Plain tales and the hills

In Delhi’s dry and scorching summers, poor plainsmen’s minds turn naturally to longing for the hills. You sit and calculate how long it would take, if you started right that moment, to get high enough above sea level to breathe easily (12 hours, if you catch the Kalka Mail from Sabzi Mandi tonight; 6 hours, if you fly to Guwahati and take the new highway up to Shillong). The thought that entire stretches of the country are naturally air-conditioned seems almost unbelievable, something of a miracle. 

Sadly, not all of us can pack up and leave at a moment’s notice. So I, at least, have tried to sate my hill-sehnsucht through books. 

I turn often to Flora’s Empire, a history of the Raj’s gardens in India written by Eugenia Herbert, a history professor at Mount Holyoke College. It came out in 2012, to rapturous reviews, but I tend to return to particular sections every summer — the bits that deal with Shimla, in particular. Shimla today may not exactly be the most beautiful of cities, and the Shimla of the Raj may have been largely inaccessible to people with the wrong skin colour, but it’s still delightful to read about the British turning up there, trying to replicate the gardens of the Home Counties, and complaining that everything else is lovely, but there just isn’t enough flat ground. The British mostly had pretty dreadful ideas about how to administer India; but surely not even Shashi Tharoor would argue, in the midst of Aprils like these, that going up to Shimla every summer was one of their worst. 

The stretch of the Himalayas most familiar to India’s baked north-west – the bit between foreign Nepal and unfriendly Kashmir – has an odd presence in our head. The prime minister recently inaugurated a highway linking the four great temple towns of Garhwal – Char Dham – which I can’t help thinking is a reminder of how we plainsmen think of these hills: As a destination, not a place. Once pilgrims would walk from one to the other, slowly becoming part of the place they were passing through; now, they will whizz along in cars, probably forgetting to turn the AC off. A book that’s stayed with me is 2002’s Sacred Waters, in which the author does precisely that, with a kerosene stove and a bedroll. Still, the hills were already looking tired then, according to the book; the walk now must be truly depressing. 

Sacred Waters was not the work of someone foreign to the hills. It was written by Stephen Alter, born in Mussoorie to American missionaries (and the actor Tom Alter’s cousin). Perhaps that helped him treat it as a place, and not a destination.

The story of the hills-as-place, of people from the outside who seek to make it their own, and how the people already there are changed as a consequence, has been told often – Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills was published in 1888, after all – but most recently, and beautifully, by Namita Gokhale in Things to Leave Behind, published earlier this year by Penguin. It begins with the “discovery” of Nainital by the British – oppressed, no doubt, by the heat of the plains – in the 1840s. It took a bit of searching, apparently. Ms Gokhale has one insist: “Every damned native Pahari knows of the Nainee Lake, and every lying one of them denies any knowledge of it”. Which is not surprising, if you look at Nainital today, and compare it with Ms Gokhale’s loving descriptions of what it looked like then. 

Things to Leave Behind continues through the decades to come, telling various stories: The stories of an American missionary’s daughter, of the angst-ridden child of a long line of ultra-orthodox Brahmins who converts to beef-eating Christianity — and of Tillie, or Tilottama, named for Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s poems, who swings wildly between the various political and religious ideas she is surrounded by without ever being less than engaging. This is a book that’s well worth reading, and not just as a reminder of the fact that the hills were always there, with people living in them, before plainsmen of whatever colour ventured up to escape their burning Aprils. It’s also a reminder of why they did so. Towards the end, Tillie sits in Benares “tiring of the endless ecstatic religiosity around her”, and the hills of Almora begin to beckon; “she would dream at night of purple skies and the smell of damp pinewood and summer fireflies that lit up dark mountain nights”. 

I defy you to put Things to Leave Behind down without telling yourself: I can get from here to Sat Tal in about eight hours, if I avoid the rush hour traffic and take NH-9. What better tribute could there be?