Every Day We Disappear

by Angela Long

  I stood on the balcony listening to the cluck of chickens, the laughter of children, the chatter of women sorting grain. They never looked my way, but I knew they could see me up here, alone, looking down and out towards the tea plantations, and across the foothills towards Darjeeling. They could see the ornate latticework of the balcony, the ochre-coloured walls of Kurseong’s Cochrane Place, the restored colonial home of Percy John Cochrane, MBE. They must have known how much I’d paid to stay in the room named after a Himalayan peak – The Pandim – the attendant of the god of the mountain.

  The prayer flags began to flap. And I stood there, looking down, looking out.

  “Are you travelling lonely?” was a question I had been asked often since I landed in Delhi. Now as the monsoon winds rattled the doors of Cochrane Place’s empty rooms, I wondered if it was true. Before India, alone had meant a desire to look inwards, to experience the world without the input of others, to test one’s mettle and resourcefulness, to strengthen one’s inner core. But here, alone had become synonymous with lonely.

  The heaviest object in my backpack was a guidebook called The Lonely Planet. It had the size and heft of a bible and was as essential to my survival as the ark must have been to Noah.

  I asked myself, Am I lonely? Yes. I was alone to face the stares, the curiosity that led to questions such as, “What are those on your arms?”

  “Freckles.”

  “Oh, I am so sorry,” said a woman on the train, adjusting her dupatta. “My sister also has a skin condition.”

  For years I’d travelled as an observer. In India I noticed straw brooms, ghee tins planted with marigolds, crimson saris, plastic sandals, acrylic cardigans.

  But in India a blonde Caucasian woman was more the observed than the observer. Gone was my romantic image of the lone traveller quietly taking notes. “What are you writing? Are you a writer?” asked a man at the chai stand.

  “I’m writing about your country,” I answered.

  “Have you ever meditated?”

  “No.”

  “You will never write anything of worth unless you learn how to meditate.”

  Being observed took some getting used to. The locals seemed able to gauge my mood the moment I stepped out the door of my hotel. They seemed to know when I was feeling vulnerable, or when I became a bliss bunny – a westerner high on borrowed Indian spirituality. Like the time I’d left Phool Chatti Ashram all full of peace and love, thinking only good was coming, and that all my bad karma had floated downstream. But on the night bus to Rajasthan, it hadn’t taken long for all that peace and love to dissipate. Five minutes of the guy beside me craning his head to read along was all it took to slam my book closed and turn towards the window.

  “What’s your name?” he asked. “Where are you from?”

  Silence.

  Two friends sitting in front turned around. They mimicked my every move. When I finally closed my eyes to feign sleep, they laughed.

  “What’s your name?” the man asked, touching my arm.

  “Don’t touch me!” I hissed with all the venom I could muster. I was ready to kill.

  “Ohhhh,” said one of the friends. “Look how angry.”

  The bus turned onto Grand Trunk Road, bound for Delhi. The driver dimmed the lights. The trio of friends began taking swigs from a plastic water bottle. The smell of alcohol was so strong my nostrils tingled.

  “What’s your name?” the man poked my shoulder. “Where are you from?”

  The more they drank, the more afraid I felt. I scanned the bus for allies. My fellow passengers were fast asleep. When I’d finally worked up the courage to ask the bus driver for help, the trio passed the bottle to him. He drank.

  Another seventeen hours to Rajasthan. I’d heard about this kind of harassment in India, called “Eve teasing.” I knew it was punishable by law. I’d witnessed Indian women tell these kinds of men off with a few choice words I wished they’d teach me.

  “What’s your name?” the man touched my thigh. “I just want to be your friend.”

  “Stop it!” I yelled and slapped his hand away.

  “Where are you from?”

  We jolted to a stop. The bus driver flicked on the interior lights, rousing the passengers. Sirens sounded in the distance. An accident up ahead. I used the distraction to ask the man across the aisle if I could switch seats with him. His wife patted my hand, shaking her head at the three drunk men. I admired her golden bangles and diamond nose piercing. Yes, she was from Rajasthan. Sorry, she didn’t speak much English.

