ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE DOON, page 13
Anandi sent me a bagful of juicy kaaphals last year, through a neighbour's son, who worked for a rich contractor in Gurgaon. She had gathered them from the forests on her way to the slopes above our village where she cut grass for a neighbour's cows. For her labours, they fed her a meal every day she worked. It usually consisted of rotis and thechwaani, a tasty dish of crushed moolis and crushed unpeeled potatoes, which I missed. Through every monsoon and autumn, till all the grass dried, died and disappeared for the year, Anandi never went to bed hungry. I had no idea, she had borrowed more money from Uday to pay for Bheem's funeral in Haridwar and for the sraadh, where she fed everyone in the village, as is our custom.
As I lay back on my bunk, an American missionary boarded the train. I knew one when I saw one. They all smelled of newsprint and scented wet wipes that disguised their unbathed and dry cleaned western filthiness. Mr Billington, with a boy aged about two strapped to his chest, held two girls aged between four and six by their wrists, one in each hand, and swung them on board. His pregnant wife sweated as she lifted strollers and bags of diapers and provisions. Tightfisted missionaries, even the Indian ones, simply never, ever, use coolies. Unable to look at the poor pregnant woman struggle with a hefty suitcase that scraped along the passage on one wheel, I went up and helped her. Ruth memsahib had obviously never left a farm in America and now, as she explained to me much later, had come to India only 'because Nathan had been asked by Jesus to save Hindus and Sikhs'.
The exertion was more than I was ready for. I doubled over coughing and turned breathless. I had been let out of prison less than twenty-four hours ago and my insides still hurt very badly. I fell back against my bunk and saw the memsahib staring at me with deep concern. She seemed a kind person. I wiped the edge of my mouth and realised, I was still coughing up blood. Grabbing some paper napkins that were wrapped over their snacks, the memsahib innocently offered to help. Her husband cringed and asked her not to interfere. I had learned a long time ago, that foreigners offered help when it suited them. Expecting it, requesting it or ever taking it for granted, was an inexcusable native presumption. Oriental stupidity.
This wonderful night train to Dehra Dun was really a journey from earth to heaven. It was a slow, noisy and bumpy ride that made hundreds of stops through the night, at stations in jungles where herds of wild elephants roamed, where thugs boarded, craftsmen loaded shipments, saadhus mingled with bahurupias to preach or dupe pilgrims to the kingdom of the gods and army personnel alighted in hide-aways where camouflaged artillery, tanks and field guns poked dangerous heads, out of the tall elephant grass that lined both sides of the railway track.
Nathan gathered his family around him on the bunk and I could tell, he had begun to open the food they had brought on. A packet of chips was passed from hand to hand, followed by some kind of meat sandwiches and a bottle of mineral water. Ruth looked at me and smiled as she chewed on the sandwich. The two girls looked over their Daddy's shoulder at me. The older one grimaced derisively, turned away and disappeared out of sight. The younger one, Alice, with sparkling blue eyes, stared at me as I opened my tiffen box. Inside were four rotis, some bhindi sabzi and two laddoo. I tilted the box in her direction, so she could get a good look at it all. Nathan looked around to see what was so interesting and immediately pulled his younger girl away. They had been taught, it was rude to stare. In truth, they were being taught, never to care.
Inside the rotis, I discovered a small piece of fish, cooked in pungent bengali mustard oil, that Laboni knew I loved. With all her problems, she was still such a caring and loving human being. Pinky would be happy with her. That made me happy, too. Alice was staring at me again from under her father's arm. I gestured to her to come close and tempted her with a laddoo. Quietly, she edged forward, slowly took the sweet from my hand and copying the way I bit mine, gingerly bit into her laddoo. As she popped in the crumbling bundis that were falling from the corners of her mouth, she smiled shyly and I burst out laughing. The father, Nathan, swung around and as soon as he realised what was going on, he grabbed the laddoo from Alice's hand and returned it to me. He then shook her and asked her to stand straight and thank the old man. She did. I smiled and reached out to touch her chin and give her a flying kiss. By then, she had been whisked away and placed on the far side of the bunk, beside her mother, from where we couldn't see one another. As I put away my tiffen box and prepared to go to sleep, I saw Ruth break a bar of chocolate into four and divide it amongst them.
