A Place Within (21 page)

I am here on a fellowship at Shimla’s Indian Institute of Advanced Study, an extraordinarily generous offer to a foreigner. The Institute’s one previous experience with a foreigner, I have been informed, was not positive. Yet here I am, where I will live and work, and gaze upon the gods’ mountains to my heart’s content; I am anonymous, for most people assume that I am from another part of India, this diverse subcontinent. I am as strange or familiar as anyone else.

We have been given the Postmaster Flat, a two-bedroom residence at the head of the long and steep winding driveway from the Gurkha Gate, and right above the defunct fire hall. This is presumably where the viceroy’s postmaster lived; I imagine the variety of post that must have passed through his—or his workers’—hands, Christmas packages, books and magazines, preserves, detailed letters in longhand linking Britain to India, including those of the apparently good-natured Lady Emily Eden to which we have now become privy. We’ve arrived in March, the winter is over; mornings are cool but sunny and bright, the nights cold and clear, speckled impeccably with stars. The comforts of the viceroy’s summer residence, however, are far from stately and barely adequate. Interiors are not well heated. The furniture is decidedly ancient, hailing from the Raj era or not much later, though some of the best antiques, we are told, were pilfered by previous residents—more well-placed ones, one supposes, than the poor scholars. The bathroom ceramic fixtures still bear the brand names of once extant British companies, the fireplaces everywhere are
defunct, the carpets threadbare. But no sign of a threadbare budget can take away from the thrill of our escape.

Our flat opens at the back onto a paved path, beyond which is a small green lawn edged with flower beds and with a shady oak tree at its centre; across the lawn from us is the Guest House, a broad, plain, two-storey white building. The upper floor accommodates occasional guests and the lower floor consists of a kitchen and a dining room on one side and a clubby lounge and television room on the other, with heavy drapes and furnished in the English drawing-room style. In the dining room, whose French doors open into the lawn, the scholars, who have been accommodated in houses and flats in the surrounding area, and who hail from various parts of India, those from the south typically in the warmest clothes, come to have their meals at tables covered with neat white cloths. In the morning at breakfast, a warm sunlight bathes the tranquility outside.

The front door of our flat opens to a flight of wooden stairs descending to the driveway and the main building of the former
Viceregal Lodge—now the Institute—in its ample grounds. The Institute can also be approached directly from the Guest House by descending a steep flight of stone stairs at the far corner of the lawn.

The Viceregal Lodge is perhaps the most visited site in Shimla. It stands majestically alone, like a temple atop a hill, its beautiful gardens and lawns ideal for family or honeymoon photographs, an emblem of the Raj and historically linked to its conclusion. Indeed its prohibitive, almost alien, reserve gives it the distinctive look of a colonial object. Whatever the humiliations of the Raj, some of its reminders are treated fondly and proudly. Especially on weekends, a steady stream of tourist cars comes racing up the driveway spitting gravel, and foreign backpackers march all the way from the Mall to have a look around, sit in the sun, take a tour of the buildings.

The viceroy’s residence was commissioned by Lord Dufferin, who had come to India having served previously as the governor general of Canada. The architect was Henry Irwin of the Public Works Department, though the overall conception seems to have been that of Lord Dufferin, who was obsessed with the construction, visiting the site regularly, often with bewildered visitors in tow, and always ready with suggestions. The design, with its Dutch gables, exterior ornamentation, mullioned windows, and cupola, has been described as “English Renaissance,” though the stonework details and second-floor balconies might suggest the excessive and baroque. The grey stone for the exterior was carted all the way from Kalka. It would not measure up to the best of English country houses, and English visitors generally loved to condemn it, but in its setting and with its history it is a striking place, reminder of a Shangri-La that was.

