By Ganesh Saili
‘Shade your camera when loading film!’ Almost a statutory warning that I gave my charges at LBSNAA till 2014. Then the digital age hit us. I staggered around like a lost dinosaur staring at a spaceship console – deluged by auto-focus, megapixels and image stabilisers. The old order changed, film cameras vanished without a whimper, denied a headstone.
A high priest of those analogue days was a certain Mr Lord, (we never did ask him his first name). He lived next to St Emilian’s Church; he could often be found warming himself in a patch of sunshine, wearing an old linen suit.
‘Clutter is good’ he announced as I peeked at his pile of broken gadgets: black-and-white televisions, blenders, grinders, radiograms, record players and transistors. ‘I love fixing broken dreams,’ he said.
Pic courtesy: Nilanjana Singh RoyJ
His workbench was a riot of Araldite, epoxy, resin, glue and Quickfix. Pliers, screwdrivers and wire-strippers were lined up on his table like a row of soldiers on parade in an abandoned cantonment.
‘Man!’ he drawled. ‘Before I moved to Landour, I worked in the Railway’s Balasore Workshop. Up in Mussoorie, I’m glad to get to seventy years!’ But those in their eighties told him, ‘You may apply for the Seniors’ Club only after you reach your eighties!’
‘Soon after, they made me an undertaker in the cemetery, where I tried to fix the unfixable.
And then there was Hans Koepke, looking like the poor man’s William Tell, but scruffier. All who saw him itched to trim his beard, clip his whiskers and give him a good scrub. Hastily dismissed bazaar rumours credited him as being a part of the team that had planted the nuclear powered device atop a peak to the north. In these matters you will find that, to say the least, I am rather gullible.
I often spotted him on a rickety old Triumph motorcycle, with Laali – his pet monkey – on his left shoulder.
‘Be the first in whatever you do!’ he advised me. ‘Never be the last person to get into a swimming pool!’
I must say he fulfilled his destiny by becoming “world famous” (in Landour only) for his handyman skills. He was a high priest of Jugaad – long before that began to mean many things. The common belief was he could fix, tweak and modify anything. Often with interesting results!
My friend Rakesh Garg, who lives in Sister Bazaar, had a Royal Enfield that seemed to have caught a whooping cough.
‘I took it to Hans. That’s what everyone did in those times.’
‘Easy-peasy!’ said Hans, eagerly stripping it apart: cams, chain, engine, fuel tank, headlights, indicators, sprockets and wheels. But trouble lurked around the corner: he couldn’t put it together again.
‘I had to do what I should have done in the first place: taken it down to the workshop in Dehradun. Which I did – in seven suitcases!’
Slowly, Khaliq’s workshop, below our house on Mullingar ramp, became like Hans’ second home. At all hours you could find him there, tinkering around with anything. On one occasion, he borrowed the milkman’s ancient muzzle loader, claiming that the trusty flintlock would help chase away Landour’s pesky monkeys. They were a nuisance – his pet monkey’s joyrides. He sawed off the barrel, saying to himself: ‘It’ll be easier to carry!’
Later, when the milkman asked for it back, Hans welded the two pieces together perfectly, well, almost, for who could argue over a slightly misaligned barrel?
‘My gun! You’ve wrecked it!’ moaned the milkman.
‘I have improved it!’ Hans said, defending the indefensible: ‘See! Now you can shoot around corners too!’
I had a sudden urge to laugh, and almost did, but for the fact that Linda, his long-suffering wife turned up. What on earth had the poor girl done to deserve such a stiff sentence for a single mistake?
When the digital age arrived, Mr Lord had already gone to meet his Maker. Hans had gone missing. Last heard of, he was helping a nunnery in the south build an earthen dam.
But let that tale await another day, for someone other than I to tell.
Ganesh Saili, born and home-grown in the hills, belongs to those select few whose words are illustrated by their pictures. As the author of two dozen books, some translated into twenty languages, his work has found renown worldwide.
