by Angela Long
“Here,” the girl said about ten minutes later in front of a small clearing in the forest. A woman wearing the burgundy robe of a Tibetan nun appeared. “Uncle!” she called.
Uncle crouched in a dark corner of the kitchen shack, scrubbing a giant pot with a scrap of cloth. “You will be staying with Uncle while you’re here,” Hedwig, the wearer of the burgundy nun’s habit and one of the directors of Sikkim Himalayan Academy, said. “That way you will benefit culturally and the community will benefit financially.” Her Dutch accent was as crisp and fresh as a tulip. “But don’t worry, it won’t be more than ten dollars.”
“A day?” I asked.
“A week. If we give them too much, it can create problems.”
Uncle put down the pot and swung my backpack onto his shoulders. The three of us walked through the grounds of Sikkim Himalayan Academy – a residential school founded in 2003 by two local teachers plus Hedwig and another Dutch volunteer to provide “education and living opportunities to underprivileged children from remote areas of Sikkim.” Thirty students called this place home. I heard their voices reciting the alphabet in English as we walked past the open window of a classroom. We passed the outdoor toilets and shower stalls until we reached a steep brick-lined path leading straight into the clouds.
“I call this the yellow-brick road,” Hedwig laughed. She told me paths such as these existed all over Sikkim, cutting swaths through the rainforest and into the most remote villages. “A government initiative,” she said. “Careful of the leeches. It’s that time of year.”
Leeches loved the rainy season, Hedwig said, and didn’t confine themselves to water around here. “Never take a shortcut.” She pointed beyond the path to where vine and leaf and grass and flower literally dripped with life.
Uncle forged ahead despite the weight of my backpack. Hedwig followed close behind. They stopped every once in a while to wait for me. We passed garden plots flush with squash, corn, peas, onions. Cosmos and marigolds lined the path to every white-washed hut. Beneath shelters made of woven palm fronds, cows and goats ate from wooden troughs. After one last steep incline, we reached Uncle’s home, three single-storey rooms built of cinder block, their separate doors facing the mountains.
“That’s the water spigot,” Hedwig said. “Where you can fill buckets for the shower.”
“And where should I take a shower?”
Hedwig pointed to a flat-roofed shed with two wooden doors. “Pit toilet on the left, shower on the right.”
Uncle led us along the veranda and into a freshly mopped room decorated with posters. One featured a baby sitting in a wicker chair holding balloons: “Discover Happiness in Things Around You.” Another, a bouquet of roses: “Nature are witnesses to your thoughts and deeds.”
“This is Uncle’s first time hosting a volunteer,” Hedwig said.
Uncle looked at Hedwig and spoke. “He says you are very welcome,” she translated. A woman wearing a bright red salwar-kameez appeared in the doorway. “This is Uncle’s wife,” Hedwig said.
Uncle’s wife gestured for us to sit down on the bed beneath the window. She and Uncle sat on the bed in the opposite corner. Their eyes flicked from my backpack to my muddy running shoes that had just left tracks across the freshly mopped floor.
“Is this their room?” I asked.
“Yes. But they are happy to move into another room.”
Uncle and his wife smiled. I smiled back as best I could after a two-day journey by share jeep and bus along some of the most bone-shattering roads I’d ever encountered. Roads with potholes the size of a vehicle. Roads that had washed down cliff sides and were propped up by two-by-fours, entire families working alongside with pickaxes and hammers – making boulders into rocks and rocks into pebbles. Making new gravel as we’d waited to continue.
Suddenly, everyone got up and left me to settle in. “Uncle says to choose what you need from over there.” Hedwig pointed to a pile of mattresses as thin as lawn chair cushions, a stack of a dozen pillows and matching comforters. “Dinner is at five. You will eat all of your meals at the school.” Just as she turned to leave, the rain began. “I hope you brought an umbrella.” She pointed to the door. “And a padlock.”
I chose four mattresses and layered them one atop another. I toured the room, admiring the collection of flowered plastic teacups, saucers, and multi-sized serving dishes inside a wooden cabinet with sliding glass doors. One candle, one flashlight with batteries removed, two large copper vases. A lone high-heeled shoe in the corner. A piece of corncob.
