A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  The wooden front stairs of the Postmaster Flat are old, a couple of steps worn out and yielding. One damp monsoon afternoon I come out the front door on my way to the Mall. A few steps down, I slip and fall heavily on my back. During one fateful instant, as my head snaps back and hits something hard, I think I’m about to die. But I survive, winded, my back savagely sore, and slowly climb the remaining steps down. The next morning I report this near demise to the residence office, not only for the sake of my safety in the days ahead but also the safety of future residents of the flat. I am reassured warmly that the matter will be taken care of, not to worry. Nothing happens. That’s the reverse side to the warmth and easy informality, to all the namasté-ji and the flexibility to accommodate to your needs.

  Sometimes, in the late afternoon, as a residual sunlight strains in through the western sky, I come to sit at the small outdoor café of dilapidated sticky furniture and numerous small flies, at the cliff edge in the lee of the Institute, under the windows of the library that was once the viceroys’ ballroom. Watching the sunset from this vantage point becomes a game, one repeated frequently. There is nothing between me and the distant peaks of the Himalayas, the sun always behind them.

  Down below, the green hills. Undulating hills, moving shadows at play with the angular glare, shades of green, textures and depths of pine foliage merging with the jet black of the western slopes. A thin haze hangs in the air. A road curves round some hills and departs the town; a train whistle blows close by, but the train, directly below at the bottom of the cliff, is not visible. Straight ahead again, light blue of the sky meets orange glow of the sun and forms a sharp line of transition, behind which the mountains peep like dim shadow-figures through the haze. Suddenly the air turns cold, the sun now a bright yellow and sharply delineated disk no bigger than a fat full moon, no harder on the eye. And the sky hued from blue through green, purple, and orange, all in soft tones. Are there clouds in the west, way in the distance? As if to answer, a wisp appears in front of the setting sun, attains sharper and sharper focus as it moves down, like a mountain range viewed through a telescope. A cold wind blows. The disk, covered it seems by a wave of alternating orange and yellow, suddenly enters a swath of cloud, sinks deeper into it until a thin crescent, more an arc, peeps out at the top, and yes, a similar curve at the bottom, grey in between. The clouds have been made visible only because the sun must go behind them, behind everything. Then, having teased, the sun, smiling now, oblate to the eye, reappears and then ever so slowly, majestically, just perceptibly, plunges between two peaks, never for a moment in a hurry, even when it’s become a small red point in the horizon.

  Sometimes a pale silver moon appears from the opposite direction even as the red disk of the sun still watches, and there is the spectacle of the source and its reflection vying for attention at once.

  Nights are cool and, on clear days of spring or the few days of summer, crisp; the moon when full is so large and low as to appear to have been simply hung there by the friendly, mischievous gods, and bathed in its thin white light the crowns of the oaks acquire a glowing cover; on moonless nights the stars are sharp, and the Milky Way is observable from the unlighted corners of the lawn, running like a strip of gossamer veil way up above, across the darkness and the beyond. Across the valley, the lights of the town like bright points conglomerate in a section of the darkness, an entire small galaxy viewed from up close; elsewhere on the valleys and the hills, isolated pinpricks of habitation. During the rains a thick swirling fog may overhang the area, its effects enhanced by the white and yellow lamps on posts; and with the grey gothic building in the background the entire place acquires a certain macabreness. If one lingered a little in this night, did not turn away quickly into the embrace of a hearth, then that shadowy figure in the near distance who is barely visible might just respond to the call: “Heathcliff!”

  And yes, they say there are ghosts here, of British folks long dead and gone.

  Once, a professor of a particularly rational and scientific bent of mind, I was told, when on a visit to the Institute was given a rather posh set of rooms in the former viceroy’s residence. Every day during his stay, he noticed his bottle of hair oil had been somewhat roughly treated, even thrown about, and he would place it back neatly where it belonged. One morning he said somewhat irritably to the attendant who had been assigned to the room, “Why do you people throw around my things?” To which the attendant replied, “Lady Curzon does not like the smell of your hair oil.” The guest room had belonged once to her. Bad history but good story, said my informer: The lady is believed to have been poisoned with arsenic; her lord might even have had a hand in her death. “Did she die here, then?” I asked. No, she died in England.

