Book Humour Read online

  It’s a windy sort of mountain, and in cyclonic storms our corrugated iron roofs are frequently blown away. Old Negi recalls that a portion of the Savoy roof once landed on the St George’s School flat, five miles away, at the height of the midsummer storm. In its flight it decapitated an early-morning fitness freak. Had anyone else told me the story, I wouldn’t have believed it. But Negi’s word is the real thing—as good as a sip of Johnnie Walker Blue Label.

  And here’s a limerick I wrote for Nandu and the Man-from-Sail:

  There was a young man who could fix

  Anything in five minutes or six;

  His statue is found

  On Savoy’s hallowed ground,

  With Nandu beside him, transfix’d!

  The Writers’ Bar

  For some time now, Nandu has had this notion, or dream if you like, of naming the old Savoy bar the ‘Writers’ Bar’.

  ‘But to do that,’ I said, ‘you’d have to get a few writers in here, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Well, you’re one, aren’t you? Don’t you have any writer friends?’

  ‘Hardly any. And the few I know are teetotallers. The Hemingway type is out of fashion.’

  ‘Last year, when I was in Singapore,’ said Nandu, ‘I revisited the historic Raffles Hotel—it’s about the same age as the Savoy—and they had a Writer’s Bar with brass plaques on the walls stating that Somerset Maugham had been there, and Joseph Conrad, and Graham Greene.’

  ‘All very sober people,’ I remarked.

  ‘Yes, but they stayed there, and they must have had the occasional drink at the Bar, even if it was only a nimbu pani.’

  ‘Well, in the good old days, the Savoy must have had the occasional writer staying here.’

  ‘There was Pearl Buck. I still have her autograph in one of her books. She won the Nobel Prize, didn’t she?’

  ‘She did, but I doubt if she frequented the bar. I believe she was the daughter of missionaries.’

  ‘All the more reason for taking to drink. In any case, she must have looked in here from time to time. We’ll put her name on a plaque.’

  ‘All right. We’ve got Pearl Buck.’

  ‘What about Rudyard Kipling? He must have stayed here.’

  ‘My dear chap,’ I said. ‘The hotel opened in 1905. By that time Kipling had left India, never to return.’

  ‘You’re not being very helpful,’ said Nandu. ‘What about John Masters?’

  ‘Quite possible,’ I said. ‘He served with a Gurkha regiment in Dehradun. Must have come up the hill occasionally. Probably dropped in for a drink. Here or at the Charleville.’

  ‘Forget about the Charleville, it burnt down years ago. We’ll give John Masters a plaque. That’s two we’ve got!’

  ‘Why don’t we look up the old hotel register?’ I asked.

  ‘The previous manager walked off with it,’ said Nandu ruefully.

  ‘Probably wanted Pearl Buck’s autograph.’

  ‘Who was that fellow who wrote about the separation bell? You know, the bell they used to ring at four every morning so that people could get back to their own rooms?’

  ‘I’ve heard of the bell,’ I said. ‘But I can’t remember the name of the writer.’

  ‘Somerset Maugham?’

  ‘I don’t think he visited Mussoorie. It was a travel writer.’

  ‘The Gantzers? Bill Aitken?’

  ‘They are still alive. But if you ask them in for a drink, they might let you put their names up.’

  ‘A free drink, you mean?’ Nandu didn’t look too happy.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Let’s stick to the dead. Pandit Nehru stayed here. He was a writer.’

  ‘Yes, Nandu. But I don’t think you’d have found him in the bar.’

  ‘Sir Edmund Hillary?’

  ‘Well, he wrote his autobiography. Probably stopped by for a drink after climbing Everest.’

  ‘All right, I’ve got it! Jim Corbett!’

  ‘But he lived in Nainital,’ I protested. ‘I doubt if he ever came here.’

  ‘His parents were married in Mussoorie. You told me so yourself. And he wrote that book, The Maneater of Rudraprayag. Rudraprayag is only eighty miles from here, as the crow flies.’

