Easter In Darjeeling

The dangling road down Carter’s Field was a serpent’s trace. Being narrow and covered in moss most of the year, the municipality had it bleached each morning and that left an irritating smell. It was the quickest route, and I couldn’t avoid it. Baba used to walk me down to the large cricket ground in the primary wing of St Paul’s School, and wave me off, smiling from under his heavy, black moustache. I met my friend Tashi down at Dr. Zakir Hussain Road, from where we walked another twenty minutes to our yellow school bus, detached from the tourist buses in the Motor Stand, a breach in that babble of holiday spirit. 

On evenings when I returned home from school that was all the way down in Singamari – the seventh hill of Darjeeling, all the shops would begin to close down; hawkers and footpath peddlers packed up the items that refused to go away. My sister Maya would zoom past in her pool car packed with the Catholic Convent girls in their blue pinafores. Sometimes she’d ditch the car to walk uphill with me, but most of the time she didn’t. By the time I got home, she’d already be changed and perched atop her tall stool practising the piano. I’d fill the time between saying goodbye to Tashi and meeting Baba at our front door in useless musings — boys who I wished would walk up to me and say ‘Hello’, sexy vampires from teenage romances who’d appear out of the pine forests and want to touch my hair.

One day in 2008, when I was about twelve years old, I was called out of my English lesson into the principal’s office. When I went in, I quickly realised this wasn’t because I was in trouble, or that I was the only one in trouble. There were about fifteen other boys and girls in that office, and the principal’s face was visibly worried.

“Children,” he began, “the town is going to be shut down, you are to remain in my office until your parents come and pick you up”, he said slowly. 

I had seen the marches and the placards and the demonstrations in town: We want Gorkhaland. My parents had explained to me that it was, of course, an irrational demand.

“Bengal has been partitioned several times, and we’ve lost millions of lives. It will not be partitioned again,” Baba sometimes said as he switched restlessly from one TV channel to another.

At parties with their friends – Bengalis, Malayalis, Punjabis – my parents often spoke about how even if these people were given their beloved Gorkhaland, they would never be able to run it efficiently.

“How can they? They are barely educated.” 

“Yes, all the administrative posts are held by us!” 

“We come here, teach their children, treat them for their illnesses, do all the important jobs and they want their own Gorkhaland! Just imagine!”

#

There was an old man who owned a little shop on that road down Carter’s. I don’t know if he started the pleasantries or I, but after Baba waved me off and walked uphill to teach the 7 a.m lesson, the old man would shout in Nepali from his little shop, “Namastey chhori!” and I’d say, “Namastey Uncle.” He was a short, bald man, with black rimmed glasses that were held together with a piece of string and adhesive tape. Sometimes, he’d stretch his arm out from the foyer and stuff sweets into my palm. I enjoyed chewing on them until I met Tashi. On some mornings, he’d ask how I was doing, “Jatinai chhori?” 

“Hajur. Yes, I’m good. And you?” 

“Well,” he said and lifted his shoulders as if he meant, “Who does it matter to if I am good?” 

I wanted our conversation to last longer so I could loiter about in town until it was late enough and a teacher on her way to school would spot me and give me a ride. But he immediately got back to watering his potted azalais and marigolds as I walked away. 

One morning, I was in a special hurry to get to Chapel on time. Running down the bleached road wasn’t easy business, what with those leather shoes and three layers of woollens. I imagined having a wish fulfilled- that the soles of my feet would transform into pogo sticks and I could take five steps in one jump. But I fell, right there before the old man’s shop. Protecting my reputation in my hands, I tried to brush away the embarrassment, all collected nicely on my skirt. The old man hurried out and picked me up, “Are you alright? Let me get you some water.” 

Even before he turned away, the heat on my cheeks spread wildly, a flame mid-winter. As if I’d been caught reading ladies’ magazines in class, as if my sister had caught me staring at Mr. Sen’s son at dinner, leaving my scent after I stole cigarettes from my father’s study. I picked myself up from that highway to hell and ran further down. The morning bustled; small women were out in smelly clothes with loads double their weight tied to their backs, hotels opened up their gates and into their gardens; the black bat, night, had flown, breakfast bars hung up their specials for the tourists to stare at. I wished only for my pogo sticks to grow larger and larger, and for this town with soot on the wooden windows and the ground full of shit to implode. 

