{"product_id":"9789386582355","title":"No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight: Memories of a Hill Town","description":"\u003cp\u003eFor a few years in the early 1990s—at a time when the embers of a violent agitation for Gorkhaland were slowly dying down—Parimal Bhattacharya taught at the Government College in Darjeeling. \u003cem\u003eNo Path in Darjeeling Is Straight \u003c\/em\u003eis a memory of his time in the iconic town, and one of the finest works of Indian non-fiction in recent years. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eParimal evocatively describes his arrival, through drizzle and impenetrable fog, at a place that was at odds with the grand picture of it he had painted for himself. And his first night there was spent sleepless in a ramshackle hotel above a butcher’s shop. Yet, as he tramped its roads and winding footpaths, Darjeeling 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—built in 1881; and the vast tea gardens with which the British replaced verdant forests to produce the fabled Orange Pekoe. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the enmeshed lives of his neighbours—of various castes, tribes, religions and cultures—lived at the measured pace of a small town, Parimal discovered a richly cosmopolitan society which endured even under threat from cynical politics and haphazard urbanization. He also found new friends: Benson, a colleague whose death from AIDS showed him the dark underbelly of the hill station; Pratap and Newton, whose homes and lives reflected the irreconcilable pulls of tradition and upward mobility; and Julia and Hemant, with whom he trekked the forests of the Singalila mountains in search of a vanished Lepcha village and a salamander long thought extinct. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWith empathy, and in shimmering prose, \u003cem\u003eNo Path in Darjeeling Is Straight \u003c\/em\u003eeffortlessly merges travel, history, literature, memory, politics and the pleasures of ennui into an unforgettable portrait of a place and its people. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Speaking Tiger Publishing Pvt Ltd","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47180695732464,"sku":"9789386582355","price":6.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9789386582355_p0.jpg?v=1763676575","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9789386582355","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}