Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  —Anita Desai, “Hill Stations of the Raj,” The Armchair Traveler, edited by John Thorn and David Reuther

  As we approached, the social profile of Simla was rapidly revealed. On the highest level, where the town appeared to stroll and bustle even at a distance, stood Simla’s most striking emblems of Britain: a Gothic church, a gazebo-like bandstand, a Victorian theater, and a Tudor-style stone town hall, all set along the winding esplanade known as the Mall. Dribbling in profusion below, connected by cart roads and circuitous lanes and dizzying staircases, was a large community of lesser, chattering structures that was the lower Simla bazaar, called a “crowded rabbit warren” by Rudyard Kipling in Kim. The author elaborated:A man who knows his way there can defy all the police of India’s summer capital, so cunningly does verandah communicate with verandah, alleyway with alleyway, and bolt-hole with bolt-hole. Here live those who minister to the wants of the glad city—jhampanis, who pull the pretty ladies’ rickshaws by night and gamble till the dawn; grocers, old-sellers, curio-vendors, firewood-dealers, priests, pick-pockets, and native employees of Government.

  Little seemed to have changed, though there were fewer rickshaws in use. An elevator had been built, however, and it took me up in several stages from the railway station to the Mall; a huffing porter, with my bags strapped by a coarse rope to his back, took twenty minutes to make the same journey. These men are the human trucks of Simla, and I saw them every day staggering along the winding roads, carrying sofas or chests or filing cabinets, glad to have the work. Behind them, always, was the panorama of mountains, and scattered across the dense ridges and rising from the trees were the sloped roofs and weather-vaned spires of private mansions and bungalows, with names like Wingate, Prospect Hall, Knollswood, Strawberry Hills, Holly Lodge, Oakover.

  I stayed at the Woodville Palace Hotel, a converted mansion at the quietest end of the Mall. Surrounded by pines, protected by cannons, with expanses of lawn, a gazebo, and chairs outside where guests sat playing cards over tea and watching their children, Woodville still looked like the summer home of Prince Rana of Jubbal, a Punjabi state. His wife, Princess Brinda, had traveled widely in the thirties, and the spacious rooms downstairs were hung not only with swords and tigers’ heads and old prints of local scenes but also with autographs of Tyrone Power, Laurel and Hardy, Hedy Lamarr, Clark Gable, and Queen Victoria. There was the largest billiards table I have ever seen and ebony bronzes of Pan and Shiva and a nymph.

  The Woodville was still maintained by the grandson, Uday Singh (his family occupied the entire second floor), and his mother, Princess Ourmila, young photographs of whom I mistook for Ingrid Bergman’s. I sat outside and watched the Indian families at tea: father and uncles serious over cards, mother and aunts pouring and discreetly spying on the hands, children on the swing or playing around the lawns among nodding flowers. Woodville was five minutes from the activity of the Mall, in its own secret grove, and some days I had the whole mansion to myself. Every morning at breakfast a barefoot servant in round cap and gray Nehru jacket would bring me my newspaper, clasp his hands, give a slight bow, and murmur, “Sir, are you happy?” I always said, “Very happy,” and he always looked relieved.

  Simla was still a resort, but for the inheritors of an empire, no longer for the empire builders themselves. Families were on promenade all day long on the Mall and along the higher, crescent-shaped ridge, stopping to gossip where the two met at Scandal Point. Men in holiday suits whirled their canes, women in swirling saris twirled parasols, and children happy on ponies were led about by impassive attendants. Simla monkeys, a local kind of rhesus, were everywhere. Nut-brown, with plaintive, concerned faces, they scampered along the streets or from rooftop to rooftop, discussing and disapproving of the human activities below.

  My first day on the Mall I fell into step with a well-groomed boy in shorts and knee socks, hand in hand with his little sister. The boy greeted me politely—perhaps he was eleven. I envied him his perfect diction.

