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| Diary |
Magazine | 13 Apr 2009 |
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| Mussoorie Diary by Ruskin Bond |
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Sometimes in life you have to be ready to take a chance. And so I threw caution to the winds and allowed my 15-year-old grandson, Siddharth, to give me a haircut.
I’d been putting it off for weeks, waiting for warmer days. Then one day Siddharth came home from maths tuition and said, "Dada, you look like that Australian cricketer, the one who’s always angry! Forget about cricketers. I’ll give you a haircut and make you look like Ronaldo!"
"I don’t want to look like Ronaldo. Or any footballer!"
"A film star then? How about Aamir Khan?"
"The one with a trench down the centre of his scalp?"
"That’s right. He’s very popular just now."
Being too lazy to walk down to the barber’s shop, I gave Siddharth the go-ahead, and he went to work with an old pair of his mother’s scissors (normally used for cutting cloth), and every now and then, I yelped as tufts of hair were tugged out by their roots from my scalp. I would readily recommend his method to police thanas that experience difficulty in extracting confessions from those in custody.
When it was over, I looked in the mirror. There was still some hair left on my scalp, though it looked like a map of Newfoundland. I thought I detected a resemblance to someone famous, although I couldn’t be sure just who. Certainly not Ronaldo. Nor Aamir Khan. And then it came to me—Hitler!
Rants and Raves
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I did not venture out on the Mall for a few days. After digging up a flowerbed, it is always best to allow the soil some time in which to settle. Unable to face the good people of Landour and Mussoorie, I decided to spend the weekend in the Rajaji Wildlife Sanctuary, and chose for my retreat the Kansrao forest rest house, which is about an hour’s drive from Dehradun.
Here, in the forest’s sylvan silence, I recovered my equanimity. No human beings around, apart from a couple of friendly forest guards and a cook (where would we be without cooks?) and I was able to observe and appreciate the well-ordered life of the forest and its denizens.
No tigers around, but there are plenty of deer, and I am reliably informed that there are over 20,000 cheetal, or spotted deer, in the sanctuary, and several thousand other species of deer. Perhaps the absence of large predators in the region has something to do with the profusion of antlers. Now I know how the expression ‘stag party’ came into being: I just saw the real thing.
And there are elephants. Wild elephants. Stay out of their way. But the elephants themselves grow careