A Town Called Dehra Read online

  Is the baker’s son,

  I gave him a book

  And he gave me a bun.

  I told him a tale

  Of a magical lake,

  And he was so pleased

  That he baked me a cake.

  Yes, he’s my best friend,

  We go cycling together,

  On bright sunny days

  Or in rain and bad weather

  And if we feel hungry

  There’s always a pie

  Or a pastry to munch on,

  As we go riding by!

  Across the road is the old church of St Thomas, where my grandparents were married, circa 1906. This was shortly after the railway came to Dehradun, making the town more accessible; it became a popular retiring place for Europeans and Anglo-Indians. Bungalows came up in large compounds where temperate and tropical fruits grew side by side. Flower gardens proliferated. The Astley Hall shopping complex came up on one side of the old Parade Ground. Schools opened; so did cinemas and restaurants. The same thing is happening today, only on a larger, more frenzied and disorganized scale.

  In the early 1950s, when most of the British and Anglo-Indian residents had gone away, the church fell into disuse. I remember a small pipal tree growing out of the roof. Window-panes were broken; the rain came in; furnishings rotted away. In my novella, Vagrants in the Valley (a sequel to The Room on the Roof), Rusty and his vagrant friends take shelter in the church and live in it for several days.

  Behind the church there was a jungle and a watercourse, dry most of the year round. A lonely grave stood on the banks of the river bed, half-hidden by lantana and tall grass. I would often pass it on my rambles. It was the grave of a young girl, but why it stood there and not in the cemetery, I was unable to find out; but it always put me in mind of another girl who died young—little Madhu, about whom I wrote a little piece.

  Pedestrian in Peril

  I think it was really my love of walking that first took me to the hills, and then kept me there for two decades. It had become increasingly difficult for me to walk about in Delhi, and I resented this, because I had been walking about Delhi before most of my readers were born. As a youth I walked from Connaught Place to Humayun’s tomb, and from Paharganj to Pusa, and although as the years passed I still covered these distances occasionally, it was no longer a pleasurable activity. Rather it became an obstacle race, an exercise in survival.

  Now whenever I visit Delhi, I do not even try covering long distances. Even crossing a road is something of a feat for me. Usually I wedge myself between two well-built women—and cross over in their company. No Maruti owner would risk damage to his car by colliding with us.

  But being a compulsive walker, I stay out of Delhi as much as possible and do most of my walking in the hills. Even hill stations are congested these days, but as I live on the outskirts of one, I have no difficulty in marching off for a few miles with only myself and a circling eagle for company. Here too, motor roads have multiplied. But it is possible to leave them at will, taking any old path that leads through fields of maize or mustard, or through oak and rhododendron forest, until a village is reached.

  Here there is alwavs hospitality if you are not the arrogant or fastidious sort. And occasionally you might come across a mountain stream where you can rest on a bed of ferns. And if there is no stream, you will eventually find a spring, perhaps a mere trickle of water but welcome all the same. Some springs dried up last year when the rains failed. Let us hope for the sake of bird and beast and thirsty trekker that it rains this winter.

  Although I have given up walking in Delhi, it is still possible to do so in some of the smaller towns in the plains. But only just. When growing up in Dehradun, I walked all over that town, and all around it, and I tried again last week but it wasn’t the same.

  My maternal grandfather once taught me the art of zigzagging. If you take a zigzag walk, he said, you will see more of a place and also have some interesting encounters. Distrust the straight and narrow, that was his philosophy.

  In those days one zigzagged from choice; now one does so out of necessity. One zigzags between scooters, tempos, buses, trucks, cars, bicycles, bullock carts and various forms of locomotion. When a town of forty thousand people has, over a period of forty years, become a city of over a hundred thousand, the resultant traffic congestion may well be imagined. And even as you struggle to make your way along one of those overburdened roads, you are helped along by the stench from overflowing drains and piles of refuse that seems never to shrink or go away.

