Dirge on Darj

 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.

There were some who murmured they had been bought over, or that the matches were fixed by the Jesuits: but life and sports, you have to believe, were a lot cleaner then. In fact, years later when innocence had taken a knock, the principal of St. Joseph’s North Point, Maurice Banerjee, a stern mathematician who had married the confectioner’s daughter Kathy Lobo, after he had guessed the weight in grams (when the metric system went over everyone else’s head) of her father’s chocolate cake, at the fete held at St. Michael’s Diocesan School (which housed the prettiest girls – before Loreto Convent produced the likes of a gorgeous Maya Bhate and a riotous Meena Lall) died while watching a cricket match on television. The old math teacher, and gentleman, had no inkling of the modern equations of moneymaking that had begun to determine results.

At the other end of the rainbow was the colourful and awfully attractive Mrs. Celia Randhawa who, with a Czech-now-Slovak admirer in tow, decided to climb to Tiger Hills to show the children of Mt. Hermon School the first flight of an aeroplane over Kanchenjunga, in 1933. In the evening, hundred feet below the summit, in the woods beside Senchal Bungalow, as the little boys gathered around the campfire to sing, Celia’s gallant boyfriend made his move. That is when Aramis Johannes, who was just beginning to sprout fluff on his upper lip, sneezed and split all the soup (which was all they were getting to eat) into the fire. Meanwhile, little Samuel Sadka was hiding behind a rock, slyly tucking into the alu makala that he had taught guru, who sold macaroons and patties out of a steel trunk that he carried to schools all over the Kalimpong hills to cook.

The guilt-ridden Aramis approached Sammy for a morsel. Together they munched and watched flames lash around Mrs. Celia Randhawa and her consort – they too would get nothing to eat afterwards. But at least for the moment, the escorts seemed to be getting their fill of maneuvers that Sammy had been warned some unotherodox gentiles practiced. It left him a bachelor for life. As for the impressionable Aramis, he died of hypothesized melancholia several years later.

Darjeeling teemed with characters out of Dickens and Wodehouse. They could be seen breakfasting at the exclusive Planters Club on a gorganzolian selection of cheeses and open sandwiches or hogging an unlimited number of cakes and pastries with tea, for just one rupee four annas, at the plebeians Gymkhana under the disapproving gaze of Mr. Duplock, the secretary, who kept an eye out for pigs and free-loaders.

Then there was Koko Mackertich, of Armenian descent, who out of nowhere in particular, would appear astride a fawn filly, riding upright and spectrally down the Mall. He was always immaculately dressed in Scottish tweed, his silver grey hair back with Brylcreem. He sported a starched handlebar moustache on which, they said, butter flies perched in the autumn.

He would halt briefly at the flower shop run by Mrogenstern, the shot-put champion of the district, who would tenderly hold aloft a red carnation for Koko to pluck with thumb and forefinger and stick into his label, beside his yellow silk cravat, before kicking into a soft canter to Lebong and the indisputably rigged but excitingly unpredictable horse races. This was where the roar of drunken punters was drowned by the shouts of Lady Herbert whose chins, released from the confines of her scarf, were wagging and screaming over the hat-waving sophist Charlie Dunn (who always had inside information on winners) until the horses entered a blind corner in one order and emerged in a sequence that stunned spectators and baffled everybody, including a petulant Sir John, who had been disturbed while furtively staring at the rise and fall of Mrs. Cheuy’s slit shirt while she jumped up and down and shouted “Let Fly”. At the end, Koko would ride off whistling “Roses of Picardy” and reminded everyone of his encores, after several cherry brandies, at the annual Red Cross Show with Austin Plant of “The Park Restaurant” accompanying him on an upright piano from Braganza’s. Koko vanished: but his Aluminum Car No. 3 which he rode to dances at the Gymkhana, appears like a ghost from the past, every year, at the Vintage car Rally in Calcutta.

On an evening after the races, on a day when Lady Herbert had won, she instead her husband dine at Mrs. Chuey’s Chinese restaurant, the “Park”. She quite fancied the drummer in the band and Sir John (even after he retired to Norfolk, perhaps) would always have a place in his Caucasian heart for Mrs. Chuey’s oriental thighs.

It was on such a night when everyone was ogling Mrs. Chuey as she manipulated the noodle sin her work and lifted handfuls into the air and bent low over the dishes at the tables of her exclusive diners that the band struck up “Hernando’s Hid away.”

It was an irresistible tango that sent shivers down Lady Herbert’s spine. She whisked her ineffiable husband on to the floor while peering over his shoulder at the blue-eyed Anglo-Indian boy.

Meanwhile, a young Englander, Gilbert James, who was the British Raj’s local income tax officer and had been invited to dine at the restaurant by Mrs. Chuey because her accounts were in a noodle and she needed a hand out of the soup, was smitten by the latter’s obvious assets.

