Roads to Mussoorie - Ruskin Bond ( PDFDrive ).pdf

By the same author:
Angry River
A Little Night Music
A Long Walk for Bina
Hanuman to the Rescue
Ghost Stories from the Raj
Strange Men, Strange Places
The India I Love
Tales and Legends from India
The Blue Umbrella
Ruskin Bond's Children's Omnibus
The Ruskin Bond Omnibus-I
The Ruskin Bond Omnibus-II
The Ruskin Bond Omnibus-Ill
Rupa Book of Great Animal Stories
The Rupa Book of True Tales of Mystery and Adventure
The Rupa Book of Ruskin Bond's Himalayan Tales
The Rupa Book of Great Suspense Stories
The Rupa Laughter Omnibus
The Rupa Book of Scary Stories
The Rupa Book of Haunted Houses
The Rupa Book of Travellers' Tales
The Rupa Book of Great Crime Stories
The Rupa Book of Nightmare Tales
The Rupa Book of Shikar Stories
The Rupa Book of Love Stories
The Rupa Book of Wicked Stories
The Rupa Book of Heartwarming Stories
The Rupa Book of Thrills and Spills

Roads to Mussoorie
Ruskin Bond

First published in 2005 by
Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd.
7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj
New Delhi 110002
Sales centres:
Allahabad Bengaluru Chennai
Hyderabad Jaipur Kathmandu
Kolkata Mumbai
Copyright © Ruskin Bond 2005
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to
any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
This digital edition published in 2012
e-ISBN:
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From Bangalore to old Vellore
From Puri to Mussoorie
From Chandigarh to every ghar
New Delhi to Siliguri
From Chennai's shores to Mumbai's doors
From Kolkata to Kochi
From north to south and east to west
Those gentle people are the best
Who love their books and spend their leisure
In reading both for worth and pleasure.
To these good readers, young and old,
I pay respects as hands I fold,
And dedicate these words I pen—
And dare to hope they'll pay for them!
R.B.
Composed at Shamli, on my way to Mussoorie

Contents
Introduction: Backward
Breakfast Time
On the Delhi Road
Cold Beer at Chutmalpur
The Kipling Road
At the End of the Road
Sacred Shrines Along the Way
Trees by My Window
'Let's Go to the Pictures!'
Some Hill-Station Ghosts
The Year of the Kissing and Other Good Times
Running for Cover
Party Time in Mussoorie
Forward!

Backward
Instead of a Foreword I'm writing a Backward, because that's the kind of person I've
always been.... Very backward. I write by hand instead of on a computer. I listen to
the radio instead of watching television. I don't know how to operate a cellphone, if
that's what it's still called. Sometimes I read books upside-down, just for the hell of
it. If I have to read a modern novel, I will read the last chapter first; usually that's
enough. Sometimes I walk backwards. And in this book I take a backward look at
people I've known, and interesting and funny things that have happened to me on the
way up to the hills or down from the hills.
In fact, I urge my readers to start this book with the last chapter and then, if they
haven't thrown their hands up in despair, to work their way forwards to the
beginning.
For over forty years I've been living in this rather raffish hill-station, and when
people ask me why, I usually say 'I forgot to go away.'
That's only partly true. I have had good times here, and bad, and the good times
have predominated. There's something to be said for a place if you've been happy
there, and it's nice to be able to record some of the events and people that made for
fun and happy living.
I have written about my writing life and family life in The India I Love and other
books. The stories, anecdotes and reminiscences in this book deal with the lighter
side of life in the hill-station, with the emphasis on my own escapades and
misadventures. Over the years, Mussoorie has changed a little, but not too much. I
have changed too, but not too much. And I think I'm a better person for having spent
half my life up here.
Like Mussoorie, I'm quite accessible. You can find me up at Sisters Bazaar
(walking backwards), or at the Cambridge Book Depot (reading backwards), or
climbing backwards over Ganesh Saili's gate to avoid the attentions of his high-
spirited Labrador. You are unlikely to find me at my residence. I am seldom there. I
have a secret working-place, at a haunted house on the Tehri road, and you can only
find it if you keep driving in reverse. But you must look backwards too, or you
might just go off the edge of the road.
I shall sign off with the upside-down name given to me by the lady who'd had one

gin too many—
'Bunskin Rond'
Ledur (the village behind Landour)

ONE
Breakfast Time
I like a good sausage, I do;
It's a dish for the chosen and few.
Oh, for sausage and mash,
And of mustard a dash
And an egg nicely fried—maybe two?
At breakfast or lunch, or at dinner,
The sausage is always a winner;
If you want a good spread
Go for sausage on bread,
And forget all your vows to be slimmer.
'In Praise of the Sausage'
(Written for Victor and Maya Banerjee,
who excel at making sausage breakfasts)
There is something to be said for breakfast.
If you take an early morning walk down Landour Bazaar, you might be fortunate
enough to see a very large cow standing in the foyer of a hotel, munching on a
succulent cabbage or cauliflower. The owner of the hotel has a soft spot for this
particular cow, and invites it in for breakfast every morning. Having had its fill, the
cow—very well-behaved—backs out of the shop and makes way for paying
customers.
I am not one of them. I prefer to have my breakfast at home—a fried egg, two or
three buttered toasts, a bit of bacon if I'm lucky, otherwise some fish pickle from the
south, followed by a cup of strong coffee—and I'm a happy man and can take the
rest of the day in my stride.
I don't think I have ever written a good story without a good breakfast. There are
of course, writers who do not eat before noon. Both they and their prose have a lean
and hungry look. Dickens was good at describing breakfasts and dinners—

especially Christmas repasts—and many of his most rounded characters were good-
natured people who were fond of their food and drink—Mr Pickwick, the Cheeryble
brothers, Mr Weller senior, Captain Cuttle—as opposed to the half-starved
characters in the works of some other Victorian writers. And remember, Dickens
had an impoverished childhood. So I took it as a compliment when a little girl came
up to me the other day and said, 'Sir, you're Mr Pickwick!'
As a young man, I had a lean and hungry look. After all, I was often hungry.
Now, if I look like Pickwick, I take it as an achievement.
And all those breakfasts had something to do with it.
It's not only cows and early-to-rise writers who enjoy a good breakfast. Last
summer, Colonel Solomon was out taking his pet Labrador for an early morning
walk near Lal Tibba when a leopard sprang out of a thicket, seized the dog and made
off with it down the hillside. The dog did not even have time to yelp. Nor did the
Colonel. Suffering from shock, he left Landour the next day and has yet to return.
Another leopard—this time at the other end of Mussoorie— entered the Savoy
hotel at dawn, and finding nothing in the kitchen except chicken's feathers, moved
on to the billiard-room and there vented its frustration on the cloth of the billiard-
table, clawing it to shreds. The leopard was seen in various parts of the hotel before
it made off in the direction of the Ladies' Block.
Just a hungry leopard in search of a meal. But three days later, Nandu Jauhar, the
owner of the Savoy, found himself short of a lady housekeeper. Had she eloped with
the laundryman, or had she become a good breakfast for the leopard? We do not
know till this day.
English breakfasts, unlike continental breakfasts, are best enjoyed in India where
you don't have to rush off to catch a bus or a train or get to your office in time. You
can linger over your scrambled egg and marmalade on toast. What would breakfast
be without some honey or marmalade? You can have an excellent English breakfast
at the India International Centre, where I have spent many pleasant reflective
mornings... And a super breakfast at the Raj Mahal Hotel in Jaipur. But some hotels
give very inferior breakfasts, and I am afraid that certain Mussoorie establishments
are great offenders, specializing in singed omelettes and burnt toasts.

Many people are under the erroneous impression that the days of the British Raj
were synonymous with huge meals and unlimited food and drink. This may have
been the case in the days of the East India Company, but was far from being so
during the last decade of British rule. Those final years coincided with World War
II, when food-rationing was in force. At my boarding school in Shimla, omelettes
were made from powdered eggs, and the contents of the occasional sausage were
very mysterious—so much so, that we called our sausages 'sweet mysteries of life!'
after a popular Nelson Eddy song.
Things were not much better at home. Just porridge (no eggs!) bread and jam (no

butter!), and tea with ghur instead of refined sugar. The ghur was, of course, much
healthier than sugar.
Breakfasts are better now, at least for those who can afford them. The jam is
better than it used to be. So is the bread. And I can enjoy a fried egg, or even two,
without feeling guilty about it. But good omelettes are still hard to come by. They
shouldn't be made in a hurried or slapdash manner. Some thought has to go into an
omelette. And a little love too. It's like writing a book—done much better with some
feeling!

TWO
On the Delhi Road
Road travel can involve delays and mishaps, but it also provides you with the
freedom to stop where you like and do as you like. I have never found it boring. The
seven-hour drive from Mussoorie to Delhi can become a little tiring towards the
end, but as I do not drive myself, I can sit back and enjoy everything that the journey
has to offer.
I have been to Delhi five times in the last six months— something of a record for
me—and on every occasion I have travelled by road. I like looking at the
countryside, the passing scene, the people along the road, and this is something I
don't see any more from trains; those thick windows of frosted glass effectively cut
me off from the world outside.
On my last trip we had to leave the main highway because of a disturbance near
Meerut. Instead we had to drive through about a dozen villages in the prosperous
sugarcane belt that dominates this area. It was a wonderful contrast, leaving the main
road with its cafes, petrol pumps, factories and management institutes and entering
the rural hinterland where very little had changed in a hundred years. Women
worked in the fields, old men smoked hookahs in their courtyards, and a few
children were playing guli-danda instead of cricket! It brought home to me the
reality of India—urban life and rural life are still poles apart.
These journeys are seldom without incident. I was sipping a coffee at a wayside
restaurant, when a foreign woman walked in, and asked the waiter if they had 'à la
carte' . Roadside stops seldom provide menus, nor do they go in for French, but our
waiter wanted to be helpful, so he led the tourist outside and showed her the way to
the public toilet. As she did not return to the restaurant, I have no idea if she
eventually found à la carte.
My driver on a recent trip assured me that he knew Delhi very well and could get
me to any destination. I told him I'd been booked into a big hotel near the airport,
and gave him the name. Not to worry, he told me, and drove confidently towards
Palam. There he got confused, and after taking several unfamiliar turnings, drove
straight into a large piggery situated behind the airport. We were surrounded by

