Getting Myself a Friend

By Ganesh Saili

The last time I saw her was on an autumn morning, when I was eleven, on my way to Allen School in the Bala Hisar area.

‘Hey, boy! What’s your name?’ asked a raspy voice.

‘Ganesh, ma’am,’ I managed to mumble, adding ‘Saili!’ as an afterthought. You could cut the sudden chill that descended with a knife.

‘Are you that Mukand Ram Saili’s son?’ the voice, from above the road, demanded.

‘Yes, ma’am!’ I sputtered.

‘Isn’t he dead yet?’

I let the storm of emotions pass.

‘No!’ I assured her. ‘He’s fine.’ With that, I took off down the hill with my schoolbag thumping on my back, louder than my heart.

Returning home, I told my father the story. Throwing his head back, he burst out laughing: ‘Must have been that old battle-axe Mrs Hathisingh. Is she still living in Oakless?’ He said no more, and I was left to fill in the blanks.

She had been the Principal at Mussoorie Girls’ Inter College. It’s always had colourful people at the helm, foremost among them being Mrs Hathisingh.

‘She and my mother both bred dogs, but hers were of dubious pedigree,’ a dear friend confided in me, adding, ‘She once fought a ten-year-long case against a woman from Calcutta who had sued her for selling her a black cocker spaniel, which after a wash or two changed from black to golden!’

She was singularly unattractive and had voluntarily taken upon herself the entire burden of the world. Solitary men were attracted to her, and Colonel Powell called her ‘neela rani’ or ‘blue queen’, an expression that meant more than the words.

As she approached the Clock Tower, I had often heard her yell: ‘Where’s Ghanta Ghar’s chowkidar?’ at Ram Swarup, the owner of Glamour Studio.

Refusing to rise to the bait, he would merely grin and bear the invective!

I think she nursed a crush on my father. In his youth, a tall, dark man from the hills would not have been too unattractive.

Poor fellow! All he wanted was to read her electric meter, but he would barely touch the latch of her gate, and a horde of yapping Pekinese and confused Cocker Spaniels would descend upon him. Flummoxed and stymied, he complained to Ram Krishna Varma, the Chairman, who threw the rule book at her.

A man of few words, my father remained the odd man out. His relations with her were bitter to the end.

Bandhu, the Mussoorie Kotwal, was asked to look into the case, but he too ended up as a regular visitor to Oakless.

One day, we heard that she had passed away in her sleep. A man from Saharanpur turned up, made the funeral arrangements, paid for the cremation and vanished. No one had ever bothered to find out who he was. One day, he was there, and then he was gone.

Gone, too, are our fabulous kennels. Take HH Rajmata Prithvi Bir Kaur of Jind’s greyhounds – the pride of the Punjab – reputedly as swift as birds, or Alwar’s Youvrani Mahendra Kumari’s Great Danes – cropped ears, grey, blue and harlequins. All real traffic stoppers.

Our sole grey market operator was Bhagwat, employed at our college, who, I must say, loved dogs. In his spare time, he rounded up stray puppies, gave them a bucket-bath, put them into a pretty wicker basket, and sold them on the steps of Picture Palace cinema.

‘Real Bhotia puppies!’ he announced, to anyone wanting to take home a puppy. I remember he was once in a bit of a flap after someone took one. What was sold as a male turned out to be a female!

Sparks flew!

Then the other day, I got a call from a family friend.

‘I’ve got just the perfect dog for you!’ he announced and turned up the next day with a mutt in tow.

‘Uncle! He’s a gaddi from the high altitude meadows of Himachal!’ he declared.

All I saw was a brown mutt.

But my tech-savvy granddaughter, Niharika, Googled him and declared: ‘That’s a leopard hound! We’ve got a watchdog!’

And that, my friends, is how I got my friend.

(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 renown worldwide.)