A Time to Pause

All around,Darjeeling is lazing in the little comfort coming in with the winter sun. At eight in the morning,the digital clock at the Chowrasta flashed a formidable 4 degrees centigrade,and the mist from the night before can still be found hovering over the dense green down of the Happy Valley,which,like the reggae-playing Hot Stimulating Café,is among some of the Darjeeling names that evoke endless all-season sunshine and cheer.

Plump elderly Tibetan women soon come by with their knitting and wool and occupy the wooden benches; a Buddhist monk demurely works on a handheld prayer wheel accompanied by his own low chanting; a stage is being erected for a political meeting of the statehood-demanding Gorkha Janmukti Morcha around which middle-aged volunteers mull around wearing small khukri-embossed Nepali topis; and a gang of puppies struggles to reach their mothers teats even as the bitch refuses to budge from the sun. Near the bookstore at the other end,boys in low-fitted,falling-down denim and hooded shirts sweat it out over that intrinsically pahari version of soccer with the chungi an improvised ball made by tying together rubber bands and with which a single gifted player can remain engaged for the good part of an hour without the chungi touching the ground. It is a game that is Darjeelings foremost time pass,contend the good folks at Revolver,a hotel that borrows its name from the Beatles game-changing album and where framed memorabilia on the walls bear out the owners fondness for the Fab Four. In the plains,a hotel by that name might draw visits from the police,but up here in Darjeeling,Revolver works fine.

At this time of the year,Revolver,like most other hotels,is registering low occupancy rates. But nobody seems to be worried,for despite the bad press the town has deservedly earned in the recent past,the tourists never gave up on Darjeeling. They just went home after the Durga Puja season,and will inch back as soon as newspapers carry reports of the first snowfall on neighbouring Sandakphu Peak at 12,000 feet,which often is a sign for Darjeelings own impending whiteout in January. The intrepid among Bengali tourists will then pack in their woolies and thermacots and take the night train out of Kolkata to experience what a friend icily scoffs as sostay borof snow for cheap.

The interregnum between is when Darjeeling comes out to play,for in this short off-season wintry window,Darjeeling catches its frosted breath back.

It is when the town,at over 6,000 feet in the West Bengal Himalayas,begins to resemble in hesitant shades its near but irreplaceable past,as can be fathomed from the striking street-life photography from earlier decades kept framed at the Das Studio. The sepia sentiments of Darjeeling,and not unlike other hill stations in India,have since been bulldozed by the demands of ugly,gratuitous modernity. Nothing quite as much represents Darjeelings mindless concretisation over the previous decades than a tall building near the Chowrasta.  It blemishes the view of Mount Kanchendzonga for tourists sipping on their Castleton and Makaibari teas or gorging on the celebrated all-meat breakfast at the Keventers terrace,but doesnt stop at that. A brief study of the footballers statue installed on top of the building will reveal that the player is about to kick the same ball on which he is balanced.   

But the unhurried winter makes it easier to flesh out some of the remnants of Darjeelings aesthetic and bona fide half. It is there when the fireplace lights up at the colonial Planters Club; in the slow,narrow-gauge chug-chug of the Unesco World Heritage Darjeeling Himayalan Railway; in the cutlery at Glenary8217;s restaurant or the beer mugs at Joeys Pub; in the humble gear and costumes used by 1953s first successful Everest ascent team of Hillary-Tenzing displayed at the museum of the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute; or in the rare heartwarming sight of the Red Panda at the spacious Darjeeling Zoo,the reclusive mammal making an appearance only when the crowds are less.

After having seen something akin to a smiling black bear at the zoo,I retrace my steps back the road where the shooting was to happen. The sun has gained strength and the clotheslines at the red sloping-roofed colonial bungalows are reeling under the weight of washed clothes. Families walk with their dogs,who fight with strays. Dozens exercise,even in sleeveless vests,by the railing overlooking the valley.

Kanchendzonga is up today in all its finery it floats like a tiara over the town. My mind hovers over one of my favourite Satyajit Ray films. Middle of December is that time of the year when,preceding the harshest foggy winter,the worlds third-highest mountain will give a day-long exhibition of itself. I wonder how the plot of Rays Kanchenjungha would have unspooled if the gentrified Bengali family of the film had visited the town in this season and especially since the unseen,misted-over mountain is an essential allegorical prop to the films narrative of a bickering family troubled by shifting time.

It is when I spot the Nepali film crew again. The horse had moved after its tender warmed it with heavy jute blankets and cajoled it with extra food. The narrative too in dreamy interpretations of time and space,the horseman had reluctantly acknowledged the girls love for him. Near the railing again,completely oblivious of everything else,and facing the pristine white largesse of the Kanchendzonga,two young lovers are kissing. It is a moment of great reassurance and tenderness. I find myself sneakily clicking a few photographs when they lock lips and when Darjeeling begins to act real. n

Shamik Bag is a freelance journalist in Kolkata