some fifty or sixty pigs and an equal number of children from the mohalla. One boy
even asked me if I wanted to purchase a pig. I do like a bit of bacon now and then,
but unlike Lord Emsworth I do not have any ambition to breed prize pigs, so I had
to decline. After some arguments over right of way, we were allowed to proceed
and finally made it to the hotel.
Occasionally I have shared a taxi with another passenger, but after one or two
disconcerting experiences I have taken to travelling alone or with a friend.
The last time I shared a taxi with someone, I was pleased to find that my fellow
passenger, a large gentleman with a fierce moustache, had bought one of my books,
which was lying on the seat between us.
I thought I'd be friendly and so, to break the ice, I remarked 'I see you have one
of my books with you,' glancing modestly at the paperback on the seat.
'What do you mean, your book?' he bridled, giving me a dirty look. 'I just bought
this book at the news agency!'
'No, no,' I stammered, 'I don't mean it's mine, I mean it's my book—er, that is, I
happened to write it!'
'Oh, so now you're claiming to be the author!' He looked at me as though I was a
fraud of the worst kind. 'What is your real profession, may I ask?'
'I'm just a typist,' I said, and made no further attempt to make friends.
Indeed, I am very careful about trumpeting my literary or other achievements, as
I am frequently misunderstood.
Recently, at a book reading in New Delhi, a little girl asked me how many books
I'd written.
'Oh, about sixty or seventy,' I said quite truthfully.
At which another child piped up: 'Why can't you be a little modest about it?'
Sometimes you just can't win.
My author's ego received a salutary beating when on one of my earlier trips, I
stopped at a small book-stall and looked around, hoping (like any other author) to
spot one of my books. Finally, I found one, under a pile of books by Deepak
Chopra, Khushwant Singh, William Dalrymple and other luminaries. I slipped it out
from the bottom of the pile and surreptitiously placed it on top.
Unfortunately the bookseller had seen me do this.
He picked up the offending volume and returned it to the bottom of the pile,
saying 'No demand for this book, sir'.
I wasn't going to tell him I was the author. But just to prove him wrong, I bought
the poor neglected thing.
'This is a collector's item,' I told him.
'Ah,' he said, 'At last I meet a collector.'
★

The number of interesting people I meet on the road is matched only by the number
of interesting drivers who have carried me back and forth in their chariots of fire.
The last to do so, the driver of a Qualis, must have had ambitions to be an air
pilot. He used the road as a runway and was constantly on the verge of taking off.
Pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers of smaller vehicles scattered to left and right, often
hurling abuse at my charioteer, who seemed immune to the most colourful
invectives. Trucks did not give way but he simply swerved around them, adopting a
zigzag approach to the task of getting from Delhi to Dehradun in the shortest
possible time.
'There's no hurry,' I told him more than once, but his English was limited and he
told me later that he thought I was saying 'Please hurry!'
Well, he hurried and he harried until at a railway-crossing where we were forced
to stop, an irate scooterist came abreast and threatened to turn the driver over to the
police. A long and heated argument followed, and it appeared that there would soon
be a punch-up, when the crossing-gate suddenly opened and the Qualis flew
forward, leaving the fuming scooterist far behind.
As I do not drive myself, I am normally the ideal person to have in the front seat;
I repose complete confidence in the man behind the wheel. And sitting up front, I see
more of the road and the passing scene.
One of Mussoorie's better drivers is Sardar Manmohan Singh who drives his
own taxi. He is also a keen wildlife enthusiast. It always amazes me how he is able to
drive through the Siwaliks, on a winding hill road, and still be able to keep his eye
open for denizens of the surrounding forest.
'See that cheetal!' he will exclaim, or 'What a fine sambhar!' or 'Just look at that
elephant!'
All this at high speed. And before I've had time to get more than a fleeting
glimpse of one of these creatures, we are well past them.
Manmohan swears that he has seen a tiger crossing the road near the Mohand
Pass, and as he is a person of some integrity, I have to believe him. I think the tiger
appears especially for Manmohan.
Another wildlife enthusiast is my old friend Vishal Ohri, of State Bank fame. On
one occasion he drove me down a forest road between Hardwar and Mohand, and
we did indeed see a number of animals, cheetal and wild boar.
Unlike our car drivers, he was in no hurry to reach our destination and would
stop every now and then, in order to examine the footprints of elephants. He also
pointed out large dollops of fresh elephant dung, proof that wild elephants were in
the vicinity. I did not think his old Fiat would out-run an angry elephant and urged
him to get a move on before nightfall. Vishal then held forth on the benefits of
elephant dung and how it could be used to reinforce mud walls. I assured him that I

would try it out on the walls of my study, which was in danger of falling down.
Vishal was well ahead of his time. Only the other day I read in one of our papers
that elephant dung could be converted into good quality paper. Perhaps they'll use it
to make bank notes. Reserve Bank, please note.
★
Other good drivers who have taken me here and there include Ganesh Saili, who is
even better after a few drinks; Victor Banerjee who is better before drinks; and
young Harpreet who is a fan of Kenny G's saxophone playing. On the road to Delhi
with Harpreet, I had six hours of listening to Kenny G on tape. On my return, two
days later, I had another six hours of Kenny G. Now I go into a frenzy whenever I
hear a saxophone.
My publisher has an experienced old driver who also happens to be quite deaf.
He blares the car horn vigorously and without respite. When I asked him why he
used the horn so much, he replied, 'Well, I can't hear their horns, but I'll make sure
they hear mine!' As good a reason as any.
It is sometimes said that women don't make good drivers, but I beg to differ. Mrs
Biswas was an excellent driver but a dangerous woman to know. Her husband had
been a well-known shikari, and he kept a stuffed panther in the drawing room of his
Delhi farm-house. Mrs Biswas spent the occasional weekend at her summer home in
Landour. I'd been to one or two of her parties, attended mostly by menfolk.
One day, while I was loitering on the road, she drove up and asked me if I'd like
to accompany her down to Dehradun.
'I'll come with you,' I said, 'provided we can have a nice lunch at Kwality.'
So down the hill we glided, and Mrs Biswas did some shopping, and we lunched
at Kwality, and got back into her car and set off again—but in a direction opposite to
Mussoorie and Landour.

'Where are we going?' I asked.
'To Delhi, of course. Aren't you coming with me?'
'I didn't know we were going to Delhi. I don't even have my pyjamas with me.'
'Don't worry,' said Mrs B. 'My husband's pyjamas will fit you.'
'He may not want me to wear his pyjamas,' I protested.
'Oh, don't worry. He's in London just now.'
I persuaded Mrs Biswas to stop at the nearest bus stop, bid her farewell, and took
the bus back to Mussoorie. She may have been a good driver but I had no intention
of ending up stuffed alongside the stuffed panther in the drawing room.

THREE
Cold Beer at Chutmalpur
Just outside the small market town of Chutmalpur (on the way back from Delhi)
one is greeted by a large signboard with just two words on it: Cold Beer. The
signboard is almost as large as the shop from which the cold beer is dispensed; but
after a gruelling five-hour drive from Delhi, in the heat and dust of May, a glass of
chilled beer is welcome—except, of course, to teetotallers who will find other fizzy
ways to satiate their thirst.
Chutmalpur is not the sort of place you'd choose to retire in. But it has its
charms, not the least of which is its Sunday Market, when the varied produce of the
rural interior finds its way on to the dusty pavements, and the air vibrates with noise,
colour and odours. Carpets of red chillies, seasonal fruits, stacks of grain and
vegetables, cheap toys for the children, bangles of lac, wooden artifacts, colourful
underwear, sweets of every description, churan to go with them...
'Lakar hajam, pather hajam!' cries the churan-seller. Translated: Digest wood,
digest stones! That is, if you partake of this particular digestive pill which, when I
tried it, appeared to be one part hing (asafoetida) and one part gunpowder.
Things are seldom what they seem to be. Passing through the small town of
Purkazi, I noticed a sign-board which announced the availability of 'Books'—just
that. Intrigued, I stopped to find out more about this bookshop in the wilderness.
Perhaps I'd find a rare tome to add to my library. Peeping in, I discovered that the
dark interior was stacked from floor to ceiling with exercise books! Apparently the
shop-owner was the supplier for the district.
Rare books can be seen in Roorkee, in the University's old library. Here, not
many years ago, a First Folio Shakespeare turned up and was celebrated in the
Indian Press as a priceless discovery. Perhaps it's still there.
Also in the library is a bust of Sir Proby Cautley, who conceived and built the
Ganga Canal, which starts at Hardwar and passes through Roorkee on its way across
the Doab. Hardly anyone today has heard of Cautley, and yet surely his achievement
outstrips that of many Englishmen in India—soldiers and statesmen who became
famous for doing all the wrong things.

Cautley's Canal
Cautley came to India at the age of seventeen and joined the Bengal Artillery. In
1825, he assisted Captain Robert Smith, the engineer in charge of constructing the
Eastern Yamuna Canal. By 1836 he was Superintendent-General of Canals. From the
start, he worked towards his dream of building a Ganga Canal, and spent six months
walking and riding through the jungles and countryside, taking each level and
measurement himself, sitting up all night to transfer them to his maps. He was
confident that a 500-kilometre canal was feasible. There were many objections and
obstacles to his project, most of them financial, but Cautley persevered and
eventually persuaded the East India Company to back him.
Digging of the canal began in 1839. Cautley had to make his own bricks—
millions of them—his own brick kiln, and his own mortar. A hundred thousand
tonnes of lime went into the mortar, the other main ingredient of which was surkhi,
made by grinding over-burnt bricks to a powder. To reinforce the mortar, ghur,
ground lentils and jute fibres were added to it.
Initially, opposition came from the priests in Hardwar, who felt that the waters of
the holy Ganga would be imprisoned. Cautley pacified them by agreeing to leave a
narrow gap in the dam through which the river water could flow unchecked. He won
over the priests when he inaugurated his project with aarti, and the worship of
Ganesh, God of Good Beginnings. He also undertook the repair of the sacred
bathing ghats along the river. The canal banks were also to have their own ghats
with steps leading down to the water.
The headworks of the Canal are at Hardwar, where the Ganga enters the plains
after completing its majestic journey through the Himalayas. Below Hardwar,
Cautley had to dig new courses for some of the mountain torrents that threatened the
canal. He collected them into four steams and took them over the Canal by means of
four passages. Near Roorkee, the land fell away sharply and here Cautley had to
build an aqueduct, a masonry bridge that carries the Canal for half a kilometre
across the Solani torrent—a unique engineering feat. At Roorkee the Canal is
twenty-five metres higher than the parent river which flows almost parallel to it.
Most of the excavation work on the canal was done mainly by the Oads, a gypsy
tribe who were professional diggers for most of northwest India. They took great
pride in their work. Through extremely poor, Cautley found them a happy and
carefree lot who worked in a very organized manner.
When the Canal was formally opened on the 8th April 1854, its main channel was
348 miles long, its branches 306 and the distributaries over 3,000. Over 767,000
acres in 5,000 villages were irrigated. One of its main branches re-entered the
Ganga at Kanpur; it also had branches to Fatehgarh, Bulandshahr and Aligarh.

