A Town Called Dehra Read online

  Colonel Wilkie had given up on life. I suppose he could have gone off to England, but he would have been more miserable there, with no one to buy him a drink (since he wasn’t likely to reciprocate), and the possibility of his wife turning up again to rearrange the furniture.

  1951: On a hike near Rajpur Road with Dipi, Somi and Daljit.

  No one arranged my furniture. I didn’t have any, except for my bed and an old dining table which served as my writing desk. My landlady was Dehra’s first lady shopkeeper. She was a very large woman with poor eyesight and high blood pressure. But she gave me an excellent breakfast—stuffed parathas with shalgam pickle, which sustained me through most of the day. In the evenings I ate at a dhaba near the Orient Cinema, a little way down the road.

  The Orient was one of Dehra’s older cinemas, started in the 1930s by a Parsi, Mr Gazder, who had since passed on. Over the entrance it had a couple of eye-catching frescoes of dancers; created by Sudhir Khastgir, the Doon School’s art master. The cinema, where as a boy I saw Abbot and Costello comedies, and classics such as Key Largo and The Maltese Falcon, switched over to Hindi movies in the 1950s and later to soft porn—films with exotic titles such as Dark Blue Nights and Bedroom Follies, purported to be foreign but actually made down south.

  Some of my younger friends, from Karanpur and the Dilaram Bazaar, occasionally accompanied me to the pictures and often invited me to their homes. These boys were, in fact, far more hospitable than people like Suresh Mathur or William Matheson, who were always cash-strapped. In the Dilaram area there were Narinder and Sahib Singh, whose mothers were always feeding me. And in Karanpur there was Sudheer, whose father owned a small press from which he issued a newspaper called the Frontier Mail. I would occasionally help with the paper, correcting proofs and editing contributions; it was valuable experience.

  Apart from a mutual liking, these youngsters admired me because I’d made a name for myself at the age of twenty-one—barely two or three years older than they were—something my older friends (Suresh and William and others) couldn’t quite come to terms with.

  All the same, after two years of freelancing in Dehra, I found that my income remained static and I wasn’t really making much headway as an author. One novel published in England hadn’t really put me on the literary map. I was discontented with myself. There I was, stagnating in the Doon, supplementing my income with English tuitions and correcting proofs for the Frontier Mail! I could probably have continued in this mode for several years, and might even have been a better writer for it, but a job in Delhi beckoned, and I thought it might be to my advantage to make a move.

  So I packed my bags (all my belongings fit quite easily into two suitcases) and took an early morning bus to Delhi, promising my young friends that I would come back with my fortune made! The Dilaram boys, ever loyal, remained in touch with me, and even turned up in Delhi from time to time, but I had no news of Suresh or William or the Colonel—and it was to be three years before I found myself in Dehra again.

  Delhi in the 1960s wasn’t really my sort of place. The refugee influx from Pakistan had resulted in many far-flung residential complexes springing up in arid areas where there was no form of entertainment or cultural activity. To obtain a book I had to travel all the way from Rajouri Gardens to Connaught Place (forty-five minutes in a bus); and if I wanted to meet a like-minded friend, it was another forty minutes by Delhi Transport to the Civil Lines in Old Delhi.

  How I longed for Dehra’s little Royal Café, and those idle hours with Suresh Mathur and Co. How I missed my bicycle-riding friends from the Dilaram Bazaar. And Dehra’s little bookshops, and the lichi trees, and my lamp-lit room above my landlady’s homely provision store.

  I longed to return, but I’d taken up a job with a relief agency and they were paying me quite well. I felt I had to stick it out for a couple of years before making another bid for freedom, the sort of freedom that only successful freelancing could bring me. My time in Delhi was not a creative period; I travelled without absorbing much; I was writing project reports instead of stories.

