The Himalayan Arc

by Namita Gokhale

  There’s a Carnival Today is Indra Bahadur Rai’s only novel. Following its publication in 1964, he went on to write fourteen more books in a variety of genres: short fiction, literary criticism, memoir and drama. There’s a Carnival Today is part of his early work, and realistic in style. His later oeuvre veers into experimental writing. Together with two prominent modern poets from Nepal, Tilbikram Nembang (better known by the penname Bairagi Kainla) and Ishwor Ballav, Indra Bahadur Rai founded the abstract ‘Tesro Aayam’, or the Third Dimension, school of writing, introducing an abstract modernist aesthetics to Nepali-language literature. Later, Indra Bahadur Rai invented an exuberant and lyrical deconstructionist aesthetic that he called ‘Leela lekhan’, which perhaps best translates as ‘play-writing’. Much of his later work reads as prose poetry, with a non-narrative structure that can be daunting to the lay reader.

  By contrast, There’s a Carnival Today is entirely approachable. As the author mentions in his 1958 introduction, his observations of ‘life and the land’ have informed this novel. So has his erudition: versed in world literature and critical theory, he brings a keen intelligence to the art of storytelling.

  Manjushree Thapa

  Gleaming black from the rains, the Cart Road knocks against many cliffs, bluffs and sloping hills, joining Lebong, that flat patch of land in the north, to dusty, clangourous Silgadi bazaar. Cart Road. This artery that makes life flow through the mountain districts. Landslides tug at it for four months in the monsoon; its mud top tumbles and it is buried; ancient sal trees lay their bodies across the road in an act of civil disobedience. The mountain-dwellers then set out to fulfill their duty, securing the walls, clearing the soil, hacking off the male pride of the trees. Countless ox-carts, train trolleys, Jeeps, buses, cars and trucks are this road’s daily passengers. A train vanishes at each turn in the forested density of Sukna, playing hide-and-seek, like an unsightly lover, with a Jeep. The Jeep leaves it behind and speeds on, as though it were the truth of the world. When, trailing behind at a feeble pace, and pausing, the train climbs the Bataase hill and can’t see ‘him’, she emits a deep, smoky exhalation, shrieks, soaks the ground with hot tears. It must be masculine pity that compels the Jeep – which, like a bumblebee, goes anywhere – to love the train, a woman who must follow a fixed route. When, at some point, the two are able to meet as in the aligning of two planets, a truck transporting loads of coal, potatoes, tin and cigarettes views them with a split personality – one eye blazing red with desire, the other soulless with fear.

  With a honk of warning, the truck descends from the road carved into the chest of Giddhe Pahara. Seen from above, the truck looks like a burgeoning emotive life-force as it speeds single-mindedly through the endless, lonely turns below Kharsang. During the monsoon months of Asar and Saun, the fogs eradicate the division between night and day from Panchan to Ghoom, evoking the earth’s ancient past. The driver must wipe away the trickles of moisture that form on the window, and ascend each slope with supreme patience. The truck is the labourer of society; it is half of its driver’s soul. For its owner, it is a small factory that earns him a living. The truck has no home, nor has it a place to rest and close its eyes. It spends the night on the roadside, occasionally sheltering in someone’s courtyard. A single tent guards its life on a dark, terrifying night of slanting rain. Tomorrow, once again, it must sustain society and civilization by transporting a one-ton load one hundred kilometres away. Each paisa multiplies tenfold every time each of the truck’s four wheels turn, touching the ground. It is a slave bought for ten thousand.

  The red truck approaching Kagjhoda, No. 3761, is Janak’s.

  ‘If you don’t sell it, it’ll provide for you,’ Janak’s father had told him. The old man had just bought a car that year, an Austin of an old model that seated four people. The car used to ply between the bazaar and Ghoom.

  The old man had a teashop near the train station. Janak’s mother would sit in that shop with potatoes, boiled soybeans, beaten rice, sweet puffed-rice balls, buns and paan. Drivers would come there at nighttime to drink. They played cards. The old man would collect money to keep the lights on. Massive brawls would erupt from time to time; the drivers would end up in blows – some would go to the hospital with cracked heads, or to the police station for doing the cracking. ‘My house isn’t for hooking in gamblers, no more cards from today!’ the old man would fume. The card games would resume gradually, four or five days later. The old woman held on tightly to money. Other than the flat gold jewellery on her ears, the old couple made no display of their wealth.

