To Climb a Hill

The bus to the hill station was to pick me up in front of my hotel at 7:30. I found the bus a block away and I believe we left town about 8:30 after having driven a pick-up circuit twice or three times. The good news was that I was aboard with pack and briefcase stowed away. I had what I needed except for one thing, I couldn’t find my ticket. The worst that could happen would be my having to buy the ticket again which wouldn’t cost all that much. Actually the worst that could happen would be my having boarded a bus to someplace I didn’t want to go, which could be about anywhere except Kodaikanal. The town lay off to the northwest atop one of the Palani Hills. What was hard to believe was this ridge was said to be cool even at 2 PM.

Being first on the bus, I watched the other passengers board. Much has been written about the passive backseat taken by Indian wives. You want to watch out for the easy generalizations. But in planning a schedule or a seating arrangement on a bus, one should not substitute theory for observation. Not only do the women nominate a seating plan, anyone who is old enough to put a subject with a predicate adds on their ideas. The first family that boarded surveyed the (except for me) empty bus. Mom, Dad, and the kids all had an idea and discussed the main theme of their idea and after that the modifications. The seating arrangement reminds me of jazz. You take an old favorite like a half-length bus or “Tea for Two” and you see how many variations you could get out of it. To play it straight all the sisters should sit by the windows while the brothers sit on the aisle. That protects against daughter defilement by strangers but if the children are small then they need to sit with the parent or aunt or uncle or grandparent and furthermore little Billy and little Susie just don’t get along well so…. And by then the second family arrives in the doorway, surveys the scene, and seats their family members. There may be rethinking from the first family that will lead to a reshuffle and that the second family has to quickly rethink its position because a third family is boarding.

It was the third or fourth family who had a child who could have been a model for a Leonardo. The kid looked like an angel. I asked the mother how old the little girl was and she told me that he was a little boy who was two. I did my French drop vanishing coin trick since the kid was old enough to follow the action. He looked at his mother and she explained the knotting of his hair on top of his head marked him as a Brahman.

The boy, who sat next to me was a nice looking teenager. His dark glasses, clamped on top of his head like earphones, kept his baseball cap from blowing away and identified him as a boy. Women do not wear baseball caps with saris. What fixed him as a teenager was that he took out an envelope and thumbed through two dozen photos, three of which were not of him. No English. I wanted to look out over the countryside. It was a cloudy day and I was hoping that we traveled northwest, which is the general direction of Kodaikanal.

Something I’ve noticed about South India is that the country is rice paddy flat until you get to the hills and they are a jumble. I remembered the “Utah Mountains” on the tip of the country. At the moment we rolled along a paved road as level as a football field but we would be in steep Appalachia before long. I wondered if this was some remnant of an ancient landform. I suppose everyplace is but some had remained undisturbed longer than others. While they talk about the Himalayas, the Alps, and the Alaska Range as being “new,” there are chapters in the historical geology books that predate that period. The sudden change from flat-flat to up and down makes me think that southern India might have a special story to tell. Where’s are the geologists when you need them?

We stopped off at a “Harvey House” for twenty minutes to a half-hour. The passengers took breakfast and I may have bought a bag of potato chips and reboarded. I wasn’t going to be left at the station. I found a young man among one of the families, who spoke good English, and he assured me that the bus was going to Kodaikanal. Out on the road again, we did begin to climb. No gradual foothills, just up and around. This gave the bus driver a chance to demonstrate his skill at passing on curves and on hill crests.

The bus actually had a crew. There was a baggage boy who wouldn’t be old enough to vote in the U.S. He loaded and kept track of luggage. He also kept his mouth shut and maintained a low profile, sitting in the step-down to the open door. Then there was a supernumerary. His name may have been Joey. He may have been a former baggage boy but in his golden years (25 to 35) he learned to operate the stereo so when we got into the hills and began the switchbacks we could keep up with Bollywood’s Top Forty. The songs may have changed since the ride out of Ernakulam to the backwaters. I imagine that Joey would have aspired to being a pool hustler but when he discovered he’d have to practice if he wanted to shoot straight and he wisely looked for less demanding employment. Such a setback did not alter Joey’s sense of fashion. His shirt opened at the neck showing his gold chain. He shook his curls down over his forehead and he had a two day growth of whiskers. He had an easy-going cool with a smile and always something to say above the whang of the stereo. The problem was that his conversation was directed at the driver, who was driving on the right-hand side of the road as much as the left. I would guess that Joey wanted the driver to know how drunk he got during Diwali. It could be that my imagination was in overdrive but when you see a bus as large as ours coming at us and we’ve got a truck full of rock to our left, I get carried away. Joey was probably giving a report as to how much money he raised for his Christian missionary society. The bus had a large dashboard that stood forward of the steering wheel. Joey perched on the dashboard, legs in an informal lotus position. He chewed gum but then when he leaned across in front of the driver, blocking his view and spit out the window, I realized that his jaw held a wad of beetle nut. I should show some sympathy. After all you can’t swallow the stuff.

