Darjeeling Read Free Page B

their abrupt crest. From Delhi, Bagdogra is a two-hour flight east, paralleling the snowy, sinewy range; from Kolkata less, but still a solid hour flight straight north.
    In March and April—dreaded April, “herald of horrors,” E. M. Forster called it, when the sun returns “with power but without beauty” 1 —as winter lurches into summer, the flat landscape is parched. The browns turn bronze and sandy as the plane travels east. From above, through the hovering, dusty haze, the landscape takes on the sepia tone of an old American West photograph, and the ambling, channeled Ganges glints like a dulled scissor blade on its lazy arc to the Bay of Bengal. Walking down the narrow stairs from the airplane and across the tarmac, with fresh tar painted in broad strokes along its weathered cracks, to Bagdogra’s low, white terminal, the sharp glare makes disembarking passengers wince, and the heat smacks with the unsettling force of an open palm.
    While fields of tea are immediately around the airport—flat expanses broken by sal trees with tall, straight trunks—the famed estates of Darjeeling are on the slopes that rise through the shimmering, hot air to the north.
    Darjeeling is just fifty miles away by road. But it takes about four hours to reach.
    From the airport, seven or eight slow miles bring one to Siliguri, as traffic braids around potholes, bicycles and cycle rickshaws, goats, rusted buses, high-riding military trucks, and pale cows with coffin-shaped skulls. Schoolgirls with pigtails tied in colored ribbons walk along the uneven lip of the blacktop. Boys in boiled white shirts, their uniform jackets dangling jauntily by a thumb over the shoulder, follow behind. Long-stemmed leaves on pipal trees dangle downward, heart-shaped pendulums that rustle like muffled wind chimes with the slightest breeze. Rusted corrugated-tin roofs cover the small houses. Once the monsoon rains arrive in heady, uneven bursts, they turn the houses into reverberating echo chambers—and the road to muck. But in early spring, it’s sweltering and dusty, and the relief of rain only a distant dream.
    Once across the Balasan River, the route turns north up the Rohini Road toward the crumpled eruption of hills just discernible in the haze. In June 2010, landslides wiped out the main Hill Cart Road in a trio of places, and it has yet to be repaired. For the first half of the journey, the main route now cuts up a parallel valley to the west instead.
    After passing through a cluster of small shops selling sodas and paan , school satchels and wicker tables, the road opens up and runs flat and straight at the foothills as it cuts between two tea estates—Longview on the left, the lower sections of Rohini on the right. Goats graze in the scrub, and a troop of macaques—pale brown fur, pinkish faces—squat patiently at the edge of the road as if waiting for a bus. A traffic sign cautions against elephants crossing; a handful of brilliant-white, erect egrets stand in sprouting fields; and browned, plate-size leaves, curled like old leather chappals , get swept along the blacktop behind trucks.
    The lurch upward is sudden, and the flatness quickly turns steep and tropical. Passing through a handful of terraced rice fields, rippling green with tender, springtime shoots, the road begins to switchback, looping around clusters of bamboo stout as flagpoles and broad as a man’s thigh, patches of wild bananas, and thick-buttressed trees with knobby boles. Blue, blunt-nosed trucks barrel downhill with processed first flush teas under the cinched canvas tarps and return carrying everything else to the out-of-the-way part of India. Uphill traffic has the right of way on the tightest stretches.
    With its close position to the Bay of Bengal and the monsoon winds whose moisture condenses and causes heavy rainfall when they come against the mountain range, this is the most humid part of the entire Himalayan chain. “The abrupt juxtaposition of so many