by Ruskin Bond
For aloo-mutter and aloo-dhum,
Our heartfelt thanks to Captain Young!
Shimla became the capital of British India, Nainital the capital of the United Provinces. These towns were soon teeming with officials and empire-builders. But Mussoorie remained non-official, the pleasure capital of the princes, wealthy Indians, European entrepreneurs, and the wives and mistresses of all of them. Mussoorie was smaller than Shimla, all length and not much width, but there was room enough for private lives, for discreet affairs conducted over picnic baskets beneath the whispering deodars.
Ah, those picnics! They seem to be a thing of the past, now that you can drive almost anywhere and find a line of dhabas awaiting you. Few people today bother to prepare those delicate sandwiches or delicious parathas when packets of potato chips and other fast foods are to be found at every bend of the road. Stop at any dhaba in the hills and an instant meal of chow mein will be ready for you. Professor Saili tells me that chow mein is now the national dish of Uttaranchal. I believe him. My own family members demand it whenever we are out for the day.
But to return to Mussoorie’s easy-going early days, before the missionaries arrived and made their own rules, imposing their ideas of morality upon the inhabitants.
The station’s reputation was well established as far back as October 1884, when the local correspondent of the Calcutta Statesman wrote to his paper: ‘Last Sunday, a sermon was delivered by the Rev Mr Hackett, belonging to the Church Mission society; he chose for his text Ezekiel 18th and 2nd verse, the latter clause: ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes and set their children’s teeth on edge.’ The reverend gentleman discoursed upon the highly immoral tone of society up here, that it far surpassed any other hill station in the scale of morals; that ladies and gentlemen after attending church proceeded to a drinking shop, a restaurant adjoining the library and there indulged freely in pegs, not one but many; that at a Fancy Bazaar held this season, a lady stood up on a chair and offered her kisses to gentlemen at Rs 5 each. What would they think of such a state of society at Home? But this was not all. ‘Married ladies and married gents formed friendships and associations, which tended to no good purpose, and set a bad example.’
Adultery under the pines? Mussoorie was well ahead of the times. The poor reverend preached to no purpose. And it was just as well that he was not alive in the year 1933, when a lady stood up at a benefit show and auctioned a single kiss, for which a gentleman paid Rs 300, a substantial amount seventy years ago. (A year’s house rent, in fact.) The Statesman’s correspondent had nothing to say on this latter occasion; his silence was in itself a comment on the changing times.
A few years ago I received a letter from a reader in England, wanting to know if there were any Maxwells still living in Mussoorie. He was a Maxwell himself, he said, by his father’s first marriage. From what he knew of the family history, there ought to have been several Maxwells by the second marriage, and he wanted to get in touch with them.
He was very frank and mentioned that his father had given up a brilliant career in the Indian Civil Service to marry a fourteen-year-old Muslim girl. He had met her in Madras, changed his religion to facilitate the marriage, and then—to avoid ‘scandal’—had made his home with her in Mussoorie.
Although there are no longer any Maxwells living in Mussoorie, my former neighbour, Miss Bean, confirmed that Mr Maxwell’s children from his second wife had grown up on the hillside, each inheriting a considerable property. The children emigrated, but one granddaughter returned to Mussoorie not so long ago, on a honeymoon with her fourth husband, thus keeping up the family tradition.
Mussoorie was probably at its brightest and gayest in the Thirties. Ballrooms, skating rinks and cinema halls flourished. Beauty saloons sprang up along the Mall. An old advertisement in my possession announces the superiority of Madame Freda in the art of ‘permanent waving’. Another old ad recommends Holloway’s Ointment as a ‘certain remedy for bad legs, bad breasts, and ulcerations of all kinds.’
Darlington’s Pain-Curer was another certain remedy for all manner of ailments. It was even recommended by His Highness Raja Pratap Sah of Tehri-Garhwal State, whose domains bordered Mussoorie: ‘It affords me much pleasure in informing you that the two bottles of Darlington’s Pain-Curer, which I took from you, has given extraordinary relief from the rheumatism I have been suffering since last six months. Therefore I request you to send me two bottles more (large size) as I wish to take this valuable medicine with me on my tour through the Himalaya mountains.’
