People and wildlife of Eastern Himalaya_My journey to some remote village_Batasia

[Samrat Sarkar]

The Batasia settlement is situated along the road from Maneybhanjan to Rimbik. As we arrived Mohan`s house we were given a warm welcome and were served veg momo. His only son Nishan aged about 16 years runs a grocery cum stationary shop in their own house and will appear in the higher secondary examination the next year. He studies in a school in Manebhanjan about 14 kilometres away from their house. He is at home now during the recess of the winter vacation. Theirs` is a multi-store shop. From rough exercise book to ear rings and from vegetables to chilled beer- everything is available in their shop. On average the daily turnover is about fifty Rupees! But when its time of blooming of rhododendron(Guras in nepali language) flower during the months of March and April a lot of tourists come here at the Singalila National Park to enjoy the beauty of the Guras and there is a boom in the volume of the daily sales; ten bottles of beer sales easily in a day during that time. But during this bone chilling cold winter I am the only visitor in this place. No other outside people are here nearby. So Nishan is lazily watching WWE in the TV with the shutter of his shop left open and unguarded. Kalpana, the wife of Mohan, is always wearing a smile in her face while single handedly doing almost all the household chores. And Mohaon is a small local Contractor. He also cultivates some cabbages, radish, ghundruk[ A type of hilly grass] etc. in a small plot of land in front his house. He has two cows as well. All these things provides for his small family and the education of his son.

Some time after we finished our lunch Mohan and I went out to move around the village. This Batasia village is a Beat area under Tonglu Range of the Darjeeling Forest Division. As Mohan said that many years ago the earstwhile British administration allowed some villagers to settle here so that they could work in the forest. Still now nobody has been allocated land in their names in the village. There are about forty to forty-five families settled in the village. Most of the people are of the “Tamang” community. There are some others like Mohan who are “Thapa”s. At the laps of the forests the land is ready for agriculture at different steps along the slopes of the hills. Cabbages will be cultivated there. I did not know when in the cloudy afternoon I fell in love with this small hilly village named Batasia.

Batasia forest village