White Clouds, Green Mountains Read online

  ‘Binya is my name. I do not wish to have any other. Where are you going?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘No-name goes nowhere! Then you cannot come with me, because I am going home and my grandmother will set the village dogs on you if you follow me.’ And laughing, she ran down the path to the stream; she knew I could not catch up with her.

  Her face streamed summer rain as she climbed the steep hill, calling the white cow home. She seemed very tiny on the windswept mountainside; a twist of hair lay flat against her forehead, and her torn blue dhoti clung to her firm round thighs. I went to her with an umbrella to give her shelter. She stood with me beneath the umbrella and let me put my arm around her. Then she turned her face up to mine, wonderingly, and I kissed her quickly, softly on the lips. Her lips tasted of raindrops and mint. And then she left me there, so gallant in the blistering rain. She ran home laughing. But it was worth the drenching.

  Another day I heard her calling to me—’No-name, Mister No-name!’—but I couldn’t see her, and it was some time before I found her, halfway up a cherry tree, her feet pressed firmly against the bark, her dhoti tucked up between her thighs—fair, rounded thighs, and legs that were strong and vigorous.

  ‘The cherries are not ripe,’ I said.

  ‘They are never ripe. But I like them green and sour. Will you come into the tree?’

  ‘If I can still climb a tree,’ I said.

  ‘My grandmother is over sixty, and she can climb trees.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t mind being more adventurous at sixty. There’s not so much to lose then.’ I climbed into the tree without much difficulty, but I did not think the higher branches would take my weight; so I remained standing in the fork of the tree, my face on a level with Binya’s breasts. I put my hand against her waist, and kissed her on the soft inside of her arm. She did not say anything. But she took me by the hand and helped me to climb a little higher, and I put my arm around her, as much to support myself as to be close to her.

  The full moon rides high, shining through the tall oak trees near the window. The night is full of sounds, crickets, the tonk-tonk of a nightjar, and floating across the valley from your village, the sound of drums beating, and people singing. It is a festival day, and there will be feasting in your home. Are you singing too, tonight? And are you thinking of me, as you sing, as you laugh, as you dance with your friends? I am sitting here alone, and so I have no one to think of but you.

  Binya … I take your name again and again—as though by taking it, I can make you hear me, come to me, walking over the moonlit mountain …

  There are spirits abroad tonight. They move silently in the trees; they hover about the window at which I sit; they take up with the wind and rush about the house. Spirits of the trees, spirits of the old house. An old lady died here last year. She’d lived in the house for over thirty years; something of her personality surely dwells here still. When I look into the tall, old mirror which was hers, I sometimes catch a glimpse of her pale face and long, golden hair. She likes me, I think, and the house is kind to me. Would she be jealous of you, Binya?

  The music and singing grows louder. I can imagine your face glowing in the firelight. Your eyes shine with laughter. You have all those people near you and I have only the stars, and the nightjar, and the ghost in the mirror.

  I woke early, while the dew was still fresh on the grass, and walked down the hill to the stream, and then up to a little knoll where a pine tree grew in solitary splendour, the wind going hoo-hoo in its slender branches. This was my favourite place, my place of power, where I came to renew myself from time to time. I lay on the grass, dreaming. The sky in its blueness swung round above me. An eagle soared in the distance. I heard her voice down among the trees; or I thought I heard it. But when I went to look, I could not find her.

  I’d always prided myself on my rationality; had taught myself to be wary of emotional states, like ‘falling in love’, which turned out to be ephemeral and illusory. And although I told myself again and again that the attraction was purely physical, on my part as well as hers, I had to admit to myself that my feelings towards Binya differed from the feelings I’d had for others; and that while sex had often been for me a celebration, it had, like any other feast, resulted in satiety, a need for change, a desire to forget …

  Binya represented something else—something wild, dream-like, fairy-like. She moved close to the spirit-haunted rocks, the old trees, the young grass; she had absorbed something from them—a primeval innocence, an unconcern with the passing of time and events, an affinity with the forest and the mountains; this made her special and magical.

