Lets take a voyage !! Yes, it's vacation time and we all love to go on a trip but do you have the time? Personally I canceled my own expedition to Ladhak because of lack of time. So I thought why not take you all to trip down to a lovely place I dwelled up in the past, which goes by the name of Siliguri (W.B).
Siliguri doesn’t have an airport (so ‘silly’ :P), so your flight only lands you at a place called Bagdogra about 25 kms outside the city. My dad’s office had arranged a jeep (strange ?) to take us to the city. First things first, you’ll be struck by the greenery for sure (more so if you are coming from ncr). The weather is mostly delightful (except the sunlight, which is scorching during the day) and even if it isn’t, don’t you worry because it’ll sure as hell rain after every two hot days (trust me on this) and when I say day, I mean day, because evenings till morning are pleasant all 12 months.
Now for the city, it’s been 5 years since I visited it but back then it was simple and old-fashioned (difficult to realize it was the2nd biggest city of WB after Kolkata). No multi storeyed apartments , no malls or multiplexes (only single screens), only a handful of branded stores , almost no disk/pub/club etc. ; in short it was not a shoppers delight or a night-life lover’s paradise but back then.. these were not the first things I looked up in a city (things have changed now). It was a city you would love to hate but once you start living, it makes sure your assumption never become a fact. You have to live there to believe this.
Now for my dwelling place (home). I was admitted to Border Security Force School (BSF) which was again outside the city in a small village known as Kadamtala. So that’s where we rented a place to live. The house was newly constructed and we were it’s first inmates(I’ll tell you why I said inmates later). Caution : Bengali people love the colour green to the extent that they actually paint their houses with it. So no matter how inciting it may look to us, they think it’s cool or more so “divine”, which kicks the formality of you questioning their choice out of the window. Luckily, our landlords had a saner sense of decision which prompted them to use brown instead.
Now for my neighborhood, I am a keen observer especially of things new to me. My neighborhood had quite a variety of people, all ages and walks of life (mostly locals living in joint families) and we were as much a source of fascination for them as they were for us. The kids (sometimes even grown-ups) had few things to indulge into during the day other than climbing trees, rolling in the mud, giving the dogs an oil bath, watching the women folk buy fish and clean them and then play with the cats that came to feast on the remains, mango search-rescue and hog operations, jackfruit fiascos, and towards the evening when they were famished, there would be snack time and then a flower picking sessions for the deities in the house and all the cuticura and coconut oil loving that they so loved to do.
It’s seeing all this that makes you realize how artificial your life has been uptill now. How all that you have done is run stupid rat-races after the latest technology or defeating others (rather than succeeding yourself) academically. It made me wonder whether everything since childhood has only been a learning experience for me and not something that I would actually reminisce about; That’s the in-expressible abstract noun that I wanted to call upon.
As I told you, we were the first inmates in the house, inmates because people there are extremely cautious and scared of robbery. The construction gives you a jail kind-of look with even the balconies being covered up completely with iron-rods cage. Cycles were a rage there, our car was the lone one in the lane and this testifies the effort it took to find a garage for it, which was “indispensable” in our landlord’s words. The guy who owned the garage, lived a couple of blocks away and was a chain smoker. He grew mango and coconut trees and gifted ‘em to us whenever was in one of his fine moods.
Soccer is what drives Bengal crazy, and Siliguri is no exception. Cricket has its days among the people there but soccer remains their priority. The games period in school was famously called “football-time”. Two years of schooling and I never saw any other game being played in school. I won’t go on discussing about school because it’ll take up the entire post, but one thing to mention: BSF or Army schools mean that only force personnel should admit their kids there, because they expect you to join the forces after schooling and hence groom you to become one. For city brats and lazy folks like me, it was an experience I wouldn’t recommend.
Now a few words about our landlords: The family had two married brothers and their mother. The elder one lived in the front part of the house and the younger one in the rear. We were on the first floor which was originally constructed for the younger one but due to financial issues decided to be given up on rent. Living in an extremely religious, communist, socialist and severely conservative family community was so confusing that even today I’d rather not be in a room filled with those people – the war of the words would break out any moment. The elder brother’s wife was really fond of cooking and would make up all kinds of dishes (mostly coconut and banana made) and offer them to us. General courtesy demanded that we appreciated her efforts but then that encouraged her even more to try all the more stranger stuff on us. Phew…etiquettes land you in trouble!
Although there’s a lot more left about Slliguri that you should know but then, it’s my blog and not a travel catalogue. One thing is for sure, it’s a place worth visiting at least once. With Darjeeling, Gangtok, Cherapunji, Mawsynram, Assam and a hoard of tourist spots nearby, it definitely makes for an awesome trip far across east!!
Till next time…
Adios
