India (Part IV): The Land that Dad Forgot

We were flying home from Kolkata so we could finally visit my ancestral lands: The Land that Dad Forgot. Because he seldom spoke about his formative years in West Bengal it made the place all the more curious. The one thing I will always remember is that there were tigers in the jungle next to his school. But I should have known that 30 years of intrigue was always going to set me up for a disappointment. Via Uncle Bryan’s guiding email before we left, we had booked into the Fairlawn Hotel – something of a Kolkata institution. The building is bright green, inside and out, built in 1937 and British owned; the stairways and dining rooms are filled with royal memorabilia and portraits of random TV stars (Felicity Kendall?). The hotel is especially lively as it’s as popular with locals as it is with tourists and the bar has quite a reputation. Indeed, Uncle Bryan and my dad had stayed here with their parents back in the early ‘60s when they were taken into the big city for Christmas shopping expeditions. We thought this would be the ideal base to explore India’s self-proclaimed capital of culture: the classical music, the cricket and the Bengali foodie scene. But things in Kolkata just didn’t click for us.

Clearly, the reason wasn’t the iconic bright yellow Ambassador cabs that took us from the train station, or the Raj-era buildings that can transport you back to London in an instant. The zapping humidity played its part, but I actually think it was the Bengali’s themselves. They were an abrupt, grouchy bunch! Tough to take when these are supposedly ‘my people’ and where I inherited my much-fabled-friendlessness. Naturally this made me extremely abrupt and grouchy! And as much as we loved the Asiatic Society museum and eating fish curry cooked in mustard oil, my ancestral soul-searching was on the wane. We’d give it another 24 hours and if nothing improved, we’d weigh up our options. So when my father’s renowned St. Patrick’s school didn’t even pick up the telephone, let alone reply to the three emails I had sent requesting permission to visit, we decided to go north for our final few days to Darjeeling.

The change one sees - in atmosphere, climate, landscape, language and temperament – after a night or two traveling onboard a train in India is radical. From Dharamshala to Kolkata, in two train journeys we covered 2000km, the distance equivalent of Brighton to Belgrade, where I’d be more accepting of drastic cultural and ecological changes. But whilst I make these European-scale comparisons, India is very much a nation state in the eyes of the locals – for better and for worst. They refer to themselves as a superpower and they are correct. ALL young people speak outstanding English and everyone has tremendous ambition. I met a young couple from Mumbai where the girl had a world map tattoo on her arm and the center of the world was India - very cool and entirely appropriate! I think that’s why I enjoyed India so much – the constant chatter with Indians. Normally when one backpacks your peers are a steady stream of Aussies, fellow Brits, northern Europeans and a few surprises. But, in India, it is the Indian middle class who are exploring their own country. And they super fun and gregarious! It means I got to hang out with locals regularly and I could get under the skin of the country. Like the three Punjabi girls in our white-water raft, or the time I ended up downing brandy in the bedroom of a gang of rowdy Sikks, or the one standout Bengali who insisted on giving me a novel he had just purchased after he saw me reading The Calcutta Chromosome (Ghosh, 1996).

By opting for the overnight mission to Darjeeling (620km), Flo and I were simply placing our trust in the India we love, saying: "surprise us, show us something we don’t know". And it worked. Darjeeling wasn’t the quaint slice of Little England that I suspected, although it was chilly, miserable and wet. Happier inside than out, we fluked upon The Patio restaurant which seemed to double up as a meeting house for disenfranchised local men, who wished the night away with soft stringed guitars, gentle drumming and an indigenous-language rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine”. They drank magenta-coloured wine made from rhododendrons; the alchemist a trilby-wearing Bengali who told us fantastic stories about coming face-to-face with a leopard in his bedroom and making wine out of fermented dead foxes! The rest of the group was ethnically Gorkha (like most people in the Darjeeling – Nepali-speaking), beleaguered and engaged in the fight for sovereignty – ‘FOR GORKHALAND’. They point to Sikkim, the tiny state just north which secures India’s strategic borders with China (Tibet), Bhutan and Nepal and is also home to India’s highest mountain – Kanchenjunga (8586m). They say government funds go direct to Sikkim, to new roads there and the military. Whilst Darjeeling continues to rely on tourism from thirsty honeymooners looking for the perfect cuppa! The elections were literally in the air – megaphones attached to lampposts ordering out the latest propaganda – creating a quasi-Himalayan "1984". Even at the convivial restaurant, two Gorkha comrades-in-arms had a little scuffle after an ill-fated arm wrestle got too heated...

Never ones to choose the easy route, our Darjeeling excursion meant we had to travel back to Kolkata airport and then on to Sri Lanka and south to Una in one hit. The journey took a full 30 hours – taxi-train-taxi-plane-bus-tuktuk-bus-tuktuk – and we did it without a squabble. In the first cab from Darjeeling we shared the ride with two Bangladeshi's. They were the most sincere and sweet two young men you could ever hope to meet - the big one had a voice like Pee-wee Herman! As we twisted down the mountain road, we stopped for chai, toilets (my tummy was back!) and to admire the stunning view. And then Imitiaz suddenly threw his plastic Coca Cola bottle off the cliff edge and into the forest below. Seasoned to the sight of people spoiling their own landscape I was left half-smiling, half-shaking my head… Oh India, why do you do it to yourself?

Photo Credit Flo