  And so, when three, four, five days went by, and I did not find her on the hillside, I went through all the pangs of frustrated love: had she forgotten me and gone elsewhere? Had we been seen together, and was she being kept at home? Was she ill? Or, had she been spirited away?

  I could hardly go and ask for her. I would probably be driven from the village. It straddled the opposite hill, a cluster of slate-roof houses, a pattern of little terraced fields. I could see figures in the fields, but they were too far away, too tiny for me to be able to recognise anyone. She had gone to her mother’s village a hundred miles away, or so a small boy told me.

  And so I brooded; walked disconsolately through the oak forest hardly listening to the birds—the sweet-throated whistling thrush; the shrill barbet; the mellow-voiced doves. Happiness had always made me more responsive to nature. Feeling miserable, my thoughts turned inward. I brooded upon the trickery of time and circumstance; I felt the years were passing by, had passed by, like waves on a receding tide, leaving me washed up like a bit of flotsam on a lonely beach. But at the same time, the whistling thrush seemed to mock at me, calling tantalisingly from the shadows of the ravine; ‘It isn’t time that’s passing by, it is you and I, it is you and I …’

  Then I forced myself to snap out of my melancholy. I kept away from the hillside and the forest. I did not look towards the village. I buried myself in my work, tried to think objectively, and wrote an article on ‘The inscriptions on the iron pillar at Kalsi’; very learned, very dry, very sensible.

  But at night I was assailed by the thoughts of Binya. I could not sleep. I switched on the light, and there she was, smiling at me from the looking glass, replacing the image of the old lady who had watched over me for so long.

  The Kipling Road

  Remember the old road,

  The steep stony path

  That took us up from Rajpur,

  Toiling and sweating

  And grumbling at the climb,

  But enjoying it all the same.

  At first the hills were hot and bare,

  But then there were trees near Jharipani

  And we stopped at the Halfway House

  And swallowed Iungfuls of diamond-cut air.

  Then onwards, upwards, to the town,

  Our appetites to repair!

  Well, no one uses the old road anymore.

  Walking is out of fashion now.

  And if you have a car to take you

  Swiftly up the motor-road

  Why bother to toil up a disused path?

  You’d have to be an old romantic like me

  To want to take that route again.

  But I did it last year,

  Pausing and plodding and gasping for air-

  Both road and I being a little worse for wear!

  But I made it to the top and stopped to rest

  And looked down to the valley and the silver stream

  Winding its way towards the plains.

  And the land stretched out before me, and the years fell away,

  And I was a boy again,

  And the friends of my youth were there beside me,

  And nothing had changed.

  ‘Remember the Old Road’

  As boys we would often trudge up from Rajpur to Mussoorie by the old bridle-path, the road that used to serve the hillstation in the days before
the motor road was built. Before 1900, the traveller to Mussoorie took a tonga from Saharanpur to Dehradun, spent the night at a Rajpur hotel, and the following day came up the steep seven-mile path on horseback, or on foot, or in a dandy (a crude palanquin) held aloft by two, sometimes four, sweating coolies.

  The railway came to Dehradun in 1904, and a few years later the first motor car made it to Mussoorie, the motor road following the winding contours and hairpin bends of the old bullock-cart road. Rajpur went out of business; no one stopped there any more, the hotels became redundant, and the bridlepath was seldom used except by those of us who thought it would be fun to come up on foot.

  For the first two or three miles you walked in the hot sun, along a treeless path. It was only at Jharipani (at approximately 4,000 ft.) that the oak forests began, providing shade and shelter. Situated on a spur of its own, was the Railways school, Oakgrove, still there today, providing a boarding-school education to the children of Railway personnel. My mother and her sisters came from a Railway family, and all of them studied at Oakgrove in the 1920s. So did a male cousin, who succumbed to cerebral malaria during the school term. In spite of the salubrious climate, mortality was high amongst school children. There were no cures then for typhoid, cholera, malaria, dysentery and other infectious diseases.

