A Writer's World (28 page)

No little town in the world can show more kinds, and types, and manners of people. The little Lepchas, the original inhabitants of the region, are seldom more than five feet high, but immensely strong and agile. The Sherpas from eastern Nepal, the high-altitude porters of Everest and Kanchenjunga, move with an inexorable striding impetus, as though they can’t stop. The Tibetans often look immensely sophisticated, trendy almost, ready for any Chelsea discotheque with their flared pants and impeccable complexions. The Gurkhas look soldiers through and through, always marching, even off parade, with head high and chest out. One sees few sleepy or dullard faces among these Mongoloid peoples of the north: all seem eminently capable – straight square-set people, who look as though, deposited in a Brooklyn back-alley or one of the remoter villages of the southern Urals, they would instantly find their feet.

But they are only one element in the Darjeeling melange. There are
many other kinds of Nepalese, for instance – Gurungs, Magars, Tamangs, Newars. There are refugees from Tibet proper, and Indian Army soldiers from the Punjab and Rajasthan. Here comes a slim dark girl in blue pyjamas, who might be Annamese, or perhaps Malay. Here are four Rajput officers of the garrison, with their thin black Sandhurst moustaches and their suede boots. The Hindu holy man beside the lane is smeared mysteriously with yellow ochre. The Bengali family being hoisted on to its ponies is all guileless anticipation, proud young father holding the baby (who wears a pink peaked cap with yellow velvet ribbons), mother in gold and red sari assiduously combing the already immaculate hair of a small boy apparently dressed for an exceptionally extravagant wedding. The eyes that peer at you between bushy beard and bundled turban are, of course, the eyes of a Sikh: the shy porcelain smile from the lady at the next table is a smile from the palm trees and sands of Madras.

In the autumn they have races at Darjeeling, and then one may see this demographic jumble at its most cheerful. The racecourse is endearingly claimed to be the smallest in the world: at the end of a race the competitors run breakneck off the course into the approach road, an unnerving experience for newcomers. The meetings are not very formal. Young men play football in the middle of the track. Between races the horses graze casually on grassy spaces round about. A dribble of racegoers stumbles down the mountain track from the town above, carrying umbrellas and race cards, and a stream of jeeps and rattly taxis blasts its way along the motor-road.

Still, the traditional procedures are honoured. The races are run by the Gymkhana Club of Darjeeling, and in the official stand the stewards and judges, mostly army officers, sit in well-cut elegance with immensely superior ladies. Sometimes the senior steward takes a stroll about the enclosure, moving with the lordly benevolence common to racing bigwigs from Longchamps to Kentucky Downs. The race card is printed with every refinement of the racegoer’s jargon and the rules are, of course, severe (‘Trainers and Jockeys are hereby notified that Riotous Behaviour, Intemperance, or other Improper Conduct, although not occurring on the Race Course, will be taken cognizance of by the Stewards’). It would take an iconoclast indeed to defy the decrees of the Darjeeling Gymkhana Club.

The bell rings; the flag drops; hurtling around the track in billows of dust come three or four little Tibetan ponies, ridden at desperate speed and with savage concentration by fierce little high-cheeked jockeys – brilliantly
liveried in scarlets and yellows, visors low over their eyes – rocketing around that little track, as the crowd rises tip-toe with excitement, until they shoot out of sight, with cheers, laughter and catcalls, behind the grandstand and off the course. It is as though the scouts of Attila have passed through. The stranger may feel a certain sense of shock, but the stewards do not seem disconcerted. ‘Jolly good show,’ they say to each other. ‘Hell of a good race, what?’

For the most dogmatic progressive will not deny to little Darjeeling a tug of nostalgia. It is harmless. It is only a fragrance of earlier times, a Victorian bouquet still lingering up here along the ridge. Darjeeling is largely built in that gabled semi-chalet style so dear to Victorian pleasure-seekers, and imposed upon its gallimaufry of peoples is a decorous, poke-bonnet, tea-and-biscuits style. Nobody in their senses would wish it otherwise. It is an essential part of Darjeeling’s minuscule mystique, and used to suggest to me a musical-box town, where pretty little melodies would tinkle in the sunshine, while clockwork figures in top hats and bustles jerkily proceeded along the Mall. The very names of the place carry this old evocation – the Esplanade, a Happy Valley, Step Aside – and the main road to the plains is still known in Darjeeling as the Cart Road.

Some of the hotels are deliciously Victorian. The porridge at the Windamere [
sic
] Hotel is, I am told by unimpeachable authorities, unsurpassed in Scotland, while the tea at the Mount Everest is tea, my dear, just like we
used
to have it. Shopping in Darjeeling, too, is agreeably old-school. Patiently attentive are the assistants, instantly to hand is the chair for memsahib, and one almost expects to find, winging it across the Kashmiri shawls and the Tibetan prayer-wheels, one of those wire-pulley change receptacles one used to see in provincial English drapers’ long ago.

Most of Darjeeling’s pleasures (I except the illicit joys of the bazaar quarter) would perfectly satisfy our grandparents. There is the classic pleasure, for instance, which I abstemiously denied myself, of getting up at three in the morning to see the sunrise and the top of Everest from Tiger Hill. There are the pleasures of Excursions to Places of Interest, like Ghoom Rock or Kaventer’s Dairy Farm. There are the pleasures of identifying wild flowers and trees, or sketching, or looking at animals in the outdoor zoo (where the Llama and the Siberian Tiger, returning one’s inspection morosely from their enclosures, look as though they wish the Victorian era had never dawned). There are pony-rides, of course, and there is
miniature golf, and when I was there
Ruddigore
was being performed by the pupils of St Paul’s School.

