FINDING NEVERLAND

I wondered why I felt so numb when my car left behind the dazzling, sun-baked plains at last and entered the shadow lands of mist as it made its way to Darjeeling. It was not the cold — which, if anything, was delightfully comforting after the heat of Calcutta in May — that was occasioning the sinking feeling. I was going back to Darjeeling after five long years of separation, during which period I have become a laughing stock to my family for making reservations in Darjeeling hotels only to cancel them again and again, as the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha waged its battle in the hills. Notwithstanding the disappointment, I was steadfast in my resolve to go back to the place to which I have long pledged my troth. So as soon as Didi came to power, I tried again, and this time, miraculously, the booking stayed in place. I set out exhilarated. Yet where I had expected the pure joy of reunion, I felt only blankness as I tried to match the Darjeeling of my memory with the Darjeeling I now encountered.

More alarmingly, I soon realized that this was not merely a case of losing the aching joys and dizzy raptures of thoughtless youth. My heart was aching all right, but with a drowsy numbness as I saw the crumbling, lichen-covered buildings, piles of garbage by the wayside, sickly pieces of chicken or pork hanging from meatshops, and felt the craters on the road in my bones each time the car jumped. Suddenly the place seemed to have become real, which is to say, ugly. The toy train chugged past, looking less like a fairy wagon than like a vehicle whose time is up. The mountainsides were strangely bare, with clumps of greenery hacked away. To top it all, the people did not look the same. They seemed to move around with an invisible burden, which gave them a wary, sceptical look. This was not quite how I remembered the bright-faced denizens of this fey place.

The change was even more apparent when I reached Darjeeling. As I looked out of my hotel window, the clouds shifted just a bit to reveal rows of ramshackle shops in the bazar below. The colourful wares displayed in the shop-fronts made an odd contrast to the decrepitude of the buildings. Yet Darjeeling now boasts of a Big Bazaar outlet and a multiplex, which are proudly pointed out to tourists by car drivers. The Keventer’s and Glenary’s of yore stay in place, but the pervading spirit of ennui seems to have somehow touched them as well. Traffic crawls on the roads, and the sound of horns and motorcars drowns out the songs of the clouds and cicadas. Darjeeling now looks like Calcutta, I realized slowly to my utter dismay.

What calamity has befallen the place in the last five years to take Darjeeling’s charm away? The apathy of the previous Left Front government to issues great and small has, of course, worked its magic throughout West Bengal, and Darjeeling has not been exempted. But perhaps this hill town has been worse affected because it has remained out of sight of the erstwhile rulers, who have, as a result, found it easy to forget it. Even for a tourist like me, Darjeeling has always been that heavenly place, unreachable in its beauty, somewhere out there. Clinging on to its glorified image preserved in memory, I have never quite considered Darjeeling as a real place with very real problems that need to be addressed. My engagement with the Gorkhaland agitations began and ended with the uncertainty they created in my travel plans. All these years, while I have been thinking of Darjeeling with romantic yearning, the place has slowly been rotting away and suffering irreversible damage.

At the same time, I wondered whether all is lost. In my last two days in Darjeeling, tourists started trickling in steadily until the Mall Road began to resemble the streets of Calcutta during the Durga Puja days. Shop- and hotel-keepers no longer had the dazed look, and the place throbbed with life. Seeing the throng, I should have been happy for Darjeeling’s sake, but instead I panicked. Wrapping myself up in the gathering mists, I headed straight for the bench on which Karuna Banerjee had sung “E porobashe robe ke” in Ray’s Kanchenjungha. Sitting there, with the plaintive call of mountain birds for company, I settled into the familiar Darjeeling of my childhood. I was assured that there is still a Darjeeling that no change, for better or for worse, can ever touch. It’s the Darjeeling of flitting lights, bubbling pigeons and piercing, forest-scented rains — old as time and new as the day.