OWL IN AN IVY BUSH

By: Ganesh Saili

I should have known it from the very way he walked – that extra spring in his step meant he could only be from Landour. As a glimmer of recognition returned, I was back in the days when Ashok Gupta ran a store in Landour until the day he packed his bags and upped and left.

‘Owls in an ivy bush! That’s what I feared my children were turning into – oblivious of a whole wide world out there.’  He wonders: ‘How have you survived in a place where for six months you’re wrapped up in a quilt, and three under an umbrella which leaves you with only three months?’

Mussoorie has its businessmen and professionals: shopkeepers, hoteliers, property agents and schoolteachers. To them this place is mostly an ATM – you make your money and hit the road running. Best if you manage to get to the plains or better still if your children go abroad. Luckily for us, tourists continue to pour in for without them our economy would collapse. Then there are folks like me. We are easily dismissed as fillings in the sandwich – stale as last night’s leftovers. We were born here or at most arrived as infants. We are no more than downy Pygmy Owls, complaining about the way ‘we once were’ until the millennium came to brush us under the carpet. This is where it happened; this is where we found our calling; this where we fell in love; this is where life unfolded. Of course, I must add that these mountains have been generous. How I wish I could give back a little more than these words that I string together!

Up here we all know each other, and often old friends from the past return to roost carrying tales of the years sieved by.

’Is it a ghost!’ I muttered on meeting Shiv Sharma. I remembered him, all prim and proper, the second Indian student (after D.P. Singh of Bhai Dhian Singh & Company) to have studied at Vincent Hill School. He had come back, reliving the past as one returning to the scene of a crime. I knew his family well – they had come as refugees from Sialkot after partition; their father had rented Dilbahar, a dog-rose-wrapped cottage on the Sardar Harnam Singh road, where they began life again. One day, bunking classes, Shiv along with his buddy and partner-in-crime Bijee Rauthan, arrived at Jubilee Cinema hall, where at the ticket counter sat Hukum Singh, a classmate, who doubled as a booking clerk at the worst cinema, tucked as it was beneath the Electric Picture Palace like an afterthought.

They were playing truant, hoping to see a film. Trouble was that Hukum Singh was reluctant to give them tickets, saying: ‘Useless film! You won’t like it!’

‘How does it matter and why do you care?’ Shiv protested.

Pushed, Hukum Singh blinked first: ‘Fool! Listen! I have tried to fob you off! Do you really want to go inside to see your father and his mistress??’

‘Blown away!’ Shiv remembers. ‘I felt like a fool on finding out what everyone already knew.’

One day, Shiv and his mother realized that father had not returned. They set out looking for him, climbing the steep ramp that goes from Shamrock to surface on the Mall and saw father pleased as punch, twirling his favourite sterling silver knobbed swag stick in one hand and on the other, arms akimbo, was his new-found girlfriend.

‘Didn’t your mother throw a fit and make a scene?’ I asked.

‘Not a word she said! We just turned around to slip into the house. Of course they squabbled later – bitter and underhand – followed by the silent treatment!’

‘That day I learnt the meaning of hate!’ he says, adding: ‘A few days later, my father dropped dead of a heart attack while helping to push-start Dr. Prakash’s car near Big Bend.’

Shiv moved on to Mumbai to start life anew.

Often an owl’s vacant stare is shared by people who are in their cups. But don’t you believe they don’t know anything. Usually they know much more than they let on.

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 twenty languages, his work has found recognition world-wide.