Himalaya (2004) Page 9

  As a helpful man next to me says, this whole process embodies the Sikh teaching that we are all equal and we must learn to serve each other.

  This high-volume soup kitchen is not the only service; there are also free dormitories here providing accommodation for 25,000 people a night.

  It looks and sounds like a fine and good thing but there have been abuses of the system. I notice a sign advising ‘Pilgrims must not accept eatables from strangers’, which refers to a recent spate of cases of people being drugged and their belongings stolen.

  Twenty years ago this altruistic environment saw dreadful violence when a group of Sikhs demanding their own state barricaded themselves in the Akhal Takht, the second most sacred building on the site.

  The siege was lifted in the infamous Operation Bluestar, when the Indian army brought tanks into the temple and pulverized the building. It’s estimated that several thousand died in the fighting. Such was the strength of feeling that a few months later Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who authorized the attack, was assassinated by Sikh members of her own bodyguards.

  Such trauma seems almost inconceivable tonight as a setting sun burnishes the 500 kilograms of gold that sheathe the marble walls of the Hari Mandir, hymns echo around the arcades and turbanned and bearded Sikh men and their families move slowly in through its doors to pay homage to the Holy Book, the most precious object in a religion that rejects idolatry.

  Day Thirty One : Amritsar to Chandigarh

  India is much concerned these days with behavioural improvement. Yesterday I noticed the road safety campaign (though I seemed to be the only one who did) and this morning I see that the government is tackling the vexed subject of ‘night soil’, or open-air defecation, which is such a feature of life here. A series of adverts in the morning papers appeals to people to stop ‘easing themselves’ in public places. ‘Easing oneself’ is a new euphemism to me, but I rather like it and will use it whenever possible.

  Heading south from Amritsar on the main road to Chandigarh we pass an horrific accident. Two trucks have collided head-on with such force that one of them has burst, oozing a load of gravel from its ruptured sides. My driver says that truck-drivers not only don’t have to take a test, they don’t even have to be able to read.

  The road we’re on is a four-lane intercity highway, yet it’s also a country road with farm vehicles, and indeed farm animals, crossing it whenever they feel like it.

  At any given time we’re sharing the NH-1 with cars, trucks, battered Tata buses (driven like the wind), auto-rickshaws, pedal rickshaws, scooters, horse-drawn carts, buffalo-drawn carts, tractors, dogs, bicycles, motorbikes, pedestrians and unattended cows, sheep and goats.

  A roadside billboard cheers me up. ‘Youghal and Sons. Where Fashion Ends.’

  We take a short cut off the main road along an avenue of eucalyptus trees, which leads promisingly quietly through a green and pleasant countryside of rice and barley fields dotted with elegant white cattle egrets. Quite out of the blue we’re brought to a halt by a traffic jam ahead of us. I ask my driver what’s going on and he shakes his head in exasperation. It’s a police check.

  When we finally pull up alongside the policeman he swaggers slowly over to our driver. He looks like the corrupt cop out of central casting. Overweight, ponderous and self-important. He sniffs loudly as he examines our driver’s papers, but when he sees us in the back he becomes a little more animated. After a couple more questions he hands the papers back and waves us quickly on.

  My driver chuckles.

  ‘He’s fleecing people. Taking their money to drive along his road. I told him we were making a film for BBC Television. That’s why we got through so fast!’

  Arrive on the leafy ring roads of Chandigarh about six. And, miraculously, in one piece.

  Day Thirty Two : Chandigarh to Shimla

  Chandigarh seems to consist entirely of roundabouts. Beautiful, well-kept, florally abundant roundabouts, sending the traffic spinning from one to another like some endless Scottish reel.

  Verdant avenues of peepul, ashoka and mango trees connect this gently swirling system, leading, presumably, to a city of some substance, for Chandigarh is the capital of two states, Punjab and Haryana. I say presumably, because in our short stay here it is difficult to see much beyond the roundabouts and dead-straight, repetitive avenues.

  What I do see reminds me of Islamabad. Both are post-Independence cities, built in a self-consciously modern style to replace the architecture of the Raj with something new and fresh, and more in keeping with what Nehru called ‘the nation’s faith in the future’. Both are discreet, tidy and a little cheerless.

