by Ruskin Bond
I don’t have to slip away. In the five or six years during which I have helped to prop up the Savoy Bar, I have seldom paid for a drink. That’s the kind of friend I have in Nandu. You won’t find a harsh word about him in these pages. I think he decided long ago that I was an adornment to the Bar, and that, draped over a bar stool, I looked like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. (He won an Oscar for that, remember?)
As for the Man-from-Sail, who is usually parked on the next bar stool, he’s no adornment, in spite of the Jackie Shroff-moustache. But I have to admit that he’s skilful at pouring drinks, mixing cocktails and showing tipsy ladies to the powder room. He doesn’t pay for his drinks either.
How, then, does dear Nandu survive? Obviously there are some real customers in the wings, and we help them feel at home, chatting them up and encouraging them to try the Royal Salute or even a glass of Beaujolais. I can rattle off the history of the hotel for anyone who wants to hear it; and as for the Man-from-Sail, he provides a free ambulance service for those who can’t handle the hotel’s hospitality. The Man-from-Sail is the town’s number one blood donor, so if you come away from your transfusion with a bad hangover, you’ll know whose blood is coursing around in your veins. But it’s real Scotch, not the stuff they make at the bottom of the Sail mountain.
Nandu tells me that Pearl Buck, the Nobel laureate, stayed here for a few days in the early fifties. I looked up the hotel register and found that he was right as usual. As far as I know, Miss Buck did not record her impressions of the hotel or the town in any of her books. It’s the sort of place people usually have something to say about. Like the correspondent of the Melbourne Age who complained because the roof had blown off his room during one of our equinoxal storms. A frivolous sort of complaint, to say the least. Nandu placated him by saying, ‘Sir, in Delhi you can only get a five-star room. From your room here you can see all the stars!’ And so he could, once the clouds had rolled away.
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!
In a Crystal Ball: A Mussoorie Mystery
Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, had a lifelong interest in unusual criminal cases, and his friends often passed on to him interesting accounts of crime and detection from around the world. It was in this way that he learnt of the strange death of Miss Frances Garnett-Orme in the Indian hill station of Mussoorie. Here was a murder combining the weird borders of the occult with a crime mystery as inexplicable as any devised by Doyle himself.
In April 1912 (shortly before the Titanic went down), Conan Doyle received a letter from his Sussex neighbour Rudyard Kipling:
Dear Doyle,
There has been a murder in India. A murder by suggestion at Mussoorie, which is one of the most curious things in its line on record.
Everything that is improbable and on the face of it impossible is in this case.
Kipling had received details of the case from a friend working in the Allahabad Pioneer, a paper for which, as a young man, he had worked in the 1880s. Urging Doyle to pursue the story, Kipling concluded: ‘The psychology alone is beyond description.’
Doyle was indeed interested to hear more, for India had furnished him with material in the past, as in The Sign of Four and several short stories. Kipling, too, had turned to crime and detection in his early stories of Strickland of the Indian Police. The two writers got together and discussed the case, which was indeed a fascinating affair.
The scene was set in Mussoorie, a popular hill station in the foothills of the Himalayas. It wasn’t as grand as Simla (where the Viceroy and his entourage went) but it was a charming and convivial place, with a number of hotels and boarding houses, a small military cantonment, and several private schools for European children.
It was during the summer ‘season’ of 1911 that Miss Frances Garnett-Orme came to stay in Mussoorie, taking a suite at the Savoy, a popular resort hotel. On 28 July she celebrated her 49th birthday. She was the daughter of George Garnett-Orme, of Skipton-in-Craven in Yorkshire, a district registrar of the Country Court. It was a family important enough to be counted among the landed gentry. Her father had died in 1892.
She came out to India in 1893 with the intention of marrying Jack Grant of the United Provinces Police. But he died in 1894 and she went back to England. Upset by his death following so soon after her father’s, she turned to spiritualism in the hope of communicating with him. We must remember that spiritualism was all the rage in the early years of the century, seances and table-rappings being part of the social scene both in England and India. Madam Blavatsky, the chief exponent of spiritualism, was probably at the height of her popularity around this time; she spent her ‘seasons’ in neighbouring Simla, where she had many followers.
Miss Garnett-Orme’s life was unsettled. She was drawn back to India, returning in 1901 to live in Lucknow, the regional capital of the United Provinces. She was still in contact with Jack Grant’s family and saw his brother occasionally. The summer of 1907 was spent at Nainital, a hill station popular with Lucknow residents. It was here that she met Miss Eva Mountstephen, who was working as a governess.
Eva Mountstephen, too, had an interest in spiritualism. It appears that she had actually told several of her friends about this time that she had learnt (in the course of a seance) that in 1911 she would come into a great deal of money.
We are told that there was something sinister about Miss Mountstephen. She specialized in crystal-gazing, and what she saw in the glass often took a violent form. Her ‘control’, that is her connection in the spirit world, was a dead friend named Mrs Winter.
