GROWING UP WITHOUT
My memory is that when we were in boarding school in India that at Ridgewood dormitory and then in high school at the Hostel dormitory that water was heated once a week and we all took brief showers in a row of showers at the same time.. But when we were out of boarding when my mother came up from Allahabad during the very hot summer on the Indian plains to the cool summer at 7000 feet in Landour that once a week water would be heated in a tea kettle on the stove and then poured into a small tin tub where cold water would be added to get the water temperature right and that we would bathe quickly in about three inches of water. The stove was fed with charcoal which was packed carefully in a large cone and was then delivered to our house from miles away on the backs of villagers with a strap over their forehead to distribute the weight. I never observed the process of turning wooden sticks into charcoal and had no idea, or curiosity then, although I do now, how sticks were turned into charcoal.
Our consammah, cook, also used charcoal in our concrete stove to cook with. I think the electricity did go off occasionally during the heavy rains of the summer monsoons downpours during which ferns with other vegetation sprung six feet high on the hillside and the branches of oak trees were covered with moss a foot thick and a feathery golden green mantle of ferns. But if the electricity went off the only inconvenience was that we didn’t have light at night. Our mountain cottages were unheated, we had had no refrigerator or telephone. We never lost contact with the world because we didn’t have it in the first place except for weekly letters from my father on the plains and notes from mothers in other cottages delivered by chaprassies who would carry the note up the hill, wait for a note in reply, and then bring it back again. We didn’t have a radio and of course no television with the only way of quickly connecting to family in the United States by telegrams which took 12 hours to be delivered.
It was as different a world as could be from today’s United States. When we were in Swannanoa two weeks ago and the Swannanoa river was raging we had no idea what was going on until we managed to receive a video of the flooding sent to us from Todd’s brother in law in Austria.
All this demonstrates is that people who grew up in the rural United States where my Grandmother Hall bathed us in a tin tub, very like the Landour tin tub, on a kitchen table with hot water added first that had been heated on the coal stove, and then cold water added, or my childhood experience in India were less disconcerted by the lack of electricity, water, cell service or Internet than young people who have grown up with all of this taken for granted.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 