Mountains, Monasteries, and Myths: What I Discovered While Living in My Darjeeling Family Home (Catapult)
On a chilly Darjeeling morning, I sit in my grandmother’s living room. Billowy clouds sail past the 28,000-foot-high peaks of Mount Kanchenjunga, fifty miles distant as the crow flies. Sunlight spills through the lacy curtains, illuminating the thangka scroll paintings of the Buddha’s life that hang on the wooden walls. Wearing gloves with the fingers cut off, I tap out a few lines on the old Olympia typewriter my grandfather used to write letters to my mother after she left for New York in 1951. The train whistles—one long blast, two short—as it pulls into the station down near the bazaar. The smell of curry drifts from the kitchen at the back of the house, and my grandmother’s shaggy Apsos yap in the driveway at people real and imagined passing outside the tall iron gate. I put Peggy Lee’s Black Coffee on the vintage turntable, flip through albums of old family photos and magazines about the British royals. It’s 1984, and I’ve just graduated from college. I’d planned to make my life in Paris as a writer, but something has drawn me to my mother’s hometown of Darjeeling instead.
My first time in Darjeeling was at the age of three, when I traveled up the winding road into the Himalayas on my mother’s lap. My mother had left at nineteen to attend medical school at Columbia, married a classmate, and was visiting home with her American husband and two daughters. I wouldn’t return to Darjeeling until I journeyed there twenty years later to write and keep my recently widowed grandmother company.
