By: Ganesh Saili
Going past the new swimming pool-tiled Clock Tower makes you feel like you are going past a crematorium’s chimney. Our first Clock Tower was built by Ugrasen Verma around 1938-1939. It was pulled down because, afflicted by age, decrepitude had crept in and it was falling apart. In old age, Ugrasen too was no more than an old man saying his prayers, his doors thrown wide open. In my youth, I went past the place twice a day on my way to school. Landour bazaar with its two hundred-odd shops still teems with businessmen of all shapes and sizes: petty dealers in fruit and vegetables, grain merchants, traders and merchants, cloth merchants, antique dealers and wheeler-dealers. In its heyday, it was one of the best-supplied bazaars in India; the larger shops imported directly from European manufacturers and one could get almost anything one wanted.
Opposite the Clock Tower, in Ram Chander & Sons, sat shawl-wrapped Lala Kirorimal with an array of jars where I got bull’s-eye sweets. He was generous to a fault, always giving me more than I could buy.
‘Share them with your friends!’ he’d say, gently patting my head.
The other day, as I walked past the iron gates of the Castle Hill Estate, I noticed a new signboard winking at me: ‘Uttarakhand Geospatial Centre.’ This place began as two houses: Woodcroft and Greenmount, built by an Indian master mariner George Bayden Taylor in the 1830s. Afterwards, Frederick E. Wilson (also known as Rajah Wilson) bought the place. He had to leave in a tearing hurry for the Bhagirathi Valley to attend to his thriving timber business and left his newly acquired estate in the hands of Henry Vansittart, the Superintendent of the Doon, who proceeded to buy it for himself for reportedly ‘a mere song.’
Afterwards, the place was acquired by the government as a summer residence for Maharaja Duleep Singh, called the Dark Prince, who spent two happy teenage summers in 1852-53. In 1908, the Survey of India took it over, owning it for a hundred years and counting. The 182-acre estate had two houses Woodcraft and Greenmount, including Taylor’s Field where local clubs played cricket, football and hockey tournaments. The old ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’ boards have been replaced by the modern: ‘Beware! You are under CCTV surveillance!’ They serve their purpose well by putting off any would-be visitor intruding into the lovely walks inside: a circular road level with the gate wraps itself around the property and there’s another road running parallel to it a little below forming a lower circular Road.
Pic courtesy: Author’s Collection.
One is grateful for minor mercies in that the gates are firmly shut to the riff-raff that passes for tourists visiting the hill station nowadays; they would shatter the peace, scatter empty beer bottles and leave plastic bags behind.
Records have it that Rev Robert Maddock laid the foundation stone of the All Saint’s Church and the boys of the Mussoorie Seminary sang in the choir for the special service. Around the end of the 1950s, a chowkidar looking after the church was so impressed by Yugoslav President Marshal Tito (who was here for a Non-Aligned Summit) that he named his two sons Marshal and Tito.
Landour’s Tito was short, stubby, built like a tank – rough and ready – the Enforcer of Discipline in the nightly Ram Leela performances on Sylverton’s sprawling grounds. Fate intervened, striking him down with a mysterious illness. Rumours floated that his pursuit of a pretty girl from one of our better-known families proved to be his undoing. They arranged with his rivals to lace his midnight snacks with a mercury salt. Mussoorie was a tiny place in those days and a case like this was soon hushed up and forgotten.
When the congregation petered away in 1948, the All Saint’s Church was pulled down. With permission of the Anglican Bishop of Lucknow, the pulpit was dismantled and reassembled in the Hindustani Church, next to the Company School.
Whatever happened to Marshal? He was swallowed up in the vast greyness of India; he left the hills and was never seen again.
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 recognition worldwide.