Cautley's achievements did not end there. He was also actively involved in Dr
Falconer's fossil expedition in the Siwaliks. He presented to the British Museum an
extensive collection of fossil mammalia—including hippopotamus and crocodile
fossils, evidence that the region was once swampland or an inland sea. Other animal
remains found here included the sabre-toothed tiger; Elephis ganesa, an elephant
with a trunk ten-and-a-half feet long; a three-toed ancestor of the horse; the bones of
a fossil ostrich; and the remains of giant cranes and tortoises. Exciting times,
exciting finds.
Nor did Cautley's interests and activities end in fossil excavation. My copy of
Surgeon General Balfour's Cyclopedia of India (1873) lists a number of fascinating
reports and papers by Cautley. He wrote on a submerged city, twenty feet
underground, near Behut in the Doab; on the coal and lignite in the Himalayas; on
gold washings in the Siwalik Hills, between the Jamuna and Sutlej rivers; on a new
species of snake; on the mastodons of the Siwaliks; on the manufacture of tar; and
on Panchukkis or corn mills.
How did he find time for all this, I wonder. Most of his life was spent in tents,
overseeing the canal work or digging up fossils. He had a house in Mussoorie (one
of the first), but he could not have spent much time in it. It is today part of the Manav
Bharti School, and there is still a plaque in the office stating that Cautley lived there.
Perhaps he wrote some of his reports and expositions during brief sojourns in the
hills. It is said that his wife left him, unable to compete against the rival attractions
of canals and fossils remains.
I wonder, too, if there was any follow up on his reports of the submerged city—
is it still there, waiting to be rediscovered—or his findings on gold washings in the
Siwaliks. Should my royalties ever dry up, I might just wonder off into the Siwaliks,
looking for 'gold in them thar hills'. Meanwhile, whenever I travel by road from
Delhi to Hardwar, and pass over that placid Canal at various places en-route, I think
of the man who spent more than twenty years of his life in executing this
magnificent project, and others equally demanding. And then, his work done,
walking away from it all without thought of fame or fortune.
★
A Jungle Princess
From Roorkee separate roads lead to Hardwar, Saharanpur, Dehradun. And from
the Saharanpur road you can branch off to Paonta Sahib, with its famous gurudwara
glistening above the blue waters of the Yamuna. Still blue up here, but not so blue by
the time it enters Delhi. Industrial affluents and human waste soon muddy the purest
of rivers.

From Paonta you can turn right to Herbertpur, a small township originally settled
by an Anglo-Indian family early in the nineteenth century. As may be inferred by its
name, Herbert was the scion of the family, but I have been unable to discover much
about him. When I was a boy, the Carberry family owned much of the land around
here, but by the time Independence came, only one of the family remained—Doreen,
a sultry, dusky beauty who become known in Dehra as the 'Jungle Princess'. Her
husband had deserted her, but she had a small daughter who grew up on the land.
Doreen's income came from her mango and guava orchards, and she seemed quite
happy living in this isolated rural area near the river. Occasionally she came into
Dehra Dun, a bus ride of a couple of hours, and she would visit my mother, a
childhood friend, and occasionally stay overnight.

On one occasion we went to Doreen's jungle home for a couple of days. I was
just seven or eight years old. I remember Doreen's daughter (about my age)
teaching me to climb trees. I managed the guava tree quite well, but some of the
others were too difficult for me.
How did this jungle queen manage to live by herself in this remote area, where
her house, orchard and fields were bordered by forest on one side and the river on
the other?
Well, she had her servants of course, and they were loyal to her. And she also

possessed several guns, and could handle them very well. I saw her bring down a
couple of pheasants with her twelve-bore spread shot. She had also killed a cattle-
lifting tiger which had been troubling a nearby village, and a marauding leopard
that had taken one of her dogs. So she was quite capable of taking care of herself.
When I last saw her, some twenty-five years ago, she was in her seventies. I believe
she sold her land and went to live elsewhere with her daughter, who by then had a
family of her own.

FOUR
The Kipling Road
Remember the old road,
The steep stony path
That took us up from Rajpur,
Toiling and sweating
And grumbling at the climb,
But enjoying it all the same.
At first the hills were hot and bare,
But then there were trees near Jharipani
And we stopped at the Halfway House
And swallowed lungfuls of diamond-cut air.
Then onwards, upwards, to the town,
Our appetites to repair!
Well, no one uses the old road any more.
Walking is out of fashion now.
And if you have a car to take you
Swiftly up the motor-road
Why bother to toil up a disused path?
You'd have to be an old romantic like me
To want to take that route again.
But I did it last year,
Pausing and plodding and gasping for air—
Both road and I being a little worse for wear!
But I made it to the top and stopped to rest
And looked down to the valley and the silver stream
Winding its way towards the plains.
And the land stretched out before me, and the years fell away,
And I was a boy again,
And the friends of my youth were there beside me, And nothing had changed.

'Remember the Old Road'
As boys we would often trudge up from Rajpur to Mussoorie by the old bridle-
path, the road that used to serve the hill-station in the days before the motor road
was built. Before 1900, the traveller to Mussoorie took a tonga from Saharanpur to
Dehradun, spent the night at a Rajpur hotel, and the following day came up the steep
seven-mile path on horseback, or on foot, or in a dandy (a crude palanquin) held
aloft by two, sometimes four, sweating coolies.
The railway came to Dehradun in 1904, and a few years later the first motor car
made it to Mussoorie, the motor road following the winding contours and hairpin
bends of the old bullock-cart road. Rajpur went out of business; no one stopped
there any more, the hotels became redundant, and the bridle-path was seldom used
except by those of us who thought it would be fun to come up on foot.
For the first two or three miles you walked in the hot sun, along a treeless path. It
was only at Jharipani (at approximately 4,000 ft.) that the oak forests began,
providing shade and shelter. Situated on a spur of its own, was the Railways school,
Oakgrove, still there today, providing a boarding-school education to the children
of Railway personnel. My mother and her sisters came from a Railway family, and
all of them studied at Oakgrove in the 1920's. So did a male cousin, who succumbed
to cerebral malaria during the school term. In spite of the salubrious climate,
mortality was high amongst school children. There were no cures then for typhoid,
cholera, malaria, dysentery and other infectious diseases.
Above Oakgrove was Fairlawn, the palace of the Nepali royal family. There was
a sentry box outside the main gate, but there was never any sentry in it, and on more
than one occasion I took shelter there from the rain. Today it's a series of cottages,
one of which belongs to Outlook's editor, Vinod Mehta, who seeks shelter there
from the heat and dust of Delhi.
From Jharapani we climbed to Barlowganj, where another venerable institution
St George's College, crowns the hilltop. Then on to Bala Hissar, once the home-in-
exile of an Afghan king, and now the grounds of Wynberg-Allen, another school. In
later years I was to live near this school, and it was its then Principal, Rev W Biggs,
who told me that the bridle-path was once known as the Kipling Road.
Why was that, I asked. Had Kipling ever come up that way? Rev Biggs wasn't
sure, but he referred me to Kim, and the chapter in which Kim and the Lama leave
the plains for the hills. It begins thus:
They had crossed the Siwaliks and the half-tropical Doon, left Mussoorie
behind them, and headed north along the narrow hill-roads. Day after day they
struck deeper into the huddled mountains, and day after day Kim watched the

lama return to a man's strength. Among the terraces of the Doon he had leaned
on the boy's shoulder, ready to profit by wayside halts. Under the great ramp
to Mussoorie he drew himself together as an old hunter faces a well
remembered bank, and where he should have sunk exhausted swung his long
draperies about him, drew a deep double-lungful of the diamond air, and
walked as only a hillman can.
This description is accurate enough, but it is not evidence that Kipling actually
came this way, and his geography becomes quite confusing in the subsequent pages
—as Peter Hopkirk discovered when he visited Mussoorie a few years ago,
retracing Kim's journeys for his book Quest for Kim. Hopkirk spent some time with
me in this little room where I am now writing, but we were unable to establish the
exact route that Kim and the Lama took after traversing Mussoorie. Presumably they
had come up the bridle-path. But then? After that, Kipling becomes rather vague.

Mussoorie does not really figure in Rudyard Kipling's prose or poetry. The
Simla Hills were his beat. As a journalist he was a regular visitor to Simla, then the
summer seat of the British Raj.
But last year my Swiss friend, Anilees Goel, brought me proof that Kipling had
indeed visited Mussoorie. Among his unpublished papers and other effects in the
Library of Congress, there exists an album of photographs, which includes two of
the Charleville Hotel, Mussoorie, where he had spent the summer of 1888. On a
photograph of the office he had inscribed these words:

And there were men with a thousand wants
And women with babes galore
But the dear little angels in Heaven know
That Wutzler never swore.
Wutzler was the patient, long-suffering manager of this famous hotel, now the
premises of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration.
A second photograph is inscribed with the caption 'Quarters at the Charleville,
April-July 88,' and carries this verse:
A burning sun in cloudless skies
and April dies,
A dusty Mall—three sunsets splendid
and May is ended,
Grey mud beneath—grey cloud o'erhead
and June is dead.
A little bill in late July
And then we fly.
Pleasant enough, but hardly great verse, and I'm not surprised that Kipling did
not publish these lines.
However, we now know that he came to Mussoorie and spent some time here,
and that he would have come up by the old bridle-path (there was no other way
except by bullock-cart on the long and tortuous cast road), and Rev Biggs and
others were right in calling it the Kipling Road, although officially that was never
its name.
As you climb up from Barlowganj, you pass a number of pretty cottages—May
Cottage, Wakefield, Ralston Manor, Wayside Hall—and these old houses all have
stories to tell, for they have stood mute witness to the comings and goings of all
manner of people.
Take Ralston Manor. It was witness to an impromptu cremation, probably
Mussoorie's first European cremation, in the late 1890's. There is a small chapel in
the grounds of Ralston, and the story goes that a Mr and Mrs Smallman had been
living in the house, and Mr Smallman had expressed a wish to be cremated at his
death. When he died, his widow decided to observe his wishes and had her servants
build a funeral pyre in the garden. The cremation was well underway when someone
rode by and looked in to see what was happening. The unauthorised cremation was
reported to the authorities and Mrs Smallman had to answer some awkward
questions. However, she was let off with a warning (a warning not to cremate any
future husbands?) and later she built the little chapel on the site of the funeral pyre—