  Above Oakgrove was Fairlawn, the palace of the Nepali royal family. There was a sentry box outside the main gate, but there was never any sentry in it, and on more than one occasion I took shelter there from the rain. Today it’s a series of cottages, one of which belongs to Outlook’s editor, Vinod Mehra, who seeks shelter there from the heat and dust of Delhi.

  From Jharapani we climbed to Barlowganj, where another venerable institution St George’s College, crowns the hilltop. Then on to Bala Hissar, once the home-in-exile of an Afghan king, and now the grounds of Wynberg-Allen, another school, In later years I was to live near this school, and it was its then Principal, Rev W Biggs, who told me that the bridle-path was once known as the Kipling Road.

  Why was that, I asked. Had Kipling ever come up that way? Rev Biggs wasn’t sure, but he referred me to Kim, and the chapter in which Kim and the Lama leave the plains for the hills. It begins thus:

  They had crossed the Siwaliks and the half-tropical Doon, left Mussoorie behind them, and headed north along the narrow hill-roads. Day after day they struck deeper into the huddled mountains, and day after day Kim watched the lama return to a man’s strength. Among the terraces of the Doon he had leaned on the boy’s shoulder, ready to profit by wayside halts. Under the great ramp to Mussoorie he drew himself together as an old hunter faces a well remembered bank, and where he should have sunk exhausted swung his long draperies about him, drew a deep double-lungful of the diamond air, and walked as only a hillman can.

  This description is accurate enough, but it is not evidence that Kipling actually came this way, and his geography becomes quite confusing in the subsequent pages—as peter hopkirk discovered when he visited Mussoorie a few years ago, retracing Kim’s journeys for his book Quest for Kim. Hopkirk spent some time with me in this little room where I am now writing, but we were unable to establish the exact route that Kim and the Lama took after traversing Mussoorie. Presumably they had come up the bridle-path. But then? After that, Kipling becomes rather vague.

  Mussoorie does not really figure in Rudyard Kipling’s prose or poetry. The Simla Hills were his beat. As a journalist he was a regular visitor to Simla, then the summer seat of the British Raj.

  But last year my Swiss friend, Anilees Goel, brought me proof that Kipling had indeed visited Mussoorie. Among his unpublished papers and other effects in the Library of Congress, there exists an album of photographs, which includes two of the Charleville Hotel, Mussoorie, where he had spent the summer of 1888. On a photograph of the office he had inscribed these words:

  And there were men with a thousand wants

  And women with babes galore

  But the dear little angels in Heaven know

  That Wutzler never swore.

  Wutzler was the patient, long-suffering manager of this famous hotel, now the premises of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration.

  A second photograph is inscribed with the caption ‘Quarters at the Charleville, April July 88’, and carries this verse:

  A burning sun in cloudless skies

  and April dies,

  A dusty Mall—three sunsets splendid

  and May is ended,

  Grey mud beneath-grey cloud o’erhead

  and June is dead.

  A little bill in late July

  And then we fly.

  Pleasant enough, but hardly great verse, and I’m not surprised that Kipling did not publish these lines.

  However, we now know that he came to Mussoorie and spent some time here, and that he would have come up by the old bridle-path (there was no other way except by bullock-cart on the long and tortuous cast road), and Rev Biggs and others were right in calling it the Kipling Road, although officially that was never its name.

  As you climb up from Barlowganj, you pass a number of pretty cottages—May Cottage, Wakefield, Ralston Manor, Wayside Hall—and these old houses all have stories to tell, for they have stood mute witness to the comings and goings of all manner of people.