  “Good morning,” he said brightly. “And how are you enjoying Simla? You have seen the Viceregal Lodge? No? You must. They’ve done quite a good job of keeping it up, I should think. And how do you like these Simla monkeys? A special breed. We don’t have them down in Delhi. I should show you my Star Wars collection. Do you know, I was up on Jakko Peak with two bags of nuts that cost me five rupees each, and one of those jolly monkeys leapt on my head and grabbed one bag while his friend ran up and stole the other! Naughty fellows, they cost me ten rupees.”

  His sister, staring after a trotting pony, wasn’t paying attention. The boy said to her,“Be polite to the gentleman. Show some manners to the uncle.”

  The children reminded me of what Ajay, a young, amiable sales representative for a British metalworks firm, had told me on the train from Delhi, the Kalka Mail. “Simla is a society that talks,” he said.“It always was.Why? Because up there people have time. They look down on the people in the big cities on the plains as being too modern. Always in a hurry. In Simla, in the summer, even if you work there, you go to work late, have a long lunch, and close up early and go for a stroll along the Mall. In the winter you might not go to work at all. You might ring up and say, ‘Too much snow in front of my door.’ But people there gossip, gossip, gossip. Who was with whom last night on a bench on the Ridge and what X is having for dinner and why Y was not invited. It’s a favorite honeymoon place. My parents had their honeymoon there, and their parents.” He grinned. “So will I, next August. It’s an older style of living. Not like Delhi or Bombay. Like the British.”

  On the Mall, where no cars were allowed—only horses and rickshaws—I was able to have coffee in a coffeehouse, tea in a tea shop, buy a sari and goggles, go roller skating, play billiards, sit by a waterfall, hire a rickshaw, feed a monkey, select a carved walking stick, ride a horse, purchase a faded photo of a British hill picnic, eavesdrop, pick up Martial’s Epigrams in paperback. I was able to have my fortune told, my head examined, and my picture taken in front of the snowy peaks in the distance. Had it been winter I could have gone ice skating.

  I’d been wondering if there were any Britishers left, and a gentle antiquarian bookseller named O. C. Sud told me of an elderly lady named Mrs. Montagu, who lived on the Upper Bharari Road. He was busy reorganizing his shop, because a Japanese mountaineering society had recently come through and bought up masses of rare Himalayan books. He seemed, cannily, to have plenty more. “You must meet Mrs. Montagu,” he said. “She’s a bit of living history, and she’s the last one left. She’s been here since 1909. Be sure to speak up.”

  The next day I found my way along the twisting lanes that led away from the Mall. Grand bungalows were perched on the slopes above me, in stages of absolute decay or preservation, and flowers grew around them: zinnias, dahlias, pink cosmos, and others in yellows and whites and purples. The gabled bungalows had country gardens that might have been found in Kent, though the unfamiliar blossoms of the East grew among them, especially where the gardens had gone to abandonment. Some birdcalls, too, I recognized from walks in England: there were thrushes, and the unexpected cuckoo as well, imported permanently by a homesick officer a century ago. All Simla had about it, beneath the memory of cheroots and wine and officers’ clubs and dances and flirtations and tattling servants, a profound sense of homesickness. Carved hearts enclasping British names, pierced by arrows, were still on some trees.

  I found the dark, gabled cottage behind a green gate, amid the scents of honeysuckle and roses. Stone steps led from the garden into the woods. The cottage would have been at home in Tunbridge Wells, but the ayah who answered my insistent knocking was a skinny Indian woman named Rada who spoke little English.

  I was led into a shadowy hallway rich with the odor of newly polished wood and the hollow ticking of an old clock. By a staircase was a many-paned window with lace curtains, and old prints of wild tribes, men on horseback, and palaces on cliffs hung nearby. Upstairs was a sitting room full of books, a tiny fireplace, wicker
furniture, and armchairs with handmade cushions. Rada left me mysteriously, then returned five minutes later.

  “Come,” she said.

  I was led into Mrs. Montagu’s bedroom, which looked out on her garden. It began to rain very lightly, a falling mist. She lay on a settee in one corner, and she was so old she looked miniature, though her skin glowed and she still had a beautiful, open, Renoir face. She was wearing a square green Indian cap that made her look jaunty, and she was wrapped in a blanket. Near her, in a hanging cage, a parrot hopped from foot to foot, and behind her were several framed photographs of British men in uniform.