  When, after three and a half years, I did revisit my old home town, I took a room at the White House Hotel. Colonel Wilkie was missing. He had died of cirrhosis the previous year, and had been given a simple burial by those who knew him. A few weeks after the funeral his wife turned up and went through his effects, selling most of his few possessions to the local kabadiwala. She hadn’t liked the location of his grave and had wanted to shift it, in the manner of her furniture, but the local padre had refused. She had gone off in a huff, without paying for a tombstone, so the Colonel’s grave remained unmarked.

  William had left the Doon. According to reliable reports, he had inherited his father’s wealth back in Switzerland, and was now married to a beauty from Guatemala who was working her way through his fortune. I had a feeling he’d turn up again some day, asking me for a small loan.

  Good old Suresh had also had a stroke of luck, although I suppose it should really be attributed to good management on his part. The year after I’d gone away he had sold his Rajpur house to a middle-aged widowed princess; he had then struck up a close friendship with her and a year later they were married. When I met him in the Royal Café, I told him he’d made a smart move, a remark which seemed to offend him: he assured me that he was genuinely in love with the princess. And he paid for the beer and told me that the house was up for sale again! Apparently they were thinking of moving to Delhi.

  Everyone was moving out of Dehra, including my Dilaram Bazaar friends. Dehra was a place where you could get by, but there were no career prospects for young men, no ‘further education’ (whatever that meant), and no real business opportunities. It was a good place to go to school, but after graduating, many chose to seek their fortune elsewhere. Only the odd fellow like me came back—briefly.

  I wanted to live in Dehra again, and I thought seriously about it; but I kept putting it off. And when eventually, I’d had enough of Delhi, I looked for a retreat in the hills, where I could write and be myself and even fall in love from time to time.

  So here I am, forty years on, perched on a hilltop overlooking the valley where I grew up and grew into a writer. And sometimes I go down to the valley, not to look up old friends (for all of them have gone their different ways) but simply to try and recapture the feel of the place as I knew it.

  It has changed, of course, as places must over a period of time. A small garden town has grown into a large town without gardens. Not quite a city, although it comes close to being one, with its congested roads, polluting traffic and overburdened civic structure. A few lichi orchards remain but most have been replaced by housing estates. Here and there a shopkeeper recognizes me. Some of the old buildings are still here, with pipal trees growing out of the walls. The great maidan has shrunk, encroached upon by bus stands, motor workshops, and a clutter of makeshift structures. There are people everywhere. The population has gone from 50,000 in 1950 to over 700,000 at the turn of the millennium. There are pockets of prosperity; there is money to be made in the marketplace; but the unemployed and the unemployable will soon by vying for standing room.

  But here’s a quiet corner. A nice old building with a patch of grass in front . . . Ah, it’s the old White House Hotel! A bit run-down now, like the rest of us survivors from that era, but I can still find lodging for the night . . . And in the morning I shall sit on the veranda where a frond of bougainvillaea trails, and write this little memoir.

  Meena

  Someone who did go into a novel—my first—was ‘Meena’, the older woman with whom young Rusty falls in love in The Room on the Roof. In the novel she is the mother of Kishen, who befriends the runaway Rusty. As many readers have inferred, the novel is autobiographical in essence, and Rusty is the author as a boy. It’s true that I was infatuated with Meena (not her real name), who was some fifteen years older than me, the mother of three children, Kishen being the eldest. Her husband, a PWD engineer who had been su
spended on a corruption charge, was hitting the bottle in a big way.

  Tea and sympathy were the order of the day. Meena gave me tea, I gave her sympathy. She also made wonderful pakoras, and I have always believed that the best way to a young man’s heart is through his stomach.

  Apart from that, she was a beautiful woman, and I was quite smitten, ready to carry out her slightest wish. I ran errands for her, typed out her husband’s appeals for reinstatement, gave English lessons to her ten-year-old son, and even held the baby when she was busy with other things. This dog-like devotion was rewarded with amusement, affection, and even companionship, but she was ever faithful to her husband who seldom emerged from a drunken stupor.

