By Ganesh Saili
Naughty Mussoorie has always had little or almost no officialdom, and locals still leave you alone. Fortunately for us, the brass hats chose Shimla, and, mercifully, the wash from Shimla never spilt our way. Our twenty-two schools, despite all the moral science classes, still have their fair share of scandals involving rakes and vamps, grass widows, bored housewives, and occasionally the headmaster or school principal. A doggerel published in the Civil and Military Gazette still holds:
I had a little husband.
Who gave me all his pay?
I left him for Mussoorie.
A hundred miles away,
I dragged my little husband’s name
Through heaps of social mire,
And joined him in November.
As good as you’d desire.
Among the many stories, one that stands out is a prank that the boys at a school in the hill station managed to pull off. It was the Mother of all Pranks. The senior boys did not like a particular teacher who vindictively used his position to harass them. As the student-teacher relationship went from bad to worse, it was just a matter of time before it progressed to vicious. And it was time for action – something had to be done.
The boys knew that the teacher – let’s call him Brother X – nursed a secret crush on one of the junior teachers, and they devised their plan around this. One of the day scholars was nominated to get the wedding cards printed. No shortcuts were to be taken. It had to be a pucca card, all gilt-edged, properly composed and typeset, proofread and printed at Hyrat Press at the top of Landour’s Mullingar Hill. Proudly, it announced the wedding of Brother X and the pretty teacher.
These very authentic-looking cards were then mailed to literally all of Mussoorie’s prominent citizens, including the Local Administration, the school’s Board of Directors, the Bar Council, the Hoteliers’ Association, the Traders’ Association, the Rotary & Lions’ Clubs, and assorted glitterati. If you didn’t get an invitation, you hadn’t yet made it in life!
‘The resultant fireworks lit up the nearby foothills.’ A senior teacher from those times reminisces: ‘The rumblings would have done a volcano proud!’
Brother X was sent off to be sequestered for an indeterminate period of deep introspection. The young lady was given time until the end of the school term. I believe she attached herself to the Maths teacher and left the school to solve that particular theorem.
Another tale, from another school, where another officious oaf got his well-deserved comeuppance. At the time, the school administration was involved in a messy dispute with its kitchen staff, with the school principal taking on the role of the principal villain. The principal was going through a rough patch after his wife left him, which in all probability accounted for his uncompromising stance. And he did have a glad eye for one of the nursery teachers. The dispute escalated and other support staff joined in, including the night chowkidar, which is crucial to the story, for he knew what no one else did: at dusk, the principal would slink off for a rendezvous.
Late one night, the unshaven and unkempt workers decided on a Che Guevara-style raid. Creeping up as quietly as possible, they surrounded the cottage and knocked on the door. There was no response. The fat cook, a tub of lard, impatiently pushed the others aside and lunged at the door; the bolt snapped and the hordes poured in.
Principal Sa’ab, it seemed, had vanished. They looked for him from bedroom to bedroom, bathroom to sitting room, from the veranda to even under the kitchen sink. But he had disappeared, or so it seemed. As they turned around to leave, one paused to fiddle with the handle of an old steel cupboard. It clanged open, revealing the Principal in a posture that would have made any contortionist proud.
Was it panic? Or guilt? Or was it a touch of both? To this day, no one will tell.
‘That would make a great advertisement for steel cupboards!’ wryly observed my friend, author Bill Aitken.
(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 recognition worldwide.)
