Recently I revisited Siliguri, where I was posted Magistrate-in-Charge 35 years ago. As we drove along tree-lined boulevards of a new township, my escort, noticing my perplexed look, told me that Siliguri was one of the fastest growing cities in India. My hotel was located in the Cheng Mari tea estate, which had been uprooted as the tea bushes planted by the British in the 1870s no longer translated into viable real-estate. I also learnt that large tracts of the mysterious Baikunthapur forest, home to the royal Bengal tiger, had been systematically axed to enlarge the city.

I recalled this once sleepy town, located in the strategic ‘chicken’s neck’ of the North East, in a series of shifting images: the Bagdogra airport where I would sometimes sip whisky while exchanging news with its manager; the Queen Mother of Bhutan, for her generous gifts of black apples freshly plucked from the royal orchards; the Chogyal of Sikkim, who left behind a bottle of fine sherry for my mother; a Governor of Bengal, dhoti hanging loosely from his waist; the elegant barrister Jyoti Basu, then Chief Minister and the Commissioner of North Bengal, loath to drink but with a gigantic appetite, which was charged to the ‘natural calamity’ fund of the State exchequer.

On occasion, we had to delay the aircraft’s takeoff by getting red flags waved from nearby rooftops owing to the exigency of protocol; I recalled the narrow roads built over wooden bridges bordered by golden-green tea gardens, shaded by trees bearing brilliant red flowers; climbing slopes of the blue mountains; tea tasters doffing their hats at the Sinclairs auction house; the large, shingled bungalows of the tea garden sahibs and their koi hai s resounding in the coolie lines; the military officers saluting each other in natural reflex, requiring polo grounds and larger ballrooms in defence from Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Bangladesh; the warm-hearted, direct people of the hill areas of Darjeeling district, annexed by the British in 1865, who lived in harmony with the Bengali population and had now barricaded the mountain passes, raising slogans for ‘Gorkhaland’; the violent uprisings in Naxalbari, in 1977, that spread all over the country; the British emblems of authority: elephants raising their trunks at the Commissioner’s gate, the laat Sahib ’s maroon pennant fluttering in the breeze as his car traversed the mountains, with sirens resounding in the valley; the crumbling palaces of Jalpaiguri with their long dried-up fountains; archaic clerks of the Collectorate replete with convoluted logic, stepped out of a Shakespearean comedy; the tall grasses and the lilting music of boatmen as they rowed across the Mahananda river; and the railway junction at new Jalpaiguri through which the paramount power, from 1835, brought the terai areas of Sikkim under its sway. All this had changed!

The city stretched out aimlessly in all directions; everyone seemed to be in transit. Skyscraper buildings with glass-and-steel façade stood in place of rows of thriving motor-garage workshops, then owned by prosperous Sikhs; several educational institutions had been established in a now literate region; some tea garden bungalows had been converted into glamorous home-stays, the red-brick colonial mansions of the raj, which once resounded with the strains of Chopin and Stravinsky, were in a state of near-abandonment; my official bungalow with its large, sparkling-white walls now stood grey and dishevelled. On my return journey, an unruly crowd of people, their faces smeared in green and blue powder, chanting some strange ditty, blocked the road to the international airport, holding aloft a large cut-out of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

The city of Siliguri stood transformed into a stronghold of wealthy Marwari industrialists who, I was told, “owned everything”. Exchange, I concluded, is the only constant! And revisiting one’s youth a great tragedy.

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