  In the novel, Meena dies, killed in a road accident, the alcoholic husband staggers on. This was because of the exigencies of the plot. In reality, it was my friend’s father who succumbed to cirrhosis; Meena lived on to a healthy old age.

  I did not see her again, but I am told that she remained beautiful into her later years. She had that classical type of Indian beauty, personified in screen stars such as Kamini Kaushal and Nergis, that does not fade with time.

  At a book reading in the capital not long ago, a student stood up and asked me: ‘How could you fall in love with a married woman who was much older than you?’

  To which I could only reply: ‘I just couldn’t help it!’

  Meena was not in love with me, that would have been expecting too much; but she was not displeased with my attentions. She was like the character in Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance, who says: ‘Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What we like is to be a man’s last romance.’

  But it was Meena who set me on the road to romance. For the next ten years I was writing love stories.

  Geoffrey Davis

  Geoffrey Davis was at school with me in Simla, and in the holidays he was my neighbour, living a little way down the road, behind Dehradun’s Astley Hall. He was staying with his great-aunt, Mrs Wilson, the widow of Charlie Wilson, who was buried close to my maternal grandfather in the old British cemetery.

  Charlie Wilson had inherited wealth and property from his father, the celebrated Frederick ‘Pahari’ Wilson, who had made a fortune as a timber contractor for the Raja of Tehri-Garhwal. Astley Hall had been named after one of Charlie’s sons who had died in his infancy. Charlie Wilson had gone through his inheritance in fairly quick time, and the Astley Hall shopping complex was now in other hands. But his widow, Mrs Wilson, still had her old house, a spacious bungalow set amidst mango and lichi trees.

  Geoffrey had some of the looks of his great-grandparent’s wife, Gulaki, the girl from Harsil, who had given ‘Pahari’ Wilson his three sons: high cheekbones, a light brown complexion, a spare physique. Living on his own in the remote Bhagirathi valley, Wilson had ‘gone native’, spending most of the time in his mountain retreat; but he had taken care to invest in property in Mussoorie and Dehradun. One son he had disowned; another died young; only Charlie, the profligate, lived long enough to dismantle his father’s empire.

  1951: With Geoffrey Davis, great-grandson of Wilson of Harsil.

  Geoffrey’s parents were to some extent dependent on old Mrs Wilson and were no doubt hoping to inherit from her. Geoffrey was a quiet boy, always courteous and well-behaved, both at school and in Dehradun. He had told me something of the family history; the rest I learnt from others.

  We were not close friends, but we got on quite well and would borrow books from each other. I lent him my Wodehouse; he lent me his P.C. Wren. Not many know that P.C. Wren, whose ‘Beau Geste’ novels of adventure in the French Foreign Legion were best-sellers, was also the co-author of Wren & Martin’s English Grammar—a book still used in vernacular schools throughout India a hundred years after it was written—and Rasting Beau Geste and Beau Sakrour. Mr Wren, far from being a dashing legionnaire, spent most of his life in the Indian education service.

  Geoffrey received the same pocket money that I did—ten rupees a month—enough for the same half-dozen pictures at the nearby Orient and Odeon cinemas. He liked Abbot and Costello comedies; I preferred Laurel and Hardy.

  My own home life was in something of a turmoil at the time, as I had yet to adjust to life with my stepfather and mother. On one occasion I ran away and spent three nights ‘on the road’. One night was spent on a railway station bench, another on the Parade Ground (in an abandoned bus), the third night with a friend, Bhim, whose father advised me to go home. Geoffrey met me on the road and gave me his month’s pocket money—all of ten rupees! I used it to take him to the pictures, and then I went home.

  After finishing school, my mother packed me off to England. Geoffrey wrote to me once, saying he had got into the Joint Services Wing of the Indian Air Force. He was enjoying his training. Then came the news that his plane had crashed, killing him and his instructor.

  That was the end of the last descendant of ‘Pahari’ Wilson.

  Blind chance, I guess. Geoffrey’s parents were religious, God-fearing people. I hope their faith sustained them in the lonely years that followed. In their place, I would have raged against the unfairness of it all.

