by Ruskin Bond
Finally we bought platform tickets and sat down on a bench at the end of the railway platform and watched the arrivals and departures of trains, and the people who got on and off; we saw no one who looked in the least like Miss Bun. Master Bun bought an astrological guide from the station bookstall, and studied his sister’s horoscope to see if that might help, but it didn’t. At the same bookstall, hidden under a pile of pirated Harold Robbins novels, I found a book of mine that had been published ten years earlier. No one had bought it in all that time. I replaced it at the top of the pile. Never lose hope!
On the third day we returned to Barlowganj and found Miss Bun at home.
She had gone no further than Dehra’s Paltan Bazaar, it seemed, and had ditched the professor there, having first made him buy her three dress pieces, two pairs of sandals, a sandalwood hair brush, a bottle of scent, and a satchel for her schoolbooks.
5 May
And now it’s Mr Biggs’s turn to disappear.
‘Have you seen our Will? asks Mrs Biggs at my gate.
‘Not this morning, Mrs Biggs.’
‘I can’t find him anywhere. At breakfast he said he was
going out for a walk, but nobody knows where he went, and he isn’t in the school compound, I’ve just enquired. He’s been gone over three hours!’
‘Don’t worry, Mrs Biggs. He’ll turn up. Someone on the hillside must have asked him in for a cup of tea, and he’s sitting there talking about the crocodile he shot in Orissa.’
But at lunchtime Mr Biggs hadn’t returned; and that was alarming, because Mr Biggs had never been known to miss his favourite egg curry and pillau rice.
We organized a search. Prem and I walked the length of the Barlowganj bazaar, and even lodged an unofficial report with Constable Ghanshyam. No one had seen him in the bazaar. Several members of the school staff combed the hillside without picking up the scent.
Mid-afternoon, while giving my negative report to Mrs Biggs, I heard a loud thumping coming from the direction of her storeroom.
‘What’s all that noise downstairs?’ I asked.
‘Probably rats. I don’t hear anything.’
I ran downstairs and opened the storeroom door, there was Mr Biggs looking very dusty and very disgruntled; he wanted to know why the devil (the first time he’d taken the devil’s name in vain), Mrs Biggs had shut him up for hours. He’d gone into the storeroom in search of an old walking-stick, and Mrs Biggs, seeing the door open, had promptly bolted it, failing to hear her husband’s cries for immediate release. But for Mr Bond’s presence of mind, he averred, he might have been discovered years later, a mere skeleton!
The cook was still out hunting for him, so Mr Biggs had his egg curry cold. Still in a foul mood, he sat down and wrote a letter to his sister in Tunbridge Wells, asking her to send out a hearing-aid for Mrs Biggs.
Constable Ghanshyam turned up in the evening, to inform me that Mr Biggs had last been seen at Rajpur, in the foothills, in the company of several gypsies!
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘These old men get that way. One last fling, one last romantic escapade, one last tilt at the windmill. If you have a dream, Ghanshyam, don’t let them take it away from you.’
He looked puzzled, but went on to tell me that he was being transferred to Bareilly jail, where they keep those who have been found guilty but of unsound mind. It’s a reward, no doubt, for his services in getting the SP’s poems published.
*
These journal entries date back some twenty years. What happened to Miss Bun? Well, she finally opened a beauty parlour in New Delhi, but I still can’t tell you where it is, or give you her name.
Two or three years later, Mrs Biggs was laid to rest near her old friends in the Mussoorie cemetery. Rev. Biggs was flown home to Turnbridge Wells; his sister gave him a solid tombstone, so that he wasn’t tempted to get up and wander off somewhere, in search of crocodiles.
A lot can happen in twenty years, and unfortunately not all of it gets recorded. ‘Little Raki’ is today a married man!
A Station for Scandal
SIMLA, EVEN IN the days of Mrs Hauksbee, was never so promiscuous. Simla, after all, was teeming with officials and empire-builders and ambitious young civil servants. If there wasn’t room for them in Simla, they went to Nainital, capital of the United Provinces.
But Mussoorie was non-official.
