The Indian Equator

by Ian Strathcarron

  The old Ada Villa was really more of a boarding house than a hotel. One can only assume that the Darjeeling Club, popularly known as the Planters’ Club and more typical of the sort of place they would have stayed was full - or at least didn’t have the three spare rooms the Twain party needed. The Ada Villa was transformed into the Windamere Hotel in 1939 and is now far more than “fairly comfortable” and the landlord the opposite of “indiscriminate and incoherent”. In fact it takes less than ten minutes for it to be my favorite hotel in India. It feels like my perfectionist great aunt Fiona has said “borrow my country house for the week and invite your friends.” It’s not just that it is so comfortable in a familiar, chintzy, throwback sort of way but it makes the guests feel comfortable, chintzy and throwback too. I’m sure this is its secret, to make Victoriana work without ladling on nostalgia or applying a - dread word - theme. One wallows in the way things should be done but seldom are; a last pocket of resistance to the lowest common denominator. Staff are brisk and quiet and polite - and soothsayers for one’s needs. The rooms are suites with proper baths and changing rooms. In the evenings the air is heated by coal fires and in the day the air is cleaned by throwing open the windows. The green telephones in the rooms have signs saying “When certain numbers are dialed the phones ring simultaneously in separate rooms, causing alarms to guests who value their repose. We have been keeping this deficiency in our intercom service under review and, meanwhile, crave your indulgence.” In other words, they don’t work. Then there’s the notice in sitting room: “Visitors are respectfully requested not to move around furniture in this room in order that comfort may be shared in fair proportion by all. Also, visitors are requested not to take off their footwear or put their feet on the furniture, or lie supine on the hearth or sleep behind the settees lest unintended offence be given to others.”

  The hotel really doesn’t deserve to have its business vandalized by the GJM. Ones senses that Agatha Christie is about to sweep into the dining room and say “ah, now I’ve got you all together” or Noel Coward will soon be jumping up to change the 78, or in my case that Mark Twain and I are sharing a snifter and cigar in the bar.

  ***

  That night’s At Home Talk was at the town hall at 9.30 p.m. It’s just a short walk along the ridge. The town hall is still standing, just about, but no longer in use except as a ramshackle store house for... rams and shackles.

  It was and is part of a sports club compound. In 1896 it was called the Amusements Club; in 1909 it changed its name to the Gymkhana Club, a name it still retains today. Back then there were eight tennis courts, a squash court, a skating rink and stables. A small racecourse used up all of the perimeter of a plateau below, encircling a compressed polo pitch. Numerous photographs survive of the equestrian life of members and mounts. Inside the club there were card rooms and billiards rooms. There were enough planters, soldiers, recuperators and administrators to keep both the Amusements or Gymkhana Club and the nearby Planters’ Club, full and busy.

  Nowadays the Gymkhana Club has been taken over by the GJM as its unofficial headquarters and visitors are met with suspicious stares - at Sita even more than at Gillian and me. The secretary has to find someone for permission to show us even the outside of the town hall. Sullen stares follow us round. There’s not much else to see: the eight tennis courts have become two and they are as potholed as the roads. The squash court and skating rink have not been used for years. Inside the card rooms are in use but not for cards. Maybe this is the room where they dream up all their stupid schemes.

  Talking of which, right opposite the Gymkhana Club stands a mighty handsome eight-story white building in stone and marble. It is visible from around the upper levels and is really most eye-catching, clearly not the work of the Indian school of architecture. It is the new auditorium-cum-communal hall, or should be, but since it was commissioned by a previous separatist grouping the GJM has declared it politically unacceptable and banned its use apart from the occasional two-day hunger strike. The monkeys aren’t so fussy and now troupes of them have made themselves at home in the best address in town. Nor is upkeep allowed and now the first tell-tale signs of damp and decay are starting to appear in its details. The great white building is becoming a great white elephant. It is ironical that the one and only handsome new building we have seen in India is barred from use.

