Located at the elite Banjara Hills area. Once inside the spacious school grounds, the gates are closed by the security guard posted at the gate, not to be opened again till the sun begins to kiss the tops of the dusty trees late in the afternoon. The wrought-iron gates, painted a dark shade of red to indicate that Dante had once been through them, appear black at the end of the school day, when the great old school bell marks the hour one final time in deafening dissonant tones. Students wade quietly through the dust, among the remains of many generations of grass, mute, enervate, and barely conscious. They are gathered up into the arms of awaiting auto drivers, who seem a friendlier and more benevolent sight than they had in the morning.
Kalpa offers classes from the nursery to the tenth with ICSE syllabus and additional selected reading to give academics a holistic feel. SUPW is Kalpa’s crowning achievement. Indeed, proposals to make SUPW the sole subject taught at Kalpa these days are struck down only at the last minute by Mr. Shyam Gupta, who retains a sentimental attachment to traditional schooling owing to his great age. Mrs. Vandana can be seen these days sniffing glue in a dark corner of the SUPW classroom, or cackling manically while drumming her clawed fingers against the window separating her lair from the rest of the school, shooting strings of spider webs out of unseen orifices in exultation of her craft.
Kalpa School with a huge palatial building, swimming pool, skating rink is like a home away from home where children love to spend their day. Rumor has it that typhoid originated in the green, almost Amazonian waters of Kalpa’s famed swimming pool. Urine and feces stain the cracked blue-tiled floor of the pool; and if one were to cut out a cross section of the foul stuff accumulating there, one would be able to trace precisely the activities of generations of members on the famed Kalpa Swim Team, going back to the early nineties.
Kalpa as a school, believes in a holistic approach to education. Education that helps in the blossoming of the physical, mental, intellectual, social, emotional and spiritual dimensions of a child. To this end children in the preprimary sections are routinely thrown down the great concrete steps of the main school building, their infantile cries echoing shrill and mellifluous inside the office of the director, whose entrance lies at the foot of the staircase; and Mrs. Kusum Gupta eats roti and sabji happily while watching Hindi serials on her black-and-white TV.
To identify and nurture the talent in each child, Kalpa has a host of scientifically designed co-curricular activities. Bar magnets and lead shots have recently been discovered to have gone missing from the physics lab, and the mercury in the barometer mysteriously disappeared out of a hole in the bottom around the time the message “I love you, S. XOXO Srinivas XOXO” appeared on the wall, inscribed with a compass. The only chemical in the chemistry lab is a flask containing a solution of NaCl, but the origin of that can be readily explained by the fact that the custodian of the chemistry lab, a lady known only as Slabooshi, was said to have become rather depressed after all her friends abandoned her to join the cool folks in the second-floor staffroom. As for the biology lab, it is said that the animals and plants in the many formaldehyde jars were hunted down and prepared by Mrs. Kusum Gupta herself.
Apart from excellence in academics, which inculcates the best and latest educational systems from around the world, Kalpa inspires children to learn from nature, from various arts and architecture, culture, religions and regions. It has been Kalpa's motto to see every child grows from a tiny bud into a beautiful blossom.
What more can one say? These are beautiful thoughts indeed. Human grief and rapture have never coincided as they have at Kalpa. The successes of Kalpa are celebrated every day, and the failures are whispered in dark alleys through clouds of cocaine dust.
At the end of the age of man, amid the fire and desolation, the only human sounds audible in the distance, in the red-brown light of the dying sun, will be the dim whir of scooters and mopeds ridden by ex-Kalpites with bandanas tied over their heads and sunglasses pulled low over their faces to conceal their pallor, singing Hindi songs in the one dialect of Hindi guaranteed to cause the corpses under their wheels to turn and groan and wail; and that sun—the sun whose red light spreads over the surface of this once-green earth like the spilt blood of the innocent, while the dim orb sinks below the sight of man like the final grain of sand in an hourglass—is the true symbol of Kalpa.
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