in gratitude or as penance, or as a memorial, we are not told. But the chapel is still
there, and this little tale is recorded in Chowkidar (Autumn 1995), the journal of the
British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA).
As we move further up the road, keeping to the right, we come to Wayside Hall
and Wayside Cottage, which have the advantage of an open sunny hillside and views
to the north and east. I lived in the cottage for a couple of years, back in 1966-67, as
a tenant of the Powell sisters who lived in the Hall.
There were three sisters, all in their seventies; they had survived their husbands.
Annie, the eldest, had a son who lived abroad, Martha, the second, did not have
children; Dr Simmonds, the third sister, had various adopted children who came to
see her from time to time. They were God-fearing, religious folk, but not bigots;
never chided me for not going to church. Annie's teas were marvellous; snacks and
savouries in abundance.
They kept a beautiful garden.
'Why go to church?' I said. 'Your garden is a church.'
In spring and summer it was awash with poppies, petunia, phlox, larkspur,
calendula, snapdragons and other English flowers. During the monsoon, the
gladioli took over, while magnificent dahlias reared up from the rich foliage.
During the autumn came zinnias and marigolds and cosmos. And even during the
winter months there would be geraniums and primulae blooming in the verandah.
Honeysuckle climbed the wall outside my window, filling my bedroom with its
heady scent. And wisteria grew over the main gate. There was perfume in the air.
Annie herself smelt of freshly baked bread. Dr Simmonds smelt of Pears' baby
soap. Martha smelt of apples. All good smells, emanating from good people.
Although they lived on their own, without any men on the premises, they never
felt threatened or insecure. Mussoorie was a safe place to live in then, and still is to
a great extent—much safer than towns in the plains, where the crime rate keeps pace
with the population growth.
Annie's son, Gerald, then in his sixties, did come out to see them occasionally. He
had been something of a shikari in his youth—or so he claimed—and told me he
could call up a panther from the valley without any difficulty. To do this, he made a
contraption out of an old packing-case, with a hole bored in the middle, then he
passed a length of thick wire through the hole, and by moving the wire backwards
and forward produced a sound not dissimilar to the sawing, coughing sound made
by a panther during the mating season. (Incidentally, a panther and a leopard are the
same animal.)
Gerry invited me to join him on a steep promontory overlooking a little stream. I
did so with some trepidation. Hunting had never been my forte, and normally I
preferred to go along with Ogden Nash's dictum, 'If you meet a panther, don't
anther!'

However, Gerry's gun looked powerful enough, and I believed him when he told
me he was a crack shot. I have always taken people at their word. One of my failings
I suppose.
Anyway, we positioned ourselves on this ledge, and Gerry started producing
panther noises with his box. His Master's Voice would have been proud of it.
Nothing happened for about twenty minutes, and I was beginning to lose patience
when we were answered by the cough and grunt of what could only have been a
panther. But we couldn't see it! Gerry produced a pair of binoculars and trained
them on some distant object below, which turned out to be a goat. The growling
continued—and then it was just above us! The panther had made a detour and was
now standing on a rock and staring down, no doubt wondering which of us was
making such attractive mating calls.
Gerry swung round, raised his gun and fired. He missed by a couple of feet, and
the panther bounded away, no doubt disgusted with the proceedings.
We returned to Wayside Hall, and revived ourselves with brandy and soda.
'We'll get it next time, old chap,' said Gerry. But although we tried, the panther
did not put in another appearance. Gerry's panther call sounded genuine enough, but
neither he nor I nor his wired box looked anything like a female panther.

FIVE
At the End of the Road
Choose your companions carefully when you are walking in the hills. If you are
accompanied by the wrong person—by which I mean someone who is
temperamentally very different to you—that long hike you've been dreaming of
could well turn into a nightmare.
This has happened to me more than once. The first time, many years ago, when I
accompanied a businessman-friend to the Pindari Glacier in Kumaon. He was in
such a hurry to get back to his executive's desk in Delhi that he set off for the
Glacier as though he had a train to catch, refusing to spend any time admiring the
views, looking for birds or animals, or greeting the local inhabitants. By the time
we had left the last dak bungalow at Phurkia, I was ready to push him over a cliff. He
probably felt the same way about me.
On our way down, we met a party of Delhi University boys who were on the
same trek. They were doing it in a leisurely, good-humoured fashion. They were
very friendly and asked me to join them. On an impulse, I bid farewell to my
previous companion—who was only too glad to dash off downhill to where his car
was parked at Kapkote—while I made a second ascent to the Glacier, this time in
better company.
Unfortunately, my previous companion had been the one with the funds. My new
friends fed me on the way back, and in Naini Tal I pawned my watch so that I could
have enough for the bus ride back to Delhi. Lesson Two: always carry enough
money with you; don't depend on a wealthy friend!
Of course, it's hard to know who will be a 'good companion' until you have
actually hit the road together. Sharing a meal or having a couple of drinks together
is not the same as tramping along on a dusty road with the water bottle down to its
last drop. You can't tell until you have spent a night in the rain, or lost the way in the
mountains, or finished all the food, whether both of you have stout hearts and a
readiness for the unknown.
I like walking alone, but a good companion is well worth finding. He will add to
the experience. 'Give me a companion of my way, be it only to mention how the

shadows lengthen as the sun declines,' wrote Hazlitt.
Pratap was one such companion. He had invited me to spend a fortnight with him
in his village above the Nayar river in Pauri-Garhwal. In those days, there was no
motor-road beyond Lansdowne and one had to walk some thirty miles to get to the
village.
But first, one had to get to Lansdowne. This involved getting into a train at Dehra
Dun, getting out at Luxor (across the Ganga), getting into another train, and then
getting out again at Najibabad and waiting for a bus to take one through the Tarai to
Kotdwara.
Najibabad must have been one of the least inspiring places on earth. Hot, dusty,
apparently lifeless. We spent two hours at the bus-stand, in the company of several
donkeys, also quartered there. We were told that the area had once been the favourite
hunting ground of a notorious dacoit, Sultana Daku, whose fortress overlooked the
barren plain. I could understand him taking up dacoity—what else was there to do in
such a place—and presumed that he looked elsewhere for his loot, for in Nazibabad
there was nothing worth taking. In due course he was betrayed and hanged by the
British, when they should instead have given him an OBE for stirring up the sleepy
countryside.
There was a short branch line from Nazibabad to Kotdwara, but the train wasn't
leaving that day, as the engine driver was unaccountably missing. The bus-driver
seemed to be missing too, but he did eventually turn up, a little worse for some late
night drinking. I could sympathize with him. If in 1940, Nazibabad drove you to
dacoity, in 1960 it drove you to drink.
Kotdwara, a steamy little town in the foothills, was equally depressing. It seemed
to lack any sort of character. Here we changed buses, and moved into higher
regions, and the higher we went, the nicer the surroundings; by the time we reached
Lansdowne, at six thousand feet, we were in good spirits.
The small hill-station was a recruiting centre for the Garhwal Rifles (and still is),
and did not cater to tourists. There were no hotels, just a couple of tea-stalls where a
meal of dal and rice could be obtained. I believe it is much the same forty years on.
Pratap had a friend who was the caretaker of an old, little used church, and he
bedded us down in the vestry. Early next morning we set out on our long walk to
Pratap's village.
I have covered longer distances on foot, but not all in one day. Thirty miles of
trudging up hill and down and up again, most of it along a footpath that traversed
bare hillsides where the hot May sun beat down relentlessly. Here and there we
found a little shade and a freshet of spring water, which kept us going; but we had
neglected to bring food with us apart from a couple of rock-hard buns probably
dating back to colonial times, which we had picked up in Lansdowne. We were lucky
to meet a farmer who gave us some onions and accompanied us part of the way.

Onions for lunch? Nothing better when you're famished.
In the West they say, 'Never talk to strangers.' In the East they say, 'Always talk to
strangers.' It was this stranger who gave us sustenance on the road, just as strangers
had given me company on the way to the Pindar Glacier. On the open road there are
no strangers. You share the same sky, the same mountain, the same sunshine and
shade. On the open road we are all brothers.
The stranger went his way, and we went ours. 'Just a few more bends,' according
to Pratap, always encouraging to the novice plainsman. But I was to be a hillman by
the time we returned to Dehra! Hundreds of 'just a few more bends,' before we
reached the village, and I kept myself going with my off-key rendering of the old
Harry Lauder song—
'Keep right on to the end of the road,
Keep right on to the end.
If your way be long, let your heart be strong,
So keep right on round the bend.'
By the time we'd done the last bend, I had a good idea of how the expression
'going round the bend' had came into existence. A maddened climber, such as I, had
to negotiate one bend too many....
But Pratap was the right sort of companion. He adjusted his pace to suit mine;
never lost patience; kept telling me I was a great walker. We arrived at the village
just as night fell, and there was his mother waiting for us with a tumbler of milk.
Milk! I'd always hated the stuff (and still do) but that day I was grateful for it and
drank two glasses. Fortunately it was cold. There was plenty of milk for me to drink
during my two-week stay in the village, as Pratap's family possessed at least three
productive cows. The milk was supplemented by thick rotis, made from grounded
maize, seasonal vegetables, rice, and a species of lentil peculiar to the area and very
difficult to digest. Health food friends would have approved of this fare, but it did
not agree with me, and I found myself constipated most of the time. Still, better to be
constipated than to be in free flow.
The point I am making is that it is always wise to carry your own food on a long
hike or treks in the hills. Not that I could have done so, as Pratap's guest; he would
have taken it as an insult. By the time I got back to Dehra—after another exhausted
trek, and more complicated bus and train journeys— I felt quite famished and out of
sorts. I bought some eggs and bacon rashers from the grocery store across the road
from Astley Hall, and made myself a scrumptious breakfast. I am not much of a
cook, but I can fry an egg and get the bacon nice and crisp. My needs are simple
really. To each his own!
On another trek, from Mussoorie to Chamba (before the motor-road came into