It was not a summer capital. You could live there without feeling that the Viceroy or the Governor was looking over your shoulder. Those who made their way to Mussoorie did so in order to get as far as possible from viceroys and governors. It was where you went to ‘do your own thing’, indulge a secret love, or build a cottage for your mistress, far from the stern and censorious eyes of your superior officers. And sometimes the superior officers turned up too, hoping to get away from their junior officer. And if ever the twain met, well, they looked the other way . . . .
Mussoorie is smaller than Simla, all length and no breadth, but from Clouds End in the west to Jabarkhet in the east, it is all of twelve miles, straddling the ridge overlooking the two great rivers, the Ganga and the Jamuna, which are silver slipstreams across the plains below. There is room enough for private lives, for discreet affairs conducted over picnic baskets set down beneath the deodars.
Some years ago I received a letter from a reader in England, wanting to know if there were any Maxwells still living in Mussoorie. He was a Maxwell himself, he said, by his father’s first marriage. From what he knew of the family history, there ought to have been several Maxwells by the second marriage, and he wanted to get in touch with them.
He was very frank and mentioned that his father had given up a brilliant career in the Indian Civil Service to marry a fifteen-year-old Muslim girl. He had met the girl in Madras, changed his religion to facilitate the marriage, and then—to avoid ‘scandal’—had made his home with her in Mussoorie. His first wife had returned to England with her children.
Although there are no longer any Maxwells in Mussoorie, my neighbour, Miss Bean confirmed that Mr Maxwell’s children from his second wife had in fact grown up on the station, each inheriting a considerable property. The old gentleman is buried in the Mussoorie cemetery. The children emigrated, but one granddaughter returned to Mussoorie a few years ago, on a honeymoon with her fourth husband, thus keeping up the family tradition.
Mussoorie, queen of the hills, took this sort of thing in its stride.
The station’s reputation was well established as far back as October 1884, when the correspondent of the Calcutta Statesman wrote to his paper:
Last Sunday a sermon was delivered by the Reverend Mr Hackett, belonging to the Church Mission Society; he chose for his text Ezekiel 18th and 2nd verse; the latter clause, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes and set their children’s teeth on edge.’ The Reverend gentleman discoursed upon the ‘highly immoral tone of society up here, that it far surpassed any other hill station in the scale of morals; that ladies and gentlemen after attending church proceeded to a drinking shop, a restaurant adjoining the Library and there indulged freely in pegs, not one but many; that at a fancy Bazaar held this season, a lady stood up on a chair and offered her kisses to gentlemen at Rs 5 each. What would they think of such a state of society at Home? But this was not all. Married ladies and married gents formed friendship and associations which tended to no good purpose, and set a bad example.’
The poor Reverend preached to no purpose, and it was perhaps just as well that he was not alive in the year 1933, when a lady stood up at a benefit show and auctioned a single kiss for which a gentleman paid Rs 300. (The Statesman correspondent had nothing to say on that occasion; his silence was in itself a comment on the changing times.)
Mussoorie was probably at its gayest in the Thirties. Ballrooms, skating-rinks and cinema-halls flourished. Beauty salons sprang up along the Mall. An old advertisement in my possession announces the superiority of ‘Freda’ in the art of permanent waving; she was assisted by Miss Harvey, ‘late of �
�Lucille”, Bedford’.
The war was to change all this; and by the time independence came to India, most of the European and Anglo-Indian residents had sold their homes and gone away. Only a few stayed on— elderly folk like Miss Bean, who had spent her life here, and others whose meagre incomes did not permit them to go away.
I wonder what brought me back to Mussoorie. True, I had sometimes been here as a child; and my mother’s people had lived in Dehradun, in the valley below. When I returned to India, still a young man in my twenties (I had spent only four years in England), I lived in Delhi and Dehra for a few years; and then, without quite knowing why, I found myself visiting the hill-station, calling on the oldest resident, Miss Bean, and being told by her that the upper portion of her cottage was to let. On an impulse, I rented it.
That was ten years ago, and Miss Bean has gone to her maker, but here I am, still living in the cottage and keeping it from falling down.
