179. And he laughing said to me

William Blake, Frontispiece, Songs of Innocence

There has been only one occasion when I have found myself composing a tune, and it was one that seemed to descend all of a piece, perfect in every way.

It happened one afternoon in my second year at university, when, alone and at a loose end, I shut myself into one of the music practice rooms in Currier House, just me and a piano in a sterile, sound-proof cell.

I wasn’t studying the piano anymore, having abandoned it after fhree years of lessons in India and a fourth in England, ending with a fizzle after an intermediate-level Royal Schools of Music examination. The fact was, I had never taken flight as a pianist, just plodded along, heavy and uninspired, “doing”  scales and the endlessly replayed pieces one had to prepare and perform for the exam. After all those lessons I wasn’t even competent enough to be entrusted with accompanying the hymn-singing in morning chapel at Mount Hermon. But although I would never be a pianist, I was musical. I loved singing, and thanks to Mrs. Murray, the Principal’s wife, so did the whole school. Every morning, schoolchildren from Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, as well as Christian families opened their lungs to the mountain air and raised their collective voices in song, making a joyful noise that echoes in my ears even today, nearly fifty years later. And we didn’t just sing: we harmonized, reedy descants soaring over smooth altoes, sturdy tenors, and youthful baritones; adjusted the dynamics, now full-throated, now hushed; and alternated lines, first the girls, then the boys in reply.

I may have betaken myself to the practice room that day in search of the youthful spirit I feared I was losing at university (see send my roots rain). At Mount Hermon, a precious side-benefit of learning an instrument was that one got to miss a half-hour of morning or afternoon study to practice, completely alone;  perhaps I just wanted to get away and commune with myself. In any case, I sat desultorily picking out little tunes with one hand, no particular place to go.

I had been reading the Romantic poets, and was taken with William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and his idea of organized innocence. My conception of organized innocence is probably highly idiosyncratic, but I remember it as a state one can consciously choose as an adult, having tasted the bitterness of experience.  The innocence of youth is also a state of ignorance, but if one can come through experience without being poisoned, one may return to a new innocence.

Then it came to me, a tune composed expressly for Blake’s Introduction to Songs of Innocence. It came as the child had come to the poet, as the song had sprung to his lips in the poem, and I found myself singing it out loud, utterly unselfconscious in the sound-proof room, then writing it down without any effort whatsoever. It wasn’t even written for me: it had  a portamento in the second repetition of the last line which I did not have the delicacy of touch to execute; and it was always a little high for for my range, as if designed for a boy with an as-yet-unbroken voice. Someday, I tell myself, I will ask such a boy to sing it for me, and make a recording.

A cherub of song visited me that day, as angels had the young Blake; and at a desolate time when I sorely needed it. I had never composed a tune like this before (or rather, one had never offered itself to me in this way) and have never done so since; but now I know that it is possible.

Piping down the valleys wild,

Piping songs of pleasant glee,

On a cloud I saw a child,

And he laughing said to me:



‘Pipe a song about a lamb!’

So I piped with merry cheer.

‘Piper, pipe that song again.’

So I piped: he wept to hear.



‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;

Sing thy songs of happy cheer.’

So I sung the same again,

While he wept with joy to hear.



‘Piper, sit thee down and write

In a book, that all may read.’

So he vanished from my sight,

And I plucked a hollow reed,



And I made a rural pen,

And I stained the water clear,

And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear (x3).

—William Blake
Introduction, Songs of Innocence

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129. Good Morning, Rainy Day

One misty moisty morning, courtesy of Kate Stapleton Photography, sweetridgesisters.wordpress.com

Good morning rainy day/We can’t go out to play
But we are glad to think/The flowers can have a drink.

We had to recite this verse, singsong-fashion, in primary school in India, and my mother tells a flattering story of me as a child, expressing such thankfulness one rainy morning. Truth be told, it wasn’t selfless feelings for the flowers that motivated me. Rainy days, especially warm, rainy days, have always given me a feeling of comfort. Perhaps it is because of my different memories of rain—both personal and collective—in India, so longed-for after the hot, dry season, so welcomed by us children, who ran out naked to greet the first downpour of the monsoons; and in England, where it evokes misty, moisty mornings, teapots full of piping-hot tea, hedgerows laden with juicy blackberries, and general coziness. Cultivating an attitude of thankfulness, though, is something else altogether.

children running in the rain (from may11apr1940.wordpress.com)

In boarding-school in the mists of Darjeeling, when the morning bell wakened us jarringly out of sleep at six o’ clock every morning to face the daunting prospect of a cold shower, I would burrow under the bedclothes until the last possible moment, only just making it to Morning Study on time. But my best friend Marianne, who slept in the bed next to mine for all three years at Mount Hermon, would wake at first light and invariably rise before the bell, with a song in her heart. As she made her bed with crisp, hospital corners, she would murmur the song under her breath so as not to disturb me, but I would just burrow still deeper, cultivating an inner scowl worthy of Oscar the Grouch.

