nothing to do with the Finnish steam bath on Wendell Street, Fairbanks. There is an ice-cold shower you can direct on your head and enjoy the relief. But India heat, whether wet or dry, is enough to make St. Francis Xavier swear. It’s just that he doesn’t do it very often. Probably late at night when all the Christians have gone home. While I didn’t melt, I listened when Dick Wechter, who taught in the Kodai International School in 1971, told me about this place. And so as I made this southern sweep of India, I rode a bus, shepherded by the beetle nut-chewing Joey, up a hill and found himself at home among the ten-foot high poinsettias. Now that that’s explained, I have a hundred things to tell you about this hill station. And I’ll get busy very soon but I’m on my way to the “Kodaikanal Public Library,” (Why the quotes? More on that later.) where I’ve begun reading Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austin wrote this while Alexander Baranof was building Sitka and getting drunk, while George Washington was bled and blistered to death, and while Ioann Veniaminoff at age five or six was learning to read Luke II for the Christmas Program.

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Coaker’s Walk may have been laid out during the mid 19th century by the British but what gave the town a push was an American missionary in the early 20th century, who considered the need that missionary families have to educate their children and preferably where parents and offsprings would not be separated by sending them half way round the world. Kipling and Saki left written records of their experiences of being shipped out to relatives “back home.” A solution would be to build a school in India and preferably above the mosquito line along with escaping contact with a half dozen other deadly fevers. While there would be a regular missionary task of conversion, they could educate as well. And then as now the academic level of the school must be high enough to prepare the young person for entry into any university in the world. Along in the 1950s the number of missionary families dropped and the school changed its charter to becoming a multicultural educational institution but keeping a Christian base, Essentially that was and is the basic reason for the continuation of Kodaikanal International School (KIS.)

Because Dick taught here, once I arrived, KIS was a first stop. The lady’s name was Sylvia, who showed me around. She and her husband had taught here early in their careers but then returned to British Columbia to teach until they retired. Wondering what would be a worthwhile after-retirement job might be, they decided to come back to Kodaikanal.

All the buildings are of stone with red tile roofs. Planning and placement of buildings had been well thought out as had the planting. When a planner considers where a building is to be built in relation to the nearest tree and this plan is followed for a century, you have a place that is not only functional but beautiful as well. I have many more schools to see but while I have seen some attractive places to study, none surpassed Kodaikanal International School.

Math, science, English, history, and languages are at the core of the studies. There are a few electives. The focus is on preparation for the university. There is a sports program. A special problem hindering the excesses of producing sports teams is that the only way you get to another school (or they to you) is to negotiate the swerves, the curves, and the competitive driving between here and a distant playing field. Nevertheless the teams are active and do play against other schools.

The telephone rang while Sylvia and I talked. She answered and explained to the caller that there was a full day of testing for the applying student. She explained to me after hanging up that the primary skill in entering is speaking English. Regardless of the number of languages spoken or understood, the first requirement was mastery of English.

The school has an assisting cadre of volunteers. They are furnished room, board, and a stipend of Rs. 2000 ($50) per month. A volunteer’s knowledge can range through the offered curriculum but again first among equals is reading, writing, and speaking English.

The students are introduced to two other fields beyond the basics. They are expected to work for the betterment of people outside the school. They take time out to possible teach their skills learned in a school, work in a hospital, an orphanage, or an old folks home.

In addition to the noblesse oblige the school emphasizes hiking and camping. One of the longer treks takes three days to cover eighty miles. In this kind of physical education the emphasis is on the individual experience, not the team.

Sylvia showed me a map with pens stuck in the places where the students come from. India, north and south, was well pinned, but then beyond the borders, east and west, the students come from around the world. It is certainly an international school.

I was asked to come back when I said my good byes and I suspect that I will.

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