  One cannot really blame anyone. It must happen when a small town acquires the population of a large city. And no one seems to mind. Perhaps it was all part of what Swami Vivekananda once called our ‘kitchen mentality’, the attitude that as long as the kitchen is clean, what happens on the road is none of our business.

  Anyway, I need to walk in order to live, and although I have been defeated by Delhi, I am not going to let Dehra do the same. If I walk to the old cemetery, I might enjoy a reasonably quiet stroll. My maternal grandfather, he who taught me to zigzag, is buried there, and it would be nice to locate his grave. But it is thirty years since I last visited the cemetery. Will I find it without difficulty?

  It took me the better part of the morning. Two of the busiest roads had to be crossed, and there were no Amazons to get between. As I stood on the kerb, wondering how I was going to get across, a partially blind man carrying a stick tapped me on the arm and asked me if I could take him across. This put me in a quandary. It would have been churlish of me to refuse, but I was hardly the best choice for the task.

  ‘I don’t see too well myself,’ I said, which was perfectly true. ‘But I will see what I can do.’ A frail old lady now approached us, I knew she was going to ask me to take her across the road, so I got in first. ‘Could you lead two blind men across the road, madam?’ I asked. Well, she got us safely across, and then looked back and asked me, ‘Where is the second blind man?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘he probably changed his mind.’

  When I did get to the cemetery, I found it was no longer the quiet place of yore. A line of motor workshops had sprung up in front, while a slum colony had spread along one of the boundary walls. Once reputed to be the most beautiful cemetery in northern India, it still had its trees, but of the garden only traces remained. Quite obviously, funds were lacking.

  I did not think I would find my grandfather’s grave in the wilderness of worn and weathered tombs. Many had lost their inscriptions. They represented the presence in the Doon Valley of well over a thousand Europeans, from the first soldiers and settlers of the early nineteenth century to the more recent few who ‘stayed on’—and passed on. Strangely enough, I had barely begun my search when I found myself before my grandfather’s grave. The inscription, placed there by my grandmother, stood out more clearly than most. ‘In memory of my beloved husband, William Dudley Clerke, died 9th January 1935’.

  And this was the 9th of January, too. It was becoming a day of coincidences. Or had something more than coincidence led me here on the anniversary of my grandfather’s death? And if so, why? Perhaps the coming months will give me the answer.

  My Father’s Trees

  in Dehra

  Our trees still grow in Dehra. This is one part of the world where trees are a match for man. An old pipal may be cut down to make way for a new building; two pipal trees will sprout from the walls of the building. In Dehra the air is moist, the soil hospitable to seeds and probing roots. The valley of Dehradun lies between the first range of the Himalayas and the smaller but older Siwalik range. Dehra is an old town, but it was not in the reign of Rajput princes or Mughal kings that it really grew and flourished; it acquired a certain size and importance with the coming of British and Anglo-Indian settlers. The English have an affinity with trees, and in the rolling hills of Dehra they discovered a retreat which, in spite of snakes and mosquitoes, reminded them, just a little bit, of England’s green and pleas
ant land.

  The mountains to the north are austere and inhospitable; the plains to the south are flat, dry and dusty. But Dehra is green. I look out of the train window at daybreak to see the sal and shisham trees sweep by majestically, while trailing vines and great clumps of bamboo give the forest a darkness and density which add to its mystery. There are still a few tigers in these forests; only a few, and perhaps they will survive, to stalk the spotted deer and drink at forest pools.

  I grew up in Dehra. My grandfather built a bungalow on the outskirts of the town at the turn of the century. The house was sold a few years after independence. No one knows me now in Dehra, for it is over twenty years since I left the place, and my boyhood friends are scattered and lost. And although the India of Kim is no more, and the Grand Trunk Road is now a procession of trucks instead of a slow-moving caravan of horses and camels, India is still a country in which people are easily lost and quickly forgotten.

