Most didn’t sleep over, though. The junior members of a tea estate—the assistants and engineers—needed to make the garden’s dawn roll call no matter how late they stayed at the Club. So the men made their way home, somehow, late at night. They would ride back along the network of precarious paths, crossing on horseback streams and rivers whose swollen torrents were dangerous in the rainy season.44
Until just a few decades ago, horses remained a principal means of transport on a tea garden, and planters received a horse allowance. “Every manager rode his estate, and horses were considered more expensive than wives,” according to Gillian Wright. “Even in 1971, a planter was allowed Rs 300 a month for his horse and Rs 150 a month dearness allowance upon marriage.”45
While managers now make that late-night drive in a jeep, the roads are frequently washed out by monsoon rains, overrun by streams, and, in most cases, remain just as wild. “Driving home at around midnight from the Club,” Vijay Dhancholia, a member since 1992, recalled, “I saw a leopard on the road with a deer, and it crouched there until we went right next it.”
Such an evening out today is an anomaly. While most garden managers are members, like Dhancholia, they now rarely go. Planters’ families live with them on the estates, and with Internet, mobile phones, and satellite TV, most planters don’t need the Club for entertainment or even to socialize.
Today officially called the Darjeeling Club, it has 470 members. In the late 1990s, it opened admission to professions other than planters. Joining is very expensive, although it is currently not taking new members. Yet few come these days. “Just two or three,” said a receptionist on an April evening that had cooled enough to require coal fires to be lit in the guest rooms and a heater turned on at the feet of the receptionist. And before? “Three hundred,” he said flatly.
At the base of Nehru Road, across from the Planters’ Club, is Keventer’s, a popular, decades-old, inexpensive café with a roof terrace shaped like a ship’s bow. On Sundays it fills with junior boys from Darjeeling’s elite schools ordering cheese-toast sandwiches and bottled Maaza mango sodas.
During the nineteenth century, Darjeeling became famous for its English-style boarding schools modeled on Eton, Rugby, and Harrow. St. Paul’s School was the first. It started in 1823 in Calcutta and opened a branch in Darjeeling in 1864 as the highest school in the world. Located on the outskirts of town, the beefy buildings with peaked, red roofs and a massive quad comprise one of the area’s top institutions, along with St. Joseph’s at North Point, Mount Hermon, and Loreto Convent (where Mother Teresa spent ten years doing her novitiate). They draw students from beyond the hills and also India itself, with scores from Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Thailand (including royalty). The town’s numerous students stroll around in V-neck sweater-vests, slate-gray trousers or long skirts, striped ties, and crested blazers.
Even when there is no chance of rain, and Darjeeling is suffering from drought, the boys of St. Paul’s still carry their ubiquitous black umbrellas. Asked why they had them on a sunny day when it hadn’t rained in weeks, one tall boy with a fuzz of hair just appearing on his lip said, “Tradition, sir!”
“What if you get caught without an umbrella?”
“We wouldn’t be able to come into town, sir.”
“How often can you come into town?”
“Once a month, sir.”
“Really?”
“Tradition, sir.”
* They still do today. Traveling from the manager’s bungalow on the Bannockburn Tea Estate to the one on the neighboring Ging Tea Estate takes close to an hour by jeep. This is rather standard.
CHAPTER 11
Nostalgia
If there is a hint of what V. S. Naipaul called mimicry on the Indian side in the school crests and clubs with hunting trophies, dress codes, and the same elitist rules that once excluded them, there is nostalgia on the Anglo side. It’s located in the heritage hill station hotels with snuggeries displaying steam-train memorabilia, the solid, gray-stone buildings with wisteria, and the evocative smell of coal smoke in the evening air. In Darjeeling, no one traffics better in nostalgia than the city’s most exclusive hotel, the Windamere.
Established in the 1880s as a cozy boardinghouse for bachelor English and Scottish tea planters, it was converted into a hotel by the father of the current owner, who bought the property in 1939. Strung across the narrow back of a hummock, with stunning views dropping straight down on both sides and a royal guest list, the old-fashioned, self-contained Victorian cottages, annexes, and planters’ suites are the only buildings on Observatory Hill. Rooms have spacious closets (one had to dress for dinner) and a second, smaller room (to change perhaps, or for an attending footman). Full meal plans are obligatory, menu cards typed out daily on an old machine, and waiters breeze among tables wearing white gloves even to serve breakfast. The porridge is memorable, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding are served on Sundays, and desserts lean toward British public-school staples—which is to say Raj standards—such as bread-and-butter pudding with plump golden raisins, sponge cakes, and jam roly-poly, all smothered in hot custard. When evenings are cool, which is most of the year, coal fires are lit in the rooms while guests are down at dinner, offering heat along with soothing sounds of embers shifting in the grate as they burn down during the night. A hot-water bottle wrapped in flannel is surreptitiously tucked into the sheets, too.
“This place isn’t just a throwback to the early 20th century,” wrote the Canadian journalist Muhammad Lila. “It is the early 20th century.”1
The tug of nostalgia pulls the firmest at afternoon tea, which, every day at precisely four p.m., is offered fireside in Daisy’s Music Room.
The Windamere’s tradition began seventy-five years ago by copying the British fashion and has carried on with little change since. A server wearing a frilly lace pinafore and white gloves pours out tea from a silver pot and offers platters of macaroons, Bundt cake with candied cherries, and scones to slice open and generously spread butter and clotted cream across their soft crumb face. Arranged in orderly layers on silver platters are petit triangular sandwiches that have been filled with cucumber, boiled egg, or cheese and had their crusts shaved off with a long, serrated knife.
The music room is not overly large, and with the curtains drawn and a fire blazing, it becomes intimate and cozy. Stacked on the piano among candelabra are heavy, black-boarded photo albums of past Windamere celebrations. Lovingly separated by sheets of onionskin are treasured images of New Year’s Eve bonfires, dances, and dinners with Christmas crackers and shiny party hats. On the wall, frames encase regimental ware, portraits of long-dead royalty, and notes from famous guests. A card from Jan Morris contains this handwritten ode:
As the glow of Kanchenjunga
Faded with the passing of each year—
When the whistle of the Toy Train
Dies at last upon my ear—
In my heart I still shall cherish
Dear old Windamere.
The British tradition of afternoon tea originated with Anna Maria, the seventh Duchess of Bedford (a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria), in the early nineteenth century as she began having a little pick-me-up between the then-standard two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. At first private affairs, afternoon teas moved to the drawing rooms of the fashionable set—ladies only; the men had their clubs and pubs—and soon after to teahouses and hotel dining rooms. In some ways, this was a beginning of women’s emancipation. Starting in 1865, the year the luxurious Langham Hotel on London’s Regent Street opened and began offering afternoon tea in their dazzling Palm Court, ladies had a place to go out together in public without risking society’s moralizing gossip.