Parimal Bhattacharya was a teacher at the Government College in Darjeeling for a short period of time in the early 1990s, while the violent Gorkhaland agitation was fading away. One of the best pieces of Indian non-fiction in recent years is the memoir No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight, which recounts his time spent in the famous town. Darjeeling gradually won Parimal over as he walked over its meandering footpaths and dusty roads. He looked into the region's history, learning that it was once home to the Lepchas and other tribes; that the British had taken it over in the middle of the nineteenth century so they could remember home; that the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, once a crucial route but now a charming toy train; and that the area was once covered in vast tea gardens with which the British replaced verdant forests to produce the fabled Orange Pekoe. And in the enmeshed lives of the small town's inhabitants, Parimal discovered a richly cosmopolitan society which endured even under threat from cynical politics and haphazard urbanization. Written with empathy, and in shimmering prose, No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight effortlessly merges travel, history, literature, memory, politics, and the pleasures of ennui into an unforgettable portrait of a place and its people.