By: Ganesh Saili
It had something to do with spirits. To keep the early troopers happy and content, our forerunners built a non-commissioned officers’ mess. It is among the earliest structures that came up in Landour.
We’ve grown up on tales of apparitions who flitted around on cold nights. For instance, there is the tale of an ex- royal who had just got married. The two were sitting around after dinner chatting, when came a knock on the door. Initially they ignored it. Who would be so stupid as to disturb the royal couple’s honeymoon? And remember, it was way past midnight!
Again, the knocking resumed, this time round it was more insistent. Finally, the fellow got up and answered the door. There stood his valet whom he quietly bid good night at the door.
‘Who was that?’ asked his pretty bride.
‘Oh! That was just my personal valet, who had forgotten to wish us good night!’
Pic courtesy: Author.
It was only years later she recalled the knock on the door, and the maharaja told her: ‘Can you imagine the freak-out you would have had if I had told you that my valet had been dead for five years?’
‘Why do they call this place the ghost capital of Raj?’ asks young author Tanul Thakur. He is cataloguing the ghosts of our hill stations from Muree (now in Pakistan) to Kalimpong.
I tell him of my last visit to the cemetery. There was no roll of thunder, crash of cymbals or a sudden rush of horror or fear. It was like a foreboding, a feeling that crept silently, like a breeze amongst the pines. No fear or terror accompanied it, just the murmur that here, death was not the end. It was still around and restless.
Sometimes, the monsoon mist wraps around itself, throwing your shadow among the rolling clouds and creating a Brocken Spectre which can be quite unnerving, but for a photographer, it’s an opportunity to get a few good pictures.
Pic courtesy: Dr Prabhanjan.
For a place that is just a thousand and forty acres our history is so much in your face: facts leap out at you, ancient artifacts still surface in local bazaars, as they did for Ashok Nath. This Sweden based army historian found an old brass-button in a second hand-shop, with Landour Regiment embossed upon it. Even more in your face are the several writers to whom this place is home.
Next to the lychgate of the old Landour Cemetery, you find a crumbling plaque embedded in a moss-covered wall. There is no name on it, at least none that I can see. But the chowkidar insists it’s in memory of Warren Hastings riding-master, who must have passed away while recuperating from a bout of ill-health. He rests in peace, shaded by a cypress tree planted nearby by Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh in 1870.
The two burial grounds here straddle the road that forms a perfect eight along the Upper Chakkar. The road separates the Protestants from the Catholics; scattered about are lichen encrusted headstones.
Locals have long respected this invisible boundary. Is it a line that we have unwittingly crossed? Are we the new-age intruders? How else can one explain the sudden dip in temperature? With goose pimples on our arms, we remember the departed. Is it a gathering of ghosts, or are they are they just keeping an eye on us?
At Char Dukan you will hear stories about a spectre, hooded and caped, who walks across the far end of the bridge built by Rahim Baksh in 1934. Stopping at the edge, he gazes across the valley before plunging into the abyss.
The ghosts of three little children at play in the park? The locals say they always appear on the same day they had drowned in an unfenced pool nearby. This is the only place they had known; where else would they play?
Of course, the locals in these parts are not the superstitious kind, a tad more sensitive, perhaps, but certainly not the scared types.
I remember as a child I had grown up on the dictum: ‘Don’t trouble trouble, until trouble troubles you!’
Ganesh Saili, born and home-grown in the hills, belongs to those select few whose words are illustrated by their pictures. Author of two dozen books, some translated into twenty languages, his work has found renown worldwide.