Once he delivered his missionary society financial report, he stood by the open door on the left side of the bus, crowding the baggage handler, and partially hanging out the door began to chatter the same word over again and again with the staccato of an auctioneer. I asked what it was he said and it turned out like “missing, missing, missing…” which mean we still had several inches before we hit the stone guard wall. He kept up the rattle until the driver pulled away and back on the paved part of the curve. I wondered how long it would take for his wages to provide the price of a closed circuit TV keeping an eye on the distance between wall and bus.

As I write I find that I get back to the same subjects. I am purposefully avoiding the driving except to say that Joey did do his part to add to the problem. Soon the country became rougher the cultivation lessened. The small farms are pretty but the stretches of wild forest are enough to keep your eyes off the road and Joey. At least driving uphill was slow going. I can only guess at the thrill speed adds on the return trip to the plain. But because we growled along at something less than 35 mph, I could see the trees, the vines, and the blossoms, always something in bloom.

I remember fifty years ago when the bus pulled out of the Odessa station and I for Alaska, not far to the west of town a jack rabbit loped across the road. We had Northerners aboard, who rose up out of their seats for a better look. They had never seen the animal. Now it was my time. Not even Joey’s chatter could pull me away from watching a macaque monkey saunter across the road. Unlike most other animals that bolt at the sight of Man or his machines, macaques seem to recognize that we are an off-breed, who for some unknown reason gave up the trees to have one of our species hang out the door of a bus and call out, “missing, missing, missing.” No wonder macaques radiate an aura of arrogance.

At one point we pulled over for a short “Ah!” at a good sized stream that tumbled over rock and under the small bridge over which we crossed. The road was wide here and several busses were parked, gasping for breath. There were stands along the road and passengers grabbed the vendors’ fast foods. I bought a couple of breaded fried peppers. I was very hungry and I could have eaten just about anything. The pepper was reasonably spicy and the second one tasted better than the first and I wondered if I should buy a third. From the falls we could see well down into the valley below. Space was changing. In Madurai it was the distance down the street to the temple. On the road below on the plain, it was the space between the bus and a farm house or a stand of trees. As we got into the forest, space shrunk again to the breadth of the pavement but now I could see a couple of miles (maybe more) down the valley’s slope to the main river or lakes lying on the plain. There was another change. We were well passed midmorning and the air was cool. Jungle, fried peppers, and monkeys, I decided that I must be going in the right direction. So I boarded again and Joey jabbered like a monkey with a fresh thought and we drove on toward Kodaikanal.

Then the forest began to break up again and where it was flat enough, farmers terraced their land and houses appeared. There were a string of settlements that the road fed. I wondered if these were suburbs of the hill station or, if as they proved to be, small towns in their own right. And that kept up until they made a stop and I saw the baggage boy holding my pack and briefcase. Where those items get off, I get off. It seemed that I was the only person on the bus who did not have a hotel reservation and they needed to get rid of me. After lots of finger pointing, I met a young man who speaks clearly and I ask, “I want to go to Kodaikanal.”

He said, “You’re in it.”

I looked around. On one side of the street was a string of small hotels and food vendors; on the other side of the road were a construction site and a “bus stand.” That was a cleared level of dust (unless it’s raining) where people congregate to board and disembark from the buses. A great cloud bank built off beyond the open area and since the temperature had dropped to the upper fifties and the wind behind the clouds drove dust before it, my first impression of this hide-away in the hills was not the best. I needed food, clothing (a set of long johns would have been welcome,) and shelter, which my greeter got for me quickly at twice the price of a night at the Pearls. I asked if there was nothing cheaper and he said, “Oh, no sir, Diwali!”

The hotel was five minutes uphill and on the same road, “Woodville.” After a walk of no further than to the first class car at Kanyakumari, I found Coaker’s Tower, my hotel, to stop the wind but the first thing I looked for was a stove. The room seemed cold. The view out the window was the earlier mentioned cloud bank. I dropped my pack and went looking for the restaurant. They had a stove and refrigerator and pots and pans but nobody seemed to know what to do with them. At the front desk the mystery was solved…somewhat. You have to turn in your order an hour before you expect to eat. So I expected to eat a little sooner and I walked down Woodville to find food. Stopping at the first eatery, which was near the bus stand, I sat down at a communal table and asked for a menu. You ate what Hobson cooked. Fine, I’ll order Hobson’s choice. The place was set up with the prepaid tours in mind. It operated something like slopping hogs but the rice and curry were reasonably good and priced. I walked down the street with a belly full, my pack stowed, and doing something I had not done since leaving New York. I wore a North Face jacket with hood that my daughter bought me. Imagine, I was wearing a coat in south India and it was only early November!

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