The entrance faces the south and is reached from the driveway. Through the doors, to the right, a curving staircase goes up to the
bedrooms on the second floor and the viceroy’s, now the director’s, office on the third. To the left is a seminar room and a corridor that leads past a gallery of photographs of eminent people to what once was the ballroom and drawing room and an adjoining dining room. These are now all parts of the library, one of the most extensive in the country, with the advantage that it’s never crowded.

During the Raj, this was a bustling place in the Season, with a vigorous social and administrative life and hundreds of servants and officials. The population of the town apparently tripled in the summer, from a little over ten thousand in the colder season, and the English had a strict hierarchy of social status among themselves. Not everybody could be invited to a ball at the viceroy’s residence. Housing the academic Institute now, it is a quiet place we have come to, ideal for some, a nightmare of loneliness to others, and surely an escape to those not used to so much personal space. The town, the Mall, actually, remains busy during the day but is a long walk away.

In this retreat we are not quite aware how the days and weeks pass; we simply allow ourselves to be. We take long walks out the Gurkha Gate to the Mall and, behind the Institute in the opposite direction, to the local market area and bus depot known as Boileau Ganj. Everywhere, we climb up and down the hills; during our very first outing, we realized that the baby stroller we’ve brought for our three-year-old is useless—the paths are not continuously smooth and often too steep. Sometimes we cook in the Postmaster’s kitchen, other times we eat with the fellows in the Guest House dining room, whose phoolka, puffed-up chappatis, we find difficult to reproduce. Early in the morning every day, with a knock at our back door comes a tray of “wake-up tea.” It’s worth getting up just for that. Inevitably, too, we have made some friends: a Bengali couple who have a son in Virginia; a Hyderabadi couple, he having just edited a collection of Partition stories; Bhishm Sahni, a Hindi writer, and his wife; a young man in a blazer, a
nostalgic Oxonian. We’ve travelled by taxi down to Amritsar in Punjab, which is my wife’s father’s birthplace, a memorable visit. And we’ve been to Chail, a charming resort higher up in the hills that boasts two clay tennis courts and a cricket ground, reputedly the world’s highest, though it seemed that there were more monkeys than people in the town. My older son has taken to cricket, and hunting for a lost ball in the bushes with him has brought back memories of my own childhood; it’s also given us rashes from poison ivy. Other times he catches up on school work. The three-year-old charms everyone, thriving on chappati and “rice pudding” (kheer), at the sight of which he’ll push away his chappati. Inevitably he eats the family’s entire ration of dessert. A thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, occupying one half of the large, ancient dining table, is approaching completion, everyone in the family contributing.

Finally, however, they have to return to Toronto, and I am alone, and there are intensely lonely quiet periods and yet also rewarding ones, as I sit, read, and write, and contemplate the vistas before me, strangely content in my solitude.

The rains have come, and with it the scorpions. The spiders are immense but harmless. They scurry in and out with amazing speed from behind the door posts.

The wooden front stairs of the Postmaster Flat are old, a couple of steps worn out and yielding. One damp monsoon afternoon I come out the front door on my way to the Mall. A few steps down, I slip and fall heavily on my back. During one fateful instant, as my head snaps back and hits something hard, I think I’m about to die. But I survive, winded, my back savagely sore, and slowly climb the remaining steps down. The next morning I report this near demise to the residence office, not only for the sake of my safety in the days ahead but also the safety of future residents of the flat. I am reassured warmly that the matter will be taken care of, not to worry. Nothing happens. That’s the reverse side to the
warmth and easy informality, to all the namasté-ji and the flexibility to accommodate to your needs.

Sometimes, in the late afternoon, as a residual sunlight strains in through the western sky, I come to sit at the small outdoor café of dilapidated sticky furniture and numerous small flies, at the cliff edge in the lee of the Institute, under the windows of the library that was once the viceroys’ ballroom. Watching the sunset from this vantage point becomes a game, one repeated frequently. There is nothing between me and the distant peaks of the Himalayas, the sun always behind them.

