By: Ganesh Saili
While in Mussoorie, the Accreditation Committee was also due to visit the Savoy. They had to see for themselves if the hotel deserved a few stars. Anand Jauhar, whom his friends affectionately called Nandu, had been in a flap since the morning. He had been ordering his staff to fix the unfixable.
Lined up, the staff welcomed the group and the Chairperson was escorted to room no. 8 on the first floor by the owner. That room provided a grand view of the mountain ranges spread out against the canvas of a blue sky. It was grander than grand, way beyond the setting of M. M. Kaye’s Far Pavilions. Especially at sunset when the sun’s rays kissed the eternal snow to the north. A magnificent vista, guaranteed to impress any Accreditation Committee.
Or so we all thought!
Pic courtesy: Brig. R.V. Singh (Retd)
Hastening to use the facilities, the Chairperson left her vanity bag on a table next to an open window, and on her return, she found it had gone missing. How could it have vanished? Where could it have gone? Until she spotted the thief – a langur (black-faced monkey), casually rifling through the bag. Offended at finding nothing edible, it tossed the lipstick, eyeshadow and her vanity mirror to the ground below. She let out an ear-shattering screech that echoed through the historic building, shocking even the langur who abandoned the bag and beat a hasty retreat.
Later on, Nandu grumbled: ‘No wonder they didn’t give us any stars!’
‘Don’t worry, Sir, ‘ assured his manager, ‘Our hotel already has as many stars as the guests can see through the roof.’
For Nandu, nothing was impossible – he did it every day. A hotelier, he had shuttled between places far-flung places around the world. Still, he was nervous before catching a flight. He had been among the first passengers aboard the seaplane that took travellers from London to Karachi. That was where his father-in-law, Mr S. N. Singh, lived. He was the former owner of the Sea Palace – the largest hotel in the sub-continent – now the Karachi Hilton.
Pic Courtesy: Author’s Collection
Arrived in his sixties, he chuckled at the memory: ‘I once turned up at Dehradun’s Jolly Grant airport so early that the only other fellow there was sweeping the place!’
His wife, Sheila, teased him: ’You were late. Should have gone the day before!’
Occasionally, I would see him off in the days when the place was still in its infancy, an apology of an airport that handled two flights a day out of a rudimentary shelter. On one such occasion, we saw the passengers deplane from a fourteen-seat Dornier, among whom happened to be a small man with a large moustache.
Nandu quipped: ‘One should ask him: ‘Sir, is that a moustache or have you swallowed a squirrel?’
A youngster standing next to us took umbrage: ’Sir! That’s my father!’ he bristled, much like the moustache.
Rather like the aforementioned langur we too beat a hasty retreat.
Nandu and his mother lived in a little cottage tucked behind the ballroom. With lancet-shaped windows, it led us to believe it had once been the chapel of Maddock’s School. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, when its pupils failed to get decent appointments, Reverend Maddock downed shutters, selling the school to the lawyer Cecil D. Lincoln, who refurbished it over three years and started the Savoy Hotel.
On our first visit there we were surprised to see a life-sized plywood cut-out glaring at us.
‘What a conceited fellow!’ we thought, ‘Imagine having a cut-out of yourself staring at your guests.’
But we had it all wrong.
The Guruji of the Chitrashala, whose art studio along the Mall was just below the Standard Skating Rink, had been commissioned to do this lifelike portrait by Nandu’s mother after the sudden loss of her husband, Captain Rai Bahadur Kirparam, of heart failure in 1960.
Years later, despite a garland of wood shavings, it looked so realistic that it seemed as if it would chat with the guests anytime.
After Nandu sold the hotel, our hill station witnessed its first recorded case of instant combustion, and the cut-out vanished forever. Sometimes bald people too win combs!
Ganesh Saili, author-photographer, has written and illustrated twenty books, some translated worldwide into more than two dozen languages. He belongs to those select few who illustrate their writing.