  ‘All right, all right. And after shooting the maneater, Corbett tramped all the way to Mussoorie to have a refreshing beer at the Savoy. There was no motor road then, Nandu. He must have needed a drink very badly.’

  ‘It’s possible. He used to walk great distances.’

  ‘To shoot maneaters, not to drink beer. But let’s give him a plaque, on the strength of his parents having been married in Mussoorie. Who do we have now?’

  ‘Pearl Buck, John Masters, Jim Corbett!’

  The plaques are being prepared. The Writers’ Bar will be inaugurated in the spring. If any reader can come up with a suitable candidate for inclusion, he’ll be entitled to a free drink.

  Only the other evening, when I was into my third whisky, a gentleman who looked exactly like Rudyard Kipling, walked up to the bar and asked the barman, ‘Do you serve spirits?’

  Before we could ask him to join us, he’d vanished.

  Voting at Barlowganj

  I am standing under the deodars, waiting for a taxi. Devilal, one of the candidates in the civic election, is offering free rides to all his supporters, to ensure that they get to the polls in time. I have assured him that I prefer walking but he does not believe me; he fears that I will settle down with a bottle of beer rather than walk the two miles to the Barlowganj polling station to cast my vote. He has gone to the expense of engaging a taxi for the day just to make certain of lingerers like me. He assures me that he is not using unfair means—most of the other candidates are doing the same thing.

  It is a cloudy day, promising rain, so I decide I will wait for the taxi. It has been plying since six a.m., and now it is ten o’clock. It will continue plying up and down the hill till four p.m. and by that time it will have cost Devilal over a hundred rupees.

  Here it comes. The driver—like most of our taxi-drivers, a Sikh—sees me standing at the gate, screeches to a sudden stop, and opens the door. I am about to get in when I notice that the windscreen carries a sticker displaying the Congress symbol of the cow and calf. Devilal is an Independent, and has adopted a cock-bird as his symbol.

  ‘Is this Devilal’s taxi?’ I ask.

  ‘No, it’s the Congress taxi,’ says the driver.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I don’t know the Congress candidate.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ he says agreeably; he isn’t a local man and has no interest in the outcome of the election. ‘Devilal’s taxi will be along any minute now.’

  He moves off, looking for the Congress voters on whose behalf he has been engaged. I am glad that the candidates have had to adopt different symbols; it has saved me the embarrassment of turning up in a Congress taxi, only to vote for an Independent. But the real reason for using symbols is to help illiterate voters know whom they are voting for when it comes to putting their papers in the ballot-box. All through the hill-station’s mini-election campaign, posters have been displaying candidates’ symbols—a car, a radio, a cock-bird, a tiger, a lamp—and the narrow, winding roads resound to the cries of children who are paid to shout, ‘Vote for the Radio!’ or ‘Vote for the Cock!’

  Presently my taxi arrives. It is already full, having picked up others on the way, and I have to squeeze in at the back with a stout lalain and her bony husband, the local ration-shop owner. Sitting up front, near the driver, is Vinod, a poor, ragged, quite happy-go-lucky youth, who contrives to turn up wherever I happen to be, and frequently involves himself in my activities. He gives me a namaste and a wide grin.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I ask him.

  ‘Same as you, Bond sahib. Voting. Maybe Devilal will give me a job if he wins.’

  ‘But you already have a job. I thought you were the gamesboy at the school.’

  ‘That was last month, Bond sahi
b.’

  ‘They kicked you out?’

  ‘They asked me to leave.’

  The taxi gathers speed as it moves smoothly down the winding hill road. The driver is in a hurry; the more trips he makes the more money he collects. We swerve round sharp corners, and every time the lalain’s chubby hands, covered with heavy bangles and rings, clutch at me for support. She and her husband are voting for Devilal because they belong to the same caste; Vinod is voting for him in the hope of getting a job; I am voting for him because I like the man. I find him simple, courteous and ready to listen to complaints about drains, street lighting and wrongly-assessed taxes. He even tries to do something about these things. He is a tall, cadaverous man, with paan-stained teeth; no Nixon, Heath or Indira Gandhi; but he knows that Barlowganj folk care little for appearances.

