The Sleeping Buddha

by Swastika Bandyopadhyay (India)

Making a local connection India

In my seven years of being in Kolkata, I can only explain it as a long vacation to my grandfather’s house. Long drowsy train rides, low hums of grasshoppers over the fields in mid-summer afternoons, haphazardly kept things for years on end. Mosaic patterns formed out of whitewashes, which fails to keep the moisture off and ruptures into green fairy rings. Rack and shelves piled upon for ages with rusty pages falling off the binds of the books, clay models made by the prodigies of the house to showcase their talents, now frowning with dirt and layers of webs laden with the weight of time. Dingy rooms opened up into the scalp of the house, overlooking the neighbourhood. Is it the paradox of haphazardness or is it just the patterns that even the unplanned things make up? It trapped everything within it. Neighbours couldn’t think of going out of the district let alone the state. For a foreigner like me, I was nothing less than amused. Why would someone be stuck in a place like this? As my parents retired and longed for their homeland, we settled here, in the City of Joy. A sudden realisation made me understand that all these years the idea of home had been evading me. Never for once did we settle in our lives, we pretty much measured the length and breadth of the country and yet this very city stood like an austere stranger. Taxis combed the city where trees and people lived in the palatial building and entered in a symbiont relationship, both basking in the same past glory that seems to drench the entire city. Everyone like hyacinths spoke of their roots as their identity. This strange confidence lurked in their being which spoke of their past as if this one thing in their life was permanent and bereft of any question. I finally paid heed to a recurrent rumour the hills. Darjeeling is said to have cured illness and longings of all kind. In villages, the daily sound of people engaged in their daily chores makes it lonely and sometimes sad as how safe and secured their lives were with no adventure. Cities are too loud. Everything appeared and disappeared like rings of mist and clouds over the hills. When I was almost giving up the idea if Bengal was really my home, Darjeeling appeared as the last resort. If this didn’t work, was I to be homeless metaphorically? This chance would rescue me from my rootlessness. I woke up to a very restless feeling building up in my mind. listened carefully and squirmed in my bed and I adjusted my ears to a faint hum that could be heard. The hum seemed like a soft mourn falling as silently as the midnight rain. A woman was singing some distant hill song about someone she has lost. The night changed into day and I quickly sprang from my bed all in the hope to see the famous range called, “The Sleeping Buddha”. Going out into the bungalow’s lawn my ideas like ripples coincided with nature. They said “The Sleeping Buddha” is only visible to the lucky ones. The clouds swayed and danced as the wind rose up from the vales beneath. Yes, there was monotony, nothing like cities or the villages for that matter. The last day, I finally decided to talk to the driver, asking him about his past. He said calmly, “ I was brought here by my grandparents who came over the mountains from Nepal.” “Don’t you miss your home?”, I inquired. “We carry our homes in our heart, we sing of our old past and sometimes they say one can hear the spirit of our past sing at night, for the travellers who have lost their way home.” As the jeep swerved off the edge of the road, a pink hand waved at the jeep. A young face in the pink of his health, happily bidding goodbye to every jeep passing by him. It felt like home, where someone would wait upon your every arrival and departure, waving their hand and smiling with a pink face like this young boy of two.