No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight : Memories of a Hill Town

By Parimal Bhattacharya

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About the book

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.

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.

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.

Pages: 208

Available in: Paperback

Language: English

Parimal Bhattacharya

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.

Parimal Bhattacharya’s outstanding prose elegy captures the essence of Darjeeling, for me the Queen of Hill Stations, a place of many happy and sad memories. - Mark Tully

No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight is Parimal Bhattacharya’s memorable contribution to understanding Darjeeling through a prism, where different colourful images magically come together to offer a remarkable clarity into the hill town as it once was, and its steady decline to what it is now. Bhattacharya’s luminous prose and even more incandescent observations make this a mellow, heartfelt and evanescent ode to the town whose future hangs in balance! - Financial Express

Parimal Bhattacharya metamorphoses mundane reality into strangely poetic and stirring experiences … Succinct yet lucid, his narrative lures the reader into a mystical realm. - The Statesman

Mr Bhattacharya has not only mastered this way of seeing, but has also injected himself into this narrative, implicating himself in its fate. Consequently, it is difficult to pigeon-hole his book into a neat genre: It is not only a memoir, or a history, or natural history, or anecdote – it is everything at once, and more. - Business Standard

Darjeeling has enchanted both laymen and the gifted. Only a handful, Parimal Bhattacharya seems to be among them, have attempted to see through the mist, as it were, in order to piece together an account that chronicles both the beauty and the warts of the hill town. - The Telegraph

The memoir takes on the shape of a biography of Darjeeling, and this is so deftly interwoven with the personal that the reader does not notice when the book’s two main protagonists – Bhattacharya and the town he remembers so fondly – switch places. The memoir is deeply personal, even when the town assumes centre stage. - The Quint

[A] sympathetic and elegantly written account of everyday life in the Himalayas. It steers clear of well-worn tropes about the iconic hill station and the stereotypical views held by outsiders about its Nepali-speaking community. Instead, it explores the complex social and political dynamics at play in contemporary Darjeeling. - The Caravan

Part memoir, part travelogue, part amateur anthropology, No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight: Memories of a Hill Town is a fascinating and multilayered account of Parimal Bhattacharya’s experiences in Darjeeling in the 1990s … [While it] remains grounded in everyday realities, it is not immune to the lure of the mountains or the town that is the site of nostalgia, memory and desire. This fine balance is the best achievement of the book. - Biblio