Kalimpong Calling

Our Winter of Content

The second essay from my 2002 book Kalimpong Calling.

The most perfect thing about Kalimpong is its weather. This is not what you can say for Darjeeling, where it becomes a kind of a necessity to invent poetic excuses for the inconsistency of the weather gods. In Kalimpong there is perfection about the way the blue skies spread their benevolent tents above us in the winters. The dryness is almost benign. The grasses have to dry; the skin has to give away to the winter cracking that can only be cured by the perfumed antiseptic-ness of Boroline.

Boroline — that white petroleum jelly so redolent of the winter memories that it makes one almost pine for those nights of deep sleep under the warm security of freshly fluffed cotton and the smell of the good liniment whose aroma symbolises an entire season.

The good thing about the Kalimpong winter is its lack of pretension. There are no snowfalls. Thus no shifting of the snow to make second-hand snowmen that fit into our Enid Blyton ideals. Also no Archie comic hangover in trying to roll over the hillside in improvised skis. That is for other places where things have to be worked out so that they can sell or fit into some postcard prescription. Kalimpong’s is a season of its own. The winter comes and goes. No one wants to sell it.

For the Lepchas it’s a harbinger of the New Year, which they never fail to celebrate the old way. For the secular rest, winter is the time to go for picnics. This is a ritual that is as pleasantly persistent as Boroline. There is, as the good book says, a time for everything — a time to go to Deolo and look down upon the town and a time to rest it out at Relli and look up at Kalimpong.

The picnic, like the momo, is a Kalimpong metaphor. It comes after the hard work and the usual heartbreak of the harvest. (By the way, Kalimpong still has its terraced fields of paddy and the bi-weekly haat where amidst the noisy, smelly confusion of commerce, people still find fulfilment in displaying or touching, feeling and experiencing the colour and texture of diverse heaps — be it that of the pumpkin or the avocado. After all, it does not make sense to sell pumpkins if you are not proud of their benevolent rotundity.)

Picnics in Kalimpong hark at many good things under the umbrella of one enterprise. Families re-bond, the driver union finds an opportunity to reunite its flock and engage in one last annual activity that will cap their yearlong profligacy. It’s a hiatus, a reason to escape, to displace oneself geographically and temporally to a different realm by the riverside in the sand or some other locale where the anonymity of the exercise will allow one to express oneself in many gestures.

For the students the winter is a vacuum that can be filled by any kind of growth. So while an entire generation once wasted its winter with catapults chasing after elusive bulbuls, the present lot — much more street-smart and cocky — would rather haunt the NIIT or the APTECH.

Winter in Kalimpong is that twilight season where allegorically speaking one is caught between the coldness of colonial Darjeeling and the pretentious heat of a hasty, all-selling Siliguri. Kalimpong is warm. It’s not just the warmth of temperature. It’s that human warmth of closeness that comes in doing things together — of sitting beside the fires and swapping tales, of going for tuitions, of just playing out in the streets to test out the truth of that old adage that the “cold of the young are nibbled away by the goats.”

It’s also the bright botanical warmth of the bougainvillea blossoms and the poinsettia petals that sometimes hybrid fingers a little hesitantly into the same balm that their wild cousins have been piercing with impunity for aeons.