Anik Basu spent the 70s – his childhood – in the laid back Darjeeling hills, some 600 km from Calcutta in Eastern India. Here, he brings us snapshots of growing up in an Enid Blytonesque world of boarding schools, dreamy cottages and vacations in a region that’s pretty as a picture-postcard but more famously known for fine teas and Bollywood locales.
High Hills
I was seven years old when I saw the Darjeeling hills in the lower Himalayas for the first time. I had no idea then, there was a town called Ghoom, uphill from Kurseong town where Dad was being posted, which boasted of the worlds highest railway station at 7,407 ft, or of a place named Lebong, the smallest race course with a 480-yard lap. I had no idea too that this was where Vivien Leigh, the star of the iconic film Gone with the Wind, was born. Nor did I know that this was the home of Tenzing Norgay, Edmund Hillary’s Sherpa when the New Zealander conquered Mt Everest. And I certainly had no idea that this was where some of the world’s finest teas were produced. I would learn all this later. Right then, my eyes were devouring the mountains, the deep gorges and a river valley in the distance.
On Track
It was June 1970 when my parents, elder brother and I bundled into the narrow-gauge Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, a World Heritage Site, the three-car toy train dwarfed by the larger trains at the bustling station in the foothills. We chugged into Kurseong in the mountains some two hours later. Smaller than the tramcars of Calcutta, it had a tiny steam engine straight out of Noddy’s Toyland that huffed busily through one-horse towns, tooting in annoyance at jaywalkers on the tracks. A helper would sit at the engines nose, throwing sand on the iron rails for better traction. The driver, meanwhile, would throw greetings at familiar faces on the road that ran alongside, or exchange pleasantries with shopkeepers. It was a page straight out of Enid Blyton.
Home Truths
Till I was packed off to boarding school in 1973, I was a day scholar living with my folks in my dads government accommodation a cottage from the British Raj days in Kurseong. Like most things in the hills, it was charming. It had two gardens overflowing with flowers; a hen coop that goaded my mother to keep poultry, and chimneys and quaint hearths (sadly, they were never lit as we did not know how to). The walls were of stone and the roof of tin; at night, we often slept to the rhythm of the rains drumming on the roof or the windowpanes. When I visited 35 years later, the gardens had been cemented over to help park cars, the pristine-grey stone walls were whitewashed, and the timber gates replaced with iron imitations. Signs of decay were all over. It was no longer my home.
Plains Sight
Kurseong was a halfway house for us. At 4,800 feet, it was not at too high an altitude that we would lose sight of the plains below – the place we came from, and to where we would return one day. In fact, we could see a winding river in the plains below behind a hill; it was surreal. For me, Kurseong was also my first taste of the diversity that is India. Though the Darjeeling hills are in the state of Bengal, where the predominant language spoken is Bengali, locals here spoke Nepali; they had more in common with the people of Nepal culturally and physiologically than with us Bengalis, who share roots with Bangladeshis. My first friend was the gardener’s son; he would prattle away in Nepali, I would respond in Bengali, and we were thick as thieves and as happy.
Freedom Road
In 1973, when I had advanced to Class 4, I became a boarder at the same school I went to as a day scholar; at that age, I had no clue how to knot a tie or polish shoes. I picked up soon enough, and school became my home till 1979 when I sat for my secondary exams. Caged within the precincts, as kids we would gaze at the Last Bend – the final turn in the serpentine road visible from school the bend beyond which lay Kurseong with its solitary movie theatre and two restaurants, or the railway junction at the foothills, where awaited the express to Calcutta. The Last Bend was a source of both misery and hope; it was a constant reminder of our captivity, but it also promised us that soon, we would be where one ate when hungry and didn’t have to wake up before the birds.
School Daze
Today it seems the seven years as a boarder had flown by in a whirlwind. The school, the all-boys Goethals Memorial named after Paul Goethals, the first Archbishop of Calcutta (1886-1901), was run by Catholic missionaries of an order based in Ireland. Being less monastic, we would pine for the girls of neighbouring St Helen’s, with whom we would mingle at sports meets, cultural nights, fetes and dances. But such days of bliss were rare, and our usual amusements were in the playing fields or Kettle Valley, the site of a small pool formed by an onrushing mountain stream before it gurgled off downhill in a splashing hurry. The pine forests behind our school saw many battles between cowboys and Injuns when we were young; they provided shelter for smokers when we were older.
Mat Demon
No story on growing up in the hills can be complete without a word on cricket in the mountains. It rains, rather pours, four months of the year in the region June to September. To prevent playing fields from getting soggy, they are shorn of grass and instead, covered with sand. Cricket is usually played in sunny March-April on mats, given the nature of the hard soil. While the fast bowlers rejoiced, the demonic bounce the mats offered spelt terror for batsmen. We played against schools in Darjeeling town away and home games and a Kurseong XI comprising tea garden managers, government officers and tradesmen, but our greatest rivalry was with Victoria Boys, where singer Peter Sarstedt (Where Do You Go to My Lovely) was once a student.
Chilling Out
Families stationed in the hills for work, like ours, gravitated to warmer climes in December-February, when schools close for the three-month winter vacations. But in 1974-75, Dad decreed we wouldn’t flee the chill but stay put in Darjeeling town, his new posting, so my brother could prepare for his school leaving exams, the Senior Cambridge, offered in many Indian schools. That winter, I saw my first snowfall. The town was swathed in white. I also saw the Kanchenjunga, the world’s third highest peak, that forms a majestic backdrop to Darjeeling in the moonlight. It was also my first midnight picnic as we sat on the tourist benches and tucked into Ma’s cakes and coffee, drinking in the breathtaking sight. Back in the house, she gave me some brandy. I would boast of it in school later.
Book Keeper
On the flipside, the few friends I had made in Darjeeling had left town. With Dad vetoing our ritualistic visit to my grandmother’s house in Calcutta, I found myself in misery. So while my brother burrowed himself in textbooks, I joined a public library, housed in a cottage that seemed single-storey at road level but actually had another floor below, hidden from view down the hillside. Once in, I was swept off in an avalanche of story books and graduated from Enid Blyton to Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey. Westerns were regularly screened at school on film nights every Saturday; these books now added a new dimension. I also got introduced to the Just William series by Richmal Crompton. My love for the 11-year-old brat continues to this day.
Brew Stars
The original drivers of growth in the region were the British tea planters, who started the historic Planters Club, still the favourite watering hole for industry people. Though I haven’t been inside, I passed by it on my way to the Capitol cinema with its landmark clock tower, where I loved watching spaghetti westerns, or when I visited Keventer’s café opposite the club for hot dogs and milk shake. Back in the day, British managers crisscrossed the hilly terrain of their plantations on horseback. Over the decades, pony rides became a tourist attraction, and as a child, I remember taking quite a few. My daughter did too when I first took her to Darjeeling. Watching her chortle as she cantered around, I recalled a wide-eyed lad from years ago. Life indeed had come full circle.
Photo credits: Goethals Alumni Page and Darj Yester Years (Neema Doma, Arghya Mukhjerjee, Atul Chaturvedi, Rajen Thami, Saroj Rasaily, Mohan Flora, Anup Suman, Pankaj Prasad and Neeta Gabrani)