When we lived in Winchendon, where most people’s water came from wells which were perpetually in danger of running dry if overdrawn, a sign over the bathroom sink in a neighboring collective household used to annoy me. It read:

Water is precious/Use it gratefully.

Ornery type that I was, I would always think to myself that if water was precious, surely the sign ought properly to read, “Use it sparingly.” Gratitude, I thought, could merely produce a feeling of self-satisfaction without a concomitant reduction of water use. But although I grumbled, I never took up the issue with my friends in this household; neither did I understand what it meant to live and work with a grateful heart. It is only now, more than twenty years later, that I am beginning to have an inkling of it.

A couple of months ago I spoke on the phone with an old friend in England, whom I haven’t seen for a long time. Her dear mother died just recently after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s Disease, and she herself works with children who have cancer. After I had recited the litany of my accumulated woes, she told me about a daily exercise she has found useful: listing the things in her life, large and small, for which she is thankful. She said that it put her personal troubles in perspective and never failed to lift her spirits.

Twenty years ago I might have pooh-poohed such an idea, but now, in my middle age, waking with a song in my heart and a deep gratitude for the gift of life is something I can no longer afford to look upon with a jaundiced eye.

Another memory from boarding school: morning chapel, and a favorite morning hymn, one stanza of which went

Awake, cold lips and sing
Arise, dull heart and pray
Lift up, O man, thy heart and eye
Brush slothfulness away.

I remember looking over at the girl standing next to me one morning as we sang this hymn, and thinking uncharitably how cold and waxen her lips looked, how impassive her face. I loved singing, and it never failed to bring me joy, but it didn’t occur to me either that she might have unspoken sorrows of her own or that the words might have a message for me.

As I sit up in bed in my warm house this rainy morning-before-Thanksgiving with my pot of Darjeeling tea and my laptop, I welcome the new day with gladness. Soon I must arise and face the world, negotiate the traffic on the roads and mingle with the jostling throngs in the shops, and I resolve to do so with a grateful heart. But first, just one more cup of tea.

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52. Himalaya

photo by Karl Hagen

For three years in the mid-to-late 1960s, I went to boarding school in Darjeeling, six thousand feet above sea-level in the Himalayan foothills. Every March I would take a small plane from the plains down in Calcutta (Kolkata) to Bagdogra airport in Siliguri. From Siliguri it was six hours of winding vertiginously up into the mountains by jeep or bus or, for the lucky ones, narrow-gauge railway. Our school’s main building was an unheated stone castle, wreathed in mist most of the time. We slept under three blankets throughout the school year, which lasted until November, when the school closed down for the winter months and most of the students made the long journey back down to the plains. For a month beforehand we all sang GHD (Going Home Day) songs rich with school slang; one of our favorites, sung to the tune of “The Camptown Races”, went:

Going Home Day has come at last, doo-dah, doo-dah/Going Home Day has come at last, Oh, doo-dah day/We travel all the night, we travel all the day/We spend our money on the DHR (Darjeeling Himalayan Railway), doo-dah doo-dah day.

Down from old Mount Hermon, on a rutphut (ramshackle) bus/After nine months mugging (studying), back to home, to fuss/Teachers are so bucky (trouble-making), prefects are the same/Everybody’s happy, waiting for the train.

Ghoom, Sonada, Kurseong, all are left behind/Though our journey’s very long, I’m sure we do not mind (all shout: We do!)/When we reach Sealdah (railway station in Calcutta), hail it with a shout/Paan, bidi, cigret (the cries of the station-vendors), kick the teachers out!

