Our old thatch-roofs were no match for the onslaught of an Indian monsoon. ‘The last storm discovered all the joints in our harness,’ says Elizabeth Ross, wife of a joint magistrate from Meerut, in her diary in the 1880s: ‘It was at night, and my endeavours to sleep through it were put to an end by heavy drops beginning to fall on my face. The first drop murdered sleep effectively, and a few more made me jump up to drag the bed into a dry place.’
Our attic was born when the then-owner, the Rani of Sheikhupura (now in Pakistan), decided to put a stop to leaks that happened whenever it rained. She used GI or galvanized-iron sheets (a surplus after the First World War) above the old thatch roof. This created a dry space in between the two roofs, which became our attic – the repository of all our lost causes.
And in our times, with all the unpainted tin roofs, the town looks as if it’s been made of hammered out biscuit tins!
Pic Courtesy: the Internet
In our more prosaic times, someone in from the family announces that there’s too much clutter in the house, especially around the patio.
‘Let’s have a yard sale?’ I tease. But this is of no help, and no one is amused. They glare at me and then someone says: ‘Go and get some empty cardboard cartons from the bazaar!’
Silence reigns. No gnashing of teeth, tearing of hair, sackcloth and ashes as old newspaper shrouds cover old cups snuggling next to odd saucers. Chipped glasses giggle to conceal clinks of happier times. They tell forgotten tales of Johnnie Walkers who stopped walking or pipers who forgot to trill the highland pipes.
Off into the attic go our regrets, broken dreams and burnt bridges forlornly awaiting rebirth. Come to think of it, remembrance is better than wealth, at least none can steal them from you.
Pic courtesy: author
Out of a broken frame slips a fading sepia-tone image of my grandfather. He looks most uneasy seated on an armchair glaring at the camera in Landour’s Glamour Studio; he’s wearing a churidar, and a shawl is thrown casually across his shoulders. That moment captured on film will never return – in family lore, it marks the arrival of our family from the village of Sail to Mussoorie.
Time cannot stand still. Gravity takes its toll. The past is boxed into cardboard cartons, a drum beat to oblivion. Chapter closed.
What remains is the lingering yearning for days gone by. How I wish I could write them off, but I cannot. You return to the past searching for moments that have trickled away. Moments that, given one more chance, you would grasp like some magic lamp and rub them till they gleamed.
There’s a relic from the past – a crinkled ‘ayes’ mirror. Does it hide emanations from the past? If only it could talk, what tales it would tell? Next to it lies an abandoned planter’s chair that has seen better days. Off to the attic they must go.
A thought steals upon me! What if someday a flight of angels settled on our roof and squatted on the gable, their trumpets blaring as the good book says they will on that the day of judgement? Will those cartons too snap open and the captives flee their dark dungeon? And what about those who have lived in this house long years ago, long before our family came here? Will they too come to the festivities? After two hundred years if all the previous occupants came to the celebrations, I think it will be quite a party.
These homes were named after the native places of those who built them. For instance, ‘Trim Lodge’ (with Trim Cottage and Trim Ville on the same spur). I spent years looking for a ‘Mr Trim’. After all, there’s nothing trim about the house or its present occupant! It probably took its name from the Irish county of Trim. That’s where Captain Young’s friends came from.
Meanwhile, a spruce tree on our patio still stands tall. It has seen both bad times and good.
May it continue to flourish!
(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.)
