Welcome, you have Arrived!

You had more faith in Newton’s law of Inertia than Newton himself and state of rest was all you ever wanted in life. This was not the world of your dreams and you have wife and kids who have been applying an external force to take them out. You sustain the force for a long time but it grows exponentially with time. You soon realize world peace is more important and even Newton would have chosen it if given a choice.  

Your wife says she wishes to go to a place that is popular yet pristine and you tell her that was an example of oxymoron. You complement yourself on wisecrack but anyways suffer the consequences for voicing that. You are now family’s odd one out and even the kids are on the other side of this divide.

You demonstrate your seriousness and surf the internet for a long time looking for various tourist sites. You search for hotels and flight discounts. During this time, you have gifted yourself spams for a lifetime. You start getting deals for hotel/airlines and there are even offers for baggage loss insurance.

You show all this to your wife as an alibi in being helpless in locating any site and you are reminded of ‘one that should not be named’ popups that have been receiving without any complain for a long time. You quietly open your laptop and book the first exotic holiday that appears on the website. You feel a large hole in your pocket and show the amount to your wife to salvage some pride. You get a consolatory pat on the cheek. Next few days are spent in shopping for suitable dress, hats and goggles and you are ready with an attire that screams ‘See how a tourist looks like’.

The D-day arrives and you board the flight. Your kids punish the flight attendant for committing the mistake of offering a candy one time. They also compete in who can press the flight attendant call button more number of times.

After a long arduous journey, you are at the hotel and it does not disappoint. All you want to do in the hotel room is to sleep on the soft bed and wonder why there is no such mattress in your house. You have competitive kids and they treat the bed as a Bouncy and demonstrate their high jump capabilities. You remember the fortune this booking has cost and do not ask your kids to stop. They also scribble their names on the hotel walls.  

Next day, you request the hotel to book a Cab and your driver is an English-speaking man. You now can only get impressed. He confidently tells you about the not to be missed sites and for next three days, you are his ungrudging hostage. You visit/do not visit places that he recommends and you sincerely want to live up in his eyes. You eat, drink and shop at places that he says befits your stature and you enviously calculate his cut in your mind.

Long traffic snarls in the place tell you that it is anything but pristine now. You buy chips packet, water bottles and cold drink cans like all other tourists to leave your own mark at the tourist spot. You still have to negotiate a long queue in entering tourist attractions and you haggle with salesmen and beggars during that.

Your kids take toilet breaks at odd places at odd times and locating a public toilet is now your favourite pastime. Soon you have experience of sniffing public toilets of various kinds and you realise finding a clean toilet would be the ultimate dream of any Indian voyager. You have also started appreciating Graffiti on the toilet walls. There are complex biological concepts demonstrated, love professed in pure primal forms and simple copulation described. You are confident that A L Basham named his book ‘Wonder that is India’ after having a look at graffiti on toilet walls.   

You reach a historical site and since you already have been tricked, you do not mind becoming a fool one more time. You hire a tourist guide at an exorbitant price. Soon you realise hearing him may spoil chances of your kids studying history any time. You spend rest of the time in reading information written at the spot to your children and the tourist guide. You extract your revenge by not buying anything from the souvenir shop that he guides you outside.

On last day, you buy Souvenirs for neighbours and relatives. One cannot miss telling them about the great time that you had and see their envy of not being at this site. You also duly click pictures at all places and make funny smiling face. You realize breathing out when the picture is clicked helps as it hides your family pack. You keep on doing that all the time. Once you are back, you get an uncanny feeling that your trip was a waste. You still post pictures on your Facebook wall.

You finally feel that your trip was a success when you have attained the objective of getting maximum likes!

To Dear Darjeeling!

It is always the same with mountains. Once you have lived with them for any length of time, you belong to them. There is no escape. – Ruskin Bond

One day there was a big hailstorm which went on and on for an hour. Hails like stones hit entire town and everything turned white. Shaking trees, squealing tin roofs and thickening layer of snow all around, looked petrifying. When it ended, a big crowd gathered at Chowrasta and they started playing with ice. There were kids throwing snowballs at each other, a big snowman standing in between and mesmerized tourists who could still not believe their fortune. I was standing wide eyed at a corner, awestruck and completely in love with Darjeeling.