Early in the morning, as the train pulled into Haridwar, I got off to get some tea. It was the best tea you could drink anywhere, in any railway station in India and served in clean cups with a saucer, just like the sahibs drank it. In the east, through the twisted railings and above the smoke rising out of a distant colony, a blazing red sun was rising gloriously. Monkeys were already prancing along the roof of the train, hoping to snatch anything from bananas to garlands of marigold from unwary sleepy pilgrims who got off by the hundreds here, to bathe in the Ganga.
Haridwar was where an engine was added on to help the train climb into the Shivaliks. I had just sipped my tea when I saw Ruth trying to step down at the exact same time as the new engine came into position and hit the last bogie. Ruth was about to fall. I threw my cup down and ran across the platform to grab her before she fell. Nathan, who had seen it all happen from inside, came running to the compartment door and looked angrily at his pregnant wife as if she were to blame for what had happened. To cheer them up, I told them about the excellent tea and offered them some. Nathan took Ruth by the elbow and helped her back on board. Ruth turned at the door and thanked me for saving her and then they disappeared into the darkness of the train.
I went to my berth and pulled out my wallet from my bag. I counted out ten rupees, which is how much the vendor wanted for the cup I had broken. As I walked back out, I saw Nathan looking very disapprovingly at me. He obviously didn't like my touching his wife. There was nothing I could have done to avoid it. She could have hurt herself badly. The train began to pull out. I was beginning to feel a stabbing pain in my side. By the time I had paid for the tea and jumped back on, I was dizzy. I stuck my head out of the door and got sick just as the train entered a tunnel. When we emerged, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the Ganga and the sun-kissed mountains beyond.
I walked slowly back to my seat and lay down. Ruth looked concerned and whispered something to Nathan. They all turned to look at me and then silently looked away. The train rattled on; over parched riverbeds and through forests where black racquet-tailed drongos and white paradise flycatchers were swooping around rain trees, gulmohars and jacarandas. I can remember the sight of blossoms on mango trees. Then, very gently, all my pains began to subside and disappeared. The perfume of ripe mangos, litchis, roses, gardenias came to me in wonder filled wafts and then the mystical scent of lantanas filled the air.
When the train came to a halt in Dehra Dun, Nathan hurried his children past me. Ruth stopped, looked at me, sent the girls ahead with their dolls and whispered to Nathan. He nodded and lifted my arm over my chest and then noticed my open wallet lying on the floor. As he picked it up, there was shouting and someone ordering people to quickly get out of the compartment. Four sturdy policemen, fattened on junk food sold on railway platforms, shoved everyone aside and stood looking at me as if I was about to devour them. Then, one of them pulled my bag from under my head and began rummaging inside it and another tentatively felt inside my pockets and emptied their contents. Ruth had joined the girls. Nathan looked contemptuously at what was happening and walked away.
Uday had just climbed almost two thousand feet from our village with twenty litres of milk in cans tied on his back. The forests of rhododendron trees were aflame with blossoms and the paths beneath the trees were carpeted in red. Long-tailed red-billed magpies hovered like sunbirds drinking dew and nectar from the flowers and tourists flocked to take pictures of the roads and trees. Uday hardly noticed them. He came to sell his milk, seven days a week, year in year out. As he sat at the little tea-stall down the road beside St Paul's church and smoked a biri, he knew his hip and his knees wouldn't be able to take this for many more years. Far below, on the slopes above Kanda gaon, smoke was rising from a forest fire that had begun the previous day. From the looks of it, it was going to be yet another dry summer.