  At least Chandigarh secured the services of the top man. Swiss architect Le Corbusier designed the grid-plan layout and the boxy, modular buildings in concrete and red brick that can be glimpsed every now and then between the trees.

  When I enquire what sort of person lives in this mecca of modernism I’m told that it’s mostly wealthy Punjabi farmers approaching retirement.

  My local informant summed up Chandigarh as ‘a town of white beards and green hedges’. And sadly I’m not here long enough to disprove it.

  It’s time to return to the mountains, and we begin the journey dramatically, aboard the Himalayan Queen railway service to Shimla, a town high in the Shiwalik foothills, from where the British Empire in India was run during the hot summer months and which is now the capital of Himachal Pradesh (Himalaya Province).

  The 2‘6” narrow-gauge railway to Shimla climbs 7000 feet (2130 m) in 57 miles (92 km) and there is barely a level stretch of track on the entire route.

  Midday at Kalka station. Ten minutes before the Queen leaves, the express from Delhi arrives, disgorging yet more passengers for the Shimla train. Half-term holidays have just begun and sturdy schoolgirls with backpacks and walking sticks are fighting with harassed family groups for a place in one of the seven small coaches.

  The stationmaster, a stout man with a shiny bald head, ignores the helpless cries of his staff as he rolls out a liturgy of statistics.

  ‘Indian Railways is the biggest employer in the world, you know. We move ten million people a day, over 6000 kilometres of track.’ He dabs a handkerchief at his forehead, then tucks it in his pocket and produces a small scrapbook.

  ‘You want to film the viaduct?’ he asks. ‘You can do that.’

  He opens the book to reveal a grainy photograph of the railway line running over a multi-storey stone bridge, and holds it up to the camera.

  ‘There,’ he smooths down the page, ‘you film that.’

  ‘We’d rather film the real thing,’ says Nigel with a trace of irritation. The stationmaster, undeterred, riffles through the pages.

  ‘Look at that!’ he holds the book up again. A wintry scene of the same viaduct. ‘That is snow!’

  Somehow, everyone squeezes aboard and, on time at 12.10, the Himalayan Queen pulls out past Kalka signal box, rounds a curve and heads for the hills, passing by a mix of factories and rust-stained housing blocks surrounded by lush sub-tropical vegetation. A line-side tree sways beneath the weight of a family of monkeys the size of small Labradors.

  ‘Langurs,’ says the woman opposite me. ‘They’re the biggest monkeys of all.’

  I offer some sweets to her and her family and we start talking. She’s a large very jolly lady and her name is Deepti. She works for the ministry of defence in Delhi and is on a week’s holiday with her husband and two boys. I ask her if the Britishness of Shimla is still an attraction for Indian tourists.

  She frowns and shakes her head.

  ‘They’re not so interested in all that, no.’

  She reminds me that vital conferences between Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah aimed at getting the British out of India also took place in Shimla.

  We rattle into a tunnel. One of 103 on the line, their entrances all numbered and marked with the exact length.

  Deepti opens plastic containers and gets out lunch for the family. She was up at fou
r this morning, she says, preparing pooris and aloo for the journey, and she insists on sharing them with me.

  The deep-fried fluffy pooris mix deliciously with the curried potato. There are four more hours of the journey to go and I feel in no hurry at all, which is just as well, for the progress of the Himalayan Queen is dogged rather than dashing. We rarely make much more than 20 miles an hour, which is all you want with good food, good company and a good view.

  I stand at the open door and let the gradually cooling air blow over me as we snake round corners and in and out of trim stone tunnels dug into the hillside like rabbit holes. As we climb, the date palms, rubber trees and bougainvillea give way to grassy meadows, oak scrub and then spindly deciduous woodland.

  I have a knowledgeable companion in Raaja Bhasin, a neat, theatrical, young man who has written books on Shimla. The British, he tells me, had discovered the spot in the 1820s, and it was so much to their liking that in 1864 it was declared their summer capital.

  ‘At that time one-fifth of the human race was administered from Shimla.’