  Barlowganj is a small ward (one of four in the hill-station of Mussoorie); it has about one thousand voters. An election campaign has, therefore, to be conducted on a person-to-person basis. There is no point in haranguing a crowd at a street corner; it would be a very small crowd. The only way to canvass support is to visit each voter’s house and plead one’s cause personally. This means making a lot of promises with a perfectly straight face.

  The bazaar and village of Barlowganj crouch in a vale on the way down the mountain to Dehra. The houses on either side of the road are nearly all English-looking, most of them built before the turn of the century. The bazaar is Indian, charming and quite prosperous: tailors sit cross-legged before their sewing machines, turning out blazers and tight trousers for the well-to-do students who attend the many public schools that still thrive, here; halwais—pot-bellied sweet vendors—spend all day sitting on their haunches in front of giant frying-pans; and coolies carry huge loads of timber or cement or grain up the steep hill paths.

  Who was Barlow, and how did the village get his name? A search through old guides and gazetteers has given me no clue. Perhaps he was a revenue superintendent or a surveyor, who came striding up from the plains in the 1830s to build a hunting-lodge in this pleasantly wooded vale. That was how most hill-stations began. The police station, the little Church of the Resurrection, and the ruined brewery were among the earliest buildings in Barlowganj.

  The brewery is a mound of rubble, but the road that came into existence to serve the needs of the old Crown Brewery is the one that now serves our taxi. Buckle and Co.’s ‘Bullock Train’ was the chief means of transport in the old days. Mr Bohle, one of the pioneers of brewing in India, started the ‘Old Brewery’ at Mussoorie in 1830. Two years later he got into trouble with the authorities for supplying beer to soldiers without permission; he had to move elsewhere.

  But the great days of the brewery business really began in 1876, when everyone suddenly acclaimed a much-improved brew. The source was traced to Vat 42 in Whymper’s Crown Brewery (the one whose ruins we are now passing), and the beer was re-tasted and retested until the diminishing level of the barrel revealed the perfectly brewed remains of a soldier who had been reported missing some months previously. He had evidently fallen into the vat and been drowned and, unknown to himself, had given the Barlowganj beer trade a real fillip. Apocryphal though this story may sound, I have it on the authority of the owner of the now defunct Mafasalite Press who, in a short account of Mussoorie, wrote that ‘meat was thereafter recognized as the missing component and was scrupulously added till more modern, and less cannibalistic, means were discovered to satiate the froth-blower.’

  Recently, confirmation came from an old India hand now living in London. He wrote to me reminiscing of early days in the hill-station and had this to say:

  Uncle Georgie Forster was working for the Crown Brewery when a coolie fell in. Coolies were employed to remove scum etc. from the vats. They walked along planks suspended over the vats. Poor devil must have slipped and fallen in. Uncle often told us about the incident and there was no doubt that the beer tasted very good.

  What with soldiers and coolies falling into the vats with seeming regularity, one wonders whether there may have been more to these accidents than met the eye. I have a nagging suspicion that Whymper and Buckle may have been the Burke and Hare of Mussoorie’s beer industry.

  But no beer is made in Mussoorie today, and Devilal probably regrets the passing of the breweries as much as I do. Only the walls of the breweries remain, and these are several feet thick. The roofs and girders must have been removed for use in other buildings. Moss and sorrel grow in the old walls, and wild cats live in dark corners protected from rain and wind.

  We have taken the sharpest curves and steepest gradients, and now our taxi moves smoothly along a fairly level road which might pass for a country lane in England were it not for the clumps of bamboo on either side.

