These days i am reminded of Saja, a young man of Maneybhanjang, about 90km north of Siliguri. Maneybhanjang is the base camp for trekking to Singalila range of the eastern Himalayas. Besides, the small town/village is also a business hub in that part of the hilly region where thousands of people throng for weekly haats (wholesale market).
The last time i spoke to Saja when the region was in a political turmoil with a section of people demanding separate state of Gorkhaland. Saja sounded tense, but he did not hang up before inviting me to his little hut-like home where he lives with his wife and daughter. Don’t think Saja is a grown-up man, rather he is quite junior to me. When we met him about a couple of years back at the trekkers’ stand in Maneybhanjang market on a lazy late winter afternoon, he was so eager to take us to Sanadakphu that we can’t but choose him as guide to the second highest peak of Bengal.
Saja could have been an excellent guide — as proved later when some of my colleagues trekked to Sandakphu — but for some of us, he was more than that. For a youngster with a brief criminal past could also have been a threat to any one of us, but he turned out to be a friend in a day. Be it preparing breakfast at Chitrey or playing a game of volleyball at Kalipokhri, Saja was the perfect host for seven-odd days to people like us. After our return to Maneybhanjang, we never met him again. No, he did not die, but we could not make out time to go there again.
This year some days back, i was planning a trek to Dzongri in Sikkim. I thought to call up Saja, as he is a trekking guide recognised by the forest department. I rang him up, he did not pick up the call. Another try, the phone rang continuously for 32 seconds, then the usual IVRS message that he subscriber is not picking up the phone, please call again later. What to do? A last try. Luckily, someone picked up the phone. I thought Saja, who once told me: “Mota-dada (I was quite fat then!), come once in January, and you’ll get to see a different Sandakphu with snow everywhere”, would say in his usual tone: “Mota-dada, have you become thin?” But the script was not that too easy. “Why have you called me?” asked a shrill voice with scorn in his voice. The voice was known to me, not the tone. I tried to reason, but those fell far short. After some time, he told me tourism was ruined there since the past eight months or so. People like him and others are just short of starving.
In one of the leading English dailies today, a front-page story revealed how people from the hills are now up in arms against others, outsiders like us, to get Gorkhaland for them. A state of their own. Will we be allowed there? What price have we to pay for that? Is Saja a part of the rebel movement? Who knows! I did what most of us in this situation would have done: change trekking plans. But will it solve the problem, that is bigger than my personal one?
2009 ©Supratim Pal