  Am I lonely? Yes. I put on a brave face. I read books and wrote in journals. I studied the Lonely Planet before every excursion, memorizing routes so I could walk like I knew where I was going. But when I walked into the village of Kurseong with the eyes of everyone from the school girl to the jeep driver to the fruit vendor upon me, each one of them thinking Is she alone?, my footsteps echoed throughout the Himalayas: Alone, Alone, Alone.

  I walked into a shop and ordered a 7-Up. “Just one?” the storekeeper asked. She smiled kindly. “Where are you from?” She opened the cap and stuck a straw in the bottle. I drank, hidden from view, observing share-jeeps laden with boxes and passengers, bound for the plains of Siliguri. Goats ate from a pile of garbage. A crowd of protesters marched past, carrying rolled-up mattresses and blankets.

  “Those are the hunger strikers,” the shopkeeper said. “Striking for Gorkhaland in the tradition of Gandhi.”

  It was time to head back out onto Pankhabari Road. I waited for the street to clear, took a deep breath. “Thank you,” I said.

  “Dhanyavaad,” she said, bowing her head.

  Layers of dark clouds swooped across the hills, masking the view of the foothills within seconds. The fruit vendor brought in his crates. Tea workers ran for shelter with baskets bobbing on their heads. Rain fell in curtains. Alone, Alone, Alone, my sneakers squished. Rain streaked down my face. I tasted the salt of my sweat, the grime of the road. Ahead, the protesters huddled beneath the shell of an unfinished cinder block house, clutching their blankets to their chests.

  Suddenly, the rain seemed to stop. I looked beside me and there stood a man in a white lunghi, umbrella held aloft, one shoulder exposed to the rain. He led me towards the shelter. The protesters cheered and clapped as we drew closer. “Come here!” they called to us. “Come!”

  You, Beside Me

  They think I’m here to see the Taj Mahal, but I’m here to see you, in the second-class compartment, offering stories then parathas then your address in Mumbai. You, in the frayed cardigan on the public bus paying my fare, then disappearing into the fruit market. You, crouched on the pavement dying cloth or hemming trousers or fixing the strap on my sandal. You, who cannot read or write, yet speak my language and the language of your village, and of your cousin’s village. You, asleep on the floor of Varanasi station, thin blanket wrapped around your son. You, who gave me a silk scarf the colour of forget-me-nots. You, stirring chai in your stone hut. You, beside me during the monsoon, umbrella held aloft, shielding me from the rain.

  The Hotel Owner

  The greenhouse was filled with chrysanthemums, but Rita was looking for something else. She spoke in hushed tones. The owner looked uncertain for a moment, then returned with what looked like a chunk of bark. Rita shook her head. He returned with a bigger chunk covered with tufts of moss. Rita smiled. She asked for more “exactly like these,” she said. With a bow, the owner disappeared.

  He quoted a price and seemed surprised when Rita opened her purse and handed him the money. “It was a good deal,” she explained afterwards. “Besides, what he sold me is rare. Some might say illegal.”

  Rita planned to carry the secret ingredient for her orchid collection – a growing medium harvested from the ecologically rich Darjeeling Hills, where nearly 300 species of wild orchids thrived – on tonight’s train to Kolkata.
/>   “What if someone stops you?” I asked.

  “I’m travelling First Class,” she said.

  There were other errands to complete in Kurseong before she boarded the train. She signalled the driver of the Cochrane Place’s Land Rover to continue. We wound down the mountain past unfinished cinder block houses where bed sheets hung on lines strung between rebar rods, where sisters washed one another’s hair in the afternoon light, and passionfruit vines hung from the terraces.

