By: Ganesh Saili
‘Sir, are you two hundred years old?’ teased Rakhee Mayuri, a young officer trainee at one of the foundation courses where I introduced the probationers to the delights of Mussoorie.
‘I do feel like it sometimes!’ I sighed.
Come to think of it, all the things we cherish today will eventually turn brittle and crumble to dust. Our house, our dining table, and even these words that I scribble will cease to exist.
Cogitating at my desk, I watched the sun setting in all its autumnal glory. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw someone walk through the veranda and debouch onto the patio. A stranger, an older man with a camera slung over his shoulder, had arrived.
‘Ah! Another dumb tourist taking a picture!’ I grumbled. But ignoring the fiery orb, instead, he took a picture of the house and it was my turn to look surprised.
‘Your picture is behind you!’ I tried to be helpful. He shook his head saying ‘No! That’s my picture right in front of me!’ With tears streaming down his face, he sobbed: ‘My picture is that house.’
Turned out that his father, Dr Coburn, was a doctor at the BMH (or the British Military Hospital), who had rented the house from the Rani of Sheikhupura.
‘We, my three siblings and I, schooled at Landour View Academy.’ When Independence came, the family packed up and left to go to England.
‘I miss the happy times; we had good times and sad times here, but the happy times predominated.’
Homes like ours cling onto the hillside or straddle a ridge where they sprang up two hundred-odd years ago. They were made from materials that those early pioneers found locally: Khattapani’s lime kilns produced fine lime; gravel was mined locally; rhododendron trees (elsewhere mere shrubs) provided the beams for the mortar roofs; and Company Khud’s water was carried on pack mules. They outlasted men and their matters.
Patting the trunk of a spruce tree growing in the middle of the patio, he reminisces: ‘My father planted this! ‘Twas but a small sapling that he carried from Formosa where he had gone for a medical conference. Seeing it alive makes my day!’
Bidding me goodbye, he walked out of the gate, never to return.
Around us, other trees have not done so well – our last deodar – an eighty-footer – growing on the edge of the road, a reminder of our days of wine and roses, was snuffed out by the road builders’ love for concrete. They poured the mixture liberally around the base and, denied water and air, it asphyxiated.
In the early days, I suspected that a Mr Trim lurked in the backstory of the place. I could not have been more wrong. The house was named after the town of Trim in Ireland’s Trim County.
We had rented a flat from the sons of the then-joint magistrate of Meerut. In the 1960s, town criers (or dug-dugiwalas) went around town announcing: ‘Come one! Come all! Trim Lodge to be sold by public auction!’ I still remember Niadermal, the auctioneer, wrapped in a brand new silk sherwani, churidar, and topped with a rakish cap. He had been hired from Meerut by Mr Pathak and had arrived a week before the day of the auction.
Luckily for us, on the fateful day, Mrs Saroj Pathak threw a fit, saying: ‘An auction? What a stink this will create for our family?’
Ten years later, Satish Chand Pathak wrote to my father asking him if he’d buy the place for the princely sum of twenty-five thousand rupees – a huge sum in those days.
‘Two years! We’ll need two years to pay up!’ My father parried. And he agreed.
To raise funds we sold off almost everything we cherished: a wrought iron stove; a bronze hookah; a coal-fired brass dhobi press; even the carpets lovingly handmade made by the weavers of Chinka village in the Chamoli district. Somehow, ultimately, the house was paid for.
This is where our lives unfolded; this is where it began; and hopefully, with a bit of luck, will wrap up.
Ganesh Saili, born and homegrown 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.