Mussoorie

There is a great plain running from east (Kolkata) to the northwest in the neighborhood of Delhi. The snowmelt runs down to the Bengali side of India from the Himalayas. I’ve read that the invaders from central Asia came along the same route, consequently, the cultures took the same path. And since the railroads work well across the flat ground, this is a traveler’s favorite route. Kolkata, Patna, Varanasi, Lucknow, Agra, Delhi (New and Old.) I had visited most of those places and was feeling the bite of time. It was late March and I had to do my “day abroad” about the first week in April. My list of places to visit was Mussoorie, Shimla, Srinagar, and I added Amritsar, since “it was on the way.” As the train rocked along the right of way, I decided on another stopover, Lucknow. Kipling wrote about the glorious city in Kim but Lonely Planet panned it saying that the glory had long ago faded. What was important historically was that this was the site of the Residency, the focal point during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. There are a number of stories as to the causes but the effects were even better known. The British were cut off from the outside and it took months before a rescue could be completed. An outcome was that the British Crown and her government took over the governing of India from the East Indian Company and railroad building went into high gear. The great cities were no longer isolated and with the railroads, India became a different country. The railroad is still heavily subsidized and at least one observer reckoned that a third of India’s population rides along these tracks at any given moment. That’s a tad high but cheap travel is a good excuse to drop by for a visit from a hundred miles away rather making a phone call. Now after all that, the conductor wouldn’t change my ticket for a Lucknow stop over! Bad planning on my part. There is a good chance, I’ll be back.
This express stops and goes no farther at Derah Dun. This is where you leave the track for a road and hopefully a bus driver who will die at some later date. Since I’m playing catch up on this writing, the trip of ascending into the foothills is somewhat vague. I do remember a lady named Lulu. I know no one of that name and since I can’t find her name and address, she’s going to be Lulu until I do find something to the contrary. Lulu was surely to the contrary.
I met Lulu on the bus going to Mussoorie. She spoke English as well as anybody. It seems that she came from a Christian family of missionaries. I think it was her father who was the one who answered the call and so while she sat behind me on the bus, we conversed during the climb up the mountain. She said that she’d show me a hotel when we got there. The place was called the Starz Hotel, which is probably a take off on Stars’ Hotel. I took a look and felt how heavy they pack was and wondered which of us was taking leave of their senses. The Starz could refer to one or two stars. It really wasn’t that grand but with the infusion of a hundred thousand dollars, it might match up to what the original designed called for. What I didn’t know was that I was expected to bring the hundred thousand dollars. So I was about to walk out when they dropped the price per night to a number I could count to and then Lulu suggested that we order lunch. She did the ordering and out came enough food to feed a round table of six of us with food left over. Lulu had the extra food doggy bagged and told me that she “would open her heart to me.”
Have I used the term “Americanist?” An Americanist is someone who decides that what you would really like to do is to sponsor their going to America where they will get a job and find happiness. All you have to do is take care of the paperwork and guarantee their solvency, look after their expenses until the first pay check, and should these plans not work out, you provide the ticket home just as you bought the ticket over…with the understanding that they will pay you back. As an Americanist, Lulu promised more. Noting my gray hair, she decided that I needed someone to look after me and since she spoke Hindi, she would be my nursemaid or mistress or tour guide or…. India has many, many Americanists. They are not all of a particular religious sect that believes in levitation. All faiths are represented so my guess is that it has something to do with Bollywood. Nothing else I can think of is such a complete divorce from reality but Lulu was surely the most imaginative of the Americanists to date. She went away with her sacks of food to see her friend and would call me to show me the town tomorrow morning.
She had a habit common to many people east or west and exhibited it the next morning when she called to tell me to say that she was not going to be able to show me around. I explained that I really wasn’t interested in the tour, that I had been over “fooded,” not only when she ordered in Hindi but at breakfast as well and mentally toting up my bill, I had just used up a week’s worth of travel allowance on a night and two meals at the hotel. All this time she was explaining that it was Good Friday and that she wanted to attend church. She did ask the blessing over the banquet we’d been served. By the time she would have called again, I was down the road wondering if she were a shill for the establishment. Checking out was not a quiet affair. And so I went looking for an acacia tree and found the Pik-Nik Hotel for about $7.50 a night, clean, had hot water, and a place I could den up as to get ahead of the story, I was about to come down with a prize winning cold. That afternoon before coming down with this bug, I walked along Camel Back Road to look at the Himalayas.
Mussoorie is on a sharp ridge even more pronounced than Kodaikanal. The elevation is about the same, somewhere between 7,200 and 8,000 feet depending on where you are standing. Most of Mussoorie seemed to lie on the south side of the ridge; Camel Back Road lay on the north, the side where you would see the Himalayas in the distance.
