Darjeeling, Gorkhaland, 7th April 2011
You know you’re back in India when:
On arrival at an international airport, you’re picked up from the plane in a decrepit, ancient bus and dumped in a damp terminal where bags make it onto the baggage collection carousel one at a time over the course of an hour (but they do make it).
You wonder if there’s going to be problems with re-entry on our complex visas but the immigration official’s manner softens and he agrees that a holiday in the mountains is a good plan.
There’s a headline in the newspaper: ‘The Baba is critical’.
The pastry and samosa on the shelves in the airport café look very similar to the ones that were there when we left a fortnight ago.
When we refused to get in one particular taxi, its wing and the bonnet repaired with string and paper-mâché, after what looked like a recent head-on, our concerns are countered with protestations of ‘It’s not a problem – all the taxis are like this!’
The insanity of the interweaving manic city traffic, with a near miss at every junction, comes back anew. [I love a notice board in Darjeeling: ‘Obeying road rules is a mark of a civilised society, animals only are exempt. You decide’, but the children preferred a different road safety slogan, ‘Better to arrive in peace, than in pieces’]
Horns. All day and night. Continuously.
There’s a semi-naked sadhu with his trident being pulled along in a rickshaw next to you.
You walk round bodies (sleeping?) on the pavement.
Loud Americans insist that Indians just don’t get solitude.
W’s cheeks are sore from pinching again.
You spend a whole afternoon in a railway waiting room on time-lapse setting.
The children begging on the street look hungry and malnourished but there’s an epidemic of obesity among middle-class children.
The tiniest children go off to school in over-size uniforms with smart oiled plaits and ribbons with back packs larger than themselves.
It fails to occur to our travelling neighbour not to switch on the central light (and just to use her reading light instead) at 10pm to eat an elaborate and stinky fish curry meal on the train, waking us all up. Oh and then to make some loud after-dinner calls on her mobile.
Your cough comes back (or is that Bird Flu picked up in Cambodia?).
The sound of hawking (not mine) punctuates the day.
There are three fluffy, dirty-white kitten-cats hanging out on a hot tin roof, pretending to be tigers.
The Victorian ironware is still in use – from park benches to railings to the Toy Train.
There is no flesh on show (except for some cold tummy rolls under a sari-cardi combo and the chunky calf muscles, between school skirts and white pull up socks, of hill-walking school girls), not even among the foreigners here, but that could be due to their fleeces and gortex.
They play AC-DCs ‘Highway to Hell’ in genteel tea-shops and have ‘Hotel California’ as a ringtone.
Lovely single-toothed old blokes come up to tell you what a fine profession teaching is, and to let you know how much they appreciate your ancestors’ gift of the railway to Darjeeling.
There are dogs lying around all round town – and we saw one licking a pair of discarded, pooey knickers.
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