Amid the eastern Himalayas

Well, here’s the little travelogue I promised – though I know by now that very few readers are really interested.

As I said earlier, for my daughter it was her first flight (my first was in class two, and she’s in class nine now), so naturally she was full of eager anticipation. So was I. Mercifully it was an Airbus A320 and not one of those cramped and noisy little Boeing 737s of yore. Strangely enough – and I could be mistaken, my memories being twenty years old – even this aeroplane seemed rather small. It was clean and well-served, but these days on these low-cost airlines the seating is quite cramped, and the stewardesses have been reduced to salesgirls. Not that they have much to sell except a few grossly overpriced snacks and juices. Anyway, the flight was so short that it was over almost as soon as it had started. It was a cloudy day, so though we got a fine view of the snow-capped Himalayan peaks before landing at Guwahati, we missed the lovely sight of the Brahmaputra that I remembered from the last time. The road to Shillong is little more than a hundred kilometres, and the scenery is picturesque, though not as formidably grand as in the western Himalayas. But it is horribly congested, and though the widening project is visibly underway (making the trip very dusty), it took us all of six hours to reach Shillong, when it should have taken little more than three. Our hotel was, as always, decent though not fancy, but with all mod cons. That first night was pretty chilly. The next day we made a sightseeing tour of the town. Ninety per cent of the population seems to be cramped into a circle of half-km radius around the Police Bazar Chowk, and it’s basically a very crowded, noisy and flashy marketplace: all very brightly lit up on the occasion of Christmas. The whole city was in holiday mood. Most traders here are Marwaris, most tourists Bengalis, and the locals, the majority being of the Khasi tribe, seem to care little for work and a great deal for drink and revelry. The Elephant Falls and Shillong / Laitkor Peak offered some lovely views. It was good to see that these places are well-tended and guarded, and they help to earn the municipality a pretty penny. The Beadon and Bishop Falls were off-limits, because we were warned against rowdies who haunt those far-flung locations. Lady Hydari Park, the mini-zoo  and the Cathedral of Mary help of Christians all decked up for the season were particularly enjoyable.

On the 26^th we drove to Cherrapunjee (locally called Sohra) and back. Lovely drive, with some more picturesque waterfalls (though, of course, if you want to see them in their full fury you must come during the monsoons), and the long stretches of heather and gorse on the low undulating hills quite justified the sobriquet of Scotland of the East. We gave the Mawsmai caves a miss, since we don’t like cramped, closed spaces and they were too crowded with tourists anyway, but the adjoining Sacred Woods were a treat, for the sheer tranquillity if nothing else. Along the way we stopped off at several viewpoints, including one from where you could look down at the plains of Bangladesh, and imagine the great ocean of dark rainclouds rolling in from the sea during June to August, which go to make this the rainiest place on earth.

The 27th was spent lazing, sun-bathing and boating at Ward’s Lake. While my wife went shopping, my daughter and I walked for two hours around the town, since both of us enjoy walking, and have begun to agree that you cannot really see a place if you stay inside a car all the time. It was quite an exercise, since we walked fast, and didn’t spare ourselves the steepest roads. It gave us quite a few photo-ops and a keen appetite, among other things. A large part of the town is under military occupation, it being the headquarters of both the 101 Area Command of the Army and the Eastern Air Command, under a Lieutenant General and an Air Marshal respectively, no less. Besides, there are cantonments of the Indo Tibetan Border Police, the CRPF and the NCC. It’s obvious that India is taking the troubles on its borders seriously, and no wonder, because both China and Bangladesh are only a few minutes by air. But the heavy military presence is largely responsible, I am sure, for keeping the town so clean and green. One awful thing about this place is that the food is prohibitively expensive, especially anything in the line of fruits and vegetables, since everything has to be carried by truck from the plains, so I was told that the locals survive largely on meat, which is relatively cheap, especially pork.

Shillong is special for me because there used to be strong family connections. My mother’s grandfather was a self-made tycoon, and he built a large part of this town, as well as the only highway (still locally called the Gauhati-Shillong Road) and Assam’s first bus transport service and departmental store. The family fortune faded rapidly after his death in 1947, but one of his daughters ran a primary school in her sprawling house where I visited almost forty years ago. Then the huge uprising of the natives began and went through the 1980s, so that most Bengalis had to sell out to the locals and depart. Now all history seems to have been wiped out. The house (N.K. Bhattacharjee and Co.) on Jail Road has been mentioned in Leela Mazumdar’s book Aar Konokhane, but the locals are mostly young and entirely uninterested in the past, and most old buildings have been razed and replaced, so that I could find no traces of what I was looking for. It was almost as bad as looking for Corbett’s house in Nainital…

We returned on the 28^th. The drive back was just as slow as the first time round. The plus point was that we had a long panoramic view of Umiam Lake, aka Barapani. The temperature rose rapidly as we came down, so that freezing inside the car was speedily replaced by cooking. En route we stopped off at the famed Kamakshya temple, though I hung back, not being half as religious-minded as my wife, preferring to enjoy the view from the balcony of a house right next to the temple complex. Then back to Lokapriya Gopinath Bordoloi airport, which offers a smoking room, and yet they took away my lighter before I could reach it, because here, unlike in Kolkata, the rules stipulate that lighters even in the hold pose a security risk. Bureaucracy is equally cussed everywhere. The view of the lights of the city just before landing was the last bonus. We arrived at my in-laws’ place tired but happy. The next day it was my daughter’s birthday. Yesterday was spent visiting and adding a few more little touches to the new flat: for me it has become a biannual exercise! And this morning we took a Volvo home…

For photos, click on this link.

Four hours of the old year left. I wish all my readers a very Happy New Year.