  Rita tapped the back of the driver’s seat when it was time to stop again. He jumped to open his boss’s door and escorted us into a building that looked recently bombed. I held my breath until the stench of urine subsided. But Rita remained unfazed. She may have been petite, grey-haired, and wearing the khaki-coloured trousers and sneakers of a common tourist, but Rita was nothing short of regal. She was as sophisticated a Kolkatan as they came, living in a house filled with art and flowers, golfing at the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, wearing hand-embroidered saris. “My husband is a scientist,” she had told me earlier. “He weaves thread from platinum.” Rita’s family had acquired Cochrane Place as a getaway from the Kolkatan summer, recently transforming the building into a boutique hotel – “restored in stone, log & cast-iron splendour,” their website promised.

  The driver awakened the owner of a shop filled with statues of the Buddha and gestured to Rita.

  “My son is hosting a party for his colleagues in Singapore and I thought he’d like to decorate with Tibetan prayer flags,” she said. “They always look so festive.”

  The shop owner scurried about laying all manner of flag on the counter. I noticed the ones popular back home, at places with names like Tibet Shoppe or Shanti Baba, stores filled with incense and brass Buddhas. Rita brushed these cheap cotton versions aside.

  “The silk ones,” she said.

  When the shop owner realized Rita was planning to buy a significant quantity of his best prayer flags, his eyes lit up. Rita examined his wares, rubbing the edges of flags between her fingers. “Real silk,” she said.

  The shop owner rummaged beneath his cash box and laid stacks of bright flags on the counter. Rita nodded. She extracted a small golden pencil and notepad from her purse and wrote down a price. The owner crossed it out and wrote down a different price. This continued until Rita placed several crisp bills on the counter. The owner nodded.

  “Now, just the fabric to make covers for the water bottles,” she said, instructing the driver to head to the market. “Unless you find all this dreary.”

  “Of course not,” I said as we drove down the steep hill surrounded by stalls hanging with aluminum pots and pans, towel sets, plastic buckets.

  When we returned to Cochrane Place, Rita invited me for dinner later that evening. I settled back into The Pandim, watching from the balcony as the monsoon clouds rose from the base of the valley, listening as the rain obliterated all other sound. The storm ended as quickly it began. Pines dripped. Pigeons cooed. Sunlight striped the hills section-by-section, each white house a sliver of brightness. The women emerged from the village below, baskets on their heads. Young boys spread mats to play cards in the fading light. The earth steamed.

  At dinner, I could tell Rita was worried about leaving on the 10:30 train that night. There were threats of a bandh (strike) and violence. Local businesses had been encouraged to “contribute” to the cause of the Gorkhaland movement for an independent state, I’d been told. But I had no idea if Cochrane Place had complied. In the past, refusals had resulted in a few broken windows, but nothing more. I thought of the night when I’d woken to what sounded like gunshot in the village below. I’d stood on the balcony as house lights turned on, as the villagers yelled words I couldn’t understand, as doors slammed, and cars screeched to a halt. Cochrane Place had gone dark as the night watchman paced back and forth on the terrace.

  “Just the monsoon,” the concierge had told me in the morning, and I’d wondered if I’d dreamed it all.

  But Rita didn’t want to talk about politics during dinner. Politics weren’t conducive to the enjoyment of the betel-leaf pakoras served by an elderly waiter, the bite-sized samosas. She wanted to talk about art and books, her favourite travel writers. “You must read Pico Iyer,” she said.

  The waiter’s hand shook as he refilled our water, spilling a few drops on Rita’s lap. His face reddened. “I am so sorry, Madame. I am so sorry.”

  “It’s fine. Do not worry.” Rita patted his arm. “He is nervous to be serving me,” she said as he returned to the kitchen. “He has never done this kind of work before. Most people here have only ever worked in the tea fields.”

  I’d seen those workers, blue tarps tied to their waists, stooped over seas of green leaves. I’d seen them walking barefoot through the streets, heavy loads tied to foreheads with tumplines, focusing on the ground beneath them, never looking up.

  The waiter, like most of the staff at Cochrane Place, came from one of the poor villages surrounding Kurseong. Rita said she’d been to their homes, met their families. “I think that’s the best way to interview someone,” she said.