#

Seasons changed rapidly in Darjeeling, and yet, we had nine months of monsoon and three months of winter. In March the rhododendrons bloomed madly, red carpeting my walk down to the school bus. Baba waited eagerly for the Easter lilies to bloom, and once they did, he collected a few and placed them in the huge flower vase in our living room. I didn’t like missing Chapel in March; we’d sing Easter songs all month and prepare the Easter play.

In school, we didn’t speak much of politics, but that year, the air felt a little tense. My Nepali teachers started wearing the colourful traditional Nepali clothes to school. Men wore the daura sural and women their gunyu cholo. The ‘other’ teachers still wore their usual suits and sarees; this being the most visible spectacle.

Shanaya auntie – whom my mother called her best friend at work – had stopped visiting our home on Sundays like she had done since we were babies.

Baba said to me one morning as I left for school: “if somebody speaks to you on the way and asks for your name, make sure you tell them a Nepali or Tibetan name, ok? Don’t say you are a Bengali.”

Principal Gonzalez, a Portuguese-Indian man in his sixties, had deep lines on his face below his large bald head. Something was the matter. His usually kind voice was almost rude, as if he wanted to tell us more but couldn’t. 

Tashi, standing next to me in the office, who also lived far from school, in Jalapahar, began to fidget. 

“Sir, I saw something this morning. They torched the police vans outside Kutcheri,” she said.

“People often choose to demonstrate in different ways, children – and things like that are called political violence,” Mr Gonzalez said.

“I saw something too.” This time it was Faraaz. “They came two days ago to Raghu’s shop and closed it down. I thought he was ill, but I saw the poster on it with the dagger.”

“Yes, Faraaz, that is part of the strike action. Do you know what a strike is?”

“They close the shops,” Faraaz said.

“They close the shops because they are withdrawing their labour, and that costs the government because there is no business.” 

“Is that also political violence?” I asked. 

“No,” Mr Gonzalez said thoughtfully, taking his time before going on to say, ‘this is non-violent action. But if people burn police vans, or break buildings –’ 

“Or kill people?” Tashi said. 

Mr Gonzalez’s face reddened. “That’s enough!” he shouted. “Now sit on the benches until your parents come. And do not leave this office. I’ve got work to do.”

As he opened the door to leave his office, we could see the other students, the ones who lived in the school complex, lined up and walking up the stairs to their dormitories. It was ten in the morning and something was not right.

After all, the Nepalis did not like us Bengalis in their land and wanted their own homeland Even though my sister and I spoke Nepali to each other, especially when we wanted to say things we didn’t want our parents to hear, we were always reminded that we are Bengali. 

# 

As in many working-class Bengali families, I grew up with the promise of growing out of mediocrity by studying hard. My mother spoke of her cousins who were professors and academics abroad, and, I was told, I could become one too. If only I studied hard, I could become those who lived in foreign and exotic places. My mother always had a smile when names like ‘London’ and ‘Calgary’ (where my distant relatives lived) rolled from her tongue. Almost like the satisfaction you get when you say aloud your favourite lines of poetry. 

Both my parents were teachers, and we lived on the St Paul’s School campus. The school was over two hundred and fifty years old. Built originally to serve the British administrators and their children who lived in India, “these days it’s only business families with a lot of cash,” my father would say, disappointed, annoyed at the loss of the brilliant students he was promised when he took up the job of house master at the old school on these mountains, far away from home. 

“I didn’t study hard, and so I’ve ended up here, married to your father and not in Canada,” my mother would say and then empty out the vegetables onto my sister’s plate and go on to eat fried potatoes and goat curry with her rice.

“I hate vegetables,” she’d mutter through a hidden smile. 

She sat quietly and ate her food, always alone, after the three of us finished our meals.

“Will you not eat with us?” I often asked. 

“Na shona, let me feed you first,” she said with a smile and a sadness in her voice. 

I don’t know why she married and had children, because she was always unhappy. “Only you two,” she would say as she kissed my sister and me on our cheeks, “are the good that has come of all this.”

I never understood what she meant by that, only the sense that she was unhappy swiftly filled the room and masked the smell of the goat curry she spent hours cooking.

Even though we lived in Darjeeling, it was never our home. My parents always referred to Shantiniketan as home. They said they were in Darjeeling only for work. But when we went to Shantiniketan, my grandfather who had moved to this side of the border during the partition referred to Jessore on the other side of the border as home. 

