Excerpt. The loneliest months

Three months of ceaseless rains in Darjeeling are the cruellest, the loneliest too. Many fall prey to suicidal depression. Yet when the town was wrapped in fog and the days were filled with a murky light, when fabulous moths swarmed at lighted windowpanes in the evenings, when the unending rains seemed to be coursing through the blood vessels, it was then that Darjeeling would work her charms on me. The desolate paths, the tourist-less Mall, the listless eyes of shopkeepers, the sleeping street dogs on the railway platform, the silhouette of an umbrella on a foggy road, the lone traffic constable, the newspaper-vendor wrapped in a cellophane burqa, the droplets of water drumming on the leaves of the tree fern, the rainslicked mane of a solitary horse on the road around Observatory Hill, the smell of fresh arrivals at Oxford Bookshop, the amber hair of a bored belle behind the glass panes at Amigos restaurant, the scents of a lost time in Habeeb Mullick’s antique shop, the rash of blue wild flowers in the crevice of a stone, the flock of tiny penguins sheathed in raincoats trooping back home from school, the murmur of a swollen spring in the pine grove on Convent Road — all these I would find irresistibly seductive.

Just as the town would fold into itself during the rainy months, the mind, too, would become at one with itself. A brooding mood that sometimes lingers in old black-and-white photographs would pervade the consciousness. Dim light filtering through fog casts no shadow, each object appears in its truest form and tone; the newborn leaf of a fern peeping through a chink in the bark trembles, hit by a big raindrop, and continues to ring in the mind’s eye like a delicate tune. These languid absorptions would cast their spell on me.

This didn’t happen in a day. In the beginning, I too would crave the face of the sun.

June, July and August, these wet, dripping months in Darjeeling are the loneliest, the longest too. And then, towards the end of September, the monsoon’s fist loosens, a turbid whorl of light appears in the sky at noon. One day, early in the morning, tea-plucker women are seen on the green manicured slopes like swarms of grasshoppers, plucking leaves with both hands and throwing them, with a nimble, unbroken motion of their arms, into the baskets strapped to their foreheads. Another day, late in the afternoon, a flaming red sunset is visible from the open terrace of Keventers. The sudden scent of roasted corn in the air, the lacerated clouds hanging motionless over the distant mountains suggest the departure of monsoon. Then the chirping of crickets is heard one day. As their wings dry out, they emit a sharp staccato, like clockwork toys. The sun invariably appears in the morning following the night of chirping crickets: an intense sun, like liquid diamond, pouring from a pure rain-washed sky.

And then the long-awaited morning: the Kanchenjunga resplendent across the skies, hanging like an improbable dream over the dingy, moss-spotted town. One gets up late and steps out to the balcony, toothbrush in mouth, to be greeted by the old neighbourhood morning-walker prancing back home:

‘Good morning! I’ve seen it today!’

And then the town brushes, washes and rushes out onto the streets. One takes the chor bato (the twisting hillside tracks) to Chowrasta, turns left at the head of the stairs, and is greeted by her snowy majesty across the forest of jackets hanging from the awnings of Tibetan shops; through a gap between two tall buildings; in the porthole of the police booth; upon the begrimed windowpanes of Padma restaurant; in the cracked mirror of Lucky Saloon…

Darjeeling is not to be found in Darjeeling then because it has already been hijacked into the posters hanging on the railings of Laden La Road, sold at twenty rupees apiece, unfolded like a love letter across the narrow green ridge under a dazzling Kanchenjunga. Dadu’s favourite lines are printed in a corner of the sky:

“Once again / Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, / That on a wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion”

Below it, in fine print: Lokenath Fotoprint, Hakimpara, Siliguri.

When the bleak monsoon months graded into clear autumn, Hemraj Chhetri would set out in search of salamanders in the rain-fed pokhris in the hills. Sometimes I would accompany him. We would leave the metalled road and pick out a chor bato that corkscrewed down forested hill slopes. Hemraj knew nature here like the back of his hand; formal education had given his innate wisdom a rare edge. We would scan the damp mossy stones under thick undergrowth for those veins of trickling water which would lead us below, sometimes a hundred feet or more, to where a pool had gathered. Sometimes we would only have a feeble whisper of water as our guide. It required trained ears to pick it out from the welter of sounds in the damp forest teeming with life. Sometimes particular species of plants that grow near water would betray small hidden pokhris. At other times tiny birds darting about to catch water-borne insects would give them away. The jungles around Darjeeling were like a book filled with arcane symbols. Hemraj knew how to read them.

