DBS , Cold Baths and the Harmonium

VKV Sunpura was a girls school with 300 students. It used to be a boys school. We were told of an incident from the boys school days that truly describes what Arunachal really is all about.

 The school then was not as well developed . Boys used to be lined up at a hand pump for their bath. Standing in line for a cold bath was not exactly very exciting for the boys so they used to throw stones at birds , actually hit them , leave the line for some time, light a small fire , have a little snack and rejoin the line in time for their bath !

It was with a chance encounter with a leech that we discovered that even our friendly girl students had a wild side. Back home they told us , or , in the hills as they say it, a nice way to pass the time is to turn a big leech inside out and watch it turn back right side out!

I don’t know if this can really be done. None of my scientist friends have tried it so even they don’t know.

Food at the school followed the DBS system . Dal , Bhat and Sabji . Meat was served once a month. Someone had the brilliant idea of cutting the food bill by rearing goats at the school. This seemed feasible as the school campus is more than sixty acres , most of it unused farmland. The students refused to eat the goats they had reared so it was back to market bought chicken with the additional trouble of keeping the goats out of the teachers’ lovingly tended gardens.

Teachers were mostly from south India. Kerala to be precise. No where else are there people willing to leave home for such a remote place for a teachers salary .They lived in small cottages with tiny gardens in front. The cottages were a little raised, frames of wood and walls made of a composite of bamboo and cement. All of them were a uniform blue that one gets on mixing indigo with lime. One of the teachers was going on leave, so her cottage got allocated to us. We also inherited a cat and her two tiny kittens.

It dawns early in Arunachal. We used to get up at five and go to the school temple after a freezing cold bath. We assumed , since there was no hot water connection to the cottage, freezing cold baths are what all true arunachalis take. A few days later, one of the teachers made a casual enquiry about what we were doing about our bath. On hearing that we were taking cold baths , he was truly shocked! He took us to the kitchen and there , on the biggest wood burning chulha we had ever seen sat a humongous vessel full of hot water. All the hot water we needed had always been just a call away .

 By the time we discovered hot water at the school, we had started enjoying to the cold baths at dawn.  It was as if the cold bath was the first thrill of the day.

One day we met the school harmonium. It was an exceptionally sweet sounding instrument. But it could play only two select bhajans . The reason being , it had lost a lot of springs and all the cavities had been stuffed with rags and silk cotton to prevent it from droning unwanted notes. Some notes that were necessary but had no springs were operated  after keeping stones on the board. The school did have another harmonium, it was in the same sorry state , but the children never used it since the first one sounded better. Repairing the poor thing ment taking it at least to Assam , but no one seemed keen enough to cross the Bramhaputra with the heavy load.

I talked to the principal and it was decided that the harmonium had to be saved even if it ment sacrificing the other one.

Next  afternoon , I sat with my swiss knife and the two harmoniums. Surrounded by eager bunch of girls from class three and started a transplant of sorts . First to come out were about half a kg of stones and a medium sized plastic bag full of rags and cotton . We stripped both the harmoniums among oohs , aahs and giggles and after a good one and half hour we put them together again. The girls got their instrument back. All the keys working and all the notes sounding sweet.

If it had not been for the Victorinox, I am sure the girls would still be playing the same two songs.