Dirge on Darj
Posted by barunroy on February 3, 2008
Scones, cricket matches on a lazy summer afternoon, pretty women and quaint characters, my alter ego VICTOR BANERJEE remembers Darjeeling the way it was….Photo by Prabin Pradhan.
My first sojourn into the mountains was a trip to our family cottage, “Alice Villa”, in Darjeeling half a century ago. A Buddhist monastery and a pig farm are all I remember. The rest is shrouded in foggy lore that I overheard around fireplaces or tucked under a quilt with my toes curled against a hot water bottle. The malodorous piggery as farms here are known) housed mountains of pink oinkers that account for my gastronomic partiality to gammon steaks, smoked ham and streaky bacon.
School children after a respectful glance at Ghoom monastery, and a quick halt at the Pines hotel to scoff scones with tea from Arthur Emmet’s Selebong Tea Estate, would regularly visit those sties.
My father’s propensity to fall in line, he was after all a major in the erstwhile King’s army, made it necessary for him to introduce me early, if allegorically, to the changing states of the state. I was taken sightseeing to the piggery.
Over the years, the owner (not “Keventers”, who piously owned a farm next door specializing in ice creams we pigged upon a cheese which some times smelled suspiciously of pigs) has given special members of his herd names that he knew would appeal to the parents of youngsters being groomed for a lifetime’s adulation of celluloid heroes.
The enormous stud in the farm, who had to be prodded out of a stupor to oblige, was called Wally, for Wallace Berry. He was penned a close snort away from two voluptuous sows; widely-bottomed-curly-tailed Norma shearer and the thick-lipped-lash-batting Joan Crawford.
Their progeny of pink piglets found their way to the elegant tables of the Governor Sir John Herbert whose wife, Lady Herbert, would stick them on a spit to roast while she coasted for a spin down the Mall in flowing purple silks and a freen scarf clamped around her hat and firmly twisted around several chins that were gnawing into a brownie from the Swiss confectioner “Vado & Pliva” (later to become Glenary’s), to scream her ineloquent lungs out, around a gambling table of over-and-under 7s at the market-place. Fun days of hazardless betting and merrymaking.
That was around the same time the famous cricketers, Lala Amarnath and Shute Banerjee, representing The Aryans of Calcutta, came to play the boys of Victoria School. They were fed mounds of pork, had more stuffed into their kit bags and were served mounds of chocolate cake from Lobo’s on the Mall during drinks and tea breaks. Thereafter, with a rumble in their tummies and unaccustomed to the cold moist waves of mist that obscured the bowler or ball, they shivered at the crease and lost hopelessly. Read the rest of this entry »
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