I have left a part of me in that moment; a part of that day still lives within me!

Finally the day has come to bid adieu to the place we called home for almost two years. There is something about this place that made farewell so melancholic.

The journey till Sandakphu is as difficult as it can be. There is a collection of rolling stones which is sometimes called road. The scenery is breathtaking yet altitude of almost 12000 feet makes breathing heavy. When we finally reached, we forgot our aching body parts because we first needed to survive biting cold. That night was difficult and we swore thousand times that we will never again make such a mistake. In the early morning when we witnessed the Kanchejungha in all its
glory, we could not believe something could be so majestic. The rays of the sun first kissed its peak and then embraced entire mountains. All of us were sitting quietly imbibing we just witnessed something so mesmerizing.

I remember a night at Dello Guest house. It was somewhat cold with pleasant breeze blowing all across Kalimpong. I was the only one taking a walk in that big garden and caretakers probably knew I am a Ghazal aficionado. They played it in the background and I stayed in that moment for a long time relishing solitude. I can still feel that cool breeze caressing me.

Once we got up at three in the morning to see the sunrise at Tiger hills. We cursed the shivering cold and the crowd, and big serpentine traffic jam that snarled uphill. There was a group of youngsters who sang and danced, and I wondered what made them so jolly in this cold. When the sun peeped in and myriad colours danced on the morning sky, I could not help but feel how small we are in front of this beauty. The sharpest memory of that day is the first ray of sun hitting the horizon and how fast colours change in the sky. I also remember those happy youngsters dancing in the crowd.

Once some of our friends came down from

Kolkata and we stayed at a Tea Garden. The bungalow was one of the finest I had ever seen and was surrounded by lush green tea bushes spread across the valley. It had hills on all sides and the breeze made a continuous buzzing sound while knocking at gigantic trees. We sat in the open balcony and debated religion and politics. We fought and argued and almost reached the verge of tearing each other’s clothes. We stayed awake almost entire night and then our dear A played guitar, as he often did. I will always miss those heated debates and those songs that I heard in numerous such gatherings. How will parties look without his guitar strings?

Many other images have stayed on with me. The forest drive of Sukhna looked so pristine that one could find zillion shades of green in it. The vast bank of river was like a scene out of apocalypse. There were times when did breakfast in our garden and had Kanchenjungha’s view in front for company. One night a leopard crossed the road in front of my vehicle and looked at us with his shining eyes before disappearing. When I traveled to Kalimpong, Teesta flowed along and its emerald green water gushing with fast pace looked serene yet intimidating. There were clouds that came and embraced
entire town and the fog that made everything appear mystic. The rain once started poured together for days. There were stories of Ghosts which came back haunting whenever I was alone in my bungalow. Everything was so silent at that time of night that only those who have ever lived that silence can understand it.

And then there were people who were strangers before and became part of our life. We shared good times and sorrows, and cemented our relationship with those memories. They changed me in many ways and all those times of happiness or of melancholy, made life worth living. They took away a part of me and I often find them in my personality. They may always be in our life, or this might have been our last meeting but whenever I would look back in life, I would remember them fondly.

I remember sitting idle one night in a balcony watching myriads of twinkling lights on a hill in front of me, and a strong overpowering feeling came along with it; this is how life is meant to be. A sign of ageing perhaps, the feeling that I may not be able to relive all this is unnerving.

I loved you my dear house. You allowed us to call it home and gave us pleasant memories. I loved you
dear mountains, and your fog and your mist. I loved your serpentine roads that revealed your beauty from different perspectives. I miss you dear friends and maybe I will never get to say this, I would always love you. I always felt that I will never belong to any place but I was wrong; I belong to you, my Beloved Darjeeling!