CIRCLES & SQUIGGLES

By: Ganesh Saili      

Rahul Kohli came to see me one afternoon. It was a day when the hills were half-hidden in a drifting mist, and the rain threatened to pour.

‘I’ve brought something you might like,’ he said, unwrapping a bundle of old papers as carefully as though they were leaves pressed between the pages of time.

I admit, they did not look like much at first.

A few faint lines, wandering uncertainly across brittle sheets. Some circles, some squiggles, suggested ridges and slopes. The sort of drawings one might dismiss at a glance and set aside.

But the hills have a way of revealing themselves slowly.

We bent over the papers together. Outside, the wind stirred the trees, and now and then a ray of sunlight slipped through, as if curious to see what we had found. And then, quite suddenly, the lines began to speak.

“There,” Rahul said softly.

I saw it too.

Just twenty-six odd squiggles converging at Fisher’s Terrace, or atop today’s Taylor’s Flat.

Slowly, familiar names began to surface. At the base of Bhadraj lay Garhdudhli, though the snow-capped mountains had shifted eastwards.

 Almost two hundred years ago, an amateur surveyor had sat down, pencil in his cold hands, and made these rudimentary drawings. Time had yellowed the papeRahul had been rummaging through an antique shop in England, and stumbled upon them; he instinctively knew it had something to do with Mussoorie.

There were the two of us, virtual trowels in hand, amateur historians trying to dig up whatever we could.

What gave the game away were the regular contours at every twenty feet: a stray stump here, a lost boulder there, a weather-beaten bush or a bent tree swaying in the wind. They were all par for the course.

         The oldest map we had seen was drawn in 1831, published by J.B. Tassin. Passed on to me by Hugh Rayner, an antiquarian who lived in Bath. It had literally slipped and fallen out of an old book. Of the thirty-three house owners on it,  the only Indian sounding name was that of Hukeem Mendy.

When we placed the old map on top and superimposed it on the squiggles, it fit like a glove.

         If you were to go in chronological order, the next map to enter the public domain was thirteen years later. After that came Northam’s Guide to Mansuri, Landour, Dehra Dun and the Hills North of Dehra. Then followed  Murray’s Map of 1903.

We must remember that Colonel Lambton founded the Great Trigonometric Survey of India in 1818, with Colonel George Everest as his assistant. After Lambton passed away, Everest became surveyor-general of India. He was all of forty years old.

Everest came to Park Estate, to bring to a culmination the Great Trigonometrical Arc. His famous men: William Frazer, the first resident of Delhi, who owned Leopard Lodge, and Major Swetenham, Commandant of the Convalescent Depot in Landour, who owned Cloud End.

The grandest monument in Everest’s honour is the Arc of the Meridian extending from Cape Comorin to the Himalaya. The lure of the mountains brought him to the western edge of the hills in 1832, where he built his office and residence, having assured his masters that it was temporary ‘until the two northern sections of the Great Arc are brought to a satisfactory termination.’

Was there a biwi khana? I don’t think so.

Everest was a disciplinarian with no time for trifles. His hands were full with matters at hand: the road was slippery for riding horses, and the lack of water was a constant source of irritation; it was carted up from a nearby spring on mules and ten years after he came here, he was still struggling with an approach road.

       Almost two hundred years later, all we have to showcase Everest’s efforts is a fake Disneyland.

       Perhaps a ‘proper’ museum would be a more fitting tribute. We could show the accoutrements of early surveyors’ trade: thirty-foot tripods, telescopes, theodolites, chain-links, compensation bars, spirit levels, perambulators, Pundit Nain Singh’s and Khintup’s prayer beads, prayer wheels and pendulums, plus all the other improvised tools of our early intruders on the Roof.

Ganesh Saili, born and home-grown in the hills, belongs to those select few whose words are illustrated by their pictures. Author of over two dozen books, some of which have been translated into twenty languages, his work has garnered recognition worldwide.