The intensity of the rain increased until all other sound disappeared. The world became a perpetually gushing stream. I settled under the covers and tried to read.
It always felt strange, the arrival. It required an adjustment – time for the Me I was when the taxi dropped me off at the Kalimpong jeep stand days earlier to catch up with the Me I would become in this damp room in the foothills of Sikkim. I still felt dirty from the journey, especially from the night at Sonia’s Guest House where the Juliet balcony had looked so promising. Too bad Sonia had been so drunk. Too bad the sheets were stained, and the toilet in the dark, dank bathroom wouldn’t flush.
“Are you lonely?” Sonia had asked after knocking on my door. “Come,” she’d beckoned. “Come.” She’d wanted me to play cards and drink giant bottles of Cobra with the suspicious-looking men at the bar. Perhaps that’s what the last occupant of the room had done, and look what had happened to the sheets. “You are family,” she’d said. “Come.”
I’d barricaded myself in the room. Luckily, thanks to my mother, I had a sleep sheet. But this had done nothing to protect me from the cockroaches, the noisy fan, the hole in the window screen that admitted thousands of mosquitoes when dusk hit, the all-night mantra-chanting at the Hindu temple next door.
It was important to carry a toolkit for the arrival – perhaps a Tibetan locket, a red journal, a slim volume of poetry by Billy Collins, a packet of incense. Something to set on top of a pretty piece of fabric on a cleared space of a dusty armoire to help you feel at home. I didn’t know anything yet – if these people were kind, if the teenage boy staring at me through the window of my room was their son, if I should take a shower in the stall with a half door, if the children at the school would like me.
The rain stopped as suddenly as it began. Birds chirped. Cows lowed. Clouds slithered away above the treetops until the now even greener hillsides sparkled.
It was nearly time for dinner. I rummaged around in my backpack and found the padlock on the bottom. But what if Uncle’s wife needed a teacup? What if they thought I didn’t trust them?
I picked my way down the yellow-brick road slickened with rust-coloured mud and cow dung. Finally I arrived at the veranda of the blue cottage/schoolhouse and chose a plastic lawn chair beneath a mural of birds and flowers. Streamers rippled from the birds’ wings, blowing in the breeze.
“Would you like chai?” the principal of Sikkim Himalayan Academy offered. He walked towards the cook shack where I could see Uncle stirring a pot as high as his waist.
A British accent floated through an open window of the classroom: “J is for jaywalking,” the teacher said.
“Miss, what is jaywalking?” a student asked.
“Jaywalking is not obeying the traffic lights.”
“Miss, what are traffic lights?”
The principal emerged from the kitchen shack. “Here you are,” he said. “Forgive me, I must go. The dinner bell will ring soon.”
I sipped the chai. I listened to the rushing river, bird song, the buzz of insects. Finally I’d reached the land of red panda and snow leopard, of ginger and black cardamom. A land the original inhabitants, the Lepcha, called Paradise. A vista of green stretched as far as the eye could see: bamboo, laurel, pine. The arrival was over. I was here.
“L is for ladies’ fingers,” the teacher said.
&nbs
p; “Miss, what are ladies’ fingers?”
“Okra. Uncle makes good okra, doesn’t he?”
The students laughed.
I heard Hedwig’s Dutch accent through the window to my left.
“Let’s list the different types of suffering the young Buddha discovered when he left the palace,” she said.
“Aging,” said a student.
“Illness,” said another.
“Death.”
The dinner bell rang.
When I returned to my room later that night, I could tell someone had been visiting. Sailing Alone Around the Room was opened to a different page. My blankets were neatly folded. A stick of incense had burned down.
When I’d just about fallen asleep, I heard the pop of a bottle uncorking, a glug, glug, glug. Another glug, glug, glug. I heard the voices of Uncle and his wife as though they were right beside me. And they were. Light glowed through holes in the walls. Bugs flew back and forth freely. Uncle and his wife swigged. Coughed. Laughed. Sighed. Glug, glug, glug. I tried to remain as silent as possible on my mattresses.