Perhaps I really wanted to come back to my beginnings. Because it was in Mussoorie in 1933 (the Year of the Kissing) that my parents first met and enjoyed a typical hill-station affair.
I have a photograph of my father and mother, on horseback, riding along the Camel’s Back Road not far from the cemetery gate. He was thirty-six then, and had just given up a tea-estate manager’s job; she was barely twenty, taking a nurse’s training at the Cottage Hospital, just below Gun Hill. A few months later they were husband and wife, living in the heat and dust of Alwar state. I was not born in Mussoorie, but I am pretty sure I had my beginnings there.
There is something in the air of the place—especially in October and November—that is conducive to romance and passion. Miss Bean told me that as a girl she’d had many suitors, and if she did not marry it was more from procrastination than from being passed over. While on all sides elopements and broken marriages were making hill-station life exciting, she managed to remain single. She was probably helped in this by her father’s reputation for being a very good shot with pistol and Lee-Enfield rifle. She taught elocution in one of the many schools that flourished (and still flourish) in Mussoorie. There is a protective atmosphere about an English public school; an atmosphere which, although it protects one from the outside world, often exposes one to the hazards within the system.
The schools were not without their own scandals. Mrs Fennimore, the wife of a schoolmaster at Oak Grove, got herself entangled in a defamation suit, each hearing of which grew more and more distasteful to her husband. Unable to stand the whole weary and sordid business, Mr Fennimore hit upon a solution. Loading his revolver, he moved to his wife’s bedside and shot her through the head. For no accountable reason he put the weapon under her pillow—obviously no one could have mistaken the death for suicide—and then, going to his study, he leaned over his rifle and shot himself.
Ten years later, in the same school, the headmaster’s wife was arrested for attempted murder. She had fired at, and wounded, a junior mistress. The case was later hushed up; the motive remains obscure.
But it was on 25 July 1927, at the height of the season and in the heart of the town, that there took place the double tragedy that set the station agog. It all happened in broad daylight and in a full boarding-house, Zephyr Hall.
Shortly after noon the boarders were startled into brisk activity when a shot rang out from one of the rooms, followed by screams. Other shots followed in quick succession. Those boarders who happened to be in the public rooms or on the verandas dived for the safety of their own apartments and bolted the doors. One unhappy boarder, however, ignorant of where the man with the gun might be, decided to take no chances and came round a corner with his hands held well above his head—only to run straight into the levelled pistol. Even the man who held it, and who had just shot his own wife, couldn’t help laughing.
Mr Owen, the gentleman with the gun, killed his wife, wounded his daughter, and finally shot himself. His was the first Christian cremation in Mussoorie, performed in compliance with his wishes expressed long before his dramatic end.
This event had a strange sequel, at least for me.
Last summer, while I was taking a walk along the Mall, I was stopped by a stranger, a small man with pale-blue eyes and thinning hair. He must have been over sixty. Accompanying him was a woman of about thirty, whom he introduced as his wife. He apologized for detaining me, and said, ‘But you look as though you have been here for some time. Can you tell me where Miss Garlah lives?’
Miss Garlah, another old resident, is the Secretary of the Cemetery Committee, ‘house-proud’, so to speak, because a visiting representative of the British High Commission once declared that the Mussoorie cemetery was the best-kept ‘old’ cemetery in northern India.
I gave directions to the visitor, and then asked him if he was visiting Mussoorie for the first time. He seemed to welcome the enquiry and showed an eagerness to talk.
‘It’s nearly fifty years since I was last here,’ he said. And he gestured towards the ruins of Zephyr Hall, once the most fashionable boarding-house in the hill-station and now occupied by poor squatters and their families. ‘That was where we lived for a couple of years. That was where my poor mother died . . . . ’
My mind was alive with conjecture and now something seemed to fall into place. ‘Not—not Mrs Owen?’ I ventured to ask.
‘That’s right. But surely you’re too young to remember.’
‘I heard about it,’ I lied. Actually, I had a couple of old newspaper clippings on the case.
‘My father had a sudden brainstorm. He shot and killed my mother. My sister was badly wounded, but she recovered.’