And, unaccustomed to Szechwan food and the effects of wild mushrooms and tofu on pituitary glands he stood up and asked Mrs. Chuey to tango with him. No one else had ever dared. Because of the reputation of a dragon that her husband (who carried squeaking pigs on his shoulders from the farm in Ghoom) had for sticking it to those he caught even looking at his wife. Briefly, after mingling of sweat glands, Mrs. Cheuy squeezed out of a quivering Gilbert the rebate she wanted. Young James was given a ticket to Liverpool by a Governor who frowned on uncivilized overtures by expatriates on a native population he was prohibited to touch.

Over the years I have traveled to hill stations from those in the Nilgiris to Kashmir and Ladakh, from the western Ghats to the Northeast. I have seen the same faces, met the same characters and been charmed by the same fascinating quirks of human nature and aberrant behaviour as those I saw, and heard about, in Darjeeling.

For those of you who wonder why I have laboured to recall so much about Darjeeling, let me simply explain that, in my opinion, it is the most neglected and forgotten of all summer paradises.

As early as 1952, I saw the hills come closer as my father’s little Standard 8 effortless took on the climb into the land in the clouds (Meghalaya) and eventually my home for the next 10 years.

St. Edmund’s hidden behind forests of pine on top of a hill. The smell of resin and rain hung thick in the air and large blue butterflies with long tails glistening in the sun, flapped hard and slow through the trees and landed on dandelions that bent over backwards to receive their kiss of life.

Every hill around the school for as far as the eye could see into the clouds over east Pakistan, or the storm brewing over China, was covered in lush forests that I would explore on several picnics over the next decade.

Pinewood Hotel, Room No. 2, is where we stayed. It was owned by Mr. Chaudhury who had a beautiful Burmese wife and two gorgeous black Labrador retrievers. (Years after, I even took a pup home and trained it to become one of the best retrievers of duck and jungle murgis that it had been my privilege and joy to behold).

An extra bed was placed in the dressing room, for me. A log fire burned at twilight as my mother sat brooding in an armchair about boarding schools, with me on her lap watching the flames lick the inside edge of the brick fireplace.

The Chaudhurys were no different from the snobbish Tenduflas of the Windamere in Darjeeling, who sized up a customer as they got down from their car and refused them accommodation if they weren’t the sort who could sip a sherry, or some port, with them, by the fireplace, in the evenings. The Jauhars of the savoy in Musoorie, which had housed the Prince of Wales and every illustrious Indian imaginable were no different.

The Hotzs of the Swiss Hotels in Kasauli and Almora were a close second – only because in the days before the invention of the Electrolux kerosene refrigerator, Almora was where all the anti-rabbis vaccine in India was stored.

Hence, every mad Englishman of indifferent breeding and Indian of questionable background, who had ventured into the noonday sun to be bitten by a rational pariah, had nowhere else to go (if they made it up there on time) to survive.

On a lighter vein, the Hotzs’ daughter, Sandra was swept of her teenage feet and surreptitiously encouraged to flee her coop, upon a trance summer-night, with an elderly Quaker who later was knighted for his misadventures and directed “A Passage to India”. In which I starred: none other than Sir David Lean. And it was as Dr. Aziz that I was refused entry into Ooty Club, dressed as an Indian (until the penny dropped) where Dame Peggy Ashcroft and I went for a frame of snooker at the very place and on the very table the game had been invented.

I could regale you with stories about the strange tall Englishman with deep-set green eyes who, in the 1980s, after he graduated from Bishop Cotton School, became head priest of the monkey temple, dedicated to Lord Hanuman, at the highest point in Simla, Jakhu Hill.

It is alleged he was driven to oriental faiths by the fanaticism of a bully called Dyer, a schoolmate and a son of the owners of Dyer Meakin breweries in Solan. It was this little brat who became brigadier and then general, and was rewarded for the massacre of innocents in Jalianwala Bagh.

Or how about the Bengali Babu, Nirmal Chandra Haldar, from Coopers College in England, who became the first Indian secretary on the Railway Board and set up the Kalka-Simla, Lahore-Peshawar and Darjeeling toy train tracks! After he finished his final job on the Simla tracks, he rode off like a debonair in a new open convertible Ford from Simla to Lahore to celebrate. He died of Pneumonia on arrival, from exposure. He was only 39.

I could tell you about “A.N. John’s”, the first known hairdresses from Calcutta to Doon to Simla dn Delhi who would give children an “Eton” crop before they left public school education or a cold viewing of “Bathing Beauty” starring Ester Williams at the Capital cinema near the Rink on the Mall in Darjeeling, or before you watched players from the Royal Shakespeare Company or other traveling English repertories perform at the “Gaiety Theatre: in Simla – where little Ruskin Bond (the author of children’s books) lost the button on his shorts and bard his pink derriere in a hilarious farce called “Tons of Money” long before he minted it writing. There is the true story of mr.s Roberts, whose German husband once managed Hackmans Hotel in Mussoorie.