  As the railway was not opened for another 39 years, the entire apparatus of government had to be moved up from Calcutta on bullock carts.

  When it was eventually decided to go ahead with a railway they moved fast. The line was built in little more than two years, and the basic structures remain in good order a hundred years later. The high standards expected took their toll. Raaja tells the story of a Colonel Barog who supervised the construction of one of the tunnels working from each end simultaneously. Unfortunately, they failed to meet in the middle and Barog, distraught at the miscalculation, shot himself.

  Half an hour out of Shimla we’re into alpine forest and there is a cool, refreshing scent of pine in the air. The railway runs between tall rhododendron trees and the big cedars they call deodars, until all at once we’re among the half-timbered villas and cottages with verandahs and cast-iron canopies that comfortably conform to my image of Shimla. But as we pull away clear of the trees and get our first glimpse of the town itself I realize I’ve got it very wrong.

  Modern Shimla is no cosy retreat in the mountains but a city of considerable scale, home to 150,000, spread out over five hills and liberally sprinkled with concrete apartment blocks.

  On the steep street outside the station there is a chaos of drivers, passengers and vehicles manoeuvring in an impossibly small space. Once away from this bottleneck our taxi crawls slowly round the side of the hill and along the Mall until we reach the Cecil Hotel.

  This famous Shimla landmark has been extensively and, I should imagine, expensively, restored.

  The room is lovely and, as darkness falls, I just want to throw open the balcony doors and taste the freshest air since we left the mountain valleys of the Karakoram.

  As soon as I do so my telephone rings and I’m politely but firmly requested not to, as monkeys will get into my room. Monkeys are a big problem, they assure me. Big enough to install sensors in my tall, tempting balcony doors to sound an alarm whenever I open them.

  Day Thirty Four : Shimla

  Wake to grey skies and rain. Filming delayed till the weather clears. Retire to the best bed on the journey so far and read the Dalai Lama’s book The Art of Happiness. We have been granted an audience with him in a few days’ time and I began the book a little out of duty. Now I find I’m getting a lot out of it. There is something infectious about his optimism, an optimism which comes from confronting rather than avoiding the unacceptable and acknowledging, understanding and demystifying it.

  An hour later the clouds have passed over and I can see a crystal clear sky beyond my monkey-besieged windows.

  I can see the enemy clearly. They move in family groups along the wall opposite, scratching themselves and ambling rather cockily along, until some commotion breaks out and they race in all directions, shrieking and snarling.

  I gaze out in frustration, feeling an unlikely empathy with those mega popstars, besieged in hotel rooms by their fans.

  From being just a summer hideaway, Shimla grew to become the nerve centre of Britain’s Indian empire for eight months of the year and in 1888 a building considered appropriate for this role was completed. The Vice-Regal Lodge is an extraordinary edifice. Built at the top of a hill and the peak of Victorian self-confidence, it is authority made manifest, superiority set in stone. The British relationship with India changed in the 1860s, after the bloodshed of the Indian Mutiny, or the first War of Independence, as most Indians call it. What had been a loosely commercial enterprise, a sort of mercantile laissez-faire, began to be seen as a moral obligation. Previously relaxed relations between British and Indians were discouraged. Better communications meant that wives and families could come out to India, ending inter-marriage with locals. The army was strengthened and concentrated in well-armed cantonments.

  ‘Keeping India at bay’, is how my friend Raaja sums up this new imperial vision, as we walk in the gardens of the Lodge this morning. In his view, the sombre grey walls that rise above us represented a deliberate attempt by the British to recreate the island mentality in India. The Vice-Regal Lodge stood not just for power, but for permanence.

  Permanence lasted less than 60 years and to add insult to injury many of the most important talks that led to the departure of the British took place behind these grandiose faux-baronial walls. All the founders and future leaders of India and Pakistan at one time trooped in below the lions rampant that stand guard above the carved stone portals.

  ‘Gandhi disliked it,’ says Raaja. ‘While everybody else came in rickshaws, two men pushing and two men pulling, Gandhi walked.’