  And talking of which, the spread of ugliness down the slopes of Darjeeling is even more noticeable than elsewhere because of the setting. One needs to stay high. Heading along the upper level, the ridge, from the White Elephant past the Gymkhana Club and the Windamere one enters the large square, Chowrasta. This is most attractively laid out with a golden statue and temple at one end and in-scale and period shops along the side. Tibetan monks swirl by, ponies take laughing children for a ride, old Himalayan faces sit on park benches and smile the day away. Above it is Observatory Hill, topped by a dazzling Sikkimese temple where Buddhism and Hinduism are practiced side by side. All this is for pedestrians only and on the opposite side of Chowrasta is the start of The Mall, the main shopping street full of Tibetan tit-tat and English tea shops. Half way along higher up on the left is the Planters’ Club. One reaches the end of The Mall and the horning traffic starts again and then one sees the ugliest new building in a country of ugly new buildings: the orange-ochre and monsooned-concrete colored Telecommunications Building; the safe haven of higher Darjeeling is over and one is back in India.

  ***

  Early next morning Livy and Clara rose at first light to see sunrise over the high peaks to the north and west. At first I had assumed that like every visitor today they had taken themselves up to the viewing station on Tiger Hill, but having made that half hour journey by car and pothole realize they must have seen the spectacle more closely, probably from the viewing point on the far side of Observatory Hill. As Livy wrote to Jean: “Look on the map, and try to realize that we who belong to you are away up here in the Himalayas on the border of Thibet [sic]. I cannot think that it can be true.”

  We got up at 5:30 to see the view. I went out in the rickshaw with two men pulling and one pushing. Clara and a gentleman went on horseback and Mr. Smythe walked. Papa we left in the dressing down by the window, as he had decided to get his view from there. He got the view and the most glorious when it was.

  In his notes Mark Twain wrote:

  While my party rode away to a distant point where Kinchinjunga and Mount Everest show up best, I stayed at home for a private view. I got a pipe and a few blankets and sat for two hours at the window, and saw the sun drive away the veiling gray and touch up the snow-peaks one after another with pale pink splashes and delicate washes of gold, and finally flood the whole mighty convulsion of snow-mountains with a deluge of rich splendors.

  Kinchinjunga’s peak was but fitfully visible, but in the between times it was vividly clear against the sky - away up there in the blue dome more than 28,000 feet above sea level - the loftiest land I had ever seen, by 12,000 feet or more. It was 45 miles away. Mount Everest is a thousand feet higher, but it was not a part of that sea of mountains piled up there before me, so I did not see it; but I did not care, because I think that mountains that are as high as that are disagreeable.

  Today the trip up to Tiger Hill from base camp Darjeeling is a more or less compulsory tourist rite of passage. I was there at the same time of year as Twain’s party and clambered out into pre-dawn at much the same time of morning, 5 a.m., as Livy and Clara. The road up to Tiger Hill is now in terrible condition and it takes well over half an hour to complete the six-mile climb through the potholes and open sores that level out at 8,500 feet. In the spring and autumn viewing seasons two hundred cars a day batter the track. In the summer the monsoon washes chunks of foundation away. In the winter ice widens the cracks. I imagine it will be Shanks’s Pony only pretty soon.

  We are not alone as people come from all around to take their chances of a clear v
iew. Luckily there are chai and coffee sellers aplenty to help us wake up. Everyone has had early alarm calls and a rough ride to the viewing summit; everyone chatters teeth and words excitedly, bashing themselves to keep warm. Then the clamor subsides as the first change in the sky’s hue shows to the east. The spectacle starts with an easing of the dark into grey, then a hint of cayenne and as the gods turn the brightness up and inch by inch, billion mile by billion mile, the golden apple slips free of the horizon. The only sound is clicking cameras, Gillian’s more than most, and whispered oohs and aahs. All eyes now turn left to the north and west as the peaks and slopes of the range around the Kanchenjunga massif glow in turn, timelessly, first Venetian pink, then fresh flaxen before settling down to virgin white and another day of snow, as old as the world, freezing and melting and freezing in the sunlight.