  England still haunts the place, from a distance. Blue blazers are popular among the select; and there’s nothing better than a degree from Oxford. Harvard has not arrived here, but give it time.

  Unlike the time of the viceroys, there is little social life at Observatory Hill, or indeed in the town, at night. For one thing, it is not easy to get around. A simple dinner party, at the director’s or another scholar’s residence, for example, requires strenuous climbing on the hilly paths and up and down steep steps with wobbly banisters, at times in pitch darkness with the help of only a flashlight. Even then, the threat of a cheetah or hyena lurking in the woods, real or imagined, can make night sojourns a little unsettling. No wonder then, the alternative settled for by most: an austere regimen of early-to-bed, followed perhaps by a long walk in the beautiful, quiet dawn, when there’s little sign of life but for another solitary walker or, in the terraced gardens, someone practising yoga, or calisthenics, or voice.

  I’ve revelled in my precious mountain solitude, and I’ve sat through dreadful loneliness, nights so dark and still outside my dimly lit rooms that I could be in a capsule at the edge of the universe. This state of alternate highs and lows is alleviated briefly by the arrival of two friends from Delhi, one of whom is Mahesh. Sometimes, tiring of the monotony of the fare at the Guest House, daal-and-subzi, rice-and-chappati, day in and day out, we take the long walk to the Mall in the late afternoon in search of the simple pleasures of diet and drink that in the pristine air of this roof of the world almost bear the aura of sin or debauchery. A steep winding climb down from the main building, past the Gurkha Gate, brings us to the halfway point of Chaura Maidan. Here is a post office facing a statue of Baba Ambedkar—the hero of the low-caste and “Untouchables” and a key architect of the Indian constitution—past which is an old, defunct hotel, called the Cecil, being renovated, and a modest shopping strip: a boy frying jelebis outside a sweet vendor’s; two grocery stores with long-distance STD phone booths which are always in use; a large cow, not always the same one, eyeing mournfully a sack of potatoes or onions; and a tall, old bearded man in cap who sells flaccid fruit one just can’t make oneself buy, even out of sympathy. Past this modest strip comes an area we distinguish by its belligerent monkeys, and then the long climb up to the Mall, on which motor traffic is prohibited. By the roadside sit hawkers of apricots, apples, pears, and plums, whose prices we carefully mark for later bargaining, and roasted-corn sellers who supply our first indulgence of the day. A little further along we arrive at our second stop, the Indian Coffee House, a venerable old place with perhaps the only authentic fresh coffee in these foothills.

  The Mall proper begins at the statue of Lala Lajpat Rai, a hero of the independence struggle, who died from his wounds after beatings by police, famously saying upon his death, “Let every blow that falls upon me beat a nail on the coffin of British rule.” Perhaps an appropriate place for his memorial, this little capital of the Raj, this England away from home. The Upper Mall is where the British themselves shopped and was inaccessible to Indians not properly attired; an ill-dressed wog was simply pushed down the steps towards the Lower Bazar. Now locals come for strolls in the evenings or weekends and noisy tourists pack it in the summer. Sometimes Bollywood comes to shoot the exo
tic locale. The location of the statue is known as Scandal Point, which, mentioned the right way, I am told, is enough to bring a blush upon the cheeks of a damsel, which is the only way to describe some of the women here, fair and high cheekboned, hair braided down to the hip, a large red bindi on the forehead. It was here apparently that the Maharaja of Patiala once teased an English woman, whereupon he was refused the privilege of access to the Mall.

  One branch of the Upper Mall goes up to the ridge, which looks upon an uninhibited vista of mountains and valleys, as far as the eye can see; vendors sell snacks and ice creams and balloons and soap-bubble rings, the children are given horse rides, young couples rent colourful mountain costumes and have their photos taken. There are two ugly statues here, of two Gandhis, the Mahatma and Indira, commissioned by the government, it is said partly in jest, from the lowest bidders; from a high bandstand above the Mahatma a band sometimes gives a bravura performance. The most eminent building here is the yellow Christ Church at the far end of the ridge, with its square tower and clock, its Tudor porch and stained-glass windows, visible even from Observatory Hill, from where we’ve just come. It was designed by one Colonel Boileau, after whom was named the area of Boileau Ganj (pronounced “Baalu gunj” locally).