The stopper uncorked as regularly as the monsoon poured down. Every night the voices grew louder and the sounds bolder. Every night Uncle and his wife yelled about things in the language of these grandiose mountains. Every morning I walked down the mountainside to the school and Uncle would bring me a cup of chai. Every morning I could smell the alcohol on his breath. From dawn to dusk he stirred the giant pots and scrubbed them by the spigot. We never looked one another in the eye. I wondered if I should tell Hedwig about Uncle’s habit, but there was something about Uncle that kept me quiet.
There was something about this whole place that kept me quiet. Maybe it was one of the Indian teachers at the school who was paid twenty-five dollars a month, who’d grown up in one of Mother Teresa’s houses in Darjeeling, whose parents were dead, who had a glass eye. Maybe it was the teenage boy with a basket strapped to his forehead who arrived at Uncle’s every morning at 5:30 a.m., singing at the top of his lungs.
“Does Uncle have children?” I’d asked Hedwig.
“Not anymore,” she’d ansuewered.
Maybe it was the children at the school, who brought me plates filled with dal and rice, saying, “Enjoy your meal, Angela Miss.”
Maybe it was the little girls who always wanted to braid my hair: “It is like gold, Angela Miss”; the little boys who stood so quietly with bowed heads as the principal checked for lice, or shaved their heads to heal their painful-looking sores.
The day of departure arrived. I left an envelope on the dresser of my room with three times the agreed rate. When I walked down the yellow brick road to catch the first bus of the day, Uncle was waiting with a cup of chai and a packet of biscuits. The bus arrived. Honked. Uncle swung my backpack onto his shoulders. We looked at one another then, neither of us knowing the right words.
Soon the bus turned the first bend and cliffs merged seamlessly into valleys. Here, Hedwig had told me, you could see clear across to Darjeeling. In the morning light, the landscape shimmered with silvery threads of streams and golden spires of monasteries. I opened the biscuits.
The Travel Husband
The alarm went off at 3:30 a.m. Immediately, I opened the curtains to look outside. Thick clouds hid Darjeeling from view. Slowly they edged across Chowrasta Main Square, revealing the dark shape of a fountain, a sleeping dog. We wouldn’t be able to see a thing, I thought. But still I got dressed. I packed a few bananas and a bottle of water. I tested my flashlight, then opened the heavy wooden door leading into the hallway. Kurt was already there, waiting on the jute mat. We didn’t speak.
We descended into the dark, damp morning casting beams of light across façades of hotels and shuttered shop fronts. Rope-lashed tarps protected vendors’ stalls from the perils of the night. Piles of refuse awaited garbage pickers. In the distance, a pack of dogs began a frenzied chorus of barking.
“Tiger Hill?” A man approached from the shadows.
“Yes,” Kurt said, asking how much. It was one of Kurt’s jobs, as travel husband, to negotiate prices.
Other lone women travellers had touted the benefits of a travel husband – a male tourist who understood that India was, for the most part, still a world run by men, and who wanted to help. Kurt, a software designer from Belgium, was my second travel husband. Cyrille from Paris, whom I’d met in Ladakh’s Nubra Valley, had been my first. With something as simple as a travel husband by her side, a woman could relax a little. The millions of staring men so fond of engaging in conversation on the streets of India became more bearable. A woman could travel to the remote regions of northern India and hike across the sand dunes to Diskit, or explore the rhododendron forests of South Sikkim, and feel a little more at ease. It was a relationship of mutual benefit – cheaper room rates and transportation costs, and a little bit of company with no strings attached.
“Wait here,” the man said. “We leave soon.”
He escorted us to the back seat of his jeep, into the ice-blue glow cast by the interior lights. Dance music pumped out of his souped-up stereo at a volume much too high for this hour. “Do you think he’d mind if we turned it down?” I asked Kurt. Kurt turned it off.
The driver blended into the darkness with his black leather coat and jeans. I watched as the glow of his cell phone moved towards the door of the Olde Bellevue Hotel. I knew what he was doing – fishing for sleepy tourists. “Tiger Hill?” he asked over and over. But they were more organized than us. They’d already booked their “organized sunrise trip” at Clubside taxi stand yesterday.
