Trip To Musoorie
Trip To Musoorie
IT had all the ingredients of a potboiler unrequited love, cuckolded husbands, cheating wives, clandestine love trysts and even murder. And the backdrop of the blockbuster was Mussoorie, set in the lavender tumble of the Shivaliks.
Today the sylvan Himalayan hill resort gives little hint of its purple past when, in the days of the Raj, it was a place for rest and recreation, for dalliance and illicit love. Colonialists, their wives and girlfriends and Indian princes thronged here, drawn by the place's permissive, romantic air and a reputation for licentiousness that sparked affairs of the heart. Indeed, way back in 1834, a local priest fulminated from the pulpit about the lax morals of the town and how the good solid people back home in England would react to rumours about the scandalous goings-on! And it wasn't just the Brits but the brown sahibs and Indian princes too who liked to frolic in leafy glades and inadvertently enhanced its aura of being a wild, free-spirited sort of place.
Anecdotes aplenty
Anecdotes aplenty
During a recent visit to this enchanting resort, we spoke to Hugh and Colleen Gantzer, well-known travel writers and authors whose family has contributed a great deal to the hill station in terms of helping to preserve its unique identity and has even played the role of vigilant watch dogs on issues as varied as quarrying of the surrounding limestone hills and maintaining the mall as a pedestrian zone. Over lunch in their tiny Victorian cottage which snuggles in a sun-dappled forested hollow, the effervescent duo, who have a rich store of racy anecdotes about their beloved hill station, told us how, since Mussoorie was not a capital, Indian princes did not have to indulge in "poodle faking" behaviour. There were no governors or burra sahibs to curry favour with and fawn over. So Mussoorie became the ultimate vacation hangout for the royals where they let down their hair, built splendid palaces and indulged their extravagant whims.
The Maharajah of Kapurtala, for instance, built an extravaganza in the French chateau style with pointed turrets and sweeping balconies. To upstage him, the Maharaja of Rampur built his palace at a higher elevation! Both the edifices are still around lonely and abandoned but watch over the town as if nothing had transpired in the interim!
One can't escape the past in this sleepy hill town whose Freudian slip was constantly showing. "There was room enough (in Mussoorie) for discreet affairs over picnic baskets beneath the whispering deodars," says Ruskin Bond in his book Roads to Mussoorie. One lady, he says, even auctioned her kisses for Rs. 300 each! This is where the colonialists escaped when they had too much East and wished to get away from the dreadful anopheles mosquito, which they believed did not swarm to heights above 5,000 ft.
Time would hang heavy on the hands of pretty grass widows whose husbands toiled in the plains or were on leave in England and so they would head for Mussoorie for clandestine trysts with other singletons. Discreet dalliances would follow... the ladies would dangle their lily white hands outside their dandi (palanquins) and their young besotted swains would hold them discreetly as they swayed down the mall. The affair would continue in hotel rooms let out for the purpose, related Hugh Gantzer. One hotel employed a half blind waiter who would ring a bell at 2 a.m. to break up furtive romps (it was appropriately enough called the Separation Bell). By the time chhota hazri was served at 6 a.m. (tea, two biscuits and a banana), guests would be primly sleeping in their own rooms! Of course, most "natives" were not aware of the shenanigans of their white masters who, apart from playing the field, went to the cinema, skated at the ice rink and lived in luxurious classy hotels like the Savoy. At places like Breezy Corner, young bucks of the empire would hang around to gape at peaches and cream complexioned English lasses and some furious flirting would follow.
Ancient escapades
Eccentricities and one-up-manship were given full rein. Not to be outdone, one maharaja, who had taken a fancy to a young Englishwoman whose translucent complexion and doll-like features had a lot of brawny lads vying for her attentions, decided to whisk her away to his eerie. The young lass worked as a receptionist in one of the fancier hotels and was not seen for a week, much to the disappointment of her considerable fan following. When she returned, she confided in her close friends that she had spent time at the palace where the kindly maharaja had her loll, five times a day, in his oyster shaped bath, clad in a demure swimming costume while he would croon, "You are my pearl in the oyster, you are my pearl in the oyster."