  From the station I can take either a taxi or a snappy little scooter-rickshaw (Dehra had neither before 1950), but, because I am on an unashamedly sentimental pilgrimage, I take a tonga, drawn by a lean, listless pony, and driven by a tubercular old Muslim in a shabby green waistcoat. Only two or three tongas stand outside the station. There were always twenty or thirty here in the nineteen-forties when I came home from boarding school to be met at the station by my grandfather; but the days of the tonga are nearly over, and in many ways this is a good thing, because most tonga ponies are overworked and underfed. Its wheels squeaking from lack of oil and its seat slipping out from under me, the tonga drags me through the bazaars of Dehra. A couple of miles at this slow, funereal pace makes me impatient to use my own legs, and I dismiss the tonga when we get to the small Dilaram Bazaar.

  It is a good place from which to start walking.

  The Dilaram Bazaar has not changed very much. The shops are run by a new generation of bakers, barbers and banias, but professions have not changed. The cobblers belong to the lower castes, the bakers are Muslims, the tailors are Sikhs. Boys still fly kites from the flat rooftops, and women wash clothes on the canal steps. The canal comes down from Rajpur and goes underground here, to emerge about a mile away.

  I have to walk only a furlong to reach my grandfather’s house. The road is lined with eucalyptus, jacaranda and laburnum trees. In the compounds there are small groves of mangoes, lichis and papayas. The poinsettia thrusts its scarlet leaves over garden walls. Every veranda has its bougainvillaea creeper, every garden its bed of marigolds. Potted palms, those symbols of Victorian snobbery, are popular with Indian housewives. There are a few houses, but most of the bungalows were built by ‘old India hands’ on their retirement from the army, the police or the railways. Most of the present owners are Indian businessmen or govermnent officials.

  I am standing outside my grandfather’s house. The wall has been raised, and the wicket-gate has disappeared; I cannot get a clear view of the house and garden. The name-plate identifies the owner as Major General Saigal; the house has had more than one owner since my grandparents sold it in 1949.

  On the other side of the road there is an orchard of lichi trees. This is not the season for fruit, and there is no one looking after the garden. By taking a little path that goes through the orchard, I reach higher ground and gain a better view of our old house.

  Grandfather built the house with granite rocks taken from the foothills. It shows no sign of age. The lawn has disappeared, but the big banyan tree is still there. In this tree I spent my afternoons, absorbed in my Magnets, Champions and Hotspurs, while sticky mango juice trickled down my chin . . . There was a hole in the bole of the tree in which I kept my pocketknife, top, catapult and any badges or buttons that could be saved from my father’s RAF tunics when he came home on leave. There was also an Iron Cross, a relic of the First World War, given to me by my grandfather . . . Possibly they are still in the hole in the banyan tree; I must have forgotten to collect them when we went away after my father’s death. I am seized by a whimsical urge to walk in at the gate, climb into the branches of the tree, and recover my lost possessions. What would the present owner, the Major General (retired), have to say if I politely asked permission to look for a catapult left behind more than fifty years ago?

  An old man is coming down the path through the lichi trees. He is not a Major General but a poor street vendor. He carries a small tin trunk on his head, and walks very slowly. When he sees me he stops and asks me if I will buy something. I can think of nothing I need, but the old man looks so tired, so very old, that I am afraid he will collapse if he moves any further along the path without resting. So I ask him to show me his wares. He cannot get the box off his head by himself, but together we manage to set it down in the shade, and the old man insists on spreading its entire contents on the grass; bangles, combs, shoelaces, safety-pins, cheap stationery, buttons, pomades, elastic and scores of other household necessities.

  When I refuse buttons because there is no one to sew them on for me, he piles me with safety-pins. I say no; but as he moves from one article to another, his querulous, persuasive voice slowly wears down my resistance, and I end up by buying envelopes, a letter pad (pink roses on bright blue paper), a one-rupee fountain pen guaranteed to leak and several yards of elastic. I have no idea what I will do with the elastic, but the old man convinces me that I cannot live without it.

  Exhausted by the effort of selling me a lot of things I obviously do not want, he closes his eyes and leans back against the trunk of a lichi tree. For a moment I feel rather nervous. Is he going to die sitting here beside me? He sinks to his haunches and puts his chin on his hands. He only wants to talk.

