By: Ganesh Saili
‘Jaffar Hall.’ That’s what half the hill station calls the place. Little did I know that Zephyr Hall was named after the gentle breeze that plays around it—on a knife’s edge, along the spine of Mussoorie above the Mall, where to the south spreads the valley of the Doon and to the north lies the vista of the Himalaya.
This tale dates to July 1982. At the local courts, I was there to get some documents attested when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw an old man shuffling around, trying to catch anyone’s attention. Trying to be helpful, I sat him down on a bench. His application, addressed to the SDM Mussoorie, was titled strictly private and confidential:
‘I, as the only son of the late Percy Owen and his wife Anne Amelia Owen, would like to know the detailed Coroner’s Inquest Report on their deaths on July 25, 1927.
‘My sister, then Helen Anne Owen, has never told me anything during my whole life about the circumstances leading to the tragedy.
‘I was born on June 4th, 1912, in Faizabad, Oudh, and speak Hindi.’
‘It’s a very old case,’ noted the SDM with regret: ‘No details are available in this office, and without any particulars of the case, an inquiry cannot be conducted.’
Pic courtesy: Nilanjana Singh Roy
No one seemed too keen on rattling old bones. I came home and dipped into the old familiar, Charles Williams, where thumbing through his Mussoorie Miscellany (pub: 1936) was an entry: ‘Of course, at times, some of our sordid affairs were hushed up or simply brushed under the carpet. But you could hardly have done that with an incident that occurred at the Zephyr Hall boarding house. At the height of the season, in the heart of the town, and in broad daylight, a double tragedy set the station agog. Soon after midday, in a full-boarding house, the boarders were startled when a shot rang out from one of the rooms and a woman screamed. Other shots followed in quick succession. Those in the public rooms, verandas, or outside dived for safety into their rooms and bolted the doors. One unhappy boarder, however, ignorant of where the desperate man with the gun might be at the moment, came around the corner with his arms well above his head, taking no chances. He turned a corner and ran straight into a levelled pistol. And even the man who held it and had just killed his wife laughed!
‘You might laugh too, but say what you will; it was a delicate situation to face, for even the armed constabulary had to tread warily when they arrived.
‘Mr. Owen had just shot his wife dead, wounded his daughter, and finally shot himself. His was perhaps the first Christian cremation at Mussoorie, performed according to his own will expressed long before his unfortunate end.’
Following the publication of one of my picture books, I received a letter. It was from retired Col. W. C. Cole, living in Pune. ‘The Owens ran Zephyr Hall, located just above my grandmother’s White House, as a boarding house,’ he recalled. ‘It was the last Saturday of the month. Being teenagers, Basil Owen and I were at the 11 a.m.–1 p.m. session at the Skating Rink. He escaped the tragedy that took place about midday when his father shot his mother and wounded his sister before shooting himself. I am not sure what happened to him, but he was withdrawn from Allen School, and an uncle took him over.
‘This was not the end of the family tragedy. An older sister, in her early twenties, was boating on the river Gomti at Lucknow with her fiancé when a flash flood occurred and the strong current drowned them both.’
Death still sparked most controversies, or so I believed. The other day, while wandering around Camel’s Back cemetery, from among the old covered tombstones, a brand new red sandstone headstone jumped out at me. The legend?
‘Anne Amelia Owen. Mother, dear, I’m here. Basil Brian Owen.’
Are there no last goodbyes?
Ganesh Saili, author-photographer, has written and illustrated twenty books, some of which have been translated into more than two dozen languages. He belongs to those select few who illustrate their writing.
