Writer Marcus Dam left Darjeeling when he was 15 "and sick of the place". In Calcutta, however, distance made the heart grow fonder. He returned recently and noted the changes. This article is excerpted from the 'Miscellany' supplement of the Statesman.
When I went back this time, the skies were not the same. The city seemed to have changed over the years. It wore a smile that seemed to mock the native as he tried to return. The only thing that possibly kepi me going was a flood of memories that, came crashing to my mind, tossing me into a cemetery with gravestones overgrown with weeds: Nature paying its respects to the sahibs and their memsahibs who came to an alien land, thousands of miles away, to rule – and die.
Fresh terraces have been carved out of whatever hillsides that remain for tomorrow´s gravestones. Once, the cemetery was my makeshift stage, the headstones my devout fans; I would strum a Beatles tune on a borrowed guitar. Today, the cemetery is bursting at the seams with the dead. Like everything else in Darjeeling. Leaving you no space to laugh at the discordant notes without being overheard. Or to cry out just for the heck of it…
Spilling into public life is a new xenophobia, so long brewing in the shadows of´ bahadur-babu loyalties. Darjeeling, the place that long lay lost in the pages of photo albums and tourist brochures, is simmering with political passions and injured feelings that threaten to burst into violence any moment. The clerk at the reception of the hotel glares at me with barely concealed hostility. He refuses to answer my queries in his own language —the one I took as my own when I grew up in the hills. I am not surprised — newspapers have forewarned me of such behaviour. Nonetheless, the forbidding look on his face jars my mind: I realise that I am no longer wanted in a place where I was born and which I consider my home.