I first arrived in the Valley 20
years ago, in June 1995, wearing a flowered cotton dress stitched
by my grandmother. I didn’t understand
then why my parents, inspired by a
slim paperback called Freedom from the
Known, had moved back to India to seek
out this school for me. Over the next
few weeks, as red mud stained the
bottom of one cotton dress of mine after
another, I walked beguiled around this
unusual wonderland where wildflowers
and wish plants bloomed riotously,
and elephants, panthers, and sometimes
snakes wandered by to visit.
We wove our way through the
junior school quadrangle with its carpet
of yellow flowers, through middle
school mezzanines with skylights and
mosaics, to the senior school courtyard
with tree-top-high terraces. We picked
gooseberries and sour cherries, rubbing
them on our dresses for a second before
tossing them into our mouths. We sat
on the stone bench under the neem tree,
underneath the banyan tree that held the amphitheatre in its arms. We lingered
beside the pond at the Art Village
amidst overgrown marigold bushes
at the edge of the bamboo grove. We
flooded the art room and the pottery
shed with chatter, as we dipped our
hands into paint, clay, and plaster of
paris, making paintings, shaping pots,
and tapping our small feet.
We waited for the monsoon to
come so that rainwater would collect in
the lake. Once the pool was deep enough,
we slipped off our sandals and skipped
into the lake’s green waters. We listened
for birdcalls and observed the tiniest
insects, seeking out unbeaten paths,
knowing they would be replete with
undisturbed wonder. We lay down on
the games field on a starry night and
discovered constellations. We slid into
cool streams to study water and dug
deep into the earth to learn about soil.
We climbed onto rooftops and recited
Shakespearean monologues, “Friends,
Romans, countrymen…”. Little by little,
as I too began to bloom riotously, I began to understand what had drawn
my parents to the Valley.
Before we left, you whispered, “If
you love the Valley so much, you should
come back here…”. We burst forth
into the world with a heady curiosity.
Writing poetry, making music, curating
art, acting in plays, teaching in schools,
learning how to build with mud, understanding
sanitation, unravelling transportation
challenges, working on waste
management, on how handicrafts can
be livelihoods, studying law to promote
justice, leveraging technology to improve
the lives of the marginalized, singing,
dancing, reading, painting—myriads of
meaningful choices, each one as unique
as each of us—for we had learned, early
on in the Valley, that the paths would
always be countless and so we must
follow our hearts.
As I followed a poem of Sylvia
Plath’s to college all the way across
the world from home, and the world
split open at my feet like a ripe juicy
watermelon just as she had promised it
would, I discovered that growing up
at the Valley had made me both wideeyed
and a little bit wise. At graduate school in New York, where countless
stories unfold in parallel, each time I
told someone new about the unusual
wonderland where I grew up, I watched
their eyes light up in wonder, and felt a
prickly pride swell in my heart. “Come
back…”, the Valley seemed to whisper.
It rained before I returned to the
Valley. May carpets of gulmohar petals
lined the slopes and water lilies bloomed
in each small pond. As I began to
discover the thoughtfulness behind
our seemingly effortless experiential
education, I developed a newfound
respect for the philosophy, pedagogy,
and practices of this truly unusual place.
I saw a familiar silky, pink weed grass
that we used to wish upon, spring up
after the rains and asked if anyone
knew its name. Until a wise seven-yearold
reminded me that none of the wish
plants have names because that would
make them ordinary. Wandering through
the pathless land of nameless wish
plants, reconciling fearlessness with
mindfulness, perhaps it is inevitable
that children become somewhat extraordinary.
Maybe excellence is impossible
without freedom?