“When Winter Visits”

‘Finally, winter is here!’ says Sunil Prakash of A. Prakash & Co, as we sit in the limpid sun, adding, ‘See how the dogs are sleeping on the roads; they are content that no cars are zipping around! At last, the boys can play cricket on the road again.’

His talented brother Anil, an expert cheese maker, remembers that the Nepali Dajus of yore were a superstitious lot: ‘For neither love nor money could you find a single one willing to go down to Bala Hisar! Oh yes! They were tougher than tough and could carry almost twice their body weight uphill from the bus stand to our shop! But you could not entice them into going down that Civil Hospital Road!’ They believed that on that road, you would meet a ghostly band of man-hunters – the momiai-wallas – who would extract oil from your cranium by hanging you upside down over a fire. Momiai is an old superstition about a magic ointment that gives invulnerability against all weapons and is unrivaled for the quick healing of wounds.

In 1938, Jim Keelan of Vincent Hill School heard the story from Hans Ram of Gaonkhet: ‘There is a class of men whose whole business is to collect this momiai, and these we all call momiai-wallas. They are a brutal and unscrupulous lot, who frequent lonely roads on the lookout for solitary travellers. They carry long staves, in the ends of which are secreted certain essences which, if a man smells them, immediately deprive him of his rightful senses. ‘If by chance a traveller comes their way, they make up to him, and by some trick beguile him into smelling the rod. Instantly, his senses forsake him, and the devil leads him away into the jungle where accomplices await their arrival. Having arrived at the appointed spot, the victim is bound and strung up by the heels, with his head over a cauldron. ‘Beneath the cauldron, they quickly light a big fire. When these preparations are complete, they knock a hole in the victim’s head, at which point the momiai trickles out, drop by drop, and collects in the vessel below…

‘I once asked one of them what they would do with the oil?’ chuckles Anil.

The Daju’s answer left him stunned: ‘That’s what’s used to fly airplanes!’

Nowadays, it’s nigh impossible to find anyone willing to carry your bag downhill. And it seems as if a whole age has passed. Up until the 1960s, older folks boarded up their homes post-November, heading to the warmer climes of Dehradun down below. Among them, you would have found Ms. Edith Walsh, who helped my father get his first job as a meter reader, and she ran a guest house at Wolfsburn in Landour near Char Dukan. Before the first sign of winter, she was off to the valley, as were the other residents. Her home, like other places, was left in the care of her faithful caretaker, Kalyan Singh.

The years trickled by until one year, on a cold winter‘s night, aged 90 years, she quietly crossed the golden bridge. They brought her back up and buried her in their family plot in the Landour cemetery. And there she was laid to rest, under the Deodars facing the eternal snow.  Or so we thought. until the night her chowkidar, disheveled, pale as a sheet, almost knocked our door down at daybreak.

‘Saili Saab! Saili Saab!’ the words tumbled out of his mouth, jostling and bumping into one another in frenetic haste to get spoken. Breathlessly, he stuttered to my father, ‘She’s back! It’s March, and she’s back! Walsh Memsaab kept me up all last night! She rattled the old door-chain of the servant quarters and kept screeching: “Kalyan Singh, darwaza kholo!”‘

Although no one else saw the ghost of Edith Walsh, the effect on Kalyan Singh was irreversible. Breathing fear instead of air, he departed hot-foot for his village in the mountains behind Tehri, never to return.