Word: mccluskieganj
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Dates: during 2002-2002
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...covers her splintered table with a white cloth and pours into what may be the only set of matching cups and saucers for hundreds of kilometers. "It was such a beautiful place," she sighs in her clipped vowels, a gift of her mixed Welsh, Portuguese and Indian blood. "But McCluskieganj just went down and down. Down the drain...
...Kitty, 52, has a few dozen chickens and 4 hectares of mango, tamarind and oily mahua nut trees. On the rare occasions she has $20 to buy boxes of fruit, she sells bananas to passengers on the Calcutta Express at McCluskieganj railway station. It's hard to see how she earns enough to feed her four daughters. But it's almost impossible to imagine that when she was born inside these whitewashed walls, McCluskieganj was a paradise for mixed-race children of the British empire. What Kitty remembers most about the early days is the hope. The settlers' idea...
...There was a real togetherness. And there were lovely shows, picnics and dances. It was quite something." The farmers raised pigs and cattle and made mango jelly. There was a school, two hospitals, a clubhouse and endless rose gardens. Nothing it seemed, not even World War II, could touch McCluskieganj. And then, in 1947, came Indian independence. The community "just couldn't imagine a life without England," says McCluskieganj historian Captain David Cameron, 72. Some of the early pioneers had died and, without the colonial shield to protect them, their children emigrated to England or Australia. Those that stayed discovered...
...today, more than half a century after the end of the empire, something of McCluskieganj survives. In 1998, after an absence of 33 years, Hourigan returned from Australia to the family home with her ailing husband. "My late husband said: 'I was born here and I want to die here,'" she explains. "And somehow I'm just more comfortable here now." The weeds, say the settlers, are yet to choke the ideal of a gently segregationist shelter on which McCluskieganj was built. "This was my mother's house," says Kitty Teixeire. "How can I leave...
...There are even some newcomers, including the Scot-Indian Cameron. After living in Australia, Britain and Africa, he says he's finally found his home. Before arriving in McCluskieganj, his restless blood led him through a rainbow of identities, from Indian army captain to cocktail pianist, author to pilot, headmaster to racehorse breeder. Yet only in McCluskieganj, he says, among his fellow outsiders, is he truly himself. "Because I'm rather swarthy, people in England and Australia mistake me for an African or an Aboriginal," he says. "Nobody knows who you are or what you are. But here, in this...
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