Above all there is the pleasure of walking. In most of Darjeeling no cars are allowed, and this is one of the walkingest towns on earth. One may walk decorously around the town itself, or through the Botanical Gardens. One may walk into the foothills for a picnic. Or one may, stacking up with tinned pineapple and sleeping bags, engage a team of Sherpas and stride off into the distant mountains. Every year more and more people go trekking from Darjeeling, and a very healthy pastime it must be. ‘No place like Darjeeling,’ one stalwart matron reproachfully observed as, staggering beneath the weight of her accoutrements, she passed me doing nothing in particular over a glass of lemonade – ‘nowhere like Darjeeling for blowing the cobwebs away!’

As I say, our grandparents would have loved it: and sometimes Darjeeling’s scrapbook essence can be, to the sentimental visitor, distinctly moving. On Jalapahar Hill, at the eastern end of the ridge, there is a small military cantonment, complete with parade ground, garrison church and shops for the soldiery. I was once walking through this camp, enjoying its display of the military aesthetic – polished brass, regimental signs in whitewashed pebbles, the clump of ammunition boots and the bristle of sergeantly moustaches – when an unexpected sound reached me from the parade ground behind. With a slow and melancholy introductory wail, the Gurkha pipe band broke into the sad, sad music of a Highland lament. I stopped dead in my dusty tracks, and the tears came to my eyes: for what generations of my own people, I thought, had stirred to that music in their exiles long ago, and how strange and sweet and lonely it sounded in these hills of the Indian frontier!

‘Can I help you?’ inquired a passer-by, seeing me standing there. ‘You are not ill?’ Not ill, I assured him as I moved on up the hill. Only susceptible!

Every morning before breakfast I used to walk up Observatory Hill. This wooded hump, rising directly above the Chaurasta, is holy to the Buddhists, who have a shrine upon its summit. All along the steep and winding path to the top mendicants invite the contributions of the pious – grave holy men who bow like archbishops, jolly old crones, coveys of chirpy inquisitive children. Two grinning stone lions guard the entrance to the holy compound, the trees are hung all over with white prayer flags, and mysteriously from the recesses of the shrine one may hear the incessant murmur of prayers and tinkling of bells. There are always people up there.
Some are praying, some meditating, some reading sacred scripts, and one I met each day used to stand all alone among the bushes looking towards Tibet and writing in a large black notebook.

If the weather is clear there is a glorious view of Kanchenjunga and its peers, and while they were cooking my eggs in the hotel down below I used to sit on the grass alone and marvel at the immunity of Darjeeling. It has, it seemed to me,
escaped
. It knows its own dimension, and is satisfied. Though its name is famous everywhere, still it remains a small town of the Himalayan foothills, very close to the soil and the temple. There is material squalor enough, but seldom I think despair, still less degradation. The loads may be crippling, but still the porters find the energy to smile. The children and the chickens may be in and out of the kitchen, but the mothers never seem to get cross. The girls laugh as they laboriously chop firewood in the thickets, and the bundles of hay piled upon the backs of the labourers are speckled all over with flowers of pink and blue.

It is as though by an unconscious exertion of values Darjeeling has selected what it wants from the world below, and rejected all the rest. One feels better and kinder for a visit to Darjeeling. Those stupendous mountains in the clouds have set the scale right, and adjusted the balance. It’s no good fussing, they seem to say. It can’t last. And this sententious thought, which occurred to me every morning after ten minutes or so upon the hill, used to remind me that my eggs were waiting for me down the lane – and down I would hurry, past that merry line of beggars, tagged by swarms of children and encouraged by avuncular sages, to where the waiter in his red turban and his polished brass badge, looking anxiously from the dining-room door, was waiting to whisk the cover off my porridge.

‘You see,’ said the government spokesman, ‘you may liken Delhi to the River Ganges, it twists and turns, many other streams join it, it divides into many parts, and it flows into the sea in so many channels that nobody may know which is the true river. You follow my train of thought? It is a metaphysical matter, perhaps. You will do best to burrow under the surface of things and discover what is not revealed to us ordinary mortals! In the meantime, you will take a cup of tea, I hope?’

I took a cup of tea, milkless, very sweet, brought by a shuffling messenger in a high-buttoned jacket with a scarf around his neck, and between pleasantries I pondered the spokesman’s advice. Indians, of course, love to reduce the prosaic to the mystic. It is part of their Timeless Wisdom. For several centuries the tendency has variously baffled, infuriated, amused and entranced travellers from the West, and India is full of pilgrims come from afar to worship at the shrines of insight. But
Delhi
? Delhi is not just a national capital, it is one of the political ultimates, one of the prime movers. It was born to power, war and glory. It rose to greatness not because holy men saw visions there but because it commanded strategic routes from the north-west, where the conquerors came from, into the rich flatlands of the Ganges delta. Delhi is a soldiers’ town, a politicians’ town, a journalists’, diplomats’ town. It is Asia’s Washington, though not so picturesque, and lives by ambition, rivalry and opportunism.

‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘what you are thinking is quite true, but that is the
surface
of Delhi. You are an artist, I know, you should look
beyond
! And if there is anything we can do to help your inquiries,’ he added, with an engaging waggle of his head, ‘you have only to let us know. You may
telephone us at any time and we will ring you back with requisite information in a moment or two. We are here to help! That is why we are here! No, no, that is our duty!’

Certainly Delhi is unimaginably antique, and age is a metaphysic, I suppose. Illustrations of mortality are inescapable there, and do give the place a sort of nagging symbolism. Tombs of emperors stand beside traffic junctions, forgotten fortresses command suburbs, the titles of lost dynasties are woven into the vernacular, if only as street names.