Kurseong Diaries

Sajal makes a living as a cab driver in the hills of Kurseong and Darjeeling and loves to meet people. This piece written through the eyes of free spirited Sajal is just a fictional account of several such fascinating and real people, whose stories need to be told.

As you go past Sukna the cluster of houses on the top of the kurseong hills appear in sight, but still some four thousand feet to climb, the drive was not going to end too soon. It was getting chilly inside the car.

"The tourists who flock here are looking for a novelty in the hills. But to a large extent its unrewarding I feel. What do you feel Sajal? What's the traffic like in the hills at this time of the year?" Mr Biswas asked, but not in an usual crafted sentence. 

The physicality of the hills is overpowering for the unassuming tourists. So many of us have got carried away by the beauty of the hills and that's all what they are searching for. Mr Biswas was a drifter in the hills and that's what makes him different.

I have been in this line for over a decade to be able to read the minds of my passengers. My impressions of them are the results of their conversations inside my car - their pauses, their anger, their sulking, their pot shots at people, their signalling to God. There is a deal to be struck between my passengers and I. Then there are acts of transgressions by some passengers; those illicit behaviour and the sizing up of each other followed by no holds barred exchange of choicest of phrases among the fuming passengers and the grilling. Inner acceptance and validation concerns me more than the legality of my action. My rear view mirror is not for surveillance (sic!). I have realised that talking to people is cathartic. A lot of them share a few things with me as they go on to confide in me as we get along like friends. Sometimes our paths cross. Notwithstanding the hassles of driving, people havn't realised the purpose of going to the hills and that is to fulfill the needs of their souls. Hills heal the scars of your wounds. Power to heal and rejuvenate is consecrated in the hills. In the hills the spotlight turns inwards towards your inner self. It appears that Mr Biswas was making the journey to mend the crack lines and reconcile with his past. It is never easy to bury the past without reconciling with it.

One of the highs of ferrying tourists to the hills is the number of people you get to know and I must confess of being pretty good at remembering faces. I wouldn't have known that this man had brushed past my memories, if I hadn't had the habit of hitting off with people who entered in my car. On the flip side, I have on occasions been subjected to bad temper from few of my passengers. Dismissing those would have been being dishonest to my work and believe me, they have not been let off the hook, not once but each time they had crossed the line. Just filtering such bad elements is not enough. 

It so happened that our conversation transported us back in time and we hit a common past. It just couldn't have been providence. This story fired my senses. Recounting this story was like stepping back in my own past. I couldn't wait to tell the story. Here I was with the son of the gentleman whom I had taken to Kurseong when I started off my business years ago. Mr Biswas was numbed at the unexpected mention of his father from a taxi driver whom he met for the first time and could not thank him enough. He thought it was bizarre. His father loved to visit places but was a bad traveller. Way then I could sense that his extravagant plan of annual sojourn to the hills was doomed to fall in a heap as he announced it. But ironically I had taken him to the hills in my old Maruti Dzire way back only once. He had never made it again. He was recuperating from a bad back then. We lost touch after that trip and strangely his memory too vanished like a boat adrift in the rough sea. He had promised to me then that he would capture the time spent in the hills in his random notes and post it to me. He was gifted with prose and words flowed out of his pen with seeming ease. He didn't give the impression of a pompous man. He had narrated to me how was bitten by a travel bug right in his younger days and always longed to reach out to people and places. 

"It is so ironical that you chose to be a cab driver to earn a living and I am into an odd job, but both of us share an intense urge to cut lose and break free and drift into a world of our known ", said Mr Biswas. 

He found an echo of his mind in me. How strange is the coincidence and how sharp is the contrast among us ! I started taking fancy to his story. He let his guards down but made no reference to the trip that his father made years back in my car.

Mr Biswas later confided in me of his attraction for the hills. He had almost childlike enthusiasm when he set foot in my car. In fact the mist and the solitude of the hills had transported him to a different world. More than the place he liked the idea of a quick getaway. He promised to come back again next year. It was natural. I could see that in his eyes. 