  A wisp of the British Raj remained on the evening veranda of the rest house. After dinner I relaxed into a wicker chair, the night air cool and calm, and shared tea with two English couples. Joking, talking of England, it was easy to imagine that, for the moment, it was as it once had been: pretty memsahibs, gallant young British officers, confident in themselves, enjoying all that came with being an officer and a gentleman in British India.

  —Jan Zabinski, “Walking the Length of India”

  Her eyes were squeezed open, but she looked past me. She put her hand out, palm up, on the small table between us; it was an effort. I touched her hand with mine, and she took it and squeezed my fingers.

  “I am a hilly-billy,” she announced. “I love these hills, I have lived in them all my life, and I will die in them. I have my place already. At Jalore. My grave.”

  I said, “How old are you, Mrs. Montagu?”

  She said with surprise, “I can’t remember.” She paused. “I’m sorry. I was here in Simla when I was a little girl. It’s changed.”

  “Were you born in the eighteen-eighties?”

  “I…think so. I’m very old, you know. I’m a hilly-billy.” She loved saying that word—it made her smile sweetly. I said, “What do you remember most?”

  She said firmly, “There were so many dances then, and parties, nearly every evening. At Viceregal Lodge. And the Hotel Cecil. I was more beautiful then.” She squeezed my hand more firmly. She said suddenly, “Are you married?”

  I said I wasn’t. “Should I get married?”

  “Well, I expect it would be a good idea,” she said. “Then you and your wife could call on me more frequently.”

  I pointed to the photographs. “Was one of those men your husband?”

  She blinked at me. “No,” she said finally. I saw a memory cross her face like a cloud, but she let it pass out of sight. She said,“I can see you, but I can’t read anymore. I ruined my eyes. Have you seen my animals? I’ve got lots.”

  I’d seen none but the parrot, and it seemed tired. When I felt it was time to go, I stood up. Mrs. Montagu, still holding my hand, leaned forward on the settee a few inches. She was waiting to be kissed, and when my lips brushed her cheek her skin was as soft as a flower’s petal.

  “Perhaps I’ll see you again tomorrow,” she murmured.

  Rada led me downstairs in the gloom, past the pictures of old India. Somewhere in the inner reaches of the house a clock struck once. It had stopped raining. Rada followed me nervously out to the gate and closed it behind me, giving a little wave.

  One morning I found Viceregal Lodge, at the top of Observatory Hill. It was a tiring climb without a carriage and horses, up a long steep road that during the Raj had been covered, on festive occasions, with more than a mile of red carpet. Now the Rashtrapati Bhavan (the Indian Institute for Advanced Study) the former center of all British power in Asia, looked the same as in old photographs: a grand stone mansion in the high Victorian style, almost a castle, surrounded by carefully manicured lawns with solemn rows of blooming flowers and gardens on many levels linked by mottled stone steps. Ivy still clung to the walls, and a great bell hung in a cradle before the entrance. The inside, all five floors, was entirely of carved Burma teak. Once the ballroom had welcomed nearly a thousand guests at a time, now it was devoted to the natural sciences.

  It had been built during the rule of Lord Dufferin, from 1884 to 1888. That viceroy had not been as enamored of Simla as most were: in a letter, he wrote, “That the capital of the Indian Empire should be hanging on by its eyelids to the side of a hill is too absurd.” Viceregal Lodge still seemed invested with enormous power. It had an aura of military theatricality, of plumed pomp, and from here viceroy after viceroy had decreed, absolutely, the fate of several hundred million people and the movements of the mightiest army on the entire continent.

  I sat outside by a sundial, beneath an oak, and watched the gardeners at work. The entire scene was so British, but for the hypnotic mountains, that it was easy to enter the past. More than the gabled, polite buildings of the Mall, Viceregal Lodge was built as an act of total confidence, authority, and conviction—from balustraded balconies wrapping around every wing, as if waiting for some high officer to perform his morning constitutional, to the shaded walkways with their hanging lanterns, to the smallest detail, the weather vane perched on the highest painted dome. It was a good old British cock, and today the wind was blowing firmly from the east.