The Himalayas did not show. I found that they seldom showed except in winter and this was spring and although there were no leaves on anything, the local snow had melted. I walked along the bends and curves of the road. What really drew on my attention were the houses and how they were built on such a steep grade in many places exceeding 45 degrees. The designers simply built two and three story foundations on the valley side. Everything was made of stone. I can guess that the drainage system on the uphill side must have been both sophisticated and well maintained. We lose hillsides complete with houses in Sitka. Some sections of California downhill rides in houses are a televised spectator sport. Some of these houses had been here probably for a hundred years and they were right where they were built. On some the roofs were flat and this served as a driveway and car park. I suspect the houses were pretty on the inside and surely the valley and the ranges out in front of the houses were spectacular.
I passed the cemetery with a small chapel complete with transept and buttresses and then met a German couple coming from the other direction and we visited for probably an hour before continuing on. This would be my last healthy afternoon in Mussoorie. I was already feeling a tickle in the back of my nasal cavity. So now coming round a break in the ridge, I took a rest on a park bench. The street sellers peddled food here and the macaques decided to join the noshers. What an obnoxious bunch but at the same time, I guess I could spend the day watching monkeys. There was a big fellow sitting on a fence about ten or fifteen feet away. He had found something to eat but as if practicing, he’d throw a bluff at me a time or two a minute. I wasn’t after his food nor did I have any worth his extortion. I guess when you are the alpha male, you need to keep in up the habit of saying, Boo!
A friend in the States, who had told me about Mussoorie, had taught at Woodstock, a private school here and it is somehow related to Kodaikanal International School. I hadn’t seen the school and so asked a very international looking group of students where it was. Like the Himalayas, it didn’t show. There was a long cab ride out of town and evening was coming on. I found a place to eat, amused a kid with magic tricks, and his uncle who lived in Southern California joined us and we had a good talk about possibly finding an apartment here. It takes an investment in time to feel at home in a place and while Mussoorie seemed a nice enough place, the snow on steep streets really didn’t call to me. We said our good byes and I went back to the Pik-Nik Hotel to nurse a runny nose for the next few days. At $7.50 a night, I could afford to be sick for a while but April wasn’t all that far away and I needed to be somewhere else.
One place I considered for my Day of Exile was Lassa. Since China/Indian relations are still chilly, having had a couple of wars, the way the Lassa thing is done is first you fly to Katmandu and then from there over the mountains to Tibet. It was a thought but by this time I was thinking about the Nile and so shelved the Tibetan idea for another trip and another year.
Sick or healthy, you still have to eat. I found an upscale place called the Four Seasons that made a reasonable breakfast and an evening meal. This second-story restaurant became my watering hole. One evening after dark while having supper, I heard chanting from the street below. The voices were in unison; they had practiced. The waiters and I went to an open window and stuck our heads out. The street below was filled with smartly dressed Tibetans, marching and chanting slogans, “What do you want?” “Freedom!” Everything was very orderly, faces were scrubbed, hair combed, clothes clean, but the message was certain. “Free Tibet!” All over the world you see a bumper sticker campaign but with Tibet beneath the paw of China, I’ve never expected much. The next morning the pictures and news from the rioting in Lassa came over CNN, Asian Desk. Something was to be different this time. At least the Olympic sports fans would be distracted momentarily from the games.
And so I felt miserable. Just an hour away from the bed was enough to wear me out. I did try to keep up with the email but that came to a close. Beware of cyber cafes with an attached pool hall! The kats from a strenuous game of eight ball, take a break and play video games. As long as there is some respect for the other customers….. The young manager showed me the machine I was to use and when whoops of victory and defeat rose behind me, I waited until the noise died down and continued writing. Then the louts from the pool room smoked beneath the no smoking sign. As a former smoker, I’m really not a born-again fundamentalist non-smoker but the rowdiness was really becoming distracting. I was in the middle of a note to Harvey Brandt when the manager asked me to give up my computer, so that the boys could use the gaming software. I said, no, that I’d be here for a while. He looked peeved. I was being uncooperative. And then I told him how uncooperative I could be. First I raised hell about the noise, then the smoking, then his distraction of asking me to move and then like an unimaginative jazz musician, having established a theme, I played variations back and forth. So by now I couldn’t think what I was going to write to Harvey and signed off. The manager simply couldn’t understand why I was so upset. I was too sick to look for another c-café and so there was a news blackout from the hill station where it snows buckets in the winter. I’ve seen many winters and many buckets of snow. Mussoorie is a nice enough place if you get there before the summer crowds as I did. You can’t see the Himalayas but if you want to see mountains, try the pass in Nepal at the town of Dahman. There’s a haze there too but look above the haze. Look up. And you thought you knew what mountains looked like!
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