Down below, the green hills. Undulating hills, moving shadows at play with the angular glare, shades of green, textures and depths of pine foliage merging with the jet black of the western slopes. A thin haze hangs in the air. A road curves round some hills and departs the town; a train whistle blows close by, but the train, directly below at the bottom of the cliff, is not visible. Straight ahead again, light blue of the sky meets orange glow of the sun and forms a sharp line of transition, behind which the mountains peep like dim shadow-figures through the haze. Suddenly the air turns cold, the sun now a bright yellow and sharply delineated disk no bigger than a fat full moon, no harder on the eye. And the sky hued from blue through green, purple, and orange, all in soft tones. Are there clouds in the west, way in the distance? As if to answer, a wisp appears in front of the setting sun, attains sharper and sharper focus as it moves down, like a mountain range viewed through a telescope. A cold wind blows. The disk, covered it seems by a wave of alternating orange and yellow, suddenly enters a swath of cloud, sinks deeper into it until a thin crescent, more an arc, peeps out at the top, and yes, a similar curve at the bottom, grey in between. The clouds have been made visible only because the sun must go behind them, behind everything. Then, having teased, the sun, smiling now, oblate to the eye, reappears and then
ever so slowly, majestically, just perceptibly, plunges between two peaks, never for a moment in a hurry, even when it’s become a small red point in the horizon.

Sometimes a pale silver moon appears from the opposite direction even as the red disk of the sun still watches, and there is the spectacle of the source and its reflection vying for attention at once.

Nights are cool and, on clear days of spring or the few days of summer, crisp; the moon when full is so large and low as to appear to have been simply hung there by the friendly, mischievous gods, and bathed in its thin white light the crowns of the oaks acquire a glowing cover; on moonless nights the stars are sharp, and the Milky Way is observable from the unlighted corners of the lawn, running like a strip of gossamer veil way up above, across the darkness and the beyond. Across the valley, the lights of the town like bright points conglomerate in a section of the darkness, an entire small galaxy viewed from up close; elsewhere on the valleys and the hills, isolated pinpricks of habitation. During the rains a thick swirling fog may overhang the area, its effects enhanced by the white and yellow lamps on posts; and with the grey gothic building in the background the entire place acquires a certain macabreness. If one lingered a little in this night, did not turn away quickly into the embrace of a hearth, then that shadowy figure in the near distance who is barely visible might just respond to the call: “Heathcliff!”

And yes, they say there are ghosts here, of British folks long dead and gone.

Once, a professor of a particularly rational and scientific bent of mind, I was told, when on a visit to the Institute was given a rather posh set of rooms in the former viceroy’s residence. Every day during his stay, he noticed his bottle of hair oil had been somewhat roughly treated, even thrown about, and he would place it back neatly where it belonged. One morning he said somewhat irritably to the attendant who had been assigned to the room, “Why do you
people throw around my things?” To which the attendant replied, “Lady Curzon does not like the smell of your hair oil.” The guest room had belonged once to her. Bad history but good story, said my informer: The lady is believed to have been poisoned with arsenic; her lord might even have had a hand in her death. “Did she die here, then?” I asked. No, she died in England.

England still haunts the place, from a distance. Blue blazers are popular among the select; and there’s nothing better than a degree from Oxford. Harvard has not arrived here, but give it time.

Unlike the time of the viceroys, there is little social life at Observatory Hill, or indeed in the town, at night. For one thing, it is not easy to get around. A simple dinner party, at the director’s or another scholar’s residence, for example, requires strenuous climbing on the hilly paths and up and down steep steps with wobbly banisters, at times in pitch darkness with the help of only a flashlight. Even then, the threat of a cheetah or hyena lurking in the woods, real or imagined, can make night sojourns a little unsettling. No wonder then, the alternative settled for by most: an austere regimen of early-to-bed, followed perhaps by a long walk in the beautiful, quiet dawn, when there’s little sign of life but for another solitary walker or, in the terraced gardens, someone practising yoga, or calisthenics, or voice.