existence) I put two tins of sardines into my knapsack but forgot to take along a can-
opener. Three days later I was back in Dehra, looking very thin indeed, and with my
sardine tins still intact. That night I ate the contents of both tins.
Reading an account of the same trek undertaken by John Lang about a hundred
years earlier, I was awestruck by his description of the supplies that he and his
friends took with them.
Here he is, writing in Charles Dickens' magazine, Household Words, in the issue
of January 30, 1858:
In front of the club-house our marching establishment had collected, and the
one hundred and fifty coolies were laden with the baggage and stores. There
were tents...camp tables, chairs, beds, bedding, boxes of every kind, dozens of
cases of wine—port, sherry and claret—beer, ducks, fowls, geese, guns,
umbrellas, great coats and the like.
He then goes on to talk of lobsters, oysters and preserved soups.
I doubt if I would have got very far on such fare. I took the same road in October,
1958, a century later; on my own and without provisions except for the afore-
mentioned sardine tins. By dusk I had reached the village of Kaddukhal, where the
local shopkeeper put me up for the might.
I slept on the floor, on a sheepskin infested by fleas. They were all over me as
soon as I lay down, and I found it impossible to sleep. I fled the shop before dawn.
'Don't go out before daylight,' warned my host. 'There are bears around.'
But I would sooner have faced a bear than that onslaught from the denizens of the
sheepskin. And I reached Chamba in time for an early morning cup of tea.
★
Most Himalayan villages lie in the valleys, where there are small streams, some
farmland, and protection from the biting winds that come through the mountain
passes. The houses are usually made of large stones, and have sloping slate roofs so
the heavy monsoon rain can run off easily. During the sunny autumn months, the
roofs are often covered with pumpkins, left there to ripen in the sun.
One October night, when I was sleeping at a friend's house just off the Tehri
road, I was awakened by a rumbling and thumping on the roof. I woke my friend Jai
and asked him what was happening.
'It's only a bear,' he said.
'Is it trying to get in?'
'No. It's after the pumpkins.'
A little later, when we looked out of a window, we saw a black bear making off

through a field, leaving a trail of half-eaten pumpkins.
In winter, when snow covers the higher ranges, the Himalayan bears descend to
lower altitudes in search of food. Sometimes they forage in fields. And because they
are shortsighted and suspicious of anything that moves, they can be dangerous. But,
like most wild animals, they avoid humans as much as possible.
Village folk always advise me to run downhill if chased by a bear. They say
bears find it easier to run uphill than down. I have yet to be chased by a bear, and
will happily skip the experience. But I have seen a few of these mountain bears and
they are always fascinating to watch.
Himalayan bears enjoy corn, pumpkins, plums, and apricots. Once, while I was
sitting in an oak tree on Pari Tibba, hoping to see a pair of pine-martens that lived
nearby, I heard the whining grumble of a bear, and presently a small bear ambled
into the clearing beneath the tree.
He was little more than a cub, and I was not alarmed. I sat very still, waiting to
see what the bear would do.
He put his nose to the ground and sniffed his way along until he came to a large
anthill. Here he began huffing and puffing, blowing rapidly in and out of his nostrils
so that the dust from the anthill flew in all directions. But the anthill had been
deserted, and so, grumbling, the bear made his way up a nearby plum tree. Soon he
was perched high in the branches. It was then that he saw me.
The bear at once scrambled several feet higher up the tree and lay flat on a
branch. Since it wasn't a very big branch, there was a lot of bear showing on either
side. He tucked his head behind another branch. He could no longer see me, so he
apparently was satisfied that he was hidden, although he couldn't help grumbling.
Like all bears, this one was full of curiosity. So, slowly, inch by inch, his black
snout appeared over the edge of the branch. As soon as he saw me, he drew his head
back and hid his face.
He did this several times. I waited until he wasn't looking, then moved some way
down my tree. When the bear looked over and saw that I was missing, he was so
pleased that he stretched right across to another branch and helped himself to a
plum. At that, I couldn't help bursting into laughter.
The startled young bear tumbled out of the tree, dropped through the branches
some fifteen feet, and landed with a thump in a pile of dried leaves. He was unhurt,
but fled from the clearing, grunting and squealing all the way.
Another time, my friend Jai told me that a bear had been active in his cornfield.
We took up a post at night in an old cattle shed, which gave a clear view of the
moonlit field.
A little after midnight, the bear came down to the edge of the field. She seemed to
sense that we had been about. She was hungry, however. So, after standing on her
hind legs and peering around to make sure the field was empty, she came cautiously

out of the forest.
The bear's attention was soon distracted by some Tibetan prayer flags, which had
been strung between two trees. She gave a grunt of disapproval and began to back
away, but the fluttering of the flags was a puzzle that she wanted to solve. So she
stopped and watched them.
Soon the bear advanced to within a few feet of the flags, examining them from
various angles. Then, seeing that they posed no danger, she went right up to the
flags and pulled them down. Grunting with apparent satisfaction, she moved into the
field of corn.

Jai had decided that he didn't want to lose any more of his crop, so he started
shouting. His children woke up and soon came running from the house, banging on
empty kerosene tins.
Deprived of her dinner, the bear made off in a bad temper. She ran downhill at a
good speed, and I was glad that I was not in her way.
Uphill or downhill, an angry bear is best given a very wide path.
★
Sleeping out, under the stars, is a very romantic conception. 'Stones thy pillow, earth
thy bed,' goes an old hymn, but a rolled up towel or shirt will make a more
comfortable pillow. Do not settle down to sleep on sloping ground, as I did once
when I was a Boy Scout during my prep-school days. We had camped at Tara Devi,
on the outskirts of Shimla, and as it was a warm night I decided to sleep outside our
tent. In the middle of the night I began to roll. Once you start rolling on a steep
hillside, you don't stop. Had it not been for a thorny dog-rose bush, which halted my
descent, I might well have rolled over the edge of a precipice.
I had a wonderful night once, sleeping on the sand on the banks of the Ganga
above Rishikesh. It was a balmy night, with just a faint breeze blowing across the
river, and as I lay there looking up at the stars, the lines of a poem by R.L. Stevenson
kept running through my head:
Give to me the life I love,
Let the lave go by me,
Give the jolly heaven above
And the byway nigh me.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river—
There's the life for a man like me,
There's the life for ever.
The following night I tried to repeat the experience, but the jolly heaven above
opened up in the early hours, the rain came pelting down, and I had to run for
shelter to the nearest Ashram. Never take Mother Nature for granted!
The best kind of walk, and this applies to the plains as well as to the hills, is the
one in which you have no particular destination when you set out.
'Where are you off?' asked a friend of me the other day, when he met me on the
road.
'Honestly, I have no idea,' I said, and I was telling the truth.

I did end up in Happy Valley, where I met an old friend whom I hadn't seen for
years. When we were boys, his mother used to tell us stories about the bhoots that
haunted her village near Mathura. We reminisced and then went our different ways. I
took the road to Hathipaon and met a schoolgirl who covered ten miles every day
on her way to and from her school. So there were still people who used their legs,
though out of necessity rather than choice.
Anyway, she gave me a story to write and thus I ended the day with two stories,
one a memoir and the other based on a fresh encounter. And all because I had set out
without a plan. The adventure is not in getting somewhere, it's the on-the-way
experience. It is not the expected; it's the surprise. Not the fulfilment of prophecy,
but the providence of something better than that prophesied.

SIX
Sacred Shrines Along the Way
Nandprayag: Where Rivers Meet
It's a funny thing, but long before I arrive at a place I can usually tell whether I am
going to like it or not.
Thus, while I was still some twenty miles from the town of Pauri, I felt it was not
going to be my sort of place; and sure enough, it wasn't. On the other hand, while
Nandprayag was still out of sight, I knew I was going to like it. And I did.
Perhaps it's something on the wind—emanations of an atmosphere—that are
carried to me well before I arrive at my destination. I can't really explain it, and no
doubt it is silly to make judgements in advance. But it happens and I mention the fact
for what it's worth.
As for Nandprayag, perhaps I'd been there in some previous existence, I felt I
was nearing home as soon as we drove into this cheerful roadside hamlet, some
little way above the Nandakini's confluence with the Alakananda river. A prayag is a
meeting place of two rivers, and as there are many rivers in the Garhwal Himalayas,
all linking up to join either the Ganga or the Jamuna, it follows that there are
numerous prayags, in themselves places of pilgrimage as well as wayside halts
enroute to the higher Hindu shrines at Kedarnath and Badrinath. Nowhere else in the
Himalayas are there so many temples, sacred streams, holy places and holy men.
Some little way above Nandprayag's busy little bazaar, is the tourist rest-house,
perhaps the nicest of the tourist lodges in this region. It has a well-kept garden
surrounded by fruit trees and is a little distance from the general hubbub of the main
road.
Above it is the old pilgrim path, on which you walked. Just a few decades ago, if
you were a pilgrim intent on finding salvation at the abode of the gods, you
travelled on foot all the way from the plains, covering about 200 miles in a couple
of months. In those days people had the time, the faith and the endurance. Illness and
misadventure often dogged their footsteps, but what was a little suffering if at the

end of the day they arrived at the very portals of heaven? Some did not survive to
make the return journey. Today's pilgrims may not be lacking in devotion, but most
of them do expect to come home again.
Along the pilgrim path are several handsome old houses, set among mango trees
and the fronds of the papaya and banana. Higher up the hill the pine forests
commence, but down here it is almost subtropical. Nandprayag is only about 3,000
feet above sea level—a height at which the vegetation is usually quite lush provided
there is protection from the wind.
In one of these double-storeyed houses lives Mr Devki Nandan, scholar and
recluse. He welcomes me into his house and plies me with food till I am close to
bursting. He has a great love for his little corner of Garhwal and proudly shows me
his collection of clippings concerning this area. One of them is from a travelogue
by Sister Nivedita—an Englishwoman, Margaret Noble, who became an interpreter
of Hinduism to the West. Visiting Nandprayag in 1928, she wrote:
Nandprayag is a place that ought to be famous for its beauty and order. For a
mile or two before reaching it we had noticed the superior character of the
agriculture and even some careful gardening of fruits and vegetables. The
peasantry also, suddenly grew handsome, not unlike the Kashmiris. The town
itself is new, rebuilt since the Gohna flood, and its temple stands far out
across the fields on the shore of the Prayag. But in this short time a wonderful
energy has been at work on architectural carvings, and the little place is full
of gemlike beauties. Its temple is dedicated to Naga Takshaka. As the road
crosses the river, I noticed two or three old Pathan tombs, the only traces of
Mohammedanism that we had seen north of Srinagar in Garhwal.
Little has changed since Sister Nivedita's visit, and there is still a small and
thriving Pathan population in Nandprayag. In fact, when I called on Mr Devki
Nandan, he was in the act of sending out Id greetings to his Muslim friends. Some of
the old graves have disappeared in the debris from new road cuttings: an endless
business, this road-building. And as for the beautiful temple described by Sister
Nivedita, I was sad to learn that it had been swept away by a mighty flood in 1970,
when a cloudburst and subsequent landslide on the Alakananda resulted in great
destruction downstream.
Mr Nandan remembers the time when he walked to the small hill-station of Pauri
to join the old Messmore Mission School, where so many famous sons of Garhwal
received their early education. It would take him four days to get to Pauri. Now it is
just four hours by bus. It was only after the Chinese invasion of 1962 that there was
a rush of road-building in the hill districts of northern India. Before that, everyone
walked and thought nothing of it!