  On my way back I stopped in at Sidhuwal Lodge, perhaps the oldest building in Simla, dating from 1826—about five years after the town’s inception. It nestles just above Christ Church and the Simla Library. There I met the ex-major Bhai Fateh Jang Singh, a stooped old gentleman in a turban with white beard and mustache, glasses, and a steadfast gaze. A Sikh, he was a reservoir of stories. He’d known Simla since the twenties, and I asked him if there was a tale behind the name of Scandal Point.

  “Which tale? Which scandal?” he said. “I can tell you several. The best, and don’t bother to try and verify it, is that close to the turn of the century a local maharajah was looking for some girls for his harem, scouting around, and one of his servants collected a daughter of the queen’s viceroy for him. He had to give her back and move twenty miles away.” He shrugged. “I don’t think the British would have been satisfied with that.”

  I asked him what he thought of the British rule.

  He rested his hands on his cane and said, “Considering the fact that they were an alien culture and had to do certain unpleasant things to control India…” He paused, “They were all right. It was quite a life we had here in Simla with them. Polo thrice weekly. Other days, train our horses in the morning, lunch, three rubbers of bridge, cocktails, dinner, bed. Dances. Hunts. Pheasant shooting—I was a fine shot. And a great deal of tennis.”

  I arrived in Darjeeling in a dense fog. Above the window in the living room of the teahouse was a panoramic photograph of the most magnificent mountains I had ever seen. I asked where that scene was. The proprietor tilted her head as if I were nuts and pointed out the window. “There,” she said.

  I looked out at the solid bank of clouds and vowed to stay as long as necessary, to see that sight. Each morning I’d wake up and eagerly look out my window but it was always the same gray mist, until one morning I awoke at dawn and sensed something different in the texture of the sky visible from my bed. My heart started to race. I sat up and there, filling the window and most of the sky was the glimmering massif of Kanchenjunga, dusted a brilliant red by the rising sun and sprawling across the horizon as if embracing the whole world. For many moments I disappeared into it, overcome by the sheer gravity of the mountain. It was the most powerful vision I’d ever seen.

  —Larry Habegger, “Strolling to Sikkim”

  He preened his white mustache absentmindedly, his memory reaching back. “You must remember, the British never sent us politicians. I was a politician—I won my first election in my early twenties. No, the British sent us statesmen.” He arched his eyebrows at me. “Look around you. Until recently every stick of every building in Simla was put up by the British. Like Folkestone or Sussex, old chap, yes?” He was teasing, putting on an accent. “They all knew how to give fine parties. One viceroy, Lord Linlithgow—had three daughters. We called them Hope, Little Hope, and No Hope.”

  I said, “Besides the town, what did the Britis
h leave behind?”

  He grinned mischievously. “The bush shirt.”

  My last afternoon in Simla I was invited to have tea at Chapslee—”the most beautiful house in the hills,” people said. I found it on one of the lanes past the smoky clutter of Lakaah Bazaar, up a flagstone path by a tennis court. It was one of the more discreet old houses in Simla, without the grandiose melodrama of some of the mansions; in the old days it had been a secretariat. Its shrubbery lent it a country cottage aspect, but it was large.

  A servant showed me into a hall of carved teak. Paintings of lakeside castles, mountainscapes, and princely forefathers were framed on the walls beside elegant daggers. Gigantic blue and white Mogul vases ushered me into a sitting room of velvet chairs, painted miniatures, silk drapes, and a marble hearth. The carpets were like an ornate lawn. In a farther room were books in glass cases and ivory-inlay tables.

  A boy came to greet me, with a sweet, open face that held all the humor and intelligence of Kim himself.

  “May I show you around? My father will be along in a minute. My name is Chandrajit.”

  He caught me staring at a silver-framed photograph on the mantle, from the time of the First World War. The young woman in it was British, and beautiful in a soft-complexioned, spirited way, without fuss or pose. She looked oddly familiar. The photograph was inscribed “From Hermione M. with love” in a flourishing hand.