  Mountbatten, the man charged with giving India its independence, met the leaders of the Princely States here, reminding himself of who the most important ones were by using the mnemonic ‘Hot kippers make good breakfast’. Hyderabad, Kashmir, Mysore, Gwalior and Baroda.

  The fact that the monumental Vice-Regal Lodge still stands is hardly surprising. It would probably need some controlled nuclear device to take down these massive walls, but the fact that it is so well maintained, with gardeners sweeping immaculate lawns and carefully raking the gravel on the forecourt, says a lot about the attitude of the Indians after independence.

  ‘There was no wholesale desecration of imperial buildings in Shimla,’ says Raaja. ‘Everything was left pretty much as it was.’

  The Vice-Regal Lodge has been reborn as an Institute for South-East Asian Affairs. The Ballroom is now a library. Functional shelf stacks fill a floor that in its heyday had hundreds of dancers swirling across it, themed perhaps in Chinese or Regency fancy dress. Though chandeliers still hang from its ceiling, the spot where the orchestra played is now marked by a large sign that reads ‘Silence’.

  An index board showing where books can be located still uses vice-regal descriptions like State Lounge and Fan Room. Social Sciences can be found in the Ballroom, the Tibetan Collection in the Pantry, and copies of The Muslim World and American Scientist sit side by side in the Dining Hall.

  Modesty and earnestness has replaced display and grandeur. Entertainment has given way to enlightenment. This bastion of British certainty has become a place of enquiry, curiosity and debate. Three very Indian preoccupations.

  The imposing site on which Shimla is built can best be seen from the Ridge, a long, thin, open area that stands at the narrowest point of the bluff. It’s a watershed, with rivers on one side running east to the Bay of Bengal, and on the other, west into the Arabian Sea.

  This afternoon it’s thronged with holiday strollers eating pizza and ice cream. Though the milling tourists are almost entirely Indian, the centre of the town still lives up to its description as ‘a little bit of Cheltenham in India’. Statues of Mahatma and Indira Gandhi are overshadowed by the tall Gothic Revival tower of Christ Church dominating one end of the Ridge, looking yellow, blotchy and feverish with plants pushing up out of holes in its red, corrugated-iron roof. A little way down the hill is the Arts and Crafts Style To
wn Hall, about the only building in town with a slate roof (Raaja tells me that corrugated iron is preferred because monkeys pull the tiles out).

  A flight of steps leads down from the Ridge to another Cheltenham-ish landmark, the Gaiety Theatre. It was built about the same time as the Vice-Regal Lodge, as a home for a thriving amateur dramatic club in Shimla, which gave its first performance in 1838. With few women around at that time, the female roles had to be taken by army officers, one of whom refused to shave his moustache off for a love scene.

  A heavy stone exterior gives little indication of the little gem of an auditorium inside. Horseshoe shaped and decorated with carved wood and plaster of Paris stucco, it has a dress circle supported by slender columns with gold-leaf capitals. The stage, spacious for a theatre that only seats 200, has been graced by Kipling, Baden-Powell, who later founded the Boy Scouts, and more recently Felicity Kendall and legendary Indian stars like the singer K. L. Saighal and the Bollywood actor Anupam Kher.

  Our visit has coincided with a performance of an early play by Michael Frayn, called Chinamen. With huge successes running currently on Broadway and in the West End, I imagine this is quite a coup for them, and have taken the trouble to ring Michael and solicit a message of support for the cast.

  The director, Mrs Neelam Dewan, thanks me profusely for this, as she had been given a copy of the play without a front page and didn’t know who the author was.

  She seems a little harassed. Last night’s performance had been spoiled by mass amnesia on the part of the actors.

  Had they not had time to learn their lines, I asked her.

  Oh yes, they had time, but they are all in the army and very busy.

  So I stumbled on the truth. This pretty little theatre survives as a sort of social club for the military. The activities of the Green Room bar and lounge upstairs subsidize the thespian activities below, the quid pro quo being that the army are offered the best parts, and the best seats.

  As curtain up approaches, men trained to lead hundreds into battle are pacing about backstage, like schoolboys about to go before the headmaster, repeating the same lines over and over again. It’s a full house tonight with the local commander in chief attending. This only seems to ratchet up the tension.