There were sinister happenings too. A doctor administered slow poison to a rich patient who also happened to be his lover. The patient succumbed when the doctor was conveniently away and the murder was never conclusively solved. The British press carried the scoop and noted author Rudyard Kipling wrote to Arthur Conan Doyle to write a story centred around this mysterious death. Conan Doyle mentioned it to Agatha Christie and the thriller The Mysterious Affair at Styles was the result.
As scary was the time in the 1940s when a Himalayan yeti or the abominable snowman was said to prowl the slopes of Mussoorie at night, pry apart cattle sheds and eat goats and cattle. The townspeople lived in fear till an Anglo Indian hunter shot it down and it turned out to be a Himalayan bear!
More recently, locals cautioned people in hushed voices not to drive up to Mussoorie late at night. One is not likely to be accosted by a yeti or a bear but a lady in white sitting on a parapet trying to hitch a ride. Kindly motorists who gave her a ride would get the shock of their lives, for, when she got in and smiled her thanks, she revealed large vampire-like teeth that would glimmer eerily in the dark. As the car wound up to Mussoorie, it would invariably meet with an accident and Bhoot Aunty as the mysterious woman is called would vanish from the site of the mayhem. After all the negative publicity, Bhoot Aunty has been absconding and has not been seen in a long while, though some locals categorically state that she never existed.
Colonial cameo
Today Mussoorie is a lively colonial cameo, largely a honeymoon destination and there are no telltale whiffs of scandal. Bejewelled brides in rustling silks and suited grooms strut up and down the mall, gaze at the muscled Shivaliks and the snow-kissed Himalayas beyond. Some bounce on horses on Camel's Back Road or in cycle rickshaws; cavort at once-beautiful Kempty Falls (now ringed by dhabas) or peddle around Lake Mist, a picnic spot.
Generally, Mussoorie brims with tourists because it has easy access to the outdoors. We were there in the off-season and it had a quiet muffled quality about it. Yes, there are some outlandish developments by way of garishly designed hotels yet it is pervaded by a genteel colonial air. Time sits lightly on this Himalayan hill station where, as one ambles around, one is tempted to caress the lovely wrought iron railing that rims the mall, gawk at the pretty bandstands, ornate look-out points and at the elegant sprawl of the library with its trellised balconies; and explore the sun-warmed palaces and heritage hostelries.
And ah! Beautiful Christ Church was riveting, with its restored stained glass windows, its polished wooden pews, marble pulpit and sad memorial plaques such as "God's finger touched him and he departed." We swayed one evening via a ropeway to Gun Hill where a gun used to be fired at noon. After the departure of the British, the gun was silenced and melted to make taps.
Simple pleasures
There's lots to do in Mussoorie, for it's a walker's place where one can stumble on urbanised areas and even the untrammelled. One can trek to the various water falls like Mossey Fall, Bhatta Fall and Jharipani Fall; or head for the Sir George Everest House. Sir Everest was the first surveyor general of India after whom the highest peak in the world has been named; or check out Clouds End, now a hotel, which was built in 1838, and was one of the first four bungalows in Mussoorie. And before departure, pay homage at Jwalaji Temple on Benog Hill which commands a panoramic view of the Himalayas.
Simple pleasures
However, what we enjoyed most was sitting on the terrace bar of our hotel in the evening, watching the play of light on the mountains, inhaling the crisp Himalayan air that succours the deodars and the wild flowers, and absorbing the time-stopped meditative calm of Mussoorie nights.
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Factfile
Factfile
The nearest railhead is Dehradun, 35 km away, connected with Delhi, Mumbai, Gorakhpur, Kathgodam, Varanasi, Howrah, Amritsar, Saharanpur, Rishikesh and Haridwar. For transport to Mussoorie, buses and taxies are available outside the railway station.
© jayakumar shetty., all rights reserved.
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