Family Life in India continued

Darjeeling 

When we reached Darjeeling we were dropped at North Point, two miles down the ridge from the Darjeeling Bazaar and Railway Terminus, where the Mt Hermon School campus was situated. In the grounds of the school were a group of cottages which housed the Language School students when the school was operating during the summer months. As we were the last to arrive we had been allocated the least well-preserved of the houses! 

In fact when we looked at our cottage our hearts sank. It was a bare concrete house, with little or no furniture apart from beds and chairs, and primitive heating and cooking facilities. However, as all meals were organised in a central dining room, the cooking was no great problem. 

But there were compensations: the view, when the weather cleared, was magnificent. We were only thirty miles south of the peaks of Kanchenjunga, the Himalaya’s second highest mountain. Between us and the peaks were range upon range of forested hills, rising gradually from our 6000 feet to upwards of 12000 feet (the height of Mt Cook) and then on to the perpetual snows of the high mountains. 

Darjeeling was an interesting town, with several good western restaurants, and plenty of shops selling clothing. It had plenty of English-speaking inhabitants attending the schools and colleges using English medium. Not far away were tea plantations growing the world’s most expensive tea, and a few miles away up the hill was the local high spot, Tiger Hill, from where a view of Everest could be obtained on clear days. 

As we settled in to our studies, we also met more than a handful of other new chums from different parts of the world:  British, Dutch, American, Danish, Australian, and American. And at the school nearby were children of our own colleagues and some staff members we had at least heard the names of. 

In many ways it was an idyllic life for three months. After that we retraced our journey through Gauhati back to Agartala, where we continued our studies with our pundit, who came for an hour every weekday morning, settled in to our house, and got to know our colleagues and the surroundings of the compound and the town, and eventually managed to see something of the Tripura district. 

We also met our Indian colleagues, and began to learn how the whole organisation worked, not just the school, but the whole Church enterprise, with its social services and religious activities and outreach into the community. 

We had got back to Agartala in June, just as Summer was at its hottest. The monsoon front usually reaches northeast India around 20 June. It works its way up the country from the south, and hits the Bengal area about then. With it comes wind, rain, and storms, although the worst cyclones in those days came during the summer (March to May), rather than during the monsoon, or rainy season, which stretches from June to October. 

Someone had given us a weather station as a wedding gift, so we put it on the wall and started reading the gauges three times a day and recording the details. We did this for several years. It consisted of temperature, humidity and barometric pressure, with a guess of rainfall intensity, cloudiness, and wind direction and strength. 

We got to know our colleagues, both New Zealanders and Indians, and started to meet some of the people in the town of Agartala. We started to try to read the local Bengali newspapers, as well as the Statesman, the leading English language paper published in Calcutta. 

On Sundays the church service was held early, and we got used to sitting on cane stools, called “mora”, which stayed at the rear of the building, while all the locals sat on rush mats on the concrete floor. I never really got comfortable with this type of class distinction, which was practical, because Indians are used to squatting and sitting on the ground, whereas we are accustomed from an early age to chairs. 

After church we usually entertained one or more of our colleagues to morning tea, or were invited to someone else’s house. Afterwards we spent most of the rest of the day writing or typing letters (usually aerograms) to our families and friends in New Zealand. Apart from these weekly letters, cables were the only way of communicating with home at that time. 

We slowly got used to the servants we were expected to employ in our house. One was the cook, whose job was to do the marketing at the bazar, once a week, and it was my job to check his account each week. What use that was I never worked out because I had no information on which to tell whether he was quoting the appropriate prices. He also did all the cooking for our dinner in an earthen hearth in a separate kitchen building at the back of the house. 

The second servant swept the floors and pulled up the water from a well down in the valley into two kerosene tins, four gallons each, which he then carried up the hill to our bathrooms or kitchen slung by ropes at the ends of a bamboo pole on his shoulder. On his day off I tried once or twice to bring the water up, but it was too heavy for me! I had to bring tins only half full. In those days manual work like this was paid no more than three rupees a day (45 cents in NZ currency).