Neither the ad nor his Highness tells us whether you were supposed to apply the potion or drink the stuff. Perhaps you could do both.
By the time Independence came to India, most of the British and Anglo-Indian residents of our hill stations had sold their homes and left the country. Only a few stayed on—elderly folks like Miss Bean who had spent all their lives here and whose meagre incomes did not allow them to settle abroad.
I wonder what really brought me to Mussoorie in the 1960s. True, I had been here as a child, and my mother’s people had lived in Dehra Dun, in the valley below. When I returned to India, still a young man in my twenties (I had spent only four years in England), I lived in Delhi and Dehra Dun for a few years; and then, on an impulse, I found myself revisiting the hill station, calling on the oldest resident, Miss Bean, and being told by her that the upper portion of her cottage, Maplewood, was to let. On another impulse, I rented it.
Always a creature of impulse, my life has been shaped more by a benign providence than by any system of foresight or planning.
Well, that was forty years ago, and Miss Bean has long since gone to her Maker, and here I am in the midst of a large family, living in another cottage and doing my best to keep it from falling down.
Perhaps I really wanted to come back to my beginnings. Because it was in Mussoorie in 1933 (the Year of the Kissing!) that my parents met each other and were married.
I have a photograph of them, on horseback, riding on the Camel’s Back Road. He was thirty-six then and had just given up a tea-estate manager’s job; she was barely twenty, taking a nurse’s training at the Cottage Hospital, just below Gun Hill. A few months later they were living in the heat and dust of Alwar, in Rajasthan, and then Jamnagar in Kathiawar, where my father conducted a small palace school. I was not born in Mussoorie but I am pretty sure I had my conception there!
There is something in the air of the place—especially in October—that is conducive to love and passion and desire. Miss Bean told me that as a girl she’d many suitors, and if she did not marry it was more from procrastination than from being passed over. While on all sides elopements and broken marriages were making hill station life exciting, and providing orphans and illegitimate children for the mission schools, Miss Bean contrived to remain single and childless. She was probably helped by the fact of her father being a retired police officer with a reputation for being a good shot with the pistol and Lee-Enfield rifle.
She taught elocution in one of the many schools that flourished (and still flourish) in Mussoorie. There is a protective atmosphere about a residential school, an atmosphere which, although it protects one from the outside would, often exposes one to the hazards within the system.
The schools were not without their own scandals. Mrs Fennimore, the wife of a headmaster at Oak Grove, got herself entangled in a defamation suit, each hearing of which grew more and more distasteful to her husband. Unable to stand the whole weary and sordid business, Mr Fennimore hit upon a solution. Loading his revolver, he moved to his wife’s bedside and shot her through the head. For no accountable reason he put the weapon under her pillow—obviously no one could have mistaken the death for suicide—and then, going to his study, he leaned over his rifle and shot himself.
Ten years later, in the same school, another headmaster’s wife was arrested for attempted murder. She had fired at, and wounded a junior mistress. The motive remained obscure and the case was hushed up.
In the
St. Fidelis’ School, circa 1941, a boy asleep in the dormitory had his throat slit by another boy, it was said at the instigation of one of the teachers. This too was hushed up, but the school closed down a year later.
In recent years, there has been a suicide in one public school, and murders (involving students) in two others; also an accidental death by way of a drug overdose. Tom Brown’s school days were pretty dull when compared to the goings on in some of our residential schools.
These affairs usually get hushed up, but there was no hushing up the incidents that took place on the 25 July 1927, at the height of the season and in the heart of the town—a double tragedy that set the station agog with excitement. It all happened in broad daylight and in a full boarding house, Zephyr Hall.