All the English-medium boarding schools in Darjeeling were run by Christians of various denominations, on the model of British public schools. There was St. Joseph’s and St. Paul’s, both boys-only schools, and the all-girls’ Loreto Convent. Mount Hermon, the youngest of the four, was unique in being coeducational and was run by Baptist missionaries from Australia and New Zealand (although it had been founded by American Methodists). The schools had been established during the days of the British Raj, when Darjeeling (originally Dorje Ling) became a summer getaway for wives and children of the British civil servants stationed in the sweltering plains. Twenty years after independence,  the quaint little town was inhabited by Indians, Nepalis, Tibetan refugees, Sikkimese, Bhutanese, and a few Britishers who had stayed on. There were still vestiges of the colonial days in the Mall, where tourists could get pony rides, buy cakes and milk-shakes at Glenary’s, go for a drink at the Planters Club, and—if they could afford it—stay at the elegant, old-world Windamere Hotel, where afternoon tea and sandwiches were still served in the British style. By our day, though, one could just as easily find salt-and-buttered Tibetan tea in Darjeeling.

Despite our school’s mostly-non-Indian staff and its British boarding-school traditions such as the house system, school ties, and the tuck shop, the students themselves were mostly Indian, with a few each from Nepal, Sikkim, Tibet, Thailand, Australia, England, and the United States (three American exchange students from Chicago who initially shocked us with their cigarette-smoking but became good friends). I still remember our lively discussions about Christianity with our missionary teachers, coming as so many of us did from Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist families. Isolated on the school grounds (except when we “bunked” to Hafiz’ shop at North Point for momos, steamed meat dumplings, or to Black Rock*, the spot among the tea bushes where as teenagers we once arranged a secret—and completely innocent—meeting with our boy- and girl-friends), we were far removed from the turmoil of the outside world, from the Marxist-Leninist Naxalite movement exploding nearby in our own Marxist state of West Bengal, from the Nepali separatist movement that would erupt into violence in Darjeeling just a few years later, and from the civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, and Flower-Power movements flourishing in the United States.

photo by Karl Hagen

Surrounded by swirling mists and tea estates terraced on the steeply sloping hillsides, our one immovable frame of reference was the mountain range. On days when the mists cleared, we looked out of our dormitory windows upon the snows of Kanchenjunga, the third-highest peak in the world. We were told that it was fully fifty miles away, but it appeared to be just across the valley. Since our headmaster’s wife was a passionate music-lover, Mount Hermon was known as the singing boarding school. We sang our hearts out morning, noon and night: in morning chapel, in daytime music classes and choir practice, in evening rehearsals for the annual—and legendary—school musicals. When the choir sang the anthem, “Lift thine eyes, Oh lift thine eyes, to the mountains, whence co-meth, whence co-o-meth, whence co-o-meth help,” we lifted our eyes and souls to the Himalayas alone. The song must have been written with other, faraway mountains in mind, but for us there were no others. When we were taken into Darjeeling town to see The Sound of Music, Maria’s echoing hills were, naturally, the Himalayas only. And when we learned a song called, “Oh India, Mother India,” our hearts swelled with pride at the natural beauty of our country, a beauty that we could not fail to see around us wherever we turned our heads. The words are engraved in my mind:

O beautiful for azure skies, for amber waves of grain/For snow-capped mountain majesties, above the fruited plain.

O India, Mother India, God shed his grace on thee/And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.

Later, when my family emigrated to the United States, I encountered another version of this song, which the Americans had had the cheek to rename “America the Beautiful.” The mountains in their version were not snow-capped, but bare and purple with cold.

Today I have little use for nationalist sentiment, but the thought and even the sound of the word Himalaya remains powerfully evocative for me. Himal Southasian is an e-magazine that, like the mountains themselves, spans and defines all of the subcontinent across national boundaries. Himalayan—as in the often-used Indian English phrase, Himalayan blunder—has passed into the English language as an adjective of extremes. Abode of the snows and the Everest-climbing Sherpas, the Himalayas are the source of the River Ganges, place of myth and legend, danger, awesome beauty and unimaginably lofty heights. For me they are still the only real mountains.

photo by Karl Hagen

I took my husband to Darjeeling with me after our marriage in 1983, my first time back since I had left India fifteen years before. We had to get a special permit to travel to Darjeeling, because of the Gorkha separatist unrest. Our pilgrimage took us along my annual route up to the town, down the Lebong cart road from North Point into the cold stone building which housed the dormitory I had shared for three years with 24 other schoolgirls. We toured a tea factory together as I had in social studies class so many years before, and re-visited Black Rock. We even woke up before four on our last morning to take the trip up the 10,000-foot-high Tiger Hill, from where on rare sunrises one could catch a glimpse of Everest. Although I had not succeeded in catching it in all my years at Mount Hermon, as a newlywed I hoped that my husband and I might be blessed with the sight. It was a fairly clear morning, and I thought I saw a tiny white speck just a bit more substantial than a cloud—or so I told myself.

