Stop fighting.

The phone rang. And rang.

Or maybe it didn't ring at all. I honestly don't remember anymore.

What I remember is standing in the school's telephone booth to make the only call I was allowed to make, only to reach no one. I had already gone a few weeks without hearing a familiar voice. I looked forward to talking to someone back home, but that wouldn't be possible for another few weeks.

It was not a good moment to be on my own. The group I hung out with dissolved as two of them were expelled from school. Smoking, skipping class, and leaving the campus led to their sudden departure. They were trouble, and one of them was my crush. I liked him from the beginning.

Reset

Things hadn't exactly been going well for me in Germany. I hung out with troublemakers, skipped classes, and didn't pass the school year. Although I've always believed in myself and never doubted my abilities and skills, I usually did the opposite of what my father advised (or ordered). In short: I was a rebellious teenager.

I didn't want to repeat the year in the same school, and I applied for a year abroad. England and the United States were the usual destinations. It seemed so boring to do what everyone else did. When I heard my English teacher proposing India as an exchange program, I was thrilled. Previous attempts by my school to establish a relationship with this Indian boarding school had failed, as parents didn't want to send their child to India. But growing up with my open-minded, well-traveled parents, nobody in my family questioned India. Just my schoolmates teased me and bet I wouldn't last long before coming home.

I imagined a fresh start, a reset. But I hadn't understood that you could travel halfway around the world and still bring the exact same version of yourself with you.

India

It was the summer holidays when I stepped out of a small, flower-papered plane in Madurai.

Earthy scents. Humid air. Tropical heat that hit like a wall.

An old, honking bus climbed the Palani mountains and dropped me off at my new boarding school. Although the campus was deserted because everyone was away for the holidays, I received a warm welcome. Especially from Mrs J, my dorm mother.

The first weeks at the boarding school were hard. First, I didn't eat because I didn't like the food. I hated lentil stew already, but dal was on another level. Second, I felt lonely. I forgot the exact diagnosis, but I spent a few days in the school's hospital.

Blank page

School was overwhelming. My English wasn't good enough to keep up with class, so while the others had their leisure time, I sat through extra English lessons. Then came the maths placement test. I looked at the questions and didn't understand them. Not the maths, the questions themselves. I handed in a blank page, which earned me extra maths lessons too. That term we read Beowulf with nothing but an Oxford English-to-English dictionary. This was before Google Translate.

But I also got some freedoms I'd never had before. While the German school system gives you a fixed curriculum, here in India I could choose subjects because they interested me. Among the mandatory maths, English, and English Literature classes, I could choose World Religion, Biology, Arts, and Social Studies.

My room was no easier. My roommate was a senior: beautiful, clever, liked by everyone, and impossibly messy. I hung a curtain down the middle to separate my half. She didn't mind. She was hardly ever there. Everyone else seemed to have their circle, their laughter filling the common rooms. I had a curtain. It didn't help.

Rebel

So I did what I knew how to do. Boarding school ran on rules: bedtimes, a packed schedule, no leaving campus alone, and I found the gaps in all of them. I explored every corner of the property, then slipped past its edges: short walks into town, a little money spent at a local burger place. On one of those afternoons, I found my troublemaking friends.

Same girl. Different continent.

Until they got expelled.

And then nobody answered the phone.

Change

In my memory, that was the evening something changed. I spent the evening at the dorm, cooking instant noodles and watching a movie. I didn't need to pass a test or prove anything to anyone.

No dramatic speech. No great revelation.

Nobody asked me why I had not come before. I sat down, and I was part of the group.

I didn't think anything of it at the time. It was just an evening in our living room where I had nothing better to do.

But looking back, I think that was when India began to change for me.

Or perhaps when I stopped demanding that India change for me.

And one day, I put the separating curtain down. I became a bit messier, my roommate a bit more organized. When Mrs J rang the bell at 10 pm, which meant lights out, my senior roommate sometimes told me stories from her childhood in Delhi. We laughed and giggled until Mrs J knocked on the door and told us to sleep.

Letting go

The Friday night school disco became one of my favorite parts of the week. The assembly hall turned into a dance floor.

One of the older girls in my dorm, she was German too, lent me a pair of silver techno pants. Those cheap shiny plastic trousers people wore at Berlin's Love Parade in the 1990s. I felt like a popstar.

So there I was. A teenager in the mountains of southern India, dancing to Faithless' Insomnia.

Weekends took us outside our little boarding-school world too. The school organized "Social Experiences", where we visited villages, cleaned rubbish from a riverbank, painted buildings and planted vegetable gardens.

I remember carrying enormous rocks from a field in old bedsheets because they were too heavy to move any other way. I have never worked that hard since, and I have never felt that useful either. From week to week, my world grew much bigger, and it never shrank again.

I loved this year in India. And I started to love my daily dal.

The bet

My schoolmates had bet I would come home early.

I stayed the whole year and went back to Germany only when it was over, the way I had always said I would. I won the bet.

Return

I went back to Kodaikanal in 2016.

There was wifi on the campus now. New furniture. The toilets had been renovated, which anyone who was there in 1999 will appreciate. But the layout and the buildings had barely changed.

One of the dorm mothers recognized me. Not Mrs J, and not one I had been close to.

She looked at my face, and she knew it. Seventeen years, and hundreds of girls through that dormitory since.

I had spent my first months there mostly trying to get out.

She still knew who I was.

What stayed

The friends I chose for myself, the troublemakers, were gone before the year was over.

The roommate I did not choose, the one I hung a curtain against, is still a friend today. She lives abroad now and has built her own successful company.

Twenty-seven years.

I didn't build that year. I resisted it, in every way available to a 14-year-old, and it happened anyway.

For the first weeks, I wanted out.

Then I stopped fighting.

And somehow, I belonged.

Please note: Illustrations created from my own memories. I have almost no photographs from that year.