A little over a week ago, we were given 5,000 Rps and a train ticket for six (2nd class AC, with veg meals, very high snazz) to leave the land of limbo*. The tales we had heard about Indian train stations and cars were fantastic, but whether due to the early hour (there is something distinctly unnerving about sweating so much at 5:30 am in the
*(Anna’s – our in-country program director – apartment in Delhi, with the daily question of whether we would be traveling north or south, learning Hindi first or getting started on Telugu, and whether that uncertain beginning would happen this afternoon, sometime tomorrow, or in two weeks)
This being India, of course, the notion of sleeping because there might be nothing better to do was quickly debunked. A constant stream of food – water, tea and crackers, hot breakfast, more tea, mango juice – and adorable twin Sikh boys running between our seats and theirs to shake hands and say “hello, hello” kept me awake and wondering. Five hours and endless sugar (?) fields later, we stepped off our rocking metal transport and into the distinctly cooler air of Deridun. Anna met us at the station, fed us, and packed us into taxis to climb back up the switchbacks to a little nook of the Himalayan foothills just a town or two away from our first orientation destination. And so The Southerners rejoined rest of the fellows at the Dev Dar Woods guest house and the Landor Language school, about 4 km or a half hour walk above Mussoorie.
The trees here are dripping with green. Green climbs sideways up the short stone walls that hold in the hills, green slicks the soles of our shoes. The color swings from branches with grey-white languor monkeys and insinuates itself through the cracks in the bedroom floor.
Our Hindi classes are alternately speeding and crawling along. When clouds drift in through the door – I mean marshmallow puff passing over the threshold, visible and prickly and soft – I smile slightly and turn back to the next new letter. When the electricity goes off in the middle of a lesson, the teacher continues without a pause, and the light inevitably flicks back on a few minutes later.
The views off the sheer sides of the foothills are cottony white. When the curtains part, they reveal a sea-green coral carpet of trees covering folding mountainsides. And if we’re very lucky, if enough layers have been lifted, if six of the seven seas have parted, we may glimpse the white-gold tips of the real mountains. The
Four of us took a seven-hour meander on Saturday. Although we began with a dirt-trail descent past guest-houses and forested homes, we soon stretched along a major paved road. With our cross-strapped backpacks and sweaty American t-shirts we must have cast a strange image to the small boy who carries water up and down this slope every day, to the girls giggling in flocks on their way home from school. When we finally left the road, escaping context, we pranced under power lines and scrambled along goat trails that provide barely half a foot of horizontality in this world of vertical living.
Here, everything is either up or down. The sidewalks and roads are not smooth concrete, but are scored to keep cars that are climbing up from sliding back down, and to keep the pack mules that are sliding down from catching too much speed. Unfortunately, there is not a parallel wet/dry dichotomy. Instead, there is a steady continuum from damp to soaking. Damp is preferable, and even somewhat precious. Plain old ‘wet’ is more common. When I don’t want to connect my body to one more soggy-cool surface, I remember the absolute smog-heat of
After sixteen hours of Hindi classes, two weekends, one sweet new years, and an untold number of paperback novels and bollywood music videos, the seventeen World Partners fellows will be scattering in the (thankfully hot) winds. Maybe the Southerners will actually get on a train to
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