Back at Bagdogra airport at the base of the mountains, we boarded a return plane for Calcutta. As the plane circled west to turn south, I happened to take a backward glance out of one of the windows. Framed there as if by magic shone—Everest? Unmistakably the highest peak in the range, the Everest I had never once managed to see in all the years I was living in Darjeeling. I stared until it was out of sight. Whether or not what I saw was actually Everest, Himalaya, abode of the snows, still stands supreme, there and in my mind’s eye, the fixed point to which all else refers.

As a child I had met the mountaineer Sir John Hunt, who delighted us schoolchildren by giving the famously enigmatic answer to the question of why his team had attempted that treacherous peak: “because it’s there.” But the mountain itself makes no demands, throws out no challenges. It is simply and majestically there.

* While preparing to write this piece, I looked up Black Rock on the Internet, and learned, to my sorrow, that in November 2009 Mount Hermon student Romel Ropuia fell to his death from the rock as he and two schoolmates, bunking from the school grounds, were returning for dinner. My deepest sympathies go out to his family. According to the current Principal, plans are now underway to fence the entire 74-acre school campus.Other Tell Me Another stories set (either wholly or in part) at Mount Hermon School in Darjeeling:

Other Tell Me Another stories set (either wholly or in part) at Mount Hermon School in Darjeeling:
24. Hidden Places
38. Study Halls and Cinchona
109. Hindi Lessons
125. My Autograph Book
129. Good Morning, Rainy Day
179. And he laughing said to me

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38. Study Halls and Cinchona

photo by Karl Hagen

At boarding school in Darjeeling back in the 1960s we were required to sit through three study periods a day: morning study, from 6:30 to 7:30 am—tantalizing because the study hall was adjacent to the kitchens and we could smell breakfast being prepared; afternoon study, from 4:30 to 6 pm—also hard to sit through before dinner, since, as growing adolescents, we were perpetually hungry; and evening study, a mercifully short hour after dinner, followed by a precious hour of free time before Lights Out.

During these tedious sessions I would while away the time daydreaming or passing notes furtively back and forth between the rows of desks without attracting the attention of the teacher monitoring from a dais at the front of the hall. (In a box somewhere I still have a little stack of these notes, many of them written in Thai, which my boyfriend was teaching me.) I was grateful that I was studying the piano, because it allowed me to excuse myself legitimately from morning study for a daily half-hour of peaceful music practice—from which I could sneak out for a few minutes to race back up to the girls’ dormitory if I had not had time to make my bed between the Rising Bell at 6 am and the beginning of the study hour. (I was a slow riser at the best of times,  especially on cold, misty mornings in that unheated stone building, where we had to keep three blankets on our beds throughout the school year.)

We were required to keep a log in which we accounted for our study time and which was checked periodically by the teacher on duty. Because I never kept mine up, I was obliged to reconstruct several weeks’ worth as each review loomed. This was a faintly enjoyable creative exercise, with an element of danger involved if the subterfuge were to be found out; for the study hall was a place of punishment as well as of mere boredom. As we accumulated demerits for this or that infringement of the rules, we would have privileges progressively suspended, starting with our monthly pocket money, followed by the movie shown in the chapel every Saturday night, and finally, the highly anticipated Saturday every month when we were free to go into town for the day. On at least two occasions I had to sit writing an essay alone in the study hall while my classmates were watching the weekly movie upstairs or treating themselves to Keventer’s legendary milk shakes in Darjeeling.

I won’t dwell on the nightmarish exam periods that stretched over a very long week three times a year, when we would have to take two to three exams a day in the study hall. They instilled the principle of delayed gratification in me, because the only thing we had to look forward to during the seemingly never-ending rigors of exam week was the prospect of the school holidays beyond. To this day I find it hard to justify taking a vacation without undergoing a period of intense hard work beforehand.

photo by Karl Hagen

One of the small pleasures that made the study hall bearable was our classmate Sonia’s cinchona. Her father had a cinchona plantation a few miles down the mountain in Sonada, and she used to have supplies of the fibrous stalks which she would distribute for us to chew on like sugarcane. The bitter principle—the very substance, I suppose, from which quinine is made—had a distinct tonic effect, and to this day, I love drinking tonic water on its own because it has the same pleasantly medicinal taste.