While Negi, the tea-stall owner, was pouring out his daily allotment of milk from the cans, he turned animatedly to Uday and asked him if he had met Ranbir and heard about Trilok in Delhi. Uday, of course, hadn't. When he was told of how his old friend had been caught stealing jewelry and had been put in prison, he turned pale. It couldn't be true. Never. Negi insisted it was. He said that he had heard it from the boy, Ranbir, who worked in Gurgaon, who last year had taken kaaphals from Anandi to Trilok. Ranbir had gone down to the village earlier in the morning. Uday hadn't seen him on the path. He was disturbed and hoped, Anandi wouldn't hear of all this. He told Negi that he would come back the next day with a phone number in Delhi that Negi could call to ascertain the truth about this terrible story.
Back in Dehra Dun, they had tied my feet and hands with ropes and put me on a luggage trolley. It was pushed to the end of the platform, out of sight. Twittering swallows in the sky meant summer was approaching. I had watched Uday climb up to Lal Tibba in Landour with his load of milk. His clothes were stained with weeks of sweat that left contours of rippled salt on his collar, his back and his arms. He wheezed as he neared the top. I thought of the days when we walked together on the hillsides and picked up rhododendrons from the ground to suck out their nectar and chew on the petals. They quenched our thirst. He would have been pleased to know I was coming back.
Police Inspector Kala had been summoned to the railway station. He looked at me and studied the contents of my pockets. The two constables who had been sitting with me and chatting about how Dehra Dun was changing for the worse, ever since it had become the capital of Uttarakhand, explained to Kala that I had no ID. They examined the signature bruises of a police thrashing on my neck, my back, my arms and legs and were worried that they would be held responsible for it. On a lovely spring morning, no one was interested in inviting trouble and complicating the lives of an overworked and underpaid police force's uncomplicated existence. The dried blood around my mouth had flies sitting on it. Kala chased them away with a swish of his baton. I almost blinked. With no claimants and no form of identification to trace the origin or destination of a person, it was always best to leave the dirty work to the city's municipal sweepers who knew their job and performed it skilfully.
Nathan was an honest Christian. When he got home, he looked inside my wallet and found two thousand and seven hundred rupees in it. St Pauls church, in Landour, had just constructed a commemorative monument in stone with a slate plaque on it, on the grass near its front gate. With the chaplain still not back from his Easter break, the secretary of the community had a problem gathering the funds needed to pay the chaps who built it. The cost was only two thousand and five hundred rupees because the stones used had come from the hillside behind the church, just as the rocks had once to build the church a century ago. Nathan gave the church the money. The church was very grateful and thanked the Billingtons at the next Sunday service. Unfortunately, try as much as she did, Ruth was unable to persuade the church's committee to put Trilok's name down in its records, as a donor. It was clear that donations from pagan heathens while welcomed in practice, couldn't be acknowledged in principle, particularly when associated with paying for a monument like the one in question.
What had begun as an ordinary brush fire had now become a raging forest fire and one could hear its crackle and see fireballs of resin fly across the sky, from the plush living rooms of gentry who lived in romantic cottages on the slopes of Landour.
That evening, when Uday got back to his village, he dumped the provisions he had bought in Mussoorie at home and rushed to Anandi's house to tell her that the rumours of Trilok stealing and being put in jail were absolutely false and that Trilok had left Delhi permanently and would be home any day now. Neighbours told Uday that they had seen Anandi climb up the hillside in the morning, as usual, to go and cut grass.
Uday found Anandi's sickle near the cowshed, covered in ash that had been carried by the wind and scattered over all the homes in Kanda.
For two hundred rupees, Nathan had bought four bars of chocolate from the tea-stall outside the church. Each member of the family was given one as they strolled happily down the road to their cottage overlooking the Doon Valley. Ruth may still weep in Nathan's alien fields but Alice, I knew, would discover her wonderland in India. My plastic wallet, empty but for a photograph of Anandi and me, taken when our son was born, was lying in a dustbin marked for recycling.
It was dusk. A lonely deer barked in the woods and an insomniac pygmy owlet began its plaintive hoot. The moon was rising over the snows of Gangotri. Like always, the world slowly and quietly went to sleep. Anandi and I were united, in peace, at last.