"So you have anchored my emotions and we have developed a bond from here on. I promise to carry your story to the world." said Mr Biswas.

That's what it is. It beckons you. I said looking at Mr Biswas.

But what do I achieve in being a partner in their journey.Their journeys are personal.I have a family to support and lead a hand to mouth existence.Where is the time to reflect back.Hills are lonely and many a times the loneliness tears you apart.So it's better off cooling your heels among people and having fun rather than being a recluse. Passengers look down upon drivers who are devoid of cheer. Anyways in the winters as night falls in the hills, its all about loneliness and obscurity. Many of passengers who have made it to the hills just for the heck of it have wondered as to how the people manage in such desolate surroundings.But most profound ones like Mr Biswas eulogise about the hills and come back again and again as their true calling. 

I had descended from the hills only the night before and hadn't brushed aside the mountain fatigue as yet. And I was there again driving to the hills the next morning. It's a job that we don't really enjoy as the tourist season comes knocking. You must drive along the Pankhabari stretch to see what we endure on the roads. It really wears you down. 

"But you don't really sound bored." said Mr Biswas.

The brain circuit gets entangled and you goof-up at some points when you drive up and down the hills too frequently. We are wired up like this. The best part is that they don't strike you without a warning. Its predictable but it drains you out emotionally. Memories are better wiped off rather than holding on to them. Tourist season is when we take people for a ride and make money big time is all bunkum because holidays and off season leave us high and dry with a big financial loss. My last break was when my father died. 

Piku, the kingpin who held a sway over the taxi driver association of the hill towns had proposed to Mr Biswas's father about me many years back.  Piku was sufficiently frank with him and hadn't hidden any of my flaws when it comes to  running of the business. Piku had always introduced me as his brother. Mr Biswas's father and I had instantly developed a liking for each other despite the difference in age. Perhaps the love for the hills brought us together. 

The slow traffic on the busy single lane Hill Cart Road would not allow my Mahindra Xylo hatchback to pick up speed. Thank Goodness, that's catered for in my tariff - those loss of man hours. Roads inside the town are honk-free zones. The traffic moved at a snail's pace as both the toy train coaches and the cars vied for space on the roads. My last stop was at Cafe Kurseong Diaries. Driving downhill in the lowest gear was edgy while negotiating the hairpin curves. Mr Biswas said good-bye as if there was no tomorrow. 

I had by now a thousand stories to share as each passenger who gets into my car has a story to tell. But it took a bit longer for me  that day to take my mind away from that trip to Kurseong! 

LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE

I can't make out whether I am left bored or I am scared. Because both seem to make me nothing but a bundle of nerves. The pandemic has clearly shown that the virus has unsuspectingly walked out of its habitat and entered the human race who couldn't have been any less careful and reckless in choosing its enemy. It will hit you when you least expect it and takes you by surprise. The virus has baffled us no end. Credible scientific information is the first sacrificial lamb in this pandemic. What do you do when the pandemic has hit you in different ways and inflicted harm in varying proportions. When you are cordoned off from all directions and left with no routes for retreat, you silently try to avenge the hordes of these viruses by turning the tables on them and step out of the spot of bother that you find yourself in. The ubiquitous virus has pulled the rug from underneath our feet and left us high and dry. Humour is the antidote that we are looking for in the gloom and despair that we are engulfed in as a result of the virus. The pandemic has hit you instinctively but the element of surprise will help you mount a response through humour and wit as the scientific community plays arbitrer of truth. So you keep your mind alive and receptive because from your fertile mind comes the detour with a funny imagination    - the humour. That's how we have shielded ourselves from the grim realities and collective horror of our past like partition, famines, terror strikes and other devastating natural calamities that have struck our country spanning several decades and left us with indelible scars. When sulking forever isn't a viable option, humour in a subtle way acts as a release phenomenon by playing wittily and playfully with the situation at hand and brings about a laughter. Humour has the power to change the contours of your thought. When you are laughing at your situation you are playing with the ego of your adversary and in the process honing a skill to fight it out yourself. It's obviously not a therapeutic solution and interestingly no one has claimed a medical solution to the virus so far. However humour has served epic purposes. The smile transcends all barriers and unites people. What words can't do in forging relations, a smile can instantly strike a cord amongst hearts and reduce sufferings.