  Take Ralston Manor. It was witness to an impromptu cremation, probably Mussoorie’s first European cremation, in the late 1890s. There is a small chapel in the grounds of Ralston, and the story goes that a Mr and Mrs Smallman had been living in the house, and Mr Smallman had expressed a wish to be cremated at his death. When he died, his widow decided to observe his wishes and had her servants build a funeral pyre in the garden. The cremation was well underway when someone rode by and looked in to see what was happening. The unauthorised cremation was reported to the authorities and Mrs Smallman had to answer some awkward questions. However, she was let off with a warning (a warning not to cremate any future husbands?) and later she built the little chapel on the site of the funeral pyre—in gratitude or as penance, or as a memorial, we are not told. But the chapel is still there, and this little tale is recorded in Chowkidar (Autumn 1995), the journal of the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA).

  As we move further up the road, keeping to the right, we come to Wayside Hall and Wayside Cottage, which have the advantage of an open sunny hillside and views to the north and east. I lived in the cottage for a couple of years, back in 1966-67, as a tenant of the Powell sisters who lived in the Hall.

  There were three sisters, all in their seventies; they had survived their husbands. Annie, the eldest, had a son who lived abroad; Martha, the second, did not have children; Dr Simmonds, the third sister, had various adopted children who came to see her from time to time. They were God-fearing, religious folk, but not bigots; never chided me for not going to church. Annie’s teas were marvellous; snacks and savouries in abundance.

  They kept a beautiful garden.

  ‘Why go to church?’ I said. ‘Your garden is a church.’

  In spring and summer it was awash with poppies, petunia, phlox, larkspur, calendula, snapdragons and other English flowers. During the monsoon, the gladioli took over, while magnificent dahlias reared up from the rich foliage. During the autumn came zinnias and marigolds and cosmos. And even during the winter months there would be geraniums and primulae blooming in the verandah.

  Honeysuckle climbed the wall outside my window, filling my bedroom with its heady scent. And wisteria grew over the main gate. There was perfume in the air.

  Annie herself smelt of freshly baked bread. Dr Simmonds smelt of Pears’ baby soap. Martha smelt of apples. All good smells, emanating from good people.

  Although they lived on their own, without any men on the premises, they never felt threatened or insecure. Mussoorie was a safe place to live in then, and still is to a great extent, much safer than towns in the plains, where the crime rate keeps pace with the population growth.

  Annie’s son, Gerald,
then in his sixties, did come out to see them occasionally. He had been something of a shikari in his youth—or so he claimed—and told me he could call up a panther from the valley without any difficulty. To do this, he made a contraption out of an old packing-case, with a hole bored in the middle, then he passed a length of thick wire through the hole, and by moving the wire backwards and forward produced a sound not dissimilar to the sawing, coughing sound made by a panther during the mating season. (Incidentally, a panther and a leopard are the same animal.)

  Gerry invited me to join him on a steep promontory overlooking a little stream. I did so with some trepidation. Hunting had never been my forte, and normally I preferred to go along with Ogden Nash’s dictum, ‘If you meet a panther, don’t anther!’

  However, Gerry’s gun looked powerful enough, and I believed him when he told me he was a crack shot. I have always taken people at their word. One of my failings I suppose.

  Anyway, we positioned ourselves on this ledge, and Gerry started producing panther noises with his box. His Master’s Voice would have been proud of it. Nothing happened for about twenty minutes, and I was beginning to lose patience when we were answered by the cough and grunt of what could only have been a panther. But we couldn’t see it! Gerry produced a pair of binoculars and trained them on some distant object below, which turned out to be a goat. The growling continued, and then it was just above us! The panther had made a detour and was now standing on a rock and staring down, no doubt wondering which of us was making such attractive mating calls.

  Gerry swung round, raised his gun and fired. He missed by a couple of feet, and the panther bounded away, no doubt disgusted with the proceedings.

  We returned to Wayside Hall, and revived ourselves with brandy and soda.

  ‘We’ll get it next time, old chap,’ said Gerry. But although we tried, the panther did not put in another appearance. Gerry’s panther call sounded genuine enough, but neither he nor I nor his wired box looked anything like a female panther.