Mussoorie House Names
Bill Aitken
he names given by Mussoorie's first British settlers to their bungalows reveal insights into the Raj and help explain why its rule barely lasted in the town for one hundred and thirty years. Hill-stations were created as summer retreats from the enervating heat. Not only individual officers escaped to the cooler mountain heights, but the whole apparatus of government in certain places shifted bag and baggage, to provide evidence (if any, were needed) that the British presence in India was doomed by the climate, to be short term. The British in India were essentially birds passage because of their unwillingness to adapt to the Indian topography and their insular reluctance to absorb, or be absorbed by Indian culture. Instead, like many Indian settlers abroad today, they withdrew within their own communities. In winter, they lived in their 'civil lines' and in summer, moved to their hill-stations to manage the affairs of the East India Company, aloof from the heat, dust and janata of the pains. However, the stations they started from scratch have survived the departure of the Raj and maintained their unique identity with inputs both from Anglo-Saxon and Pahari culture.
Inevitably, nostalgia played a leading role in the naming of their bungalows and British names of places were translocated to the hills of Garhwal, to make the surroundings seem more like home. For example, the first resident of Mussoorie was Captain Young, an Irishman and his house at 'Mullingar' like others to come up in Landour (e.g. 'Trim Lodge', 'Shamrock Cottage') are named after places or things in Ireland, with which the captain had sentimental attachments. Scottish names abound more than English and this may be the fallout of the Biblical law of primogeniture in the former country which made it incumbent on younger sons to find their fortunes overseas. The absence of specific English names of places is surprising and it seems, the English preferred to name their bungalows after sylvan species: there are any amount of houses named after pines, firs, oaks, willows, maple and hazel.
In the 1968 Survey guidemap of Mussoorie and Landour (priced at two rupees and twenty-five paise), nine properties are listed with oak in their names and they run all the way from 'Oakgrove' (the first building on the climb from Rajpur by the original bridle path) to 'Oakville' the eastern-most house on Landour ridge. 'Oakgrove' campus is the school for railway officers' children, while 'Oakville' is the home of the talented Alter family. 'Seven Oaks' (now, demolished to provide staff quarters for Wynberg Allen School) situated at the bottom of Palpitation Hill was the estate of the shikari, Colonel Alfred Powell, while 'Four Oaks' at the top of the hill belonged to the Nabha royal family. Halfway up the hill, standing between these two sprawling bungalows is the appropriately named 'Acorns Cottage' with its original steep tin roof intact.
In the early 1830s, subscriptions were raised to build Christchurch at the centre of the town belonging to the Anglican (Church of England) dispensation. At the town's extremes were founded the two oldest religiously endowed schools, both still going strong and much sought after for their quality education. Waverley Convent follows the Roman Catholic ritual and Woodstock School at the other end of the theological spectrum, supports the Presbyterian faith. A third college, St George's in Barlowganj, continues as a premier Catholic institution because of the dedication of the Irish Brothers, who were indifferent to the fate of the Raj. What is intriguing about the disparate beliefs of 'Waverley' and 'Woodstock', is their both choosing names directly from the works of Sir Walter Scott. At least, a dozen houses in Mussoorie (and especially Landour) continue to boast names from Scott's literary canon, an extraordinary compliment to that Scottish writer's genius and a comment on the Victorian taste for British history, enlivened with romance and adventure.
However, in real life, a romantic adventurer like 'Raja' Wilson of Harsil who owned at least two properties in Mussoorie named after Scott's fiction—Ivanhoe' and 'Rokeby'—was kept at arm's length from polite society. Wilson who made a fortune floating deodar logs down the Bhagirathi from Harsil, married a local lass and to make matters worse, she was the daughter of a temple drummer from Mukhba. However, this humbly born hill woman possessed the character to manage her affairs so well, that she was entrusted with playing hostess in Rajpur to Lady Dufferin, the most snobbish of all the vicereiness. It is interesting to note that today's State Bank of India building in Kwality Chowk is listed by the 1968 Survey map under its old name and designation as the 'Himalayan Bank' of which Raja Wilson was a director. There are over three hundred and thirty named properties listed on the modern survey map. Some of their oblong cast-iron nameplates which were bolted into the gate pillars still exist.
