My Travel Adventures

India and Ireland are very close to each other on an alphabetically ordered list of countries, but it does not take a world traveller to know that they are not so in reality. I was confronted with this fact towards the end of this week during my pilgrimage from Darjeeling to Donegal, a journey that took the better part of two days.

As I have already written, we had intended to visit the city of Darjeeling on Independence Day but were kept from doing so by terrible traffic. Having learnt our lesson, we moderated our ambitions and decided that today, we would only try to get as far as Kurseong. After all, the people travelling to Darjeeling would probably be returning in droves that day, and the driver estimated it might take three hours one way if the roads looked the way they did yesterday.

Tuesday the 15 th was Independence Day. I woke up in the morning to find a scorpion in the bathroom, whom I clobbered to death with a flip-flop. I figured that leaving it alone to go seek help might give it a chance to hide somewhere and threaten us later. I paid off my karmic debt in a few minutes by letting a trapped cicada out of the house. Having lodged itself between a shoe and the door, the insect zoomed off into the garden when I threw open the door and pushed the shoe out.

I woke up a few minutes after four this morning as Sparsh began to rouse the house for our journey to the train station. Frantically but methodically, we washed ourselves and packed the last of our belongings before loading them into three cars and piling the fourteen-headed group inside them. The ride was smooth. Although I had been woken up a few times that night by the loudest thunder I had ever heard, the roads did not seem dangerously wet, and indeed, it was early enough in the morning that the lack of traffic added considerably to my feelings of safety.