  The Garlands on His Brow

  Fame has but a fleeting hold

  on the reins in our fast-paced society;

  so many of yesterday’s

  heroes crumble..

  Shortly after my return from England, I was walking down the main road of my old home town of Dehra, gazing at the shops and passers-by to see what changes, if any, had taken place during my absence. I had been away three years. Still a boy when I went abroad, I was twenty-one when I returned with some mediocre qualifications to flaunt in the faces of my envious friends. (I did not tell them of the loneliness of those years in exile; it would not have impressed them.) I was nearing the clock tower when I met a beggar coming from the opposite direction. In one respect, Dehra had not changed. The beggars were as numerous as ever, though I must admit they looked healthier.

  This beggar had a straggling beard, a hunch, a cavernous chest, and unsteady legs on which a number of purple sores were festering. His shoulders looked as though they had once been powerful, and his hands thrusting a begging-bowl at me, were still strong.

  He did not seem sufficiently decrepit to deserve of my charity, and I was turning away when I thought I discerned a gleam of recognition in his eyes. There was something slightly familiar about the man; perhaps he was a beggar who remembered me from earlier years. He was even attempting a smile; showing me a few broken yellow fangs; and to get away from him, I produced a coin, dropped it in his bowl, and hurried away.

  I had gone about a hundred yards when, with a rush of memory, I knew the identity of the beggar. He was the hero of my childhood, Hassan, the most magnificent wrestler in the entire district.

  I turned and retraced my steps, half hoping I wouldn’t be able to catch up with the man and he had indeed got lost in the bazaar crowd. Well, I would doubtless be confronted by him again in a day or two . . . Leaving the road, I went into the Municipal gardens and stretching myself out on the fresh green February grass, allowed my memory to journey back to the days when I was a boy of ten, full of health and optimism, when my wonder at the great game of living had yet to give way to disillusiomnent at its shabbiness.

  On those precious days when I played truant from school—and I would have learnt more had I played truant more often—I would sometimes make my way to the akhara at the corner of the gardens to watch the wrestling pit. My chin cupped in my hands, I would lean against a railing and gaze in awe at their rippling muscles, applauding with the other watchers whenever one of the wrestlers made a particularly clever move or pinned an opponent down on his back.

  Amongst these wrestlers the most impressive and engaging young man was Hassan, the son of a kite-maker. He had a magnificent build, with great wide shoulders and powerful legs, and what he lacked in skill he made up
for in sheer animal strength and vigour. The idol of all small boys, he was followed about by large numbers of us and I was a particular favourite of his. He would offer to lift me on to his shoulders and carry me across the akhara to introduce me to his friends and fellow-wrestlers.

  From being Dehra’s champion, Hassan soon became the outstanding representative of his art in the entire district. His technique improved, he began using his brain in addition to his brawn, and it was said by everyone that he had the making of a national champion.

  It was during a large fair towards the end of the rains that destiny took a hand in the shaping of his life. The Rani of _____ was visiting the fair, and she stopped to watch the wrestling bouts. When she saw Hassan stripped and in the ring, she began to take more than a casual interest in him. It has been said that she was a woman of a passionate and amoral nature, who could not be satisfied by her weak and ailing husband. She was struck by Hassan’s perfect manhood, and through an official offered him the post of her personal bodyguard.

  The Rani was rich and, in spite of having passed her fortieth summer, was a warm and attractive woman. Hassan did not find it difficult to make love according to the bidding, and on the whole he was happy in her service. True, he did not wrestle as often as in the past; but when he did enter a competition, his reputation and his physique combined to overawe his opponents, and they did not put up much resistance. One or two well-known wrestlers were invited to the district. The Rani paid them liberally, and they permitted Hassan to throw them out of the ring. Life in the Rani’s house was comfortable and easy, and Hassan, a simple man, felt himself secure. And it is to the credit of the Rani (and also of Hassan) that she did not tire of him as quickly as she had of others.