  Everyone now wants to see Everest hiding between other, seemingly higher, peaks one hundred miles away across the earth’s curve. Usually she is coy and is so again for us earthlings this morning. By 6 a.m. the night-time mist below dissolves and clouds wrap themselves around the peaks but for ten minutes back there nature and consciousness share a transcendent experience of the change and constancy of beauty, of the one without a second.

  I have no idea if the breakfast at Ada Villa was as good as the one at the Windamere Hotel is now but feel it would be impossible for it to be so. The secret of making porridge - the only meal I know how to make apart from toast - is to forget water and the microwave and use a significant saucepan, politically incorrect full-bore milk and slow stirring. No need for further milk, but a dollop of honey doesn’t go amiss. There’s obviously been some industrial espionage as the Windamere chef has pinched my formula but with a warm stomach on this cold high Himalaya morning all is forgiven.

  ***

  Meanwhile Mark Twain was busy watching the world go by.

  I changed from the back to the front of the house and spent the rest of the morning there, watching the swarthy strange tribes flock by from their far homes in the Himalayas. All ages and both sexes were represented, and the breeds were quite new to me, though the costumes of the Tibetans made them look a good deal like Chinamen. The prayer-wheel was a frequent feature. It brought me near to these people, and made them seem kinfolk of mine. Through our preacher we do much of our praying by proxy. We do not whirl him around a stick, as they do, but that is merely a detail.

  The swarm swung briskly by, hour after hour, a strange and striking pageant. It was wasted there, and it seemed a pity. It should have been sent streaming through the cities of Europe or America, to refresh eyes weary of the pale monotonies of the circus-pageant. These people were bound for the bazaar, with things to sell. We went down there, later, and saw that novel congress of the wild peoples, and ploughed here and there through it, and concluded that it would be worth coming from Calcutta to see, even if there were no Kinchinjunga and Everest.

  The bazaar, now called Chowk Bazaar, spreads down from The Mall and is still the scene of colorful chaos it was then. Only the size has changed - along with the rest of Darjeeling which now has over 300,000 souls, a twenty fold increase since Twain’s time. It is not only the size that has changed: traffic has arrived and with it Indian driving manners and so in an area that cries out to be pedestrianized one’s amusement is somewhat curtailed by having to squeeze up against the walls and find respite from the blaring horns. The trading from the stalls is almost exclusively local as there’s not much for foreigners to buy unless they are self-catering or have lost their luggage. Most of the souvenir shops - and the more interesting Tibetan artifact shops - are up in the peace and quiet, and no doubt extra expense, of The Mall.

  At midday Twain ambled down to the Planters’ Club. The Standard reported that “he had a peg,[61] was genial and entertaining, and kept the billiard-room so jolly, that, though it was full of members, no one could play.” He himself remembered that “It was a comfortable place. It is loftily situated, and looks out over a vast spread of scenery; from it you can see where the boundaries of three countries come together, some thirty miles away; Tibet is one of them, Nepal another, and I think Herzegovina was the other.” Well, I suppose Sikkim does sound a bit like Herzegovina after a couple of pegs.

  Today the famous Planters’ Club still exists but as a shadow of its former self; the unkind might dismiss it as a metaphor for Darjeeling. It no longer has any members; that is to say there is no membership scheme. The public rooms are still there, the bar and lounge and dining room, but they are only open in the day and don’t serve anything to eat or drink. Heads and antlers of dead members of the cervidae family look down disapprovingly at the threadbare carpets and damp-patched walls; they prefer the good old days of pegs and billiards, joshing sahibs and flirting mem’sahibs. From dusk the whole place is shut down. Upstairs there are nineteen bedrooms which are more tired than the most tired of guests; it has in effect become a two-star hotel with three-star prices trading on four-star cachet.