The Nepali people came to Darjeeling throughout the mid-18^th and 19^th centuries in large numbers as soldiers for a faction of the British Army, the Gorkha Regiment. They also came to work in the tea plantations. 

#

When I was twenty-five, I moved to Newcastle upon Tyne in England to research anticolonial revolutionary political violence. All alone there, I was happy to vapourise my family off limits. Nobody knew me and everybody wanted to know me. The city had gathered itself on every leaf and I walked about with rain. Maya, seventeen now, was abandoning her pool car very often, and instead walked downhill with her sweetheart. 

One day, she told me over the phone that an old man had been stopping her down Carter’s road and speaking to her as if he’d known her all along. She was a quiet girl and didn’t like much talking. She only smiled and nodded, wondering why it would matter to an old man if she was doing good.

We soon established that the old man had been confusing her for me. I asked her to play along. But one day, perhaps too dazed in the arms of her lover, she told him the truth. He looked quite disappointed; she told me over the phone. But he asked, “Where is your sister?” She told him I was studying in England. 

Regardless, soon he forgot and began speaking to her again as if she were me. Sometimes he tended to his flowers, other times he sat on his plastic chair in the front of his little shop Every time Maya reminded him she was not me, he only asked, “Where is your sister?” 

#

 An SUV came to our school to pick us up at noon that day in 2008. It was only then that Mr Gonzalez let us out. Silence spread in the car. Even though nobody told us anything, we all knew something had happened. Something worse than burning cars and sealing shops shut. It wasn’t until the SUV drove round the Capitol Clock Tower that one of the boys brought out his secret Nokia 3110 out of the breast pocket of his school blazer and told us what had happened. 

By the time I got off the car across the cricket ground where I lived, I could clearly imagine the severed head of Madan Tamang, the opposition party’s leader, rolling down the slope of the mall road where we used to buy ice-cream and watch it melt down our wrists until droplets of milky vanilla fell on the ground. Maybe the head rolled between the feet of the Gorkha nationalists, maybe they saw his eyes still open, red, puzzled. Maybe it left droplets of blood along the path of the procession from earlier in the morning as they raised their colourful banners, as if in a fairground, chanting: “We want Gorkhaland.” 

Maa came to the SUV and hugged me, saying, “One day, we will return to the plains. We will go home and all of this will be over.”

#

A couple of years ago, I went home to spare myself the greyness and freezing grounds of Newcastle upon-Tyne. Spring in Darjeeling was a host of activities. The precious time between the small silver sunshine and the mist eating it up whole was spent in drying shoes and socks, drying meat, drying blankets. I walked about aimlessly for a couple of days, Tashi had moved to Dubai with her mother. Besides, the woodlands through which I walked to school had all been ripped out and replaced with hotel-chains. I was angry not least because of my recently developed bourgeois sensibility, but for the people who remained, and had no access to the views of the mountains because of multi-storey hotels. Each year, the landslides got worse and took away entire portions of the hills. In April, Carter’s road was unbleached; the sun had dried up the moss that grew on it, baking it into savourlessness. 

I didn’t find the old man’s shop where it was, instead there was now a large wooden villa with plants everywhere. All the spring flowers smiled shamelessly from where there used to be an old, short, bald man with broken spectacles. 

Baba was especially excited to have me home, forgetting that I wasn’t a tourist. “Look at these Easter lilies, it’s just the season for them and I have grown them at a special place.” 

One day, walking uphill from Chowrasta, I met the old man by the Himalayan Nursery School, panting and with a walking stick in his hand. When I go back to Darjeeling now, my childhood bedroom in the campus flat where we grew up, even though a room of many firsts, still seems to have receded to a realm of lost familiarity. You see, it is only traces of a life once lived that breathe through the wooden room now – photographs of my two best friends from when I was thirteen collect dust on the slanted wood wall, cheap posters of Kurt Cobain on my side of the room and those of Taylor Swift on my sister’s side, bought with childhood-pocket-money, piles of colourful books on the mantlepiece above the fireplace, the stain on the carpet left from a chocolate milk spill years ago that wouldn’t go even after my mother had scrubbed it for hours – that assure me that it was indeed I who had once lived there.

I stopped him and said, “Namastey Uncle.” He looked at me with very tired, confused eyes and said, “Where is your sister?”