By Ganesh Saili
‘Hey diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon!’ With twinges in the hinges, I understand this ditty much better now. Every few years, a new con artist appears in town, flaunts wealth and seduces the upper echelon. He infiltrates their ranks, throws great parties, charms the pants off old biddies, and seduces their offspring. He lets them take a peep at the gold pots buried under the proverbial rainbow.
Then one fine morning, he vanishes. It is his version of the Bangkok act. Only much later do folks find ‘so much gone with the thief’; not just money, but daughters, too, were frequently reported ‘missing’.
The visiting card proclaimed ‘International Tea Taster’, and it marked the arrival of Rafiq Ahmed Kidwai to town. He worked his way through the upper crust. The phrase ‘taken in’ is inadequate in this context; ‘taken over’ would be more precise, more exact.
Gentle reader, please bear with me! Just remember that this story is set in the socialist order of the 1960s. In those austere times, it was almost impossible to obtain what he had promised: walk-in fridges, fancy cars, and flats in the metropolitan cities.
Pic courtesy: Rahul Kohli
‘An imported General Electric fridge will be perfect for all the cold cuts – like bacon, ham and salami – that you love to serve your guests!’ he assured the hotelier.
Silver changed hands.
‘For you, a white Mercedes-Benz,’ he told Mr Hari, owner of Hamer’s Store, one of the many Mussoorie merchants who fell for his spiel.
Then, one fine morning, the charmer went missing. But he did not go alone; along with him had gone the pretty wife of another Mussoorie merchant. Mercifully, she was back a few days later. ‘He is a fine man,’ she told anyone wanting to hear her story, adding: ‘It’s not as if he doesn’t want to, but it does take time to get all these things together!’
And it is true. It did take time. It was a case of ‘just now coming!’
Pic courtesy: Tulika Singh Roy
Then, the houri Humra came to the hill station one morning from East Africa to rent Macquarie Cottage near Hampton Court, the Convent school. Her story was that her husband, whom she had most thoughtfully left behind, owned several sugarcane plantations in Kenya. She had come in advance to find a cottage for them at the station. Anyway, she was attractive; that was a great plus, and she had a roving eye, another point in her favour. Soon enough, eager beavers were cluttering her door.
It was the brawls – noisy dog-fights that broke out amongst her endless suitors – that, in the end, proved to be her undoing.
Among them, one stood out. You could say he was like the leader of a pack of wolves, Deepak Aditya, a physical training teacher at one of our government schools. He was strong, he was mean, and even meaner when he found the gate locked, so he jumped over the wall. The lights were on, but Humra had long since departed. The optician, the paunchy Mr Khanna, led the search party, accompanied by Lakhar Singh, his next-door neighbour, who owned a saw mill, and Prince Rajbir Singh of Jind, also known as Scampy, but nothing came of it.
It was as if the greyness of India had swallowed her, much like the Great Indian Rope Trick (which no one had seen and everyone claimed to have heard about) in which a little waif of a boy emerges from a slim wicker basket, climbs up a rope mysteriously standing upright, unsupported, and vanishes into thin air.
As I write, there’s a new kid on the block. You name it, he’s done it, with an iron in every fire. The chatterati and the literati are eating out of his hands. One day, he too shall go up the rope, to leave in his wake a legacy of folly that we shall hear different versions of in the years ahead.
But that’s a story I’ll leave as grist for the mill for the writers of tomorrow.
(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 of which have been translated into twenty languages, his work has gained renown worldwide.)