  In spite of being run-down its position and renown make it still highly salvageable. The great white planters have long gone, replaced by here-today gone-tomorrow managers for multinationals. The officers and gentlemen of the Indian Army are higher up the Himalayas towards the border with China and the movers and shakers are broking power down in Calcutta, but if the GJM sees sense it has all the makings of a wonderful counterpoint to the Windamere; not competitively but complementarily.

  Later that night Livy and Clara left; Twain and Smythe left the next morning. It is not clear why they split up, presumably a shortage of space on the railroad.

  This next morning they had a much finer view of the massif and Twain told Smythe: “I intended to tell the many people in Calcutta, who told me of the grandeur of the snows, that I had seen them, whether I had or not. I am glad to be saved the pain of telling a lie.”

  And so for Mark Twain’s famous adventure down the mountain in the brake car, unfortunately now impossible to recreate due to the GJM’s ransacking of the route and the brake car having been disbanded - and in the museum.

  If one visits the toy train museum at Ghoom, the highest railway station in the world, one sees this plaque with a Twain misquote and misspelling: “The most enjoyeable day I’ve spent on earth is of mixed ecstasy of deadly fright and unimagineable joy.”

  But he did have the time of his life and wouldn’t have begrudged the botched citation one iota:

  We changed to a little canvas-canopied hand-car for the 35-mile descent. It was the size of a sleigh, it had six seats and was so low that it seemed to rest on the ground. It had no engine or other propelling power, and needed none to help it fly down those steep inclines. It only needed a strong brake, to modify its flight, and it had that. Mr. Barnard, the chief engineer, was to take personal charge of our car, and he had been down the mountain in it many a time.

  Everything looked safe. Indeed, there was but one questionable detail left: the regular train was to follow us as soon as we should start, and it might run over us. Privately, I thought it would.

  We started, like an arrow from a bow, and before I could get out of the car we were gone. The sensation was pleasurable - intensely so; it was a sudden and immense exaltation, a mixed ecstasy of deadly fright and unimaginable joy. I believe that this combination makes the perfection of human delight.

  The pilot car’s flight down the mountain suggested the swoop of a swallow that is skimming the ground, so swiftly and smoothly and gracefully it swept down the long straight reaches and soared in and out of the bends and around the corners. We played with the train behind us. We often got out to gather flowers or sit on a precipice and look at the scenery, then presently we would hear a dull and growing roar, and the long coils of the train would come into sight behind and above us; but we did not need to start till the locomotive was close down upon us - then we soon left it far behind. It had to stop at every station, therefore it was not an emba
rrassment to us. Our brake was a good piece of machinery; it could bring the car to a standstill on a slope as steep as a house-roof.

  A few miles down the mountain we stopped half an hour to see a Tibetan dramatic performance. It was in the open air on the hillside. The audience was composed of Tibetans, Ghurkas, and other unusual people. The costumes of the actors were in the last degree outlandish, and the performance was in keeping with the clothes.

  To an accompaniment of barbarous noises the actors stepped out one after another and began to spin around with immense swiftness and vigor and violence, chanting the while, and soon the whole troupe would be spinning and chanting and raising the dust.

  And so, presently we took to the hand-car and went flying down the mountain again; flying and stopping, flying and stopping, till at last we were in the plain once more and stowed for Calcutta in the regular train.

  That was the most enjoyable day I have spent in the earth. For rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday trip that approaches the bird-flight down the Himalayas in a hand-car. It has no fault, no blemish, no lack, except that there are only thirty-five miles of it instead of five hundred.

  40 Job Charnock worked for the East India Company and is usually regarded as the founder of Calcutta on the east bank of the Hooghly river. In 1690 he persuaded the Company that this was the place to establish its Bengal headquarters because of its defensible position and its deep-water anchorage. The Company received permission from the Great Mughal in Delhi to build a factory in Bengal, and Charnock set up his headquarters near a hamlet on the Hooghly.