  The chef served multi-layer pilau decorated with glowing green pepper lanterns. I became self-conscious the more Rita talked about what sounded like an opulent life in Kolkata. Was I using the right fork? Was my posture straight enough? Should I tell Rita that she was dining with a backpacker who didn’t usually stay in places described as “boutique hotels,” that no one would read the book I was planning to write, that she’d wasted her day escorting me around in her Land Rover, pointing out the lemon pines and the mango pines and the small white orchids Kurseong was named for? But I suspected Rita knew all this; she listened intently and looked me in the eye. I was the only one who cared about such matters.

  Outside the dining room windows, villages invisible by day began to dot the dark slopes of the Himalayas with specks of light. Soon Rita was telling me she wasn’t really from India.

  “I grew up in what’s now Pakistan, in Lahore,” she said. “We were forced to leave during Partition.” She told me about her grandfather, a surgeon, shot in his car. Her father, also a surgeon, shot in the hospital he had founded. The rest of her family hid for three days under a hospital bed (“they knew us there, so let us in,” she said), eating a boiled egg a day until it was safe to leave the newly formed country. Train after train arrived in Lahore, all of its Pakistan-bound passengers slaughtered. Train after train left Lahore, all of its India-bound passengers slaughtered on the other side of the new border. Rita’s family fled on foot to a refugee camp in Madhya Pradesh. “We lost everything material,” she said. “But we were alive. My story is the story of millions.”

  Rita poured me a cup of tea. “No,” she said gently as I reached for milk and sugar. “Not with Darjeeling.” The tea master stood by, awaiting her approval. She sipped and nodded. He returned to his station flanked by a collection of teapots and tins, an armoire of teacups. Framed quotations decorated the walls: “Where there’s tea, there’s hope”; “Tea is drunk to forget the din of the world.”

  More and more villages lit up the dark slopes. The chef served a steamed banana pudding with passionfruit sauce.

  “Your company has been delightful,” Rita said as she rose to prepare for the Darjeeling Mail. “Please visit me in Kolkata someday.”

  I stood with the staff in the courtyard to bid her farewell, watching the Land Rover’s tail lights zigzag down the terraced tea fields, and into the plains of Siliguri.

  The Jesuit Priest

  You probably don’t remember me. We met in the sitting room of Cochrane Place – pakoras, large bottles of Black Label lager. I laughed when you took a swig. You said, “Weren’t expecting that, were you?” No, I wasn’t. The only Jesuits I’d ever seen had starred in films set in jungles, building chapels and dug-outs. But then there you were – in the foothills of the Himalayas, where monsoon clouds steeped in tea fields
and passed through the pines like ghosts. I wanted to see the peaks of Khangchendzonga. You wanted to visit a little boy whose mother had just died of typhus, but you weren’t feeling well that day. You spoke as though the world were as black and white as your biretta and cassock, and maybe it was in a country where you were either hungry or not, homeless or not, alone or not. When I asked how best to help you answered: “Just be there.” And I should have listened. Be there to hold a hand. Be there to shiver in the cold and sweat in the heat. Be there to get your hands dirty and your heart broken.

  The Acupuncturists

  It was just after ten in the morning when the power went out. But Darpan was prepared. He switched on his headlamp, beaming light onto my left ear. “Inhale, please,” he said, positioning a needle above the acupuncture point Shen Men. “Exhale, please.” He pricked the skin. I winced for a split second, then relaxed; I was in good hands. Darpan was no stranger to needles. For fifteen years he’d used them to inject low-grade heroin into his veins. But now the only needles he used were fine-tipped and sterile, aimed towards strategic points on the outer ear.

  “Good job,” Dr. Laura Louie said when Darpan completed “needling” the first point on my ear – a pathway now unblocked by the needle’s fine tip, allowing Qi – the Chinese term for life energy – to flow freely again.

  It was the beginning of week two – the second and final week of Acupuncture Detox Specialist (ADS) training at Kurseong’s Red Cross. Outside on Pankhabari Road, groups of tea pickers hurried past. Overloaded share jeeps careened downhill, honking at anything that crossed their path. But nothing distracted Darpan and the three other ADS trainees – all male, all ex-addicts – from the surface of my outer ear.