  ‘I am very tired, hazoor,’ he says. ‘Please do not mind if I sit here for a while.’

  ‘Rest for as long as you like,’ I say. ‘That’s a heavy load you’ve been carrying.’

  He comes to life at the chance of a conversation and says, ‘When I was a young man, it was nothing. I could carry my box up from Rajpur to Mussoorie by the bridle path—seven steep miles! But now I find it difficult to cover the distance from the station to the Dilaram Bazaar.’

  ‘Naturally. You are quite old.’

  ‘I am seventy, sahib.’

  ‘You look very fit for your age.’ I say this to please him; he looks frail and brittle. ‘Isn’t there someone to help you?’ I ask.

  ‘I had a servant boy last month, but he stole my earnings and ran off to Delhi. I wish my son was alive—he would not have permitted me to work like a mule for a living—but he was killed in the riots in 1947.’

  ‘Have you no other relatives?’

  ‘I have outlived them all. That is the curse of a healthy life. Your friends, your loved ones, all go before you, and at the end you are left alone. But I must go too, before long. The road to the bazaar seems to grow longer every day. The stones are harder. The sun is hotter in the summer, and the wind much colder in the winter. Even some of the trees that were there in my youth have grown old and have died. I have outlived the trees.’

  He has outlived the trees. He is like an old tree himself, gnarled and twisted. I have the feeling that if he falls asleep in the orchard, he will strike root here, sending out crooked branches. I can imagine a small bent tree wearing a black waist-coat; a living scarecrow.

  He closes his eyes again, but goes on talking.

  ‘The English memsahibs would buy great quantities of elastic. Today it is ribbons and bangles for the girls, and combs for the boys. But I do not make much money. Not because I cannot walk very far. How many houses do I reach in a day? Ten, fifteen. But twenty years ago I could visit more than fifty houses. That makes a difference.’

  ‘Have you always been here?’

  ‘Most of my life, hazoor. I was here before they built the motor road to Mussoorie. I was here when the sahibs had their own carriages and ponies and the memsahibs their own rickshaws. I was here before there were any cinemas. I was here when the Prince of Wales came to Dehradun . . . Oh, I
have been here a long time, hazoor. I was here when that house was built,’ he says pointing with his chin towards my grandfather’s house. ‘Fifty, sixty years ago it must have been I cannot remember exactly. What is ten years when you have lived seventy? But it was a tall, red-bearded sahib who built that house. He kept many creatures as pets. A kachua (turtle) was one of them. And there was a python, which crawled into my box one day and gave me a terrible fright. The sahib used to keep it hanging from his shoulders, like a garland. His wife, the burramem, always bought a lot from me—lots of elastic. And there were sons, one a teacher, another in the Air Force, and there were always children in the house. Beautiful children. But they went away many years ago. Everyone has gone away.’

  I do not tell him that I am one of the ‘beautiful children’. I doubt if he will believe me. His memories are of another age, another place, and for him there are no strong bridges into the present.

  ‘But others have come,’ I say.

  ‘True, and that is as it should be. That is not my complaint. My complaint—should God be listening—is that I have been left behind.’

  He gets slowly to his feet and stands over his shabby tin box, gazing down at it with a mixture of disdain and affection. I help him to lift and balance it on the flattened cloth on his head. He does not have the energy to turn and make a salutation of any kind; but, setting his sights on the distant hills, he walks down the path with steps that are shaky and slow but still wonderfully straight.

  I wonder how much longer he will live. Perhaps a year or two, perhaps a week, perhaps an hour. It will be an end of living, but it will not be death. He is too old for death; he can easily sleep; he can only fall gently, like an old, crumpled brown leaf.

  I leave the orchard. The bend in the road hides my grandfather’s house. I reach the canal again. It emerges from under a small culvert, where ferns and maidenhair grow in the shade. The water, coming from a stream in the foothills, rushes along with a familiar sound; it does not lose its momentum until the canal has left the gently sloping streets of the town.