As a result of their common interest in the occult, Miss Garnett-Orme took on the younger woman as a companion when she returned to Lucknow in the winter. There they settled down together. But the summers were spent at one of the various hill stations. Was there a latent lesbianism in their relationship? It was a restless, rootless life, but they were held together by the strong and heady influence of the seance table and the crystal ball. Miss Garnett-Orme’s indifferent health also made her dependent on the younger woman.
In the summer of 1911, the couple went up to Mussoorie, probably the most frivolous of hill stations, where ‘seasonal’ love affairs were almost the order of the day. They took rooms in the Savoy. Electricity had yet to reach Mussoorie, and it was still the age of candelabras and gas-lit streets. Every house had a grand piano. If you didn’t go out to a ball, you sang or danced at home. But Miss Garnett-Orme’s spiritual pursuits took precedence over these more mundane entertainments. Towards the end of the ‘season’, on 12 September, Miss Mountstephen returned to Lucknow to pack up their household for a move to Jhansi, where they planned to spend the winter.
On the morning of 19 September, while Miss Mountstephen was still away, Miss Garnett-Orme was found dead in her bed. The door was locked from the inside. On her bedside table was a glass. She was positioned on the bed as though laid out by a nurse or undertaker.
Because of these puzzling circumstances, Major Birdwood of the Indian Medical Service (who was the Civil Surgeon in Mussoorie) was called in. He decided to hold an autopsy. It was discovered that Miss Garnett-Orme had been poisoned with prussic acid.
Prussic acid is a quick-acting poison, and would have killed too quickly for the victim to have composed herself in the way she was found. An ayah told the police that
she had seen someone (she could not tell whether it was a man or a woman) slipping away through a large skylight and escaping over the roof.
Hill stations are hotbeds of rumour and intrigue, and of course the gossips had a field day. Miss Garnett-Orme suffered from dyspepsia and was always dosing herself from a large bottle of Sodium Bicarbonate, which was regularly refilled. It was alleged that the bottle had been tampered with, that an unknown white powder had been added. Her doctor was questioned thoroughly. They even questioned a touring mind-reader, Mr Alfred Capper, who claimed that Miss Mountstephen had hurried from a room rather than have her mind read!
After several weeks the police arrested Miss Mountstephen. Although she had a convincing alibi (due to her absence in Jhansi) the police sought to prove that some kind of sinister influence had been exerted on Miss Garnett-Orme to take her medicine at a particular time. Thus, through suggestion, the murderer could kill and yet be away at the time of death. In her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), the poisoner was in a distant place by the time her victim reached the fatal dose, the poison having precipitated to the bottom of the mixture. Perhaps Miss Christie read accounts of the Garnett-Orme case in the British press. Even the motive was similar.
But there was no Hercule Poirot in Mussoorie, and in court this theory could never be made convincing. The police case was never strong (they would have done better to have followed the ayah’s lead), and it appears that they only acted because there was considerable ill-feeling in Mussoorie against Miss Mountstephen.
When the trial came up at Allahabad in March 1912, it caused a sensation. Murder by remote control was something new in the annals of crime. But after hearing many days of evidence about the ladies’ way of life, about crystal-gazing and premonitions of death, the court found Miss Mountstephen innocent. The Chief Justice, in delivering his verdict, remarked that the true circumstances of Miss Garnett-Orme’s death would probably never be known. And he was right.
Miss Mountstephen applied for probate of her friend’s will. But the Garnett-Orme family in England sent out her brother, Mr Hunter Garnett-Orme, to contest it. The case went in favour of Mr Garnett-Orme. The District Judge (W.D. Burkitt) turned down Miss Mountstephen’s application on grounds of ‘fraud and undue influence in connection with spiritualism and crystal-gazing’. She went in appeal to the Allahabad High Court, but the Lower Court’s decision was upheld.
Miss Mountstephen returned to England. We do not know her state of mind, but if she was innocent, she must have been a deeply embittered woman. Miss Garnett-Orme’s doctor lost his flourishing practice in Mussoorie and left the country too. There were rumours that he and Miss Mountstephen had conspired to get hold of Miss Garnett-Orme’s considerable fortune.
There was one more puzzling feature of the case. Mr Charles Jackson, a painter friend of many of those involved, had died suddenly, apparently of cholera, two months after Miss Garnett-Orme’s mysterious death. The police took an interest in his sudden demise. When he was exhumed on 23 December, the body was found to be in a perfect state of preservation. He had died of arsenic poisoning.
Murder or suicide? This puzzle, too, was never resolved. Was there a connection with Miss Garnett-Orme’s death? That too we shall never know. Had Conan Doyle taken up Kipling’s suggestion and involved himself in the case (as he had done in so many others in England), perhaps the outcome would have been different.
As it is, we can only make our own conjectures.
Up at Sisters Bazaar
A few years ago I spent a couple of summers up at Sisters Bazaar, at the farthest extremity of Mussoorie’s Landour cantonment—an area as yet untouched by the tentacles of a bulging, disoriented octopus of a hill station.
There were a number of residences up at Sisters, most of them old houses, but they were at some distance from each other, separated by clumps of oak or stands of deodar. After sundown, flying foxes swooped across the roads, and the nightjar set up its nocturnal chant. Here, I thought, I would live like Thoreau at Walden Pond—alone, aloof, far from the strife and cacophony of the vast amusement park that was now Mussoorie. How wrong I was proved to be!
