Getting Here...

Day 1

I left for Kodaikanal from Calcutta on the 6^th of July with a very strange feeling in my gut – a combination of excitement, apprehension, and the tension of leaving behind everything and heading towards a new land and a new lifestyle.

The flight to Chennai was rather unremarkable, except for the elaborately plump young Bengali couple sitting next to me.  The wife emasculated her husband all through the trip while elbowing me in the stomach while I was clutching my pillow and trying to catch up on some sleep.

Chennai to Madurai was also eventless except that my iPhone charger blew up at the Madras airport and I flew in a propeller-Vayadoot plane.  I had never been in one before so I kept staring at the engines from the window throughout the flight.  Yes, I’m very easily fascinated.

At oven hot Madurai ours was the only plane at the airport!  Mr. Rajni Siva picked me up in an Indica taxi and we were on our way to Kodi.  The 137 km drive takes about 3 hours with a couple of breaks in between and Mr. Siva happily taught me some Tamil phrases and basic counting along the way while telling me about his family, and about the local flora.  As we hit the Palini hills, the climate suddenly chilled and a light mist descended around the peaks. 

It was about 8 in the evening when we pulled into the Main Gate of Kodaikanal International School where Katrnina Derrick, the drama teacher from Wisconsin was waiting for us to show me my new home.  KIS is spread across Kodaikanal with multiple campuses and staff housing.  Mine turned out to be a little cottage in the middle school campus called Hiawatha House about a five minute walk from the lake.  My neighbor, Amit, who I will be meeting tomorrow at a dinner with our hosts, lives in a cottage called Minihaha. 

Dropping my stuff off, I went out for a little tour of the area with Katrina and her husband Naveen who is a free-lance nature preservationist and motivational speaker from Mt. Abu in Rajasthan.  He told me what he really missed here in Kodi is his old Enfield motorbike and we talked about Motorcycle Baba and Rajasthan.  We finished the evening with a dinner of dal-bati at a new Rajasthani family run place called Aby’s Café.

Back in my really large (2 and a half bedroom) and tastefully furnished cottage, it was really chilly and slightly damp, as is common with these hillside cottages, so I started a small fire in my fireside boiler and went through all the introductory paperwork that HR had left for me at the cottage – which included Maggie, coffee, biscuits, oatmeal, and a carton of Slim Milk.  There is a eucalyptus oil distillery close to my cottage, so leaving the windows open allows the minty smell of eucalyptus to waft into the room.

I went to bed after making a few calls, wrapped in the linen and thin blankets the school had provided but couldn’t sleep.  I was hit with a sense of longing for familiarity and people I love who I’ve left behind.  I wanted to write about it, but it was too cold to think really, and I got too lazy to go stoke the fire…

So here I am now, seven thousand feet up in the Palini hills, en-route to becoming a lonely high school economics teacher.   Who would have thought…