Dehra Dun
by Susan MacTavish Best
Friday, October 1
On Wednesday, I went to visit the Woodstock School near Mussorie. It’s a sleep-away school perched on the hillside about 4km down a dirt road out of the town. The horns on the roads have been driving me batty again. Completely off my rocker. Constant noise. Ahhh! Am I sounding like a broken record? Nothing like what they sound like. But this road out of the town was peaceful. Wow, I didn’t realize how important it was for me to get out of the city and onto trails. I usually runaway a few times a week over to Mt. Tam. Talk about spoilt. I’m missing that. Really missing outside smells. Car fumes here weigh down the air something awful.
I met up with the fellow, Steve Edigar, who’s in charge of computing on campus at Woodstock. What a tough job. The school is spread out over 450 acres with a 1200ft elevation difference between various buildings. Of course, there’s no central heating. The school takes a two and a half month break in the winter during the nastiest months.
Does the school use the Internet at all? Yes. Of course. There are six Internet connections in the school (there are 450 students). Students can use the Internet with adult supervision. That makes it sound stricter than it is; a teacher is present in the rooms where there is web access. Kids going to porn sites and hacker sites are potential problems. Hacker sites? They’d have to be fairly dead keen techies to be going to hacker sites. Anyway, Mr. Edigar said that the school had a three step approach to using the Internet: Library, CD-ROM, and then, if still no success, move on to the Internet. Using mailing lists isn’t encouraged because all the email clogs up the servers. It’s hard to expect that the Internet be completely integrated into the typical school day when there are so many challenges to actually getting online and getting a connection. Definitely a far cry from the US college student for whom it is mandatory to turn up at Freshman Week with a computer.
Mr. Edigar has been at the Woodstock School for almost four years and has never called the US on a personal telephone call. Thanks to email.
Saturday, October 2, 1999
I’m
walking everywhere. Five kilometers here, three kilometers there, back
and forth. Yesterday I went to the Forestry Research Institute outside
of Dehra Dun. More for the sake of having somewhere to aim towards. Plus,
I was desperate for some peace. Away from the beeps. From anyone.
The curator at the museum never left my side. I hate it that I let things like that annoy me. I tried to outfox him. I’d motion towards the right and then sneakily turn to the case behind me. Right there with me, he was. Always. Mostly, I think he was just excited that someone came to the museum. And someone alone, all the more opportunity to chat.
Forestry Research Institute, Dehra Dun
Guys are like knats here. Not all of them, of course. But they are there, just behind the hairs on my neck. Not threatening. In my space, though. Following me down the streets. On their bikes, on foot. I’ll stop. And drink some water purely to give them some time to walk on ahead. Past me. And there they are, around the corner, casually sitting on a railing, spitting and kicking their shoes. The minute I walk by, they start to sing. Don’t they have somewhere to go? Somewhere to be? Work? And has any woman every just stopped in her tracks and said, Hey there, Babe. Fancy dinner and a screw tonight? Which reminds me, today I had lunch with a journalist for one of the big national papers here. After lunch he said, Will you make love to me? I laughed out loud. Odd. Inappropriate. No.
If
the road is paved, you’re on a main road. A serious Marg. Main roads pushing
through cities and dirt roads crumbling through residential neighborhoods
are complete with pigs. This evening I walked into town here in Dehra
Dun to come use the telephone line in a local store for my computer. I
took a new route cutting through a residential neighborhood. The houses
were spiffy. Fancy gates which means spiffy. What’s best about walking
past these houses is that my nosiness is instantly satisfied. I love to
make up stories in my head about who lives in what house. Here, all the
gates have the names of the residents and titles and lists of fancy Prestigious
University degrees. And outside the houses are piles of garbage: little
blue, plastic bags, ashes simmering from where someone has lit a fire.
And mammoth pigs push their snouts through the smoking, rotten junk. I
don’t like to get too close to them. I’m scared they’ll snout me.
Dehra Dun is just stuffed choc-o-British-digestive-bloc with sleep-away schools. Am I turning old? I seem to remember my Mum saying that she liked to see students in a school uniform. Me too. Now. Seeing groups of girls with their plaits looped up in ribbons and proper skirts with striped socks pulled up (Pulled up? How orderly. We used to have to get up at first gong if our socks were down. Always pushed down. I wore wooly tights that needed darning.) brings a sense of order to my dusty, horn-riddled mind. There’s something cruel in the air here though. The boys, the young men, their school uniform trousers are pleated. No teenager should ever have to wear pleated trousers. And then their belts are cinched tightly around their waists. Dandyfied.
Best of all, Dehra Dun is home to The English Book Depot. A brilliant bookstore where they let me set up camp right in the middle of the store. No questions asked, I was able to work away on my laptop for hours.
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