Finding My Way Home

Growing up makes you forget—and then with time, you remember, the beauty and pain of the rain. Take a journey to the eastern town of Darjeeling with a local as she too rediscovers.

- Stuti Agarwal

As a school kid growing up in Darjeeling, the monsoon was never a welcome time. It wasn’t about the landslides that devastated nooks of the town, life in the hills always went on undisturbed, it was about having to walk to school and arriving soaking wet.

Cars were a luxury in Darjeeling, and while many schools have buses, ours didn’t. Of course, here I’m missing the tiny detail that we lived very close to the school—one small hill down to be precise—and we had no choice but to walk.

As mothers often do, the Darjeeling ones have found a way for kids to have a dry day—bundled up in ankle-length raincoats with their special bag pockets and large umbrellas. Rain boots were seldom an option given that carrying them around the whole day seemed tedious, so the alternative was chappals. An extra bag with plastics to wrap everything that was wet, and towels to dry our feet before slipping into dry socks and shoes was a laborious addition.

Every day, for at least five months or so, the ‘wet bag’ was carried painstakingly to school. Let me not bother you with what happened when we had to step out into the market. And so, when I finally did go out to study, I knew that the one thing I wouldn’t miss was the rains in my hometown. I stand corrected today.

I’ve been away for the last eight years and made it a point to avoid the rains, until this year, when all I wanted to do was sit on my writing desk, undisturbed, and finish writing my book. I went back home, the rain pouring down on my suitcase as I dragged it downhill, complaining about the bad paths; but as soon as I sat down to write, the rain drumming outside my window, I smiled, and I knew something had changed, I felt like stepping out.