Nightfall in Thunder Town

Headlights and street lamps project portentous puppet plays through the tumbling misty darkness. Most of the stores still haven't closed, and even the food-sellers remain open for business. Middle aged women and a few men sit cross legged on the raised platform of their bamboo and canvas stalls, chopping meat and fish or just waiting patiently for the evening rush to start. All around their dusty feet their fruits and vegetables are spread out for display, illuminated by thin candles sticking out of wine bottles and dangling from coat-hanger wires.

Everything in Darjeeling is moist and full of texture. None of the dusty pastels of Kalimpong, this is a city of earth tones--rich ones that leave the eye heartbroken that such colors appear so rarely. Paint chips and fades, concrete cracks and stains, and stone is slowly overtaken by thick green moss and spotty red lichen. The walls all speak of history and life. This is not an old city by many standards, but its peculiar trials and struggles have been worn deep into the cobblestones by a sort of loving neglect, giving the city an aged quality that towns like Kalimpong lack.

The name "Darjeeling" is Tibetan, meaning "place of the thunderbolt." Here the qualities that have endeared me to Kalimpong have been taken to a further extreme. The particular mountain on which the city is perched is higher, steeper, and cloudier than the hills I've grown familiar with. Darjeeling is colder too. Scarves and fleeces seem to be the way to go, even in early September. During the day the day the Chowrasta area near our hotel reveals its touristy nature, dissolving into a seemingly homogeneous soup of cafes, handicraft stores, and curio shops. When the sun sets anonymously behind the clouds, however, things change, become more interesting, more mysterious. You see, Darjeeling has a night life.

"Night life," of course, is a relative term. In Darjeeling it means that the last band finishes its set at 9:30, and even the hippest parties end at ten. Still, compared to Kalimpong, where lack of street lights and unpaved roads make getting home after six o'clock a treacherous task, the excitement practically never stops. The first night Ansel, Josh and I head out after dinner. We stumble past the scarab-green mosque and down narrow, steeply sloping road. The air smells strongly of halal, and here and there packs of street dogs dig through piles of soggy trash. We settle on a tiny bar whose name we can't make out. The inside is sparsely decorated with the strangest assortment of posters; the Dali Lama, the stars of the Harry Potter movies, and a poem about mothers all hang framed from the pale, unrememberably colored walls. We sit in a curtained booth, and one of the employees brings us our beers. I don't usually buy alcohol, but having a drink in a sketchy Indian bar seems too amusing to pass up. Two Nepalis we recognize as employees of our hotel nod to us as they leave. Hit Beer is poor and mediocre at best, but tries to make up for it by coming in larger quantities. The label says "for sale in Sikkim only," and we notice that it is stamped with a price twenty rupees less than what the bartender told us. Assuming they are price gouging for rich foreigners, we insist on the lower amount. The bartender explains that the jump in price is due to the risk taken in smuggling the beer across the boarder into West Bengal and brings out the bar's accounting books to prove that they do indeed charge everyone fifty-five rupees. We apologize and leave, chuckling at our paranoia.

The next night Tanya gets a call from our morning lecturer that a good band is playing at the area's hottest night spot, The Buzz. This time our whole group goes, including the program kitchen staff. The Buzz is apparently located is the basement of a Glenary's cafe and sweet shop. As we tromp down the stairs, the smells of alcohol mix with the doughy aromas of Indian pastries. Downstairs the interior design is an ode to western culture: model airplanes, pictures of revolvers and vintage cars, eighties electric guitars, forties pulp movie posters, a small boat. A band occupies one corner, playing American rock songs as tolerable volumes. We sit. Drinks and, later, hookah are brought out. We're joined by two trios of travelling westerners about our age, one from Stanford, the other from England. During one of the band's short breaks, Ansel goes up and convinces them to let him play drums for "Smoke On The Water." We all cheer and crowd the small dance floor. The lead singer introduces his special guest performance as "all the way from America!" and calls him his Nepali name, Prashant--a reference lost on our western companions, who have just arrived in the hills area. When the song is over Ansel and the singer hug, and we all stay up dancing for the last few songs of the set. Afterwards we jog home to make curfew, held in silence by the mesmerizing shadow-play of gas lamps through mist and marijuana smoke.