  A mist has come up the valley to settle over Barlowganj, and out of the mist looms an imposing mansion, Sikander Hall, which is still owned and occupied by Skinners, descendants of Colonel James Skinner who raised a body of Irregular Horse for the Marathas. This was absorbed by the East India Company’s forces in 1803. The Cavalry regiment is still known as Skinners Horse, but of course it is a tank regiment now. Skinner’s troops called him ‘Sikander’ (a corruption of both Skinner and Alexander), and that is the name his property bears. The Skinners who live here now have, quite sensibly, gone in for keeping pigs and poultry.

  The next house belongs to the Raja of K but he is unable to maintain it on his diminishing privy-purse, and it has been rented out as an ashram for members of a saffron-robed sect who would rather meditate in the hills than in the plains. There was a time when it was only the sahibs and rajas who could afford to spend the entire ‘season’ in Mussoorie. The new rich are the industrialists and maharishis. The coolies and rickshawpullers are no better off than when I was a boy in Mussoorie. They still carry or pull the same heavy loads, for the same pittance, and seldom attain the age of forty. Only their clientele has changed.

  One more gate, and here is Colonel Powell in his khaki bush-shirt and trousers, a uniform that never varies with the seasons. He is an old shikari; once wrote a book called The Call of the Tiger. He is too old for hunting now, but likes to yam with me when we meet on the road. His wife has gone home to England, but he does not want to leave India.

  ‘It’s the mountains,’ he was telling me the other day. ‘Once the mountains are in your blood, there is no escape. You have to come back again and again. I don’t think I’d like to die anywhere else.’

  Today there is no time to stop and chat. The taxi-driver, with a vigorous blowing of his horn, takes the car round the last bend, and then through the village and narrow bazaar of Barlowganj, stopping about a hundred yards from the polling stations.

  There is a festive air about Barlowganj today; I have never seen so many people in the bazaar. Bunting, in the form of rival posters and leaflets, is strung across the street. The teashops are doing a roaring trade. There is much last-minute canvassing, and I have to run the gamut of various candidates and their agents. For the first time I learn the names of some of the candidates. In all, seven men are competing for this seat.

  A schoolboy, smartly dressed and speaking English, is the first to accost me. He says: ‘Don’t vote for Devilal, sir. He’s a big crook. Vote for Jatinder! See, sir, that’s his symbol—the bow and arrow.’

  ‘I shall certainly think about the bow and arrow,’ I tell him politely.

  Another agent, a man, approaches, and says, ‘I hope you are going to vote for the Congress candidate.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about him,’ I say.

  ‘That doesn’t matter. It’s the party you are voting for. Don’t forget its Mrs Gandhi’s party.’

  Meanwhile, one of Devilal’s lieutenants has been keeping a close watch on both Vinod and me, to make sure that we are not seduced by rival propaganda. I give the man a reassuring smile and stride purposefully towards the polling station, which has been set up in the municipal schoolhouse. Policemen stand at the entrance, to make sure that no on
e approaches the voters once they have entered the precincts.

  I join the patient queue of voters. Everyone is in good humour, and there is no breaking of the line; these are not film stars we have come to see. Vinod is in another line, and grins proudly at me across the passageway. This is the one day in his life on which he has been made to feel really important. And he is. In a small constituency like Barlowganj every vote counts.

  Most of my fellow-voters are poor people. Local issues mean something to them, affect their daily living. The more affluent can buy their way out of trouble, can pay for small conveniences; few of them bother to come to the polls. But for the ‘common man’—the shopkeeper, clerk, teacher, domestic servant, mule-driver—this is a big day. The man he is voting for has promised him something, and the voter means to take the successful candidate up on his promise. Not for another five years will the same fuss be made over the local cobblers, tailors and laundrymen. Their votes are indeed precious.

  And now it is my turn to vote. I confirm my name, address and roll-number. I am down on the list as ‘Rusking Bound’, but I let it pass: I might forfeit my right to vote if I raise any objection at this stage! A dab of marking-ink is placed on my forefinger—this is so that I do not come round a second time—and I am given a paper displaying the names and symbols of all the candidates. I am then directed to the privacy of a small booth, where I place the official rubber-stamp against Devilal’s name. This done, I fold the paper in four and slip it into the ballot-box.