“He’s not going to leave until the jeep is full,” I said. Full, I’d learned, meant at least double a jeep’s recommended seating capacity. It wasn’t called a “share jeep” for no reason. You shared everything. Body parts, sneezes, sweat.
“Let’s wait and see,” said Kurt.
Fifteen minutes passed and we were still alone. This was my last day in Darjeeling, my last chance to see Tiger Hill. Finally the monsoon had been over long enough to be guaranteed a view of a 250-kilometre stretch of Himalayan peaks – including Everest – light up in the sunrise. A sight even the most jaded of travellers had recommended.
“Let’s offer to pay for all the seats so we can just go,” I suggested. But Kurt wouldn’t hear of it. “It won’t cost that much,” I said.
I’d learned the Indian rupee became more than just a type of currency to some tourists. The well-worn bills became their pride. They began to forget, after a relatively short time in India, that they were haggling for mere pennies. I’d witnessed several embarrassing interactions between westerners and Tibetan refugees who were selling hand-knit woolen socks for the equivalent of a dollar, for example. “Twenty-five rupees,” the westerner insisted. I’m certain they’d read the same thing I’d read in my guidebook, to begin bargaining by offering half the asked-for price. But they’d forgotten the part about how this woman had walked hundreds of miles through the Himalayas to arrive at the refugee camp on the other side of the hill. Hence the wind-burned cheeks, the cracked skin on her palms. “Twenty-five,” the westerner had insisted and the woman took the money, too desperate to refuse.
Bargaining became a matter of principle for some. People seemed to loathe the thought that someone could be screwing them. They yelled, swore, much to the amusement of the locals.
“No,” Kurt said. “Let’s wait.”
“I’ll pay.” But I knew this suggestion was futile. The leather coat man would begin to wonder about Kurt’s masculinity. He’d look at the bills handed to him by a woman in the ice-blue glow, and then look at Kurt and smile.
Another fifteen minutes passed. I imagined I saw the sky lighten, though the cloud-cover was so thick it was hard to tell. “I’m leaving,” I said. I didn’t care about wandering the dark streets alone anymore. When would I ever have the chance to see some of the highest peaks in the
world light up one by one again? Kurt looked at the leather jacket man and yelled, “We’re leaving!” The man waved his glowing cell phone in reply.
We hurried down the cobblestone path to Clubside, where we hoped a few stray share jeeps would be lying in wait. A woman wearing a heavy cardigan poured chai from a thermos into plastic shooter cups, serving a handful of drivers. “Tiger Hill?” they asked half-heartedly. One of them gestured towards his jeep.
“When are you leaving?” Kurt tapped his watch.
“Two minutes.”
“How much?”
The driver didn’t answer. He could smell our desperation. He knew he had us.
The jeep was almost full. Burly Australians who still stank of booze from the night before. They sat in the back, boasting of their bargaining conquests on the subcontinent. “He said 1,000 and I said 500. No way I’d pay more than 500.”
Five minutes ticked by. Ten. Now I knew I wasn’t imagining things: the sky really was lightening. The only tourists who would arrive at this hour would be the ones even more stubborn than us. The anti-tourist-site tourists. The ones who spent their days drinking tea and reading the Times of India like modern-day versions of the British Raj. The ones who scorned all those who came to India to see things like the Taj Mahal.
Finally, two lone women sauntered down the hill toward the jeep. “Tiger Hill?” the driver asked. The Australians were delighted as the women squished into the back seat.
“Can we go now?” I hissed to Kurt. He got out of the jeep and tapped the driver on the shoulder. But you should never rush a man who is drinking his morning chai in India. The driver ignored him and made us wait another five minutes. Of course we were never going to see Tiger Hill now.
The stories of bargaining escalated in volume now that the two women had arrived. I was just about to open the door and go back to the hotel when the driver appeared, suddenly bursting with energy. He looked at his watch and lurched out of the parking lot. He attached his hand to the horn, squealing around corners, scattering vendors trying to make their way to the market. He was heedless of the oncoming traffic, mostly cargo trucks at this hour, also in a hurry, careening down the pot-holed, monsoon-ravaged, barely paved road. The Australians began to tell tales of the crazy drivers of India.