How is it that my feelings about these experiences are ones of fondness, even nostalgia? Perhaps it is because our school was sited in one of the most beautiful spots in the world, six thousand feet high in the Himalayan foothills, with a view of Kanchenjunga from our dorm windows on clear days; perhaps because we were known among the Darjeeling schools for our music, and sang our way through the days and weeks that would have been unbearably regimented if they had consisted solely of work and more work; perhaps because we were all in it together, like one big family (albeit dysfunctional at times), students and teachers alike. Or was it simply that we were young, full of life, and determined to enjoy it, rules or no rules? As my classmate Bina wrote in my autograph book before I left, “May you live all the days of your life!”

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24. Hidden Places

photo by Karl Hagen

Why are children so attracted to hidden places? At boarding school in Darjeeling, up in the Himalayan foothills, one might have thought that we would take every opportunity to get out of school bounds and into nature, and we did. But more frequently we sought hidden places within the school itself, places unknown to adults and authorities, where we delighted in being unseen.

We organized a midnight feast, probably inspired by the Enid Blyton books that were ubiquitous in our childhood. (Enid Blyton’s boarding-school books were the Harry Potters of the time, except that the magic, for most readers, lay in the unreality of the privileged world of her characters.) In preparation, we collected as much food as we could, smuggling sticky jam sandwiches out of the dining hall under our arms, contributing a can of baked beans and a bar of chocolate, bought from the school tuck shop with our precious pocket money. Some girls had parcels of food sent from home, and we may have cajoled a special treat out of one of them. At the appointed hour we crept out of our beds and down the long, dark hallway of the stone school building, terrified that we might wake the matron. When we reached the chapel, we tiptoed through the stage door and then climbed the stepladder into the loft above the stage, careful not to drop our candle and our bundle of goodies. Once there, we ate the clandestine food, told ghost stories in hoarse whispers, and screwed up our courage to brave the long passage back to our beds again.

There was another secret place, also behind the stage. One night, while students were rehearsing late for a school play but most of us girls were back in our dormitory, we heard excited whispers coming out of a dorm closet. It turned out that there was a small hole in the back of the closet that opened through to a changing room in the wings of the theatre. What a thrill to talk to our boyfriends through that hole, and at an hour when we were supposed to be in our separate dorms getting ready for bed!

Early one evening, three of us set out looking for hidden places. We climbed up to the third floor where the little girls’ dorm was, and found there a door under the eaves leading to a long, low space that ran the length of the dorm behind the wall. Creeping along in the dark with only a candle to light our way, we heard the sounds of the matron and the junior girls on the other side of the wall, all unaware of our presence. As we edged along, shadowy objects loomed at us out of the dark, and we had to catch our breaths to keep from crying out. Then the corridor widened and we entered what seemed to be a small room, where we could stand upright. There was a large, dark object in the corner which, on closer inspection, we found to be an old piano,  festooned with cobwebs. It is hard to account for the excitement that we felt at this discovery, but anything that caught our imaginations or hinted at secret worlds was thrilling to us. For me, the abandoned piano in the hidden room, waiting with open sheet music for ghostly players, evoked my favorite scene in the Classic Comic of Great Expectations: Miss Havisham still wearing her wedding gown after all those years, the wedding feast, cake and all, similarly hung with cobwebs.

We didn’t spend all our time hiding behind the walls like Mary Norton’s Borrowers. Some of the more intrepid among us would “bunk” under cover of dark to a little stall called Hafiz’s up the hill at North Point, and bring back hot momos, delicious meat-filled dumplings. Every evening, in the five or ten minutes between dinner and evening study hall, those of us who were official “couples” would stroll round and round the school building in the gathering dusk hand-in-hand, defying the eagle eye of the aptly-named Miss Hawke. And on the Saturdays when we had permission to go into town, one of our favorite destinations was the New Dish Chinese restaurant, which offered us a rare experience of privacy with its curtained booths.

(For more Tell Me Another stories involving Mount Hermon School in Darjeeling, see Himalaya and Study Halls and Cinchona.)

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