  When Janak passed the matriculation exam, many people offered to help enlist him as a constable in the police department, but the old man shook his head in refusal. The British bank manager had raised the hope of finding work right here – he’d already told him, in broken Hindi, ‘We see, achha!’ Dressed in a red felt cap and a white shirt done all the way up with hooked buttons, the old man would boast, ‘It’s because of what the Sahib said that Janak is studying in Calcutta.’

  Janak received news of his father’s death in Calcutta, in his second year of studying banking. The colleges had been closed, since the day before, to celebrate CV Raman’s Nobel Prize victory. Janak put off a plan to visit Dandi, the site of Gandhi’s Salt March, and returned to Darjeeling to support his grieving mother. Her composed bearing and serene countenance took him aback.

  The Ghewa-Sange mourning rituals took place. After everyone, including the lamas, had left, Janak’s mother called him over and said, ‘How many more months of study do you have? Even as he died, your father told me to educate you, he said: Make that one pass, do so for certain… So go, go and pass quickly, and come back. There’s so much work to do after that…’

  Upon saying this, his mother wept that night, when no one else was at home.

  Janak couldn’t even recognize his mother when he returned home eight months later. Thin, sickly, elderly. What had happened to her girth? It alarmed Janak. But there was the same serenity on her face. She sat at her accustomed spot in the teashop till Sita arrived.

  Now, after accounting for every last paisa at the bank, Janak would come home exhausted at seven or eight in the evening, yet he would still tell his mother about the commotion and uproar taking place outside.

  Draped in a chequered red Highlander shawl, his mother would say, ‘How could the British ever quit a Raj so grand? That’s just people talking. Would they really quit a Raj that they made their own through so much warfare, intelligence and effort, just because people demand it? The British made all these cities, roads, buildings; how could they just stop caring and leave?’

  Displaying great tenderness towards his mother, Janak would try to explain. ‘Our country is our home. You tell me, Aama, what would you do if a thief were to enter our home?’

  ‘Me? What would I do? You’re the one who wouldn’t beat him up and chase him away: what could I do?’

  ‘No, you mustn’t beat anyone, Aama. Non-violence…’ Janak would tell his mother about Gandhi. ‘You must have faith in humanity and love everyone, even a foe, understand, Aama? You must lovingly conduct a satyagraha and make him realize his mistake. Do you know, Aama, that demands grounded in the truth have the power to bring about a complete transformation in the heart of a guilty man? And even if by chance he becomes harsher or more oppressive or cruel, we must observe the vow of civil disobedience, and not be enraged or seek revenge. Do you understand now, Aama?’

  ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand a thing.’

  One day, fifteen or sixteen summers later, after a huge struggle, India became independent. Its liberated moments began ticking away from midnight onwards, when half the world was hushed and asleep. Millions of joyful banners were going to flutter from each house all over India the following day.

  ‘Janak, is our country really free, then?’

  ‘That’s what they say.’ Janak had changed.

  ‘Thank the Lord! My life has proven meaningful,’ his mother
said.

  From the names and dates scrawled on the novels and other books that Janak was reading at the time, it can be discerned that he saw Sita on his final return to Darjeeling.

  No one can be found to expound on the subject of the introduction, progress and love between the two, and one mustn’t write an entire story concocted from the imagination. What this demonstrates clearly is how closely Janak and Sita – the ‘father and daughter’ of the Ramayana – guarded the secret of their ‘sinful’ love, the precious truth that only they knew. Janak’s confidant Sumshere knew only this much: Sita had come here from Nepal to study. She was probably a Pradhan by caste. Because on Sundays she came shopping with a Pradhan family who lived in Haridas Hatta below the court.

  One day, when their novelistic love-drama had passed the halfway chapter, Janak read Sumshere a passage from a short letter that Sita had sent him: ‘Your soul is a thousand times more precious to me than my own.’

  To Janak this single passage seemed to contain all of the world’s literature and devotion.

  ‘One thing,’ Sumshere said excitably to Janak that day. ‘Have you noticed? The second toes on both of Sita’s feet are long. This alone makes her seem to be of good birth!’

  Pathetic Janak must have had nothing better to do than to blab about this to Sita. From the next day onwards, whenever Sita and Sumshere crossed paths, she glared at him like a black serpent.

