Day 8, Gangtok

April 30, 2009

Thunder woke me up at 5am. Being my lazy self I went back to bed and woke up at about 8 when I discovered that the previous night’s rain had brought a cloud cover over entire Gangtok reducing the visibility to almost zero.

It’s Election Day in Sikkim. So I got the day off.

They say that the best way to know a city is to walk it and that is what I did in Gangtok today. After a good night’s sleep I took off at about 10 in the morning and started walking the streets. Pretty soon I discovered the reason for the petite figures of natives of this part of the country. The roads here either go uphill or downhill and hence, to walk on the roads here you need to exert extra effort as compared to the plains. If you live on the mountains since your childhood, you get so much exercise even without asking for it, that there is no way for you to put in that extra flab around your waist.

I heard that every important city in this country has a street named after the Mahatma. So does Gangtok. The only difference here is that on the MG Marg in Gangtok vehicular traffic is not allowed. It is built exclusively for pedestrians. This street is so European that it reminded me of the area around Pathe in Eindhoven. It is neatly decorated with flowering plants of various kinds and has benches for people to sit on and spend some time. This is exactly what I did. I sat there for three hours reading Frankenstein and watching the crowd pass by. This is something that I miss in Hyderabad. In Indian cities, we do not have the concept of public spaces. The only places that I can think of in Hyderabad where I can sit alone and read a book are the parks. And everyone knows what parks in Hyderabad are famous for – joggers and lovers.

My night, however, wasn’t as pleasant as my day. Rikesh, Pavitrha and I were supposed to go out to dinner. To our dismay all the restaurants in the town were closed because of the elections and as a last resort, we went to one of the star hotels here. As always, they served bad food. They even served the wrong food. For pasta layered with spinach, they brought us spinach layered with pasta and vehemently argued that it was what we asked for. As a follow up for our disastrous dinner, the weather got worse and it started raining, thus putting a dismal end to the evening.