Sitting alone that same evening in the little garden of the rest-house, I heard
innumerable birds break into song. I did not see any of them, because the light was
fading and the trees were dark, but there was the rather melancholy call of the hill
dove, the insistent ascending trill of the koel, and much shrieking, whistling and
twittering that I was unable to assign to any particular species.
Now, once again, while I sit on the lawn surrounded by zinnias in full bloom, I
am teased by that feeling of having been here before, on this lush hillside, among
the pomegranates and oleanders. Is it some childhood memory asserting itself? But
as a child I never travelled in these parts.
True, Nandprayag has some affinity with parts of the Doon valley before it was
submerged by a tidal wave of humanity. But in the Doon there is no great river
running past your garden. Here there are two, and they are also part of this feeling
of belonging. Perhaps in some former life I did come this way, or maybe I dreamed
about living here. Who knows? Anyway, mysteries are more interesting than
certainties. Presently the room-boy joins me for a chat on the lawn. He is in fact
running the rest-house in the absence of the manager. A coach-load of pilgrims is
due at any moment but until they arrive the place is empty and only the birds can be
heard. His name is Janakpal and he tells me something about his village on the next
mountain, where a leopard has been carrying off goats and cattle. He doesn't think
much of the conservationists' law protecting leopards: nothing can be done unless
the animal becomes a man-eater!
A shower of rain descends on us, and so do the pilgrims. Janakpal leaves me to
attend to his duties. But I am not left alone for long. A youngster with a cup of tea
appears. He wants me to take him to Mussoorie or Delhi. He is fed up, he says, with
washing dishes here.
'You are better off here,' I tell him sincerely. 'In Mussoorie you will have twice as
many dishes to wash. In Delhi, ten times as many.'
'Yes, but there are cinemas there,' he says, 'and television, and videos.' I am left
without an argument. Birdsong may have charms for me but not for the restless
dish-washer in Nandprayag.
The rain stops and I go for a walk. The pilgrims keep to themselves but the locals
are always ready to talk. I remember a saying (and it may have originated in these
hills), which goes: 'All men are my friends. I have only to meet them.' In these hills,
where life still moves at a leisurely and civilized pace, one is constantly meeting
them.
The Magic of Tungnath
The mountains and valleys of Uttaranchal never fail to spring surprises on the
traveller in search of the picturesque. It is impossible to know every corner of the

Himalaya, which means that there are always new corners to discover; forest or
meadow, mountain stream or wayside shrine.
The temple of Tungnath, at a little over 12,000 feet, is the highest shrine on the
inner Himalayan range. It lies just below the Chandrashila peak. Some way off the
main pilgrim routes, it is less frequented than Kedarnath or Badrinath, although it
forms a part of the Kedar temple establishment. The priest here is a local man, a
Brahmin from the village of Maku; the other Kedar temples have South Indian
priests, a tradition begun by Sankaracharya, the eighth century Hindu reformer and
revivalist.
Tungnath's lonely eminence gives it a magic of its own. To get there (or beyond),
one passes through some of the most delightful temperate forest in the Garhwal
Himalaya. Pilgrim, or trekker, or just plain rambler such as myself, one comes
away a better person, forest-refreshed, and more aware of what the world was really
like before mankind began to strip it bare.
Duiri Tal, a small lake, lies cradled on the hill above Okhimath, at a height of
8,000 feet. It was a favourite spot of one of Garhwal's earliest British
Commissioners, J.H. Batten, whose administration continued for twenty years
(1836-56). He wrote:
The day I reached there, it was snowing and young trees were laid prostrate
under the weight of snow; the lake was frozen over to a depth of about two
inches. There was no human habitation, and the place looked a veritable
wilderness. The next morning when the sun appeared, the Chaukhamba and
many other peaks extending as far as Kedarnath seemed covered with a new
quilt of snow, as if close at hand. The whole scene was so exquisite that one
could not tire of gazing at it for hours. I think a person who has a subdued
settled despair in his mind would all of a sudden feel a kind of bounding and
exalting cheerfulness which will be imparted to his frame by the atmosphere
of Duiri Tal.
This feeling of uplift can be experienced almost anywhere along the Tungnath
range. Duiri Tal is still some way off the beaten track, and anyone wishing to spend
the night there should carry a tent; but further along this range, the road ascends to
Dugalbeta (at about 9,000 feet) where a PWD rest-house, gaily painted, has come up
like some exotic orchid in the midst of a lush meadow topped by excelsia pines and
pencil cedars. Many an official who has stayed here has rhapsodised on the charms
of Dugalbeta; and if you are unofficial (and therefore not entitled to stay in the
bungalow), you can move on to Chopta, lusher still, where there is accommodation
of a sort for pilgrims and other hardy souls. Two or three little tea-shops provide
mattresses and quilts. The Garhwal Mandal is putting up a rest-house. These tourist

rest-houses of Garhwal are a great boon to the traveller; but during the pilgrim
season (May/June) they are filled to overflowing, and if you turn up unexpectedly
you might have to take your pick of tea-shop or 'dharamshala': something of a lucky
dip, since they vary a good deal in comfort and cleanliness.
The trek from Chopta to Tungnath is only three and a half miles, but in that
distance one ascends about 3,000 feet, and the pilgrim may be forgiven for feeling
that at places he is on a perpendicular path. Like a ladder to heaven, I couldn't help
thinking.
In spite of its steepness, my companion, the redoubtable Ganesh Saili, insisted
that we take a shortcut. After clawing our way up tufts of alpine grass, which formed
the rungs of our ladder, we were stuck and had to inch our way down again; so that
the ascent of Tungnath began to resemble a game of Snakes and Ladders.
A tiny guardian-temple dedicated to the god Ganesh spurred us on. Nor was I
really fatigued; for the cold fresh air and the verdant greenery surrounding us was
like an intoxicant. Myriads of wildflowers grow on the open slopes—buttercups,
anemones, wild strawberries, forget-me-not, rock-cress—enough to rival
Bhyundar's 'Valley of Flowers' at this time of the year.
But before reaching these alpine meadows, we climb through rhododendron
forest, and here one finds at least three species of this flower: the red-flowering tree
rhododendron (found throughout the Himalaya between 6,000 feet and 10,000 feet);
a second variety, the almatta, with flowers that are light red or rosy in colour; and
the third chimul or white variety, found at heights ranging from between 10,000 and
13,000 feet. The chimul is a brush-wood, seldom more than twelve feet high and
growing slantingly due to the heavy burden of snow it has to carry for almost six
months in the year.
These brushwood rhododendrons are the last trees we see on our ascent, for as
we approach Tungnath the tree line ends and there is nothing between earth and sky
except grass and rock and tiny flowers. Above us, a couple of crows dive-bomb a
hawk, who does his best to escape their attentions. Crows are the world's great
survivors. They are capable of living at any height and in any climate; as much at
home in the back streets of Delhi as on the heights of Tungnath.
Another survivor up here at any rate, is the pika, a sort of mouse-hare, who
looks like neither mouse nor hare but rather a tiny guinea-pig—small ears, no tail,
grey-brown fur, and chubby feet. They emerge from their holes under the rocks to
forage for grasses on which to feed. Their simple diet and thick fur enable them to
live in extreme cold, and they have been found at 16,000 feet, which is higher than
any other mammal lives. The Garhwalis call this little creature the runda— at any
rate, that's what the temple priest called it, adding that it was not averse to entering
houses and helping itself to grain and other delicacies. So perhaps there's more in it
of mouse than of hare.

These little rundas were with us all the way from Chopta to Tungnath; peering
out from their rocks or scampering about on the hillside, seemingly unconcerned
by our presence. At Tungnath they live beneath the temple flagstones. The priest's
grandchildren were having a game discovering their burrows; the rundas would go
in at one hole and pop out at another— they must have had a system of underground
passages.
When we arrived, clouds had gathered over Tungnath, as they do almost every
afternoon. The temple looked austere in the gathering gloom.
To some, the name 'tung' indicates 'lofty', from the position of the temple on the
highest peak outside the main chain of the Himalaya; others derive it from the word
'tunga', that is 'to be suspended'—an allusion to the form under which the deity is
worshipped here. The form is the Swayambhu Ling. On Shivratri or Night of Shiva,
the true believer may, 'with the eye of faith', see the lingam increase in size; but 'to
the evil-minded no such favour is granted'.
The temple, though not very large, is certainly impressive, mainly because of its
setting and the solid slabs of grey granite from which it is built. The whole place
somehow puts me in mind of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights—bleak, windswept,
open to the skies. And as you look down from the temple at the little half-deserted
hamlet that serves it in summer, the eye is met by grey slate roofs and piles of
stones, with just a few hardy souls in residence—for the majority of pilgrims now
prefer to spend the night down at Chopta.
Even the temple priest, attended by his son and grandsons, complains bitterly of
the cold. To spend every day barefoot on those cold flagstones must indeed be
hardship. I wince after five minutes of it, made worse by stepping into a puddle of
icy water. I shall never make a good pilgrim; no rewards for me, in this world or
the next. But the pandit's feet are literally thick-skinned; and the children seem
oblivious to the cold. Still in October they must be happy to descend to Maku, their
home village on the slopes below Dugalbeta.
It begins to rain as we leave the temple. We pass herds of sheep huddled in a
ruined dharamshala. The crows are still rushing about the grey weeping skies,
although the hawk has very sensibly gone away. A runda sticks his nose out from his
hole, probably to take a look at the weather. There is a clap of thunder and he
disappears, like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. We are halfway down the
Tungnath 'ladder' when it begins to rain quite heavily. And now we pass our first
genuine pilgrims, a group of intrepid Bengalis who are heading straight into the
storm. They are without umbrellas or raincoats, but they are not to be deterred. Oaks
and rhododendrons flash past as we dash down the steep, winding path. Another
short cut, and Ganesh Saili takes a tumble, but is cushioned by moss and buttercups.
My wrist-watch strikes a rock and the glass is shattered. No matter. Time here is of
little or no consequence. Away with time! Is this, I wonder, the 'bounding and

exalting cheerfulness' experienced by Batten and now manifesting itself in me?
The tea-shop beckons. How would one manage in the hills without these wayside
tea-shops? Miniature inns, they provide food, shelter and even lodging to dozens at
a time. We sit on a bench between a Gujar herdsman and a pilgrim who is too
feverish to make the climb to the temple. He accepts my offer of an aspirin to go
with his tea. We tackle some buns—rock-hard, to match our environment—and wash
the pellets down with hot sweet tea.
There is a small shrine here, too, right in front of the tea-shop. It is a slab of rock
roughly shaped like a lingam, and it is daubed with vermilion and strewn with
offerings of wildflowers. The mica in the rock gives it a beautiful sheen.
I suppose Hinduism comes closest to being a nature religion. Rivers, rocks,
trees, plants, animals and birds, all play their part, both in mythology and in
everyday worship. This harmony is most evident in these remote places, where gods
and mountains co-exist. Tungnath, as yet unspoilt by a materialistic society, exerts
its magic on all who come here with open mind and heart.

