it is as comfortable as I can expect but even so, I am beginning to feel my whole person change under this strange oriental vibration. It is neither a spiritual nor sensual vibration but a strange unnamed mixture of both, a new wave that my whole body has got to become accustomed to. I wonder if this India could have effected them both for I am trying hard not to. In India there is a blithe acceptance of sorrow and suffering, as if anything other than pain would be a bonus. I realise I am not expressing this very well. It has an almost surrealist, existential quality about it, but something very unmasked and unsaid. Perhaps something of this feeling penetrates the English community here. After all I am only passing through and the waves that I dimly feel will vanish with my passing on.

Again, I am a nomad in these parts, entertaining the expectation of escape.

The war is nearly up - rumour has it at least that it will be up before the month is over. There is a sense in Calcutta that even I can feel that already India is shifting to a new solution, or a new problem – a change of atmosphere, like a change of season. I think the English will not last long here.

This account is the account of my involvement with this Darjeeling group. It’s changed my life. It has to be marked somehow, no?

My name by the way is Malcolm Hepworth. As if names are that important and can make a difference in a life or a story. Names are only names after all, are they not - or are they?

*

And now for Aunty – my very own Aunty - did I list her in my list of interviewees?

Probably not, because she came up very slim in the dossier, and though in fact she was indeed included (without photograph) and I had made a mental note of her name and thin profile, she was not top list like the official beefs. The fact was (I am justifying here in retrospect, bear with me) the fact was this woman in the dossier didn’t even have a proper name, what importance could I accord her, a woman without a name…