The life cycle of the elusive salamanders has turned silently for millions of years in the water collected in moss-lined, Fallopian hollows of stones where sunlight seldom entered. Looking at the water’s surface, we would find the greyish pink creatures in suspended animation. Sometimes we would spot them from a distance on the edge of the pool, clinging to the rocks like damp leaves, but they would jump back into water in a flash at the sound of our feet.

Once we trekked down from Sonada to Margaret Hope tea garden to study the creatures in a pokhri there. It was a rather large pokhri nestled among a group of hummocks clad in green tea plants. A school of newts lived in its depths. There was a tea-pluckers’ shed nearby; the leaves were weighed there and taken to the factory in tractors. The plucker women lounged in the shed after work, gossiped, and shared the food they had brought from home.

I had seen them working, immersed up to their waist in green slopes. From a distance they had appeared like mysterious fairies, the baskets on their backs hanging like folded wings. I also knew they had magical fingers. With a practised speed that the eye failed to discern, they would pluck two leaves and a bud from a new five-leaved shoot, never touching the other three leaves that were the plants’ breathers. Processed and dried, the leaves produced quality pekoe, while premium orange pekoe was made from the buds.

But, at close quarters, these women were a far cry from the fairies of the distant slopes. There were about twenty of them in the group, ranging from pubescent girls to old women. From their physical features it appeared that among them were a number of Santhals and Mundas as well as those from local hill tribes. They chattered in a kind of pidgin and exchanged giggles as they watched a Darjeeling-ko-chora and a Bangali babu meditating on the edge of the pokhri. They had hunched backs and rough skin; a few had heavy silver studs on their ears and noses. They sat on their haunches, with arms wrapped around their knees, while the salamanders were drawn to the pale green shafts of sunlight reaching into the water. The women waited with their empty baskets for the tractor to return from the factory. The salamanders remained suspended in water, as they had always been over the drift of time, for millions of years.

A short distance from Margaret Hope tea garden, on a shoulder of the hill, stood a church and the remains of a dozen European cottages. Here, lost amid tea plants gone wild and the tangled undergrowth, one could still find a rupture in the history of Darjeeling. This place is referred to as Hope Town in old documents. It was Hope Town, and not Kurseong, that was initially planned to be developed as the first proper station on the way to Darjeeling. The railway line was supposed to climb the hills via Hope Town to reach Darjeeling. Accordingly, land began to be distributed here from 1856; many Englishmen from Calcutta built cottages and a church was built in 1868. But the railway never came to Hope Town; it was aligned along the higher elevation of Sonada. A fog of despair hung over Hope Town, pierced by the whistles of distant trains that echoed among the ruins like the wails of an ogress.

Such forgotten nuggets of history, or non-history, are scattered all over these hills. One must turn the gaze to these false steps, these miscarriages of planning, to understand the marvellous fabrication of a nostalgia high up in the Himalayas.

Take the case of Mr Stuart, a Baptist, who had brought a group of German missionaries in 1841 to convert the heathens. They set up a mission in Tukvar and started to work among the Lepchas there. It was a failure: the climate, the natural surroundings and the torpid ways of life corroded the fervour of these missionaries. They themselves turned into heathens and were absorbed into the local society. A few of them even became planters. In the old cemeteries of Tukvar and Darjeeling, the dust that had been the ribs of these men might still tell, to listening ears, tales of the heart of darkness. Their names and years of death are engraved on stone tablets over the graves. But history’s many silences do not usually have that privilege.

The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway traverses 550 small viaducts which, in earlier times, used to have wooden boards with their serial numbers painted on them. Some of these rotted, lichen-spotted boards still stand like epitaphs on the non-existent graves of the nameless coolies who died working here. The wonderful loops, reverses and culverts on this great railway display the ingenuity of British engineers. What the eye cannot see is the fatal labour of thousands of coolies who were brought here from distant plains. What voices ring out on these bridges and viaducts when the trains run upon them?

“Darjeeling, who do you belong to?”

“I belong to the nameless coolies who came to build these bridges and never returned.”

Parimal Bhattacharya teaches at Maulana Azad College, Kolkata

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