To begin with, I found that almost everyone on the hillside was busily engaged in writing a book. Was the atmosphere really so conducive to creative activity, or was it just a conspiracy to put me out of business? The discovery certainly put me out of my stride completely, and it was several weeks before I could write a word.
There was a retired Brigadier who was writing a novel about World War II, and a retired Vice Admiral who was writing a book about a Rear Admiral. Mrs S, who had been an actress in the early days of the talkies, was writing poems in the manner of Wordsworth; and an ageing (or rather, resurrected) ex-Maharani was penning her memoirs. There was also an elderly American who wrote salacious bestselling novels about India. It was said of him that he looked like Hemingway and wrote like Charles Bronson.
With all this frenzied literary activity going on around me, it wasn’t surprising that I went into shock for some time.
I was saved (or so I thought) by a ‘far-out’ ex-hippie and ex-Hollywood scriptwriter who decided he would produce a children’s film based on one of my stories. It was a pleasant little story, and all would have gone well if our producer friend hadn’t returned from some high-altitude poppy fields in a bit of a trance and failed to notice that his leading lady was in the family way. Although the events of the story all took place in a single day, the film itself took about four months to complete, with the result that her figure altered considerably from scene to scene until, by late evening of the same day, she was displaying all the glories of imminent motherhood.
Naturally, the film was never released. I believe our producer friend now runs a health-food restaurant in Sydney. I shared a large building (it had paper-thin walls) with several other tenants, one of whom, a French girl in her thirties, was learning to play the sitar. She and her tabla-playing companion would sleep by day, but practise all through the night, making sleep impossible for me or anyone else in my household. I would try singing operatic arias to drown her out, but you can’t sing all night and she always outlasted me. Even a raging forest fire, which forced everyone else to evacuate the building for a night, did not keep her from her sitar any more than Rome burning kept Nero from his fiddle. Finally I got one of the chowkidar’s children to pour sand into her instrument, and that silenced her for some time.
Another tenant who was there for a short while was a Dutchman, (yes, we were a cosmopolitan lot in the 1980s, before visa regulations were tightened) who claimed to be an acupuncturist. He showed me his box of needles and promised to cure me of the headaches that bothered me from time to time. But before he could start the treatment, he took a tumble while coming home from a late night party and fell down the khud into a clump of cacti, the sharp pointed kind, which punctured the more tender parts of his anatomy. He had to spend a couple of weeks in the local mission hospital, receiving more conventional treatment, and he never did return to cure my headaches.
How did Sisters Bazaar come by its name?
Well, in the bad old, good old days, when Landour was a convalescent station for sick and weary British soldiers, the nursing sisters had their barracks in the long, low building that lines the road opposite Prakash’s Store. On the old maps this building is called The Sisters. For a time it belonged to Dev Anand’s family, but I believe it has since changed hands.
Of a ‘bazaar’ there is little evidence, although Prakash’s Store must be at least a hundred years old. It is famous for its home-made cheese, and tradition has it that several generations of the Nehru family have patronized the store, from Motilal Nehru in the 1920s, to Rahul and his mother in more recent times.
I am more of a jam-fancier myself, and although I no longer live in the area, I do sometimes drop into the store for a can of raspberry or apricot or plum jam, made from the fruit brought here from the surrounding villages.
Further down the road is Dahli
a Bank, where dahlias once covered the precipitous slope (known as the ‘Eyebrow’), behind the house. The old military hospital (which was opened in 1827), has been altered and expanded to house the present Defence Institute of Work Study. Beyond it lies Mount Hermon, with the lonely grave of a lady who perished here one wild and windy winter, 150 years ago. And close by lies the lovely Oakville Estate, where at least three generations of the multi-talented Alter fancily have lived. They do everything from acting in Hindi films to climbing greasy poles, Malkhumb-style. From wise old Bob to Steve and Andy, those Alter boys are mighty handy.
It is cold up there in winter, and I now live about 500 feet lower down, where it is only slightly warmer. But my walks take me up the hill from time to time. Most of the unusual eccentric people I have written about have gone away, but others, equally interesting, have taken their place. But for news of them you’ll have to wait for my autobiography. The Mussoorie gossips will then get a dose of their own medicine. Let them start having sleepless nights.
Miss Bun and Others
1 March 1975
Beer in the sun. High in the spruce tree the barbet calls, heralding summer. A few puffy clouds drift lazily over the mountains. Is this the great escape?
I could sit here all day soaking up beer and sunshine, but at some time during the day I must wipe the dust from my typewriter and produce something readable. There’s only eight hundred rupees in the bank, book sales are falling off, and magazines are turning away from fiction.
Prem spoils me, giving me rice and kofta curry for lunch, which means that I sleep till four when Miss Bun arrives with patties and samosas.
Miss Bun is the baker’s daughter.
Of course that’s not her real name. Her real name is very long and beautiful, but I won’t give it here for obvious reasons and also because her brother is big and ugly.
I am seeing Miss Bun after two months. She’s been with relatives in Bareilly.