Shortly after noon the boarders were startled into brisk activity when a shot rang out from one of the rooms, followed by screams. Other shots followed in quick succession. Those boarders who happened to be in the lounge or on the verandah dived for the safety of their own rooms and bolted the doors. One unhappy boarder however, ignorant of where the man with the gun might be, decided to take no chances and came round the corner with his hands held well above his head only to run straight into the levelled pistol! Even the man who held it, and who had just shot his wife and daughter, couldn’t help laughing.
Mr Owen, the maniac with the gun, after killing his wife and wounding his daughter finally shot himself. His was the first official Christian cremation in Mussoorie, performed apparently in compliance with wishes expressed long before his dramatic end.
A couple of years ago I had a letter from an old Mussoorie resident, Col. Cole, now retired in Pune, who recalled the event: ‘Mrs Owen ran Zephyr Hall as a boarding house. It was the last Saturday of the month, and Mrs Owen’s son Basil was with me at the 11 a.m.–1 p.m. session at the skating rink and so escaped the tragedy that took place about midday, when Mr Owen shot Mrs Owen and one daughter and then shot himself. I do not know what happened to Basil but he was withdrawn from school and an uncle took him over. This was not the end of the family tragedy. An older sister of Basil’s in her early twenties was boating on the river Gumpti at Lucknow with her fiance, when a flash flood took place and the strong current drowned them both.’
This was not the end of the story, at least not for me.
A few summers ago, while I was walking along the Mall, I was stopped by a stranger, a small man with pale blue eyes and thinning hair. He must have been over sixty. Accompanying him was a much younger woman, whom he introduced as his wife. He apologized for detaining me, and said: ‘You look as though you have been here a long time. Do you know if any of the Gantzers still live here? I believe they look after the cemetery.’
I gave him the necessary directions and then asked him if he was visiting Mussoorie for the first time. He seemed to welcome the inquiry and showed a willingness to talk.
‘It’s well over fifty years since I was last here’, he said. ‘I was just a boy at the time’. And he gestured towards the ruins of Zephyr Hall, now occupied by postmen and their families. ‘That was my mother’s boarding house. That was where she died…’
‘Not-not Mr Owen?’ I ventured to ask.
‘That’s right. So you’ve heard about it. My father had a sudden brainstorm. He shot and killed Mother. My sister was badly wounded. I was out at the time. Now I have come to revisit her grave. I know she’d have wanted me to come.’
He took my telephone number and promised to look me up before he left Mussoorie. But I did not see him again. After a few days, I began to wonder if I had really met a survivor of this old tragedy, or if he had been just another of the hill station’s ghosts. But one day, while I was walking along the cemetery’s lowest terrace, I found confirmation that Mrs Owens son had indeed visited his mother’s grave. Set into the tombstone was a new stone plaque with the inscription: ‘Mother Dear, I am Here.’
A Hill Station’s Vintage Murders
There is less crime in the hills than in the plains, and so the few murders that do take place from time to time stand out as landmarks in the annals of a hill station.
Among the gravestones in the Mussoorie cemetery there is one which bears the inscription: ‘Murdered by the hand he befriended.’ This is the grave of Mr James Reginald Clapp, a chemist’s assistant, who was brutally done to death on the night of 31 August 1909.
Miss Ripley-Bean, who has spent most of her eighty-seven years in this hill station, remembers the case clearly, though she was only a girl at the time. From the details she has given me, and from a brief account in A Mussoorie Miscellany, now out of print, I am able to reconstruct this interesting case and a couple of others which were the sensations of their respective ‘seasons’.
Mr Clapp was an assistant in the chemist’s shop of Messrs. J.B. & E. Samuel (no longer in existence), situated in one of the busiest sections of the Mall. At that time the adjoining cantonment of Landour was an important convalescent centre for British soldiers. Mr Clapp was popular with the soldiers, and he had befriended some of them when they had run short of money. He was a steady worker and sent most of his savings home, to his mother in Birmingham; she was planning to use the money to buy the house in which she lived.
