PARIMAL BHATTACHARYA, a bilingual writer and translator, is an associate professor of English in the West Bengal Education Service. He is the author of No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight, Bells of Shangri-La and Field Notes from a Waterborne Land. Nahumer Gram O Onyanyo Museum, published in 2021, is his most recent work in Bangla.
<div>"For a few years in the early 1990s – when the embers of a violent agitation for Gorkhaland were slowly dying down – Parimal Bhattacharya taught at the Government College in Darjeeling. No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight is a memoir of his time in the iconic town, and one of the finest works of Indian non-fiction in recent years.</div><div>As Parimal tramped its roads and winding footpaths, Darjeeling slowly grew on him. He sought out its history: a land of incomparable beauty originally inhabited by the Lepchas and other tribes; the British who took it for themselves in the mid-1800s so they could remember home; the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway – once a vital artery, now a quaint toy train; and the vast tea gardens with which the British replaced verdant forests to produce the fabled Orange Pekoe. And in the enmeshed lives of the small town’s inhabitants, Parimal discovered a richly cosmopolitan society which endured even under threat from cynical politics and haphazard urbanization.</div><div>Written with empathy, and in shimmering prose, No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight effortlessly merges travel, history, literature, memory, politics, and the pleasures of ennui into an unforgettable portrait of a place and its people."</div>
