By: Ganesh Saili
There’s nothing cosy about Cosy Nook. You wonder who named the place. It sits on the northern face, below the road, underneath towering deodars, and gets but a kiss of sunshine. This is where you could have met Mrs Roberts née Penn-Anthony.
Our story has its beginnings in Hakman’s Grand Hotel – once with ‘one of the finest ballrooms.’ It was the chosen destination of the rich and famous. After Mr Hakman passed away, his widow ran the place with a whip in her hand and her Great Dane ‘Cleo’ by her side. She took the dawn by surprise, all dressed and ready to receive the fish, packed in ice, delivered from Karachi. Bedtime had to wait until after the last dance finished, past dawn of the next day.
On my desk is a letter from Mrs. Barbara Atkinson, (who like many other Anglo-Indians had headed to Australia in the 1950s.) She remembers being a ‘parlour boarder ’ at Hampton Court and wonders if it was still there. She recalls names like the Taylors and the Blanchettes, and many others, and being dragged screaming to ballet lessons at Hakman’s Grand Hotel.
Those dancing classes were conducted by Mr. Roberts, a handsome Jewish-Austrian, and his wife, Penny. She was white, though her sing-song accent gave her away. When the Great War began, Robert escaped to Paris leaving his home in Salzburg, Austria. There the S.S. Nazis turned it into Eagle’s Nest, where they would do what they could not be seen doing elsewhere.
Mrs. Roberts had a double-barrelled maiden name: Penn-Anthony. She was the niece of McGowan, the then-Principal of Oak Grove, the railway school in Jharipani.
‘To look more fair, she had had her skin bleached. That primitive treatment left her sensitive to the sun,’ author Hugh Gantzer tells me over the phone.
Robert came out to Mussoorie along with a troupe of cabaret artists that he billed as ‘Robert and His Danish Beauties.’
‘We used to call them Robert-and-his-Vanish-beauties!’ chuckled Lillian Skinner of Sikander Hall, when I last saw her. ‘They had lost all their glitter and sparkle somewhere along the way.’
At the end of the Great War, he left Mussoorie for France to gather his share of the war reparations. When the staggering amount was announced, he died of heart failure, some say, at the cashier’s counter. Penny, being his widow, received the proceeds in his stead.
‘In the 1960s she rented our place,’ Deepak Vaidya, living in Barlowganj’s Happy Garden tells me. He crinkles his nose at the distant memory saying: ‘Months after she left, this place still stank of her dogs!’
Avoiding the sun, she slept during the day, stirring out at night, wrapped in a flowing dressing gown, as she paced up and down the old bridge next to the Crown Brewery. Though not for too long; our station’s Lotharios discovered her soon enough. Among them was the owner of a small restaurant, who borrowed a large sum and vanished; another walked away with her baubles. Disgusted, she turned her back forever on the human race and, turning recluse, devoted herself to a medley of dogs of dubious pedigree. Henceforth, she never ventured beyond the garden gate, her only contact being the butcher. He left food at the doorstep, pocketed his cheque pinned to the front door, and hastened away from the cottage.
‘One day Dr. Olson, the missionary doctor, sent a message asking me to help bury Penny,’ author Stephen Alter says. ‘I headed straight to the Landour Cemetery but found no sign of them there. On a hunch, I finally caught up with them below Woodstock School, carrying the coffin to the burial grounds.’ With no family or friends, she was buried like a pauper – without a headstone. Like a dead leaf, brushed aside and forgotten.
Leaving the Christian servants’ burial ground, I scamper up the hill as the sun sets. In the moonlight, the forest’s canopy plays a game of hide and seek. I wonder if Penny – who had once been the toast of Mussoorie, wined and dined by the chatterati – would return just one last time if only to check on her dogs?
Ganesh Saili born and home-grown in the hills belongs to those select few whose words are illustrated by their own pictures. Author of two dozen books; some translated into twenty languages, his work has found recognition worldwide.