  The lower branch of the Upper Mall is where the fancy shopping takes place, for Western-style clothes, English books, liquor, cakes, brown breads, and processed cheese, unfortunately the only kind available. At regular intervals along this street, steep steps go down to the several levels of the Lower Bazar, crowded with local shoppers and knowing visitors. Here, you find the hardware store, the halwais, the fruit sellers, the gold-and silversmiths, the grocers, the stationer, the ironmongers, the tailors, the cobblers, and the chemist, and the temple and the mosque. Right at the bottom is the Cart Road, which heads out of town. Originally called the Grand Hindostan and Tibet Road, it was completed in 1856.

  In the Lower Bazar—which meets the Upper Mall at a hairpin bend marked by the dhaba called Sher-e-Punjab—opposite the fruiters, is one tempting stop: the boy outside the halwai making reputedly the best jelebis in town, or anywhere: not too thick but crisp, just out from the hot oil and dipped in syrup, rich yellow and dripping, sticky whorls of sweet. We might have the jelebis first or head for a meal at Aunty’s, up ahead above the mosque. There is nobody who could be an aunty at this small, single-room restaurant always packed during dinner time, but there apparently had been one. Now it is run by a young Chinese man, proprietor and chef, and his one waiter. No possible request is refused, the food is cooked to order, Chinese and Indian, veg and nonveg. And after Aunty’s or jelebis or both, we walk back to the Institute, speculating like young escapees what malicious concoction from the Guest House cooks we have dodged today. Ah, but there is one more stop. Chaura Maidan, with its cow and its halwai, where we stop for a last tea before making the long climb up. By this time the road back is dark, and the grounds of the Viceregal Lodge, though lighted by lamp posts, are suffused in an eerie stillness, and it seems just possible that a cheetah might be lurking somewhere. Mahesh, partly in jest, has his umbrella at the ready. From here the lights of the town we’ve left behind shine like distant stars.

  Even the Delhi papers have something to say about our monkeys. Until recently, monkey catchers used to come routinely; business was lucrative, on a per-monkey basis, when large numbers were sent to North American laboratories for experimentation. But that export has been prohibited recently, and the monkeys are proliferating.

  There are two types of monkeys here. The langurs, grey with black face, slim and taut-bodied, handsome and quite strong; they can be seen on tree branches or in bushes feeding on vegetation, babies sometimes clutching at their fronts. Early in the mornings they will land with a crash upon my corrugated-metal roof, startling me awake. But otherwise they are the silent type, and timid; and so they get pelted with stones from children and cruel tourist youth. It is the other monkeys, “the monkeys,” which are always the subject of discussion. No Curious George, but ugly and hairy, always dishevelled, the females with fiery red daubed on their behinds, babies clutched underneath as they prowl on all fours, or sitting before them as they contemplate the passersby, waiting for a chance to mug someone.

  Stories about monkeys, I realize, are like those about backaches; once you’ve been afflicted, all manner of incidents are revealed to you. My local friend, silent on the subject so far, confesses finally to an incident in which, when she was a girl, a large female monkey jumped on her shoulder and she screamed for dear life. And so it is not only the visitor or the tourist who gets victimized, or walks nervously past a group of these simian cousins, but the locals also; and like many predators, they prefer to victimize women and children.

  The monkeys on the way to Jakhoo Temple, dedicated to the monkey god Hanuman, are considered by the locals to be the most aggressive. This small slander has come about perhaps because the Mall road to the Institute is not as well travelled. In my experience, the most odious of these creatures are the monkeys of Chaura Maidan on the way to the Mall. A group of women come down the road eating ears of roasted corn, a monkey lithely climbs down a parapet, tries to swipe one out of a hand; before the woman can be scratched she yields up her snack. A man gaily walks along swinging a polythene bag of mangoes he’s just purchased; along comes one of the creatures from behind, snatches the bag and makes a dash for it. As two women walk by with bags in their hands, two monkeys from behind a parked truck appraise them, get under the truck to begin their surprise attack; the women notice, clutch their bags close, and the monkeys change their minds. A group of boys just out from school with their backpacks walk nervously through a monkey gauntlet.

