Cloud Mountain

It is five in the morning, and I am waiting for sunrise over Darjeeling. The Kanchenjunga is now a mountain of myth, veiled in cumulonimbus, forever on our horizon but rarely visible.  It suppose it exists because I've seen the photographs in the tacky tourist shops that line the market here in Darjeeling, but I have no way of knowing, without seeing it first hand, if it is merely a magnificent cultural meme, made real by imagination and Photoshop. Yes I am aware that I would be blessed if I did not see but yet believed, but I am a child of Thomas.

 We cut a transect across the country, from Bombay to Bagdogra where we met Sr. Subeshna.  One of those forces of nature that Fede seems to always have in his centrifugal influence. She glides through every challenge with a broad smile and a fierce humor.  She is a good foil for Fede's frustrating stubbornness.  The journey exhausted Fede and although his spirit is indomitable, he body protested, and he was forced to crawl beneath the covers for full day.  We had plenty to do without him, and the Cluny Sisters kept us busy with their regimen of seven meals a day and snacks for the intervening hours.

The sisters have a small centre in Kalimpong for children rescued from child labour.  Some 103 happy boisterous faces mobbed us when we visited.  They worked to a plan learnt from some ancient strategic text on warcraft.  First they separated us, driving wedges of humanity between our rough phalanx.  Once that was done, it was easy. We were driven to pre-appointed corners, and between 30 and 40 of them bombarded us in an assault of words.  Delivered together at top decibel, their narratives interwove in a skein of curiosities and aspirations, ugly histories and lost childhoods.  Hearteningly, their childhood dreams are more powerful than their histories and while they narrate their pasts like some cruel fairy tale they have been made to learn by rote, of their futures, they are nothing but spontaneity and imagination.  We left charged with their energy and smiling.

From Kalimpong to Darjeeling.  The road winds steeply through conifer and fern forests, and our breath turns to mist in the cold.  Fede is still in Kalimpong, regaining his strength and charming the sisters.  We are on a mission to capture a sunrise. This morning we head up for Sandakphu and Phalut, the highest point in West Bengal, from where we can, they assure me, see 4 of the 5 tallest peaks in the world, including Everest.  I will believe it when I see it.