Down the years, we have begun to look more and more like a distended octopus. From Haunted House to Cloud End, Mussoorie-Landour is nineteen square miles, and even if you add a minuscule cantonment spread over 1040 acres, we are still small and no big deal. When you go out looking for someone, you find that the locals have named the old cottages after the owner.
Ask for ‘Motey-ki-Kothi!’ and you’d be in trouble because it could be any old Fatso’s house. In cases like this, you have to be more specific about the area. Of course, I am aware that it is most impolite! But that’s the way this cookie crumbles. May I suggest you make it easier on yourself by learning to take it with a pinch of salt?
‘Kutta-khana’ is the Doghouse, also called Kirkland Estate, known for the owner’s racing hounds; Redburn, which is now a rabbit warren of guest houses, was ‘Lal muuh-waley-ka-ghar’ or ‘home of the red-faced one.’
Do not expect traces of a menagerie near Kingcraig just because the place is called Chidyawali Kothi. Whilst Masani Lodge refers to collective mumbo-jumbo, or at least that’s what it seemed like to outsiders.
These names are laser-etched into our collective memory. They refuse to go away.
People were shapes, rather than names. There used to be this bent-double fellow who worked as a meter reader alongside my father in the electricity office. While talking about him, folks would hunch their backs like a camel.
‘Mukand Ram,’ said he to my father one day. ‘My wife arrives today, can you go to the Kingcraig bus-stand to fetch her home!’
‘Never seen her before! Won’t I look like an idiot asking every other girl if she is your wife’ hedged father.
But the chap refused to take no for an answer.
‘Look around for her. She’ll be the only one who will have no male companion.’ Well, that was as clear as mud! Anyway, my father went to the bus stand, found her, and brought his bashful bride home.
The partition saw them switch sides from Muree in Pakistan. He was a gifted storyteller – to this day, I remember that after one of the rough days at school, he comforted me with: ‘When I was in school, one of my teachers took an instant dislike to me. He enjoyed walloping me on the knuckles with a ruler!’
He chuckled at the memory: ‘One day I plunged my hands into the cold waters of a spring-fed canal flowing through our school; my hands swelled up, and when I got home, my father took one look at them and stormed off to the school and took him to task.
‘That’ he said with finality, ‘was the last time the old codger dared to walk down my row at school!’
Walking past his table one day, I noticed him scribbling, almost furtively, in a diary. ‘What are you writing?’ I asked.
Puffing his chest proudly like a pouter pigeon, he said, ‘Kinarey-Kinarey – as in the ‘river’s bank’ – doesn’t it sound good for a film title?’ he asked me. In that dark, musty office, he had written a screenplay for a film to be shot by his cousin, who lived in Bombay.
As luck would have it, news came that the film producer had passed away most suddenly.
A fading portrait – made in the heydays of the film publicity department in Bombay – still hangs over the mantelpiece of their sitting room today. Of course, the garland of dusty wood shavings has seen better days. The trouble is that even the long-lamented doesn’t know what he’s doing hanging on that wall in a house where no one remembers him.
It’s the same look that Tungal, the road inspector, had as he asked my mother for tiny amounts of ghee. ‘Bibi ji!’ he’d say to my mother. ‘Please give me a touch of ghee,’
‘What will you do with it?’ asked my mother, innocently.
‘Can’t afford the stuff! Too expensive! Rubbing it on my moustache makes them shine, plus I can walk around getting a whiff of the real thing all day long.’
Ganesh Saili, born and home-grown in the hills, belongs to those select few whose words are illustrated by their own pictures. Author of two dozen books, some translated into 20 languages, his work has found worldwide renown.