SEVEN
Trees by My Window
Living at seven thousand feet, I am fortunate to have a big window that opens out
on the forest so that the trees are almost within my reach. If I jumped, I could land
quite neatly in the arms of an oak or horse chestnut. I have never made that leap, but
the big langurs—silver-gray monkeys with long, swishing tails—often spring from
the trees onto my corrugated tin roof, making enough noise to frighten all the birds
away.
Standing on its own outside my window is a walnut tree, and truly this is a tree
for all seasons. In winter the branches are bare, but beautifully smooth and rounded.
In spring each limb produces a bright green spear of new growth, and by
midsummer the entire tree is in leaf. Toward the end of the monsoon the walnuts,
encased in their green jackets, have reached maturity. When the jackets begin to
split, you can see the hard brown shells of the nuts, and inside each shell is the
delicious meat itself.
Every year this tree gives me a basket of walnuts. But last year the nuts were
disappearing one by one, and I was at a loss as to who had been taking them. Could
it have been the milkman's small son? He was an inveterate tree climber, but he was
usually to be found on the oak trees, gathering fodder for his herd. He admitted that
his cows had enjoyed my dahlias, which they had eaten the previous week, but he
stoutly denied having fed them walnuts.
It wasn't the woodpecker either. He was out there every day, knocking furiously
against the bark of the tree, trying to pry an insect out of a narrow crack, but he was
strictly non-vegetarian. As for the langurs, they ate my geraniums but did not care
for the walnuts.
The nuts seemed to disappear early in the morning while I was still in bed, so one
day I surprised everyone, including myself, by getting up before sunrise. I was just
in time to catch the culprit climbing out of the walnut tree. She was an old woman
who sometimes came to cut grass on the hillside. Her face was as wrinkled as the
walnuts she so fancied, but her arms and legs were very sturdy.
'And how many walnuts did you gather today, Grandmother?' I asked.

'Just two,' she said with a giggle, offering them to me on her open palm. I
accepted one, and thus encouraged, she climbed higher into the tree and helped
herself to the remaining nuts. It was impossible for me to object. I was taken with
admiration for her agility. She must have been twice my age, but I knew I could
never get up that tree. To the victor, the spoils!
Unlike the prized walnuts, the horse chestnuts are inedible. Even the rhesus
monkeys throw them away in disgust. But the tree itself is a friendly one, especially
in summer when it is in full leaf. The lightest breeze makes the leaves break into
conversation, and their rustle is a cheerful sound. The spring flowers of the horse
chestnut look like candelabra, and when the blossoms fall, they carpet the hillside
with their pale pink petals.
Another of my favorites is the deodar. It stands erect and dignified and does not
bend with the wind. In spring the new leaves, or needles, are a tender green, while
during the monsoon the tiny young cones spread like blossoms in the dark green
folds of the branches. The deodar enjoys the company of its own kind: where one
deodar grows, there will be others. A walk in a deodar forest is awe-inspiring—
surrounded on all sides by these great sentinels of the mountains, you feel as though
the trees themselves are on the march.
I walk among the trees outside my window often, acknowledging their presence
with a touch of my hand against their trunks. The oak has been there the longest, and
the wind has bent its upper branches and twisted a few so that it looks shaggy and
undistinguished. But it is a good tree for the privacy of birds. Sometimes it seems
completely uninhabited until there is a whirring sound, as of a helicopter
approaching, and a party of long-tailed blue magpies flies across the forest glade.

Most of the pines near my home are on the next hillside. But there is a small
Himalayan blue a little way below the cottage, and sometimes I sit beneath it to listen
to the wind playing softly in its branches.
When I open the window at night, there is almost always something to listen to:
the mellow whistle of a pygmy owlet, or the sharp cry of a barking deer.
Sometimes, if I am lucky, I will see the moon coming up over the next mountain,
and two distant deodars in perfect silhouette.
Some night sounds outside my window remain strange and mysterious. Perhaps
they are the sounds of the trees themselves, stretching their limbs in the dark,

shifting a little, flexing their fingers, whispering to one another. These great trees of
the mountains, I feel they know me well, as I watch them and listen to their secrets,
happy to rest my head beneath their outstretched arms.

EIGHT
'Let's Go to the Pictures!'
My love affair with the cinema began when I was five and ended when I was about
fifty. Not because I wanted it to, but because all my favourite cinema halls were
closing down— being turned into shopping malls or garages or just disappearing
altogether.
There was something magical about sitting in a darkened cinema hall, the
audience silent, completely focused on the drama unfolding on the big screen. You
could escape to a different world—run away to Dover with David Copperfield, sail
away to a treasure island with Long John Silver, dance the light fantastic with Fred
Astaire or Gene Kelly, sing with Saigal or Deanna Durbin or Nelson Eddy, fall in
love with Madhubala or Elizabeth Taylor. And until the lights came on at the end of
the show you were in their world, far removed from the troubles of one's own
childhood or the struggles of early manhood.
Watching films on TV cannot be the same. People come and go, the power comes
and goes, other viewers keep switching the channels, food is continually being
served or consumed, family squabbles are ever present, and there is no escape from
those dreaded commercials that are repeated every ten or fifteen minutes or even
between overs if you happen to be watching cricket.
No longer do we hear that evocative suggestion: 'Let's go to the pictures!'
Living in Mussoorie where there are no longer any functioning cinemas, the
invitation is heard no more. I'm afraid there isn't half as much excitement in the
words 'Let's put on the TV!'
For one thing, going to the pictures meant going out—on foot, or on a bicycle,
or in the family car. When I lived on the outskirts of Mussoorie it took me almost an
hour to climb the hill into town to see a film at one of our tiny halls—but walk I did,
in hot sun or drenching rain or icy wind, because going to the pictures was an event
in itself, a break from more mundane activities, quite often a social occasion. You
would meet friends from other parts of the town, and after the show you would join
them in a cafe for a cup of tea and the latest gossip. A stroll along the Mall and a
visit to the local bookshop would bring the evening to a satisfying end. A long walk

home under the stars, a drink before dinner, something to listen to on the radio ...
'And then to bed,' as Mr Pepys would have said.
Not that everything went smoothly in our small-town cinemas. In Shimla,
Mussoorie and other hill-stations, the roofs were of corrugated tin sheets, and when
there was heavy rain or a hailstorm it would be impossible to hear the sound-track.
You had then to imagine that you were back in the silent film era.
Mussoorie's oldest cinema, the Picture Palace, did in fact open early in the silent
era. This was in 1912, the year electricity came to the town. Later, its basement floor
was also turned into a cinema, the Jubilee, which probably made it India's first
multiplex hall. Sadly, both closed down about five years ago, along with the Rialto,
the Majestic and the Capitol (below Halman's Hotel).
In Shimla, we had the Ritz, the Regal and the Rivoli. This was when I was a
schoolboy at Bishop Cotton's. How we used to look forward to our summer and
autumn breaks. We would be allowed into town during these holidays, and we lost
no time in tramping up to the Ridge to take in the latest films. Sometimes we'd
arrive wet or perspiring, but the changeable weather did not prevent us from
enjoying the film. One-and-a-half hours escape from the routine and discipline of
boarding school life. Fast foods had yet to be invented, but roasted peanuts or
bhuttas would keep us going. They were cheap too. The cinema ticket was just over
a rupee. If you had five rupees in your pocket you could enjoy a pleasant few hours
in the town.
It was during the winter holidays—three months of time on my hands—that I
really caught up with the films of the day.
New Delhi, the winter of 1943. World War II was still in progress. The halls were
flooded with British and American movies. My father would return from Air
Headquarters, where he'd been working on cyphers all day. 'Let's go to the pictures'
he'd say, and we'd be off to the Regal or Rivoli or Odeon or Plaza, only a short walk
from our rooms on Atul Grove Road.
Comedies were my favourites. Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, George
Formby, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers.... And sometimes we'd venture further
afield, to the old Ritz at Kashmere Gate, to see Sabu in The Thief of Baghdad or
Cobra Woman. These Arabian Nights-type entertainments were popular in the old
city.
The Statesman, the premier newspaper of that era, ran ads for all the films in
town, and I'd cut them out and stick them in a scrapbook. I could rattle off the cast of
all the pictures I'd seen, and today, sixty years later, I can still name all the actors
(and sometimes the director) of almost every 1940's film.
My. father died when I was ten and I went to live with my mother and stepfather in
Dehra Dun. Dehra too, was well served with cinemas, but I was a lonely picturegoer.
I had no friends or companions in those years, and I would trudge off on my own to

the Orient or Odeon or Hollywood, to indulge in a few hours of escapism. Books
were there, of course, providing another and better form of escape, but books had to
be read in the home, and sometimes I wanted to get away from the house and pursue
a solitary other-life in the anonymous privacy of a darkened cinema hall.
It has gone now, the little Odeon cinema opposite the old Parade Ground in
Dehra. Many of my age, and younger, will remember it with affection, for it was
probably the most popular meeting place for English cinema buffs in the '40s and
'50s. You could get a good idea of the popularity of a film by looking at the number
of bicycles ranged outside. Dehra was a bicycle town. The scooter hadn't been
invented, and cars were few. I belonged to a minority of walkers. I have walked all
over the towns and cities I have lived in—Dehradun, New and Old Delhi, London, St
Helier (in Jersey), and our hill-stations. Those walks often ended at the cinema!
The Odeon was a twenty-minute walk from the Old Survey Road, where we lived
at the time, and after the evening show I would walk home across the deserted
parade ground, the starry night adding to my dreams of a starry world, where tap-
dancers, singing cowboys, swashbuckling swordsmen, and glamorous women in
sarongs reigned supreme in the firmament. I wasn't just a daydreamer; I was a star-
dreamer.
During the intervals (five-minute breaks between the shorts and the main
feature), the projectionist or his assistant would play a couple of gramophone
records for the benefit of the audience. Unfortunately the management had only two
or three records, and the audience would grow restless listening to the same tunes at
every show. I must have been compelled to listed to Don't Fence Me In about a
hundred times, and felt thoroughly fenced in.
At home I had a good collection of gramophone records, passed on to me by
relatives and neighbours who were leaving India around the time of Independence. I
decided it would be a good idea to give some of them to the cinema's management
so that we could be provided with a little more variety during the intervals. I made a
selection of about twenty records— mostly dance music of the period—and
presented them to the manager, Mr Suri.
Mr Suri was delighted. And to show me his gratitude, he presented me with a
Free Pass which permitted me to see all the pictures I liked without having to buy a
ticket! Any day, any show, for as long as Mr Suri was the manager! Could any
ardent picturegoer have asked for more?
This unexpected bonanza lasted for almost two years with the result that during
my school holidays I saw a film every second day. Two days was the average run
for most films. Except Gone With the Wind, which ran for a week, to my great
chagrin. I found it so boring that I left in the middle.
Usually I did enjoy films based on famous or familiar books. Dickens was a
natural for the screen. David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations,

