“In the early 1930s, when the missionaries were transporting Goodwill Bibles to Denkal in noisy coal-fuelled cars, another kind of goodwill...
“In the early 1930s, when the missionaries were transporting Goodwill Bibles to Denkal in noisy coal-fuelled cars, another kind of goodwill had found its way up the ghat. Praise the Lord, the paper and viscose industries were discovering the wealth of raw material in the Palnis.” One of my favourite books about Kodai is a lesser-known novel that does not name it but delightfully brings it to life.
Up the Ghat (1992) – featuring a fictitious town in the South Indian hills, much like Kodai but called Denkal – is not author Zai Whitaker’s most famous book (Andamans Boy and Kali and the Rat Snake often stake that claim). Years later, not enough people have read this portrait of a young woman contending with a dull marriage and life in the mountains as her righteous husband attempts to help a group of bonded labourers (drawing on the real-life story of Sri Lankan bonded labourers who lived at Kodai’s BL Shed).
Wry, irreverent and suffused with Whitaker’s trademark wit, it is full of long walks by the lake and a tangible sense of the slow pace of mountain life. There were few novels that showed us this world in the nineties. Thirty years later, we still do not read...
