Up the Road into the Hills

To resume the leafy narrative where last I left off...

I was in Kolkata, staring grandiosely into the ruins of my great-grandfathers' former house.

Actually, this mythic visit was over in ten minutes, and we left thanking the kind lady who'd let us into what was now her home, not ours.

My granduncle proved to be an undauntable sight-seer, and the next day we were shepherded into a rented Qualis (one of the preferred modes of large-family car transport in India, unless my eyes deceive me) for a trip to Shantiniketan. Shantiniketan is that leafy not-quite-hill-station where Rabindranath Tagore grew up. Tagore is, like I said before, author of the Indian national anthem. He enjoys, however, a more respected place in the Indian consciousness than his American counterpart, Francis Scott Key (Francis Scott who? Exactly).

The car rumbled along the highway, leaving the gullies and trenches of Kolkata behind and emerging into forest. I have seen a limited amount of India's variable scenery. Madhya Pradesh, a central state, was brownish and dusty, and Mumbai is more noted for its human than its plant life. But the road to Shantiniketan got narrower, greener. We passed pools where white lotuses bloomed amid litter, and villages of fifty houses set right beside the main road. Over and around all of this were so many trees that the next highway, a few feet over, looked lost in a greenish haze.

This was monkey country.

I didn't see monkeys (tragic!) but after three hours we arrived in a small town where the main traffic was two-wheelers and pedestrians, and where our Qualis sweated and barely squeezed along the streets. It was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Women and men alike rode bikes with one hand on the handle and another holding an umbrella overhead, as a shade against the white slicing of the sunlight.

Within minutes of crawling out of the car I was parched, aching in my deepest bones, ready to throw in the towel and go home. The Tagore museum, although indoors, did not have air conditioning. We saw pictures of Tagore's early life, photos of him with his wife (whom he married when she was 9 and he was in his 20s). Much of the best Tagore memorabilia, so I've heard, is kept under lock and key. Ever since Tagore's original gold Nobel Prize medal, once on display in this same museum, was stolen and never returned.

"You know," I said to my father afterwards, as we took a rest by sitting outside the main office in an area across which a faint air-conditioned breeze blew, "these days, you could see the same sights on the Internet."

"But there's no replacement for being in Tagore's hometown," he said.

"Of course not," I said, wringing sweat from my shirt. Downstairs we bought postcards with reproductions of Tagore's paintings on them. Like many artistic geniuses, Tagore was a Renaissance man, adept in many different media.

We toured the cluster of nearby buildings, some of them built from a light adobe-type mud that kept the heat almost entirely at bay.

At 5 pm the heat relaxed its claws and we ventured forth again, this time to the grounds of a local ashram. I went picture-happy until my camera ran out of charge. We hired a guide, whose only shortcoming was that he delivered his entire spiel in Bengali. Bengali might have been Tagore's native tongue, but it isn't mine.

Afterwards we would marvel at how ten-foot murals depicting gods at play were left to molder in the open, mushrooms growing at their base. Or how the twisting sculptures of curvacious women, once carved into some of the buildings, were now so weathered that they seemed almost Picasso-esque.

Tagore wanted a place where nature and learning mixed freely with each other. He wanted all the buildings to blend with the landscape, which they do, brown and gray squares that never challenge the treeline. Students still take lessons in the open air, seated on benches built around the ashram's thick banyan trees. The campus is dotted with valuable sculptures, left in the open for visitors to view and even touch.

Despite Tagore's megastar draw, Shantiniketan (the name means "home of peace") is still a small town. Perhaps that's because it's difficult to reach - the three hour road from Kolkata goes through an unchanging landscape of paddy fields and red soil. Or perhaps there's some other reason.