Extra #2

Graveyards and Leeches

Kurseong

There's a British Graveyard in Kurseong that hangs on the side of a hill and when the low cloud comes across it, as it does frequently, it looks like the spookiest place I've ever seen.  Imagine a gothic horror movie and you're somewhere near.  The gravestones are almost indecipherable, nothing lasts for long in the damp that pervades.  Creepers grow up and over the trees and fall down in curtains.

To get in, you go through a pedestrian gate with a rusty padlock.  The main gate is locked tight and looks like its not been opened in hundreds of years.  Above the graveyard, on the other side of the road, life goes on for the people of Kurseong.  In their tiny apartments meals are cooked, children sleep, families visit.  To enter the graveyard, as very few do, is to step back in time.
Here is James ... Somebody, who died aged 24.  I can't read how.  Next to him an elaborate memorial to a missionary priest, who at 26 can't have known much of life before succumbing to whatever tropical disease took him to meet his maker.  There are women and children buried here too, babies, infants, victims of the climate and the water.
We walked there several times, somehow it drew us back. Once I went in summer skirt and flip-flops - not a good idea.  Feeling something on my foot - an insect bite perhaps? - I looked down to see a leech gripped to my toe.  India certainly presented me with challenges...