Skip to main content

Sunrise in Darjeeling

In a park in Darjeeling


Maggie and I were two among scores of people who got up at 3.30 am to go and watch sunrise when the rain was lashing the windowpanes of our room in a hotel in Darjeeling. It was the summer of 2010. We had spent three days in Gangtok already. Gangtok was a cheerful sunrise while Darjeeling was like a gloomy sunset, Maggie would say poetically later as we sat in the leisurely toy train that moved from Darjeeling to Kurseong.  

Our tour of Darjeeling was to start with the sunrise seen from Tiger Hill and our hotel had arranged a taxi to take us to Tiger Hill at 4 am. The sunrise would be at 4.45, we were told. But it started pouring right after midnight, a kind of rain that didn’t sound quite characteristic of a hill station. When the reception rang us at 3.30, I asked how anyone would see a sunrise in that weather. “Your taxi will be ready at 4.” The answer was terse and the call was over. Most people of Darjeeling were equally terse and morose, as we would learn soon.

Darjeeling was a town of shutdowns and hartals in those days. The Gorkhas were demanding a separate state for themselves: Gorkhaland. The agitation had gone on for decades and had sucked out the vitality of the people. You would see sullen faces all over, on the streets, in the shops, at the museum.

Since the entire amount for the Tiger Hill trip had been taken in advance by our hotel, Maggie and I had little choice but roll off the quilt and pull up the pants. The rain subsided as we set off to Tiger Hill. The drizzle never stopped, however. And the sun did not rise for us though we waited on the watch tower till 5.30 or so.

A Jupiter year has passed since then. I wonder whether Darjeeling is a happier place now. Have smiles returned to those weary and sullen faces of 2010? Does the sun rise cheerfully beyond Tiger Hill in the mornings now?

I still remember how Maggie and I had decided back then that we wouldn’t return to Darjeeling. We would return to Gangtok again and again, we agreed. Now, 12 years later, I wouldn’t mind returning to Darjeeling again. Even if the sunrise gets drowned in a drizzle again. Both West Bengal and India have undergone many political changes since 2010. How have these changes affected the people of Darjeeling? I am interested in seeing personally.

Signboards had already declared it Gorkhaland in 2010

xZx

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanFebruary 22, 2022 at 12:20 AM

    Hari OM
    ...this begs the question as to when you are booking your tickets?!! It is a small regret of mine that I never managed to get to the eastern side of India during my time there. Now, I wonder if I will even leave Scotland again... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 22, 2022 at 6:24 AM

      The pandemic has altered life drastically, especially travel plans. We restrict ourselves to nearby places now. Let's hope for better.

      Delete
  2. ARTHFebruary 22, 2022 at 10:48 AM

    Matheikal sir, Maggie mam
    Your English classes in sawan
    And now your blogspot
    Are still as intriguing as were in those days .. fortunate enough to be around you and Maggie mam in sawan, Maggie mam was our mentor in Eklavya house hope she remember's us from
    2010 -2014

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 22, 2022 at 8:09 PM

      Thank you, Siddharth, for refreshing certain memories. Maggie ma'am conveys her fond regards to you. Sawan had a unique knack for creating extraordinary bonds between teachers and students.

      Delete
  3. Pandian RamaiahFebruary 26, 2022 at 9:22 AM

    You have written a moisture sprayed post, sir. I could feel the breeze blowing there. I never visited north east. Hope I'll go once.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 26, 2022 at 10:18 AM

      Worth going at least once. Quite a different world it is.

      Delete
  4. Anupama JoshyMarch 12, 2022 at 2:12 PM

    Added to my bucket list ✅

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more