After his death she lived on a pension that came to the local post office from Germany and retired to a lonely cottage on the northern slopes of Landour and never steeped out in the day for 40 years. She lived with 47 dogs in one room.

She left a cheques outside her front door for the milkman to deliver to Prakash Stores and collect his due. When she died, those who saw her body say she looked like an emaciated Afghan hound.

Her dogs, unused to any humans but her for generations (for they bred, lived and died in the same room) ran wild over the hills ( I saw them myself) until some were captured and others died or were eaten by leopards.

And last but by no means forgotten is the swank Princess of Gujarat who would skate down the Mall and drop her pants for any Englishman who doffed his hat unit her homosexual brother shot himself because someone trampled on his pansies.

The little Princess settled down to rear a family of alcoholics who frequented Mackinnon’s brewery in Barlowgunj whose phenomenal sale of beer was attributed to a distinct flavour acquired after they discovered the decomposed body of a Nepali worker at the bottom of one of their giant vats. It is rumoured that the secret recipe to fine beers and other fine drinks, guarded jealously by the heirs of distilling families, is still a lump of human or animal flesh, dropped in secretly to putrefy slowly in the mix.

But before I end I must tell you that, much as I might admire Captains Kennedy and Young, the two adventurous and enterprising Irishmen who formed Simla and Mussoorie, the natives of India had “hill-stations” too, centuries before even the Moghuls got here; much lovelier, “heaven wardheading, sheer and vast, in a million summits bedding on the last world’s past” – but immensely difficult to reach.

Exactly 40 years ago, I walked to Badrinath. It lay hundreds of miles from civilization almost a 1,000 years ago. It was my first experience of the real Himalayas. At the end of the trail was a small village called Hanuman Chatti.

A 3 mile, 2000 foot climb from there took us to a point called Dev Darshan. As we climbed over the last shoulder there slowly appeared a vast green valley, and about a mile and a half away glistened the golden steeple of the temple of Badrinath. It was a breathtaking sight that I remember almost every day of my life.

Beside the temple was just one small tea stall built with stones that served rotis, dal and if you were lucky, alu ka sabji. The had a counter that sold pahari tulsi and wild flowers and Prasad of dried coconut kernel missed with sugar-coated elaichi seeds for offering at the temple.

On the other side of the raging Alaknanda was a small PWD hut, the only other construction for miles around.

Today, Badrinath looks like a junkyard after a demolition derby and has the sanctity and serenity of Burma Bizarre, Janpath Chandni, or Blackpool which ever you fewest identify with or most loathe. So does every pilgrim point and every hill station created by the British.

In every case, from the denuding of Cherrapunjee to the quarrying of Garhwal, throughout India it is the government and government alone that is directly or indirectly responsible for ruining the hills and the Himalayas so our children are left with naught but the dregs of a degenerate society.

When Rajiv Gandhi said Calcutta was “dying” we almost lynched him. When a senior civil servant Surjit Das (who later became commissioner of Garhwal) worte the “Queen is Dying”, people dismissed his book as sentimental pap: the puerile ravings of a lunatic in love with Mussoorie.

The systemless and mindless decimation of our beautiful hill stations by nouveau riche social climbing self seekers and hoteliers has for all time disfigured the Himalaya from Kulu to Shillong. Nostalgia is a meaningless journey for people like me whose every dream and hope for a livelier tomorrow is stalked by property developers, money-making politicos and NGOs.

NGOs, in general, like politicians in general, rationally devastate societies, cultures and the environment and make pots of money doing it. They pick all the right casues to champion and regularly enumerate their achievements in glossy reports tot eh amazement of the people they represent, who stare starry-eyed at all the promises NGOs hold out and obtusely deliver.

All our hill belts have seen an influx of highly motivated and deeply concerned people in floppy hats Saratoga safari shorts and Nike boots driving around in air-conditioned Sumos with laptos on thighs bouncing with ideas to smoothen a rugged world, at elast in the yes of their donor agencies abroad. But,

“The toad beneath the harrow knows
Exactly where each tooth-point goes;
The butterfly upon the road
Preaches contentment to that road.”

I have lived for two decades in Musoorie and watched it all go steadily down hill. I sti alone in my tiny cottage in the woods and listen to it rain. I hear the blackbird singh and watch the whistling thrush drive through the deodars to chase blue magpies that come to their nests, and wonder if Kipling was right when he said:

“Too late, alas!
The song to remedy the wrong.
The rooms are taken from us, swept and garnished for their fate,
But these tear –besprinkled pages
Shall attest to future ages
That we cried against the crime of it too late, alas! Too late!”
As for me, who has chosen to dwell and perhaps one day die in the Himalayas, my heart will always stay with the hills, if only for old sake’s sake!