  Some people from Sita’s home arrived with porters and took her back for the winter holiday. Like others in that situation, Janak spent all night writing Sita an especially literary ‘letter of solace’. Without so much as changing out of his dirty shirt, he folded up his handiwork to hide most of it and showed Sumshere a relevant passage:

  isn’t either. To be locked in embrace

  staring at each other’s face isn’t love, Sita.

  To face in the same direction while standing apart

  and keeping the same goal, that’s love. Today my

  Janak sent off the letter after placing it in a blue envelope (one with a picture of a flying bird with a letter in its beak).

  Sita began to live in Janak’s house from that winter on.

  It was only twenty or so days after Gandhi’s re-arrest. From the mouths of all the wedding guests emerged debate and disagreement about the banning of the Congress. News of the arrest of four members of the Nepali Congress in Kharsang had spread even more sensationally through the bazaar.

  Janak quit his bank job and his monthly salary of Rs 173 on the same month that Mussolini’s Fascists invaded Greece. Not because he heard the call of human rights, or because he felt a grave responsibility towards his nation or his peoples, but to do business. First the Tommies, then the Yankees, came and danced all night, and also threw up, in the dining room of his hotel, Beechwood. The Goans played jazz; Gurkha ‘Johnnies’ fed them chowmein and millet beer. Janak’s tables and chairs splintered many a time. Plates would go sailing out of the window, yet the bond and trust between Janak and the bank only grew. Friends who had invested in the bank were dazzled by bright visions.

  In the week that Hyderabad joined the Indian union, Janak began to run a government ration-control shop. His behaviour towards everyone was friendly. He didn’t grease up anyone, nor did he spit on anyone. Equanimity was his supreme policy. In the dark of the night, sack upon sack of high-quality rice would disappear. People would consider themselves lucky if they could buy sugar, wheat flour, flour, kerosene, matches, soap easily, at double or triple price. During this spell of shortages, many families were safe islands in an ocean of rationing. Janak’s was as well.

  The three or four years between the Second World War and India’s Independence swept Janak along, as if on ocean currents and waves, to the meeting points of different situations, different nations and eras. Though it was no longer possible to keep advancing in the same way, he tried to remain in commensurate circumstances.

  A lot of time had passed since his father’s death – a lot of water had flown under the bridge. Among the Nepalis of Darjeeling, Janak was respected for many reasons, including for having transformed his father’s Austin into a truck. If it were true that only those Nepalis known to and respected by the local Marwaris and Bengalis were human, and the rest were rubbish, then the name Mr Janakman Yonzon would appear at the very top rank.

  If it were true that all voting citizens and their sons and daughters were human, then, in the recent election, Janak’s name came out at roll number 4897 at an address in a bazaar ward, where he, Sita, and their son Ravi and daughter Divya lived as a family in three rented rooms. There was also a boy, Birman, to do the housework.

  DOWNHILL IN DARJEELING

  Prajwal Parajuly

  At Tiger Hill, Darjeeling’s famous viewing point, stands an observation tower. As early as 5 a.m., the bottom two floors of the tower are already crammed with standing tourists. We are on tiptoe – there’s no room. The top deck isn’t crowded. There, tourists sit on sofas that were once plush and sip tea while men stand guard at the door. These men forbid us from entering.

  ‘No tickets,’ they say in English. ‘Sold out.’

  We say we’ll pay extra. They say all the seats are taken.

  We say we’ll stand. They say that would be obstructive.

  One of us speaks in Hindi. It doesn’t work.

  One of us tries broken Bengali. They glare at us.

  I make a final request in Nepali. They let us in.

  ‘Aye, we thought you were Bengalis,’ the burly bouncer at the door says. ‘You should have told us right away and we would have let you in.’

  ‘What if we were Bengalis?’ I ask, self-righteous now that I’ve already been the beneficiary of this one-sided ethnic rivalry.

  ‘Then we would maybe only allow you in if you paid us.’ The bouncer cackles. His friends hoot.

  ‘That’s discrimination,’ I say.

  ‘For good reason,’ the bouncer replies.

