The Tale of Jaspal Sehdave

One would be well advised to carefully plan any voyage to a foreign land. Get together your visa. Purchase your airline tickets. Make contacts with friends who may or may not live at your destination and verify lodgings. Pack sensibly – carry as little as you can, but cover your necessities. 

When I traveled to India, I failed to follow my own advice and, rather, flew to Siliguri airport in West Bengal with little notion of how to proceed from there. My destination was the town of Darjeeling, former British hill station, famous for tea and a popular stop for trekkers preparing their journeys into the Himalayas. A friend of mine was stationed up there, tracking the movements of Himalayan wolves by listening for their howls.

Before I could join my friend in her wolf research, I had to cross the distance between Siliguri airport and Darjeeling. Despite what Wes Anderson might have you believe, there is no Darjeeling Limited waiting to take you across India, so I opted to hire a flat rate cab to take me into the city. And that’s how I met Jaspal Sehdave.

Mr. Sehdave wore a black suit with gold cufflinks, a gold watch on his left wrist, and a burnished pair of black dress shoes. The maroon frames of his spectacles matched the hue of his turban. The skin of his face and neck that was not covered by turban, spectacles, or collar was obscured by long, black hairs. If it had been revealed that Jaspal had not shaved once in his life, I would not have been surprised as the longest of his facial hairs were twisted around a cord that ran from under his jaw up underneath his turban, thus hiding the true extent of his hariness.

Naturally, I decided that this would be just the person with whom I might split the cost of a cab. 

“Pardon me,” I said, affecting the sort of over-articulation I employ when I want to hide my American-ness, “But would you by chance be going to Darjeeling?”

I soon realized my mistakend pronunciation of “dar-JEE-ling” had already revealed my ignorance and foreignness. 

“Yes,” my new acquaintance replied, “I am going to DAR-juh-ling.”

He declined my offer to split a cab with him, and instead said, “My company has already hired a car, would you like to ride with me?”

Naturally, I accepted.

When the British conquered India, they took a liking to the highlands of West Bengal, the land of the Ghorka people, where Darjeeling now sits. Its cool climate was perfect for tea plantations and holiday excursions. I can see the British governor’s wife, suffering from the sort of fainting spells Victorian society expected of a “proper” lady in the heat of Calcutta, one hundred years ago. 

She beseeches her husband, “Oh darling, won’t you take me to Darjeeling? It’s beastly hot here.”

And he looks up from his work and sighs. He’s exhausted because there’s violence in the streets and mutiny among his regiments.

He removes his spectacles and says, “Of course, darling,” and together they board a carriage guarded by the best Ghorka fighters and they trundle northwards, towards the land of tea.

Jaspal pointed out the window towards the tea fields.

“Look,” he said, “They pull up the tea plants and level off the roots and the branches. They make excellent tables here and only here. I am going to buy two and send them back to Delhi.”

We climbed into the mountains and the landscape changed as the road grew more sinuous, the dry lowlands grew greener and rockier and the air began to thin. Jaspal was traveling to Darjeeling to install a wireless network in a new hotel.

I explained to him that a friend was conducting wolf research based at the Darjeeling zoo. I explained to him that we had worked together once upon a time, during what, in retrospect, may have been the disappointingly low pinnacle of my scientific career. His phone rang.

“Hello,” he says, “Yes…no…no! No,” and then he spoke in Hindi for a few moments before saying, “You’ll have to call Roopreet for that…no…You’ll have to move these properties and only Roopreet can do that…I can’t because I’m in Darjeeling...no…no…hello…hello?”

We rounded a corner into a sheer ravine bound on both sides by verdant mountains. The signal to his phone died and he sighed as if to say, “Delhi can’t run without me.”

“Where will you be staying in Darjeeling?” he asked.

“I dunno,” I said, having terribly under planned my trip, “I might just sleep at the zoo.”

Jaspal nodded as if I had said nothing odd.

“I loved animals as a child, and I still do,” he said, “I’ll have to visit the zoo. When I was young, growing up in Assam – not so far from here actually – I had all sorts of pets. My family had dogs and cats, but what I loved most of all were our pet birds. Chickens, ducks, geese, swans, parakeets, songbirds, and even a parrot that could talk.

“In my village there was a bird market where they sold wild chickens and ducks for food and songbirds for pets. My parents would send me to the market to fetch dinner, and I would return with a new songbird to add to our household and so our menagerie grew.”

“One day I went to the market as usual,” Jaspal continued, “To find the usual pheasants and chickens for sale. But one trapper had caught something special. He had brought to market three brown and tan Laggar falcons, tied up like chickens I guess because he didn’t know what else to do with them. Laggar falcons were common once, but you don’t see them that often now and I was excited beyond belief. I loved birds and I still love birds and I had never seen falcons before so I bought all three – it cost me all the money I had – and I ran home.

“My mother was not so happy. ‘A waste of money,’ she said, but my father said, ‘We might as well keep them.’ We got together as much wood and chicken wire and nails as we could find and started building a pen for them to live in.

“It was a fairly large pen, that we built. Two meters tall with places for the falcons to perch and enough space for them to fly around. They were lovely birds, brown and tan with intense eyes, fierce eyes. They were the most beautiful things I have ever bought. I begged my mother and father for more money and went out and bought meat for them, and left it for them in their cage. I left them a bowl of water so that they would not get thirsty.

“But the next morning I checked on them. The meat was still here I left it. They had not eaten. And the water was untouched. They would not eat or drink.”

“So I begged my parents for more money and, well,” Jaspal laughs, “I must have been spoiled rotten because they gave me the money and I skipped school that day. I was too excited by having these Laggar falcons and too worried about their health to think about anything else. I thought, ‘Maybe they won’t eat unless they can hunt,’ and I bought as many live mice as I could afford and released them into the enclosure.

“But the falcons wouldn’t chase after the mice. They just glared at me with their fierce eyes. They still wouldn’t eat or drink. I even offered up some of my songbirds in the hope that they would survive, but they just stared, fiercely. And after a week without eating, they were growing visibly weak.

“This was the hardest thing I ever did. I wanted these falcons so bad, you see. I loved them more than anything in the world and, to this day, they were the most beautiful things I have ever bought,” and Jaspal briefly appeared to be a Sikh Charles Foster Kane as he told his story, “My father said to me, ‘Son, if these birds stay here, they will die in one, maybe two days. But if you release them, they will live.’

“And so I opened the door to the enclosure my father and I had built. The birds wasted no time. They bolted out the door towards the sky and I thought that was the end. Goodbye falcons. But they stayed, for a moment at least. There was a telephone line right above our house and they perched up there and, for the first time since I had bought the falcons, they began to preen. They spent two hours on those phone lines and I watched them the whole time. They straightened their feathers and licked themselves and scratched themselves until they were clean and beautiful again.

“And then, one after another, they took off and disappeared into the blue sky.”

The cab stopped in the middle of Darjeeling, in front of Jaspal Sedhave’s hotel. It was cold, and night was about to fall. Jaspal conversed with the driver in Hindi.

“He will take you to your zoo, so you don’t have to walk,” he said to me, “He’ll ask for extra money. Don’t give him more than one hundred rupees.”

“I can help cover the cost of the cab ride,” I offered out of politeness, knowing full well was Jaspal would say.

He said, “No need. The car is paid. I’m just happy for the company.”

Jaspal went to his hotel and I to my zoo, and neither of us saw the other again.