  At other places they can expect to feed off leftovers or get into garbage or help themselves to temple offerings; but the monkeys of Chaura Maidan have mean, grumpy, restless looks as they prowl up and down and jealously guard their offspring, humourlessly though diligently pursuing their nefarious occupation, resentful at having been reduced this way to the role of scavengers, beggars, and robbers of their neighbours on the evolutionary ladder. When you see a group of monkeys, said a companion to me, you have to walk like a newly wed bride, looking down and clutching your things close to you.

  To be sure, there are cute moments; like the time there’s not a monkey in sight, and then, when you look up the hillside, you see a row of them, ten or more in number, taking turns intently grooming each other, presumably before they all hit the road like the Forty Thieves as the tourists arrive on their strolls. And of course there are monkey legends. The monkeys of the temple area had so bothered an Englishman who lived in the neighbourhood that he one day packed up his bags to leave. But a priest from Jakhoo Temple advised him, Hold on, no need for this extreme step; he called together all the monkeys of the area and gave them a good talking to in, presumably, Pahadi, the local mountain dialect. The Englishman was left alone after that.

  It is easy to imagine a Valmiki, author of the Sanskrit epic the Ramayana, sitting under a tree or outside a hut and invoking these creatures in a story; it was they who made a bridge across to Lanka, defeated the demon Ravana, and set the island aflame.

  Rudyard Kipling even composed a poem to the Shimla monkey (“bandar” in Hindi), which begins:

  It was an artless Bandar and he danced upon a pine,

  And much I wondered how he lived and where the beast might dine.

  And many other things, till o’er my morning smoke,

  I slept the sleep of idleness and dreamt that Bandar spoke.

  The Jakhoo specimens of the bandar turn out not as aggressive as advertised. My companion on my visit to the temple, a devout worshipper but also the author of a scholarly book on the female mystics of south India, is nervous all the way, clutching her bag in front of her; on a previous occasion her camera had been stolen by a monkey, but a group of locals entreated the thief, who had climbed up a cliff and realized it couldn’t be eaten. Finally, she relinquished it. The path, cut thro
ugh a forest of cedar and rhododendron, is paved and the incline steep, and all the way we are stared at but untouched by these creatures of Hanuman; we could have bought a walking stick (in effect a monkey-fending stick), but our umbrellas do the job. Right outside the temple, the monkeys seem somehow tamer; or perhaps it is the people here who have been tamed. At a water tap, humans wash their hands before entering to worship, and monkeys come to drink. The ancient temple, a small, evidently rebuilt, red-brick structure with a tiled roof and a front porch supported on decorated pillars, is situated on the highest hill of the region. Apparently the monkey-god Hanuman had stopped here to look for the sanjivini plant, a herb he needed to cure Lakshman, brother of the eponymous hero of the Ramayana, who lay wounded after a battle on the island of Lanka.

  Having visited the temple, my companion is a transformed person, her anxiety gone, and beaming she proceeds to distribute the prasad—the offering of sugar balls blessed by the temple priest—to the monkeys. A large one goes to her and waits patiently for the sugar; to a little one, somewhat impatient for his share, she says tenderly, “Wait, son, your turn will come.” Meanwhile, a monkey steals a bag of unblessed prasad from the woman vendor; another is biting a dog; yet another one steals a large bread pakoda through the window of the canteen and runs away and, the attendant distracted by the thief, a fourth one snatches another pakoda and makes a dash through the door. “He gives and he also scares us,” my companion says pithily to the prasad lady, making a reference, evidently, to the god Hanuman.

  Another temple, and this time with two other companions, one of them Mahesh of Delhi. This visit is to the Tara Devi Temple, outside the town, on the road to Kalka. We have come out in a joyous, even playful, mood this Sunday morning; high on mountain air, perhaps, we are teenagers again, out on a romp, though it’s been raining and grey—the monsoon has arrived—and we descend down the back road from the Institute to Boileau Ganj, from where we take our bus. It deposits us on the highway at the bottom of a hill, where we gird our loins, so to speak, for the climb up to see the Goddess.