At the time of the murder, Clapp was particularly friendly with a Corporal Allen, who was eventually to be hanged at the Naini Jail. The murder was brutal, the initial attack being launched with a soda-water bottle on the victim’s head. Clapp’s throat was then cut from ear to ear with his own razor, which was left behind in the room. The body was discovered on the floor of the shop the next morning by the proprietor, Mr Samuel, who did not live on the premises.
Suspicion immediately fell on Corporal Allen because he had left Mussoorie that same night, arriving at Rajpur, in the foothills (a seven-mile walk by the bridle path) many hours later than he was expected at a Rajpur boarding house. According to some, Clapp had last been seen in the corporal’s company.
There was other circumstantial evidence pointing to Allen’s guilt. On the day of the murder, Mr Clapp had received his salary, and this sum, in sovereigns and notes, was never traced. Allen was alleged to have made a payment in sovereigns at Rajpur. Someone had given Allen a biscuit tin packed with sandwiches for his journey down, and it was thought that perhaps the tin had been used by the murderer as a safe for the money. But no tin was found, and Allen denied having had one with him.
Allen was arrested at Rajpur and brought back to Mussoorie under escort. He was taken immediately to the victim’s bedside, where the body still lay, the police hoping that he might confess his guilt when confronted with the body of the victim; but Allen was unmoved, and protested his innocence.
Meanwhile, other soldiers from among Mr Clapp’s friends had collected on the Mall. They had removed their belts and were ready to lynch Allen as soon as he was brought out of the shop. The situation was tense, but further mishap was averted by the resourcefulness of Mr Rust, a photographer, who, being of the same build as the corporal, put on an army coat with a turned-up collar, and arranged to be handcuffed between two policemen. He remained with them inside the shop, in partial view of the mob, while the rest of the police party escorted the corporal out by a back entrance. Mr Rust did not abandon his disguise or leave the shop until word arrived that Allen was secure in the police station.
Corporal Allen was eventually found guilty, and was hanged. But there were many who felt that he had never really been proved guilty, and that he had been convicted on purely circumstantial evidence; and looking back on the case from this distance in time one cannot help feeling that the soldier may have been a victim of circumstances, and perhaps of local prejudice, for he was not liked by his fellows. Allen himself hinted that he was not in the vicinity of the crime that night but in the company of a lady whose integrity he was determined to shield. If this was true, it was a pity that the lady prized her virtue more than her friend’s life, for she did not come forward to save him. The chaplain who administered to Allen during h
is last days in the ‘condemned cell’ was prepared to absolve the corporal and could not accept that he was a murderer.
One of the hill station’s most sensational crimes was committed on 25 July 1927, at the height of the ‘season’ and in the heart of the town, in Zephyr Hall, then a boarding house. It provided a good deal of excitement for the residents of the boarding house.
Soon after midday, Zephyr Hall residents were startled into brisk activity when a woman screamed and a shot rang out from one of the rooms. Other shots followed in rapid succession.
Those boarders who happened to be in the public lounge or verandah dived for the safety of their rooms; but one unhappy resident, taking the precaution of coming around a corner with his hands held well above his head, ran straight into a levelled pistol. And the man with the gun, who had just killed his wife and wounded his daughter, was still able to see some humour in the situation, for he burst into laughter! The boarder escaped unhurt. But the murderer, Mr Owen, did not savour the situation for long. He shot himself long before the police arrived.
Ten years earlier, on 24 November 1917, another husband had shot his wife.
Mrs Fennimore, the wife of a schoolmaster, had got herself inextricably enmeshed in a defamation law suit, each hearing of which was more distasteful to Mr Fennimore than the previous one. Finally he determined on his own solution. Late at night he armed himself with a loaded revolver, moved to his wife’s bedside, and, finding her lying asleep on her side, shot her through the back of the head. For no accountable reason he put the weapon under her pillow, and then completed his plan. Going to the lavatory, three rooms beyond his wife’s bedroom, he leaned over his loaded rifle and shot himself.
The Garlands on His Brow
Fame has but a fleeting hold
On the reins in our fast-paced society;