‘And what about you?’ I asked. I couldn’t remember reading about a son.
‘I was at school in England, just fourteen years old. They’d sent me to England only a few months before it happened. I heard about it much later. Naturally, I couldn’t attend my mother’s funeral, and I’ve had to wait fifty years before I could come and see her grave. I know she’d have wanted me to come.’
He took my telephone number and promised to look me up before he left Mussoorie. But I did not see him again. After a few days I began to wonder if I had really met the survivor of a fifty-year-old tragedy, or if he had been just another of the hill-station’s ghosts. But only a couple of weeks back, when I was walking along the cemetery’s lowest terrace looking for a grave that Miss Garlah said needed to be identified (she couldn’t manage the steep path down to the bottom terrace), I received confirmation that Mr Owen Junior had indeed visited Mussoorie and that he had found his mother’s grave.
There before me was the grave of Mrs Owen, victim of her husband’s brainstorm. And a new plaque had been set into the stone, with the inscription: ‘Mother Dear, I am Here’.
1976
It Must be the Mountains1
A thirty-minute play for radio
Characters
Miss Mackenzie: an active old lady
Colonel Wilkie: retired from the Indian Army
Anil: an Indian schoolboy
An old Bearer: (or manservant)
(and a narrator for the opening passage)
Sound effects required
Birdsong, including sound of woodpecker
Doors and windows which must sometimes be opened or closed
Footsteps on gravel
A creaking gate
A boy scrambling through shrubbery Sound of digging
A rattle of teacups
Notes for guidance
The Colonel and Miss Mackenzie would of course speak with English accents. The boy would speak fairly clear English, without any marked Indian accent—he studies at an English-medium school; the Bearer would speak English with difficulty and slow deliberation—but he doesn’t have to say much.
The term ‘Miss’ rather than ‘Ma’am’ is used by schoolboys in India when addressing a lady teacher—irrespective of whether she’s a Miss or Mrs.
NARRATOR : The year is 1968. Miss Mackenzie, who is eighty-six years old, is the ol
dest resident of a small hill-station in northern India. She has been living there since 1904. One of a handful of British people still living in the hills of India, she has known more prosperous days. She has been a spinster all her life, and lives alone in a small cottage near a forest of oak and rhododendron. Her old bearer, who is almost eighty himself, is her only companion, apart from the occasional visitor.
(BIRDSONG, DOMINATED BY THE KNOCKING OF A WOODPECKER)
MISS MACKENZIE : Bearer! [Pause] Bearer! [Pause] Oh, what a deaf old codger he’s become. Bear-er!
BEARER : Yes, missy-baba.
MISS M : Oh, do come here and help me open this window. I can hear a woodpecker outside. I must know where it is. And I’ve told you a hundred times not to call me missy-baba—I stopped wearing pigtails seventy years ago!
BEARER : Yes, missy-baba. The window.
MISS M : Come on then—push!
(PAUSE. BOTH STRAIN AT THE WINDOW)
MISS M : No, it won’t open. You are a feeble old man. Never mind . . . I’m going out into the garden. Its good to have the sun again after two days of rain and hail.
(DOOR OPENS, BIRDSONG IS LOUDER)
MISS M : Oh, it is lovely outside. Just listen to the birds. There’s a blackbird—and a whistling- thrush. And there’s the woodpecker, up at the top of that old spruce. Can you see it, Bearer?
BEARER : No, missy-baba, I cannot see as well as you.
MISS M : No, I suppose not. The Mackenzies always had good eyesight.
BEARER : Your father’s eyesight was very good, missy-baba.
MISS M : And so is mine, thank God. Yes—I can see Colonel Wilkie coming down the road, though he hasn’t seen me as yet. Unless, of course, he’s trying to avoid me. Colonel Wilkie! [Pause] Colonel!
COLONEL WILKIE : [startled] Oh!—ah—why, it’s Mary! Good morning, Mary. Lovely day, isn’t it?
MISS M : Gorgeous. Can you see the woodpecker?
COLONEL : No. Where?
Miss M : At the top of the spruce.