So as the corona epidemic marches on, we have reset our shock absorber unwittingly to absorb more stress. The mechanism of denial will only weaken you from inside and gradually rob you of your innate immunity. We cope with acute stress reactions or threat by our own traditional mechanism of fight or flight response  with strong feedback or counterpunch from our brain with the help of hormones and neurotransmitters. No two persons endure or respond in a similar fashion. That is because of the strength of the emotion generated. Despite the world surrounded by gloom we must not get besieged by the threat. 

Havn't you still not got the answer to how do we counterpunch grief with humour? Is it about the emotional wherewithal that is inherent in some and lacking in others - the sulkers and naysayers. 

There is an old adage that if you cannot beat them then join them. You will do well to not sulk but keep your instincts alive by looking at the lighter side of the crisis. So the humour is not just for fun but it's an adaptation sought in the behaviour. It's an instinctive reaction and a very handy one at that. So what better tool than humour to fight the pandemic as humour has both intellectual and emotional components and also humour brings about fortification around the sufferings. So how does humour help is a study in itself. However one of the theories proposed is that it enables one to step back away from the elements of a situation and dissociate from it emotionally. That explains why some find humour in something and others dont. This is because those who don't are still in the middle of the problem and haven't been able to dissociate from it and still grappling with it. Suffering has a terrible way of unleashing the pain by multiplying the agony by leaps and bounds. So what if lack of vaccines or other public health strategies in the management of covid-19 infection are proving to be the chink in the armour, humour will shield us from the suffering. It is good to launch a blitzkrieg of humour and satire, not to unsettle the enemy in the actual sense of the term, but to attempt to keep the spirits high.

A term 'joke intimacy' was coined in the western philosophy of humour. It brings together two people sharing a laugh together tied to a common thread. It also goes on to become a psychological catalyst of sharing and connecting together of course, in a non-physical way. Humour brings people closer together like nothing else does. How does it help to do this is rooted in neurobiology of hormones and neurotransmitters. One of the hypotheses which was proposed as a defining philosophy of humour was that humour bridged and smoothened the incongruity of our lives' experiences and allowed us to look at situations in an alternate and interesting way. This is what humour is doing to the people of various backgrounds and aesthetics during this pandemic.

Indians by nature dont take to humour well because of various cultural and religious issues. But in this time of gloom, the 'happy' hormones or the 'feel good' hormones are the just the  'boosters' your doctor would prescribe. Smile brings about a surge of these hormones. So when you are in the doldrums it's not a bad idea to turn in a smile. So these silly looking slapstick humour doing the rounds of social media nowadays is nothing but trying to cheer you up and you for once give it a chance. But a disclaimer needs to be mentioned that not all jokes which are making fun are cracked to alleviate our distress; sometimes it is at the cost of somebody. So the self depricatory humour is an exception rather than the rule. Humour must carry moral and religious approval and hurtful and distasteful humour must be shunned. 

Haven't you seen people sharing a laugh even as they transcend pain and grief? This is because emotions painted in pain have a unique characteristic of surging in and filling the heart but it's poor staying power makes it stop short of wreaking havoc with the mind. Humour is the quick fix glue that fixes up the cracks in our mind and gives us a fresh lease of life. No matter how grievous and how terminal is your predicament, humour brings in an empathy along with the laughter. So as people are facing distress in this pandemic humour can be incidental. But it is always intended to bring about a smile or a hearty laugh just the way a warm hug snuggles you and seems like a perfect gift in distress. 

Humour has positioned itself as a lifeline in these times and had quickly rushed in to fill in the void left wide open by physical distancing. So as the 'elusive' , 'invisible' and 'conspiracy' barbs invoke a sense of an 'invasion' , humour goes onto calm our minds and make these tough times bearable. So, LOL!.