(Ebook) No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight: Memories of a Hill Town by Parimal Bhattacharya ISBN 9789386582355, 938658235X

(Ebook) No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight: Memories of a Hill Town by Parimal Bhattacharya ISBN 9789386582355, 938658235X

For a few years in the early 1990s--at a time when the embers of a violent agitation for Gorkhaland were slowly dying down--Parimal Bhattacharya taught at the Government College in Darjeeling. No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight is a memory of his time in the iconic town, and one of the finest works of Indian non-fiction in recent years. Parimal evocatively describes his arrival, through drizzle and impenetrable fog, at a place that was at odds with the grand picture of it he had painted for himself. And his first night there was spent sleepless in a ramshackle hotel above a butcher's shop. Yet, as he tramped its roads and winding footpaths, Darjeeling grew on him. He sought out its history: a land of incomparable beauty originally inhabited by the Lepchas and other tribes; the British who took it for themselves in the mid-1800s so they could remember home; the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway--once a vital artery, now a quaint toy train--built in 1881; and the vast tea gardens with which the British replaced verdant forests to produce the fabled Orange Pekoe. In the enmeshed lives of his neighbours--of various castes, tribes, religions and cultures--lived at the measured pace of a small town