  Inside, the windows are giant, the sofas comfortable enough to snooze on when the mountain – or the sun – decides to delay appearance, and if you fancy closer Kanchenjunga views, you can perch yourself on stools right by the windows. Back in the day, this viewing deck might have been cosy, even luxurious. But it’s in disrepair now. Paint is chipping off. Walls are cracked. The rugs covering some sofas are threadbare. The bathroom needs water.

  Around us mostly Western tourists, bleary eyed yet hopeful, tinker with their cameras and wait.

  ‘It will rise today,’ the burly bouncer promises. ‘It will.’

  ‘Did you see the sun yesterday?’ I ask. Early November is usually a great time to visit Darjeeling, but it has been a gloomy few days.

  ‘Yes, we did,’ the bouncer replies. ‘And the day before.’

  We amuse the bouncer and his friends. We are from Sikkim, right next door, and yet we’ve dragged ourselves out of bed in the cold, even before the crack of dawn, to see what we’ve been taking for granted all our lives.

  ‘You people are behaving like exact tourists,’ the bouncer jokes. ‘One of you must even have a monkey cap.’

  We deign to laugh. He’s being snide about balaclavas, favoured by Bengali tourists, who descend on Darjeeling and neighbouring areas in droves. Singara tourists, the locals call them. Travellers on a budget who’ll haggle you down to the last rupee. Their money-spending capacity notwithstanding, the sheer number of these tourists has kept tourism alive in these hills for years.

  I ask Prakash, who says he’s not a bouncer but a part-time guide, why the place isn’t well maintained.

  ‘What do you expect, mams?’ he says, slipping into lingo that’s archetypically Darjeeling. ‘This is Darjeeling. Do you think Bengal cares? Why shouldn’t we hate Bengalis? They’ve robbed us of all our tourism and tea revenue, and we are left with nothing. No money. No Gorkhaland. Nothing.’

  ‘But hasn’t there been some development in the last few years?’ I ask.

  And that’s invitation enough for Prakash to
segue into a forty-five-minute diatribe on everything that’s wrong with Darjeeling. As the clouds part to make way for the sun to reticently emerge and weave its magic in the sky, Prakash asks me if a place like Tiger Hill would be as poorly maintained in Sikkim. I say it wouldn’t. While shutter-happy tourists scuttle from one end of the room to another for views of the mountain changing hue, Prakash fills me in on the ill-treatment meted out to Darjeeling by West Bengal.

  Every trip to Darjeeling I’ve taken as an adult leaves me sadder than the last. Nature continues being bountiful. Man continues being destructive.

  The click-clacking of horses on the Chowrasta, Darjeeling’s pedestrianized square, is enough to transport me to happier, carefree days. We often spent weekends here when I was a child. Gangtok, my hometown, was a long way from becoming as shiny and Swiss as it is now. Darjeeling was only a four-hour drive away. A trip wouldn’t be complete without horses to ride on at the square, cakes to feast on at Glenary’s and schools to visit, where, it was understood we’d board for a year or two when we grew older.

  Of course, the town – and all of north Bengal – was in the midst of gargantuan problems. The Gorkhaland revolution – that impassioned movement that everyone here hoped would result in the creation of the Nepali-speaking-majority state of Gorkhaland, a separate entity from West Bengal – had reached its crescendo in 1986–87. The Nepali-speaking people of West Bengal, the majority of whom live in the Darjeeling hills, demanded statehood on linguistic and ethnic grounds. It was an often-violent movement, and clashes between the agitators and the CRPF personnel were frequent. Curfews, months-long strikes and killings were normal.

  Yet, my family was undeterred. The minute we’d hear of things returning to normalcy, we’d pack our bags for a weekend away. We made frequent trips because Gangtok didn’t have a decent bookstore in the late 1980s. Darjeeling’s Oxford Bookstore, bang in the middle of the Chowrasta, was where I purchased my first Puss in Boots book. We went because all of us cousins had unending hankerings for the chocolate éclairs at Glenary’s. We went because the Windamere Hotel – where, we were told, the last king of Sikkim courted the American Hope Cooke – charmed us. We went because we loved to see tea leaves being crushed and curled at the many tea gardens. We went because the Kanchenjunga was visible from far more points in Darjeeling than it was from Gangtok. We went, above all, because we couldn’t get enough of Darjeeling’s toy train, songs about which – ‘Darjeeling’s little train/Is ready to start/Listen to the whistle of the guard, brother/The train’s ready to chug along’ – had been our lullaby since the day we were born.