Nicholas Nickleby, A Tale of Two Cities, Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol
(Scrooge) all made successful films, true to the originals. Daphne du Maurier's
novels also transferred well to the screen. As did Somerset Maugham's works: Of
Human Bondage, The Razor's Edge, The Letter, Rain and several others.
Occasionally I brought the management a change of records. Mr Suri was not a
very communicative man, but I think he liked me (he knew something about my
circumstances) and with a smile and a wave of the hand he would indicate that the
freedom of the hall was mine.

Eventually, school finished, I was packed off to England, where my picture-
going days went into a slight decline. No Free Passes any more. But on Jersey
island, where I lived and worked for a year, I found an out-of-the-way cinema which
specialised in showing old comedies, and here I caught up with many British film
comedians such as Tommy Trinder, Sidney Howard, Max Miller, Will Hay, Old
Mother Riley (a man in reality) and Grade Fields. These artistes had been but names
to me, as their films had never come to India. I was thrilled to be able to discover
and enjoy their considerable talents. You would be hard put to find their films today;
they have seldom been revived.
In London for two years I had an office job and most of my spare time was spent
in writing (and rewriting) my first novel. All the same, I took to the streets and
discovered the Everyman cinema in Hampstead, which showed old classics,
including the films of Jean Renoir and Orson Welles. And the Academy in Leicester
Square, which showed the best films from the continent. I also discovered a couple
of seedy litte cinemas in the East End, which appropriately showed the early
gangster films of James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.
I also saw the first Indian film to get a regular screening in London. It was called
Aan, and was the usual extravagant mix of music and melodrama. But it ran for two
or three weeks. Homesick Indians (which included me) flocked to see it. One of its
stars was Nadira, who specialised in playing the scheming sultry villainess. A few
years ago she came out of retirement to take the part of Miss Mackenzie in a TV
serial based on some of my short stories set in Mussoorie. A sympathetic role for a
change. And she played it to perfection.
★
It was four years before I saw Dehra again. Mr Suri had gone elsewhere. The little
cinema had closed down and was about to be demolished, to make way for a hotel
and a block of shops.
We must move on, of course. There's no point in hankering after distant
pleasures and lost picture palaces. But there's no harm in indulging in a little
nostalgia. What is nostalgia, after all, but an attempt to preserve that which was good
in the past?
And last year I was reminded of that golden era of the silver screen. I was
rummaging around in a kabari shop in one of Dehradun's bazaars where I came
across a pile of old 78 rpm records, all looking a little the worse for wear. And on a
couple of them I found my name scratched on the labels. Pennies from Heaven was
the title of one of the songs. It had certainly saved me a few rupees. That and the
goodwill of Mr Suri, the Odeon's manager, all those years ago.
I bought the records. Can't play them now. No wind-up gramophone! But I am a

sentimental fellow and I keep them among my souvenirs as a reminder of the days
when I walked home alone across the silent, moonlit parade ground, after the
evening show was over.

NINE
Some Hill-Station Ghosts
Shimla has its phantom rickshaw and Lansdowne its headless horseman. Mussoorie
has its woman in white. Late at night, she can be seen sitting on the parapet wall on
the winding road up to the hill-station. Don't stop to offer her a lift. She will fix you
with her evil eye and ruin your holiday.
The Mussoorie taxi drivers and other locals call her Bhoot-Aunty. Everyone has
seen her at some time or the other. To give her a lift is to court disaster. Many
accidents have been attributed to her baleful presence. And when people pick
themselves up from the road (or are picked up by concerned citizens), Bhoot-Aunty
is nowhere to be seen, although survivors swear that she was in the car with them.
Ganesh Saili, Abha and I were coming back from Dehra Dun late one night when
we saw this woman in white sitting on the parapet by the side of the road. As our
headlights fell on her, she turned her face away, Ganesh, being a thorough
gentleman, slowed down and offered her a lift. She turned towards us then, and
smiled a wicked smile. She seemed quite attractive except that her canines protruded
slightly in vampire fashion.
'Don't stop!' screamed Abha. 'Don't even look at her! It's Bhoot-Aunty!'
Ganesh pressed down on the accelerator and sped past her. Next day we heard
that a tourist's car had gone off the road and the occupants had been severely
injured. The accident took place shortly after they had stopped to pick up a woman
in white who had wanted a lift. But she was not among the injured.
★
Miss Ripley-Bean, an old English lady who was my neighbour when I lived near
Wynberg-Allen school, told me that her family was haunted by a malignant phantom
head that always appeared before the death of one of her relatives.
She said her brother saw this apparition the night before her mother died, and
both she and her sister saw it before the death of their father. The sister slept in the
same room. They were both awakened one night by a curious noise in the cupboard

facing their beds. One of them began getting out of bed to see if their cat was in the
room, when the cupboard door suddenly opened and a luminous head appeared. It
was covered with matted hair and appeared to be in an advanced stage of
decomposition. Its fleshless mouth grinned at the terrified sisters. And then as they
crossed themselves, it vanished.
The next day they learned that their father, who was in Lucknow, had died
suddenly, at about the time that they had seen the death's head.
★

Everyone likes to hear stories about haunted houses; even sceptics will listen to a
ghost story, while casting doubts on its veracity.
Rudyard Kipling wrote a number of memorable ghost stories set in India
—Imray's Return, The Phantom Rickshaw, The Mark of the Beast, The End of the
Passage—his favorite milieu being the haunted dak bungalow. But it was only after
his return to England that he found himself actually having to live in a haunted
house. He writes about it in his autobiography, Something of Myself:
The spring of 96 saw us in Torquay, where we found a house for our heads
that seemed almost too good to be true. It was large and bright, with big
rooms each and all open to the sun, the ground embellished with great trees
and the warm land dipping southerly to the clean sea under the Mary Church
cliffs. It had been inhabited for thirty years by three old maids.
The revelation came in the shape of a growing depression which
enveloped us both—a gathering blackness of mind and sorrow of the heart,
that each put down to the new, soft climate and, without telling the other,
fought against for long weeks. It was the Feng-shui—the Spirit of the house
itself—that darkened the sunshine and fell upon us every time we entered,
checking the very words on our lips.... We paid forfeit and fled. More than
thirty years later we returned down the steep little road to that house, and
found, quite unchanged, the same brooding spirit of deep despondency within
the rooms.
Again, thirty years later, he returned to this house in his short story, 'The House
Surgeon,' in which two sisters cannot come to terms with the suicide of a third
sister, and brood upon the tragedy day and night until their thoughts saturate every
room of the house.
Many years ago, I had a similar experience in a house in Dehra Dun, in which an
elderly English couple had died from neglect and starvation. In 1947, when many
European residents were leaving the town and emigrating to the UK, this poverty-
stricken old couple, sick and friendless, had been forgotten. Too ill to go out for
food or medicine, they had died in their beds, where they were discovered several
days later by the landlord's munshi.
The house stood empty for several years. No one wanted to live in it. As a young
man, I would sometimes roam about the neglected grounds or explore the cold, bare
rooms, now stripped of furniture, doorless and windowless, and I would be assailed
by a feeling of deep gloom and depression. Of course I knew what had happened
there, and that may have contributed to the effect the place had on me. But when I
took a friend, Jai Shankar, through the house, he told me he felt quite sick with

apprehension and fear. 'Ruskin, why have you brought me to this awful house?' he
said. 'I'm sure it's haunted.' And only then did I tell him about the tragedy that had
taken place within its walls.
Today, the house is used as a government office. No one lives in it at night except
for a Gurkha chowkidar, a man of strong nerves who sleeps in the back verandah.
The atmosphere of the place doesn't bother him, but he does hear strange sounds in
the night. 'Like someone crawling about on the floor above,' he tells me. 'And
someone groaning. These old houses are noisy places...'
★
A morgue is not a noisy place, as a rule. And for a morgue attendant, corpses are
silent companions.
Old Mr Jacob, who lives just behind the cottage, was once a morgue attendant for
the local mission hospital. In those days it was situated at Sunny Bank, about a
hundred metres up the hill from here. One of the outhouses served as the morgue:
Mr Jacob begs me not to identify it.
He tells me of a terrifying experience he went through when he was doing night
duty at the morgue..
'The body of a young man was found floating in the Aglar river, behind Landour,
and was brought to the morgue while I was on night duty. It was placed on the table
and covered with a sheet.
'I was quite accustomed to seeing corpses of various kinds and did not mind
sharing the same room with them, even after dark. On this occasion a friend had
promised to join me, and to pass the time I strolled around the room, whistling a
popular tune. I think it was "Danny Boy," if I remember right. My friend was a long
time coming, and I soon got tired of whistling and sat down on the bench beside the
table. The night was very still, and I began to feel uneasy. My thoughts went to the
boy who had drowned and I wondered what he had been like when he was alive.
Dead bodies are so impersonal...
'The morgue had no electricity, just a kerosene lamp, and after some time I
noticed that the flame was very low. As I was about to turn it up, it suddenly went
out. I lit the lamp again, after extending the wick. I returned to the bench, but I had
not been sitting there for long when the lamp again went out, and something moved
very softly and quietly past me.
'I felt quite sick and faint, and could hear my heart pounding away. The strength
had gone out of my legs, otherwise I would have fled from the room. I felt quite
weak and helpless, unable even to call out.....
'Presently the footsteps came nearer and nearer. Something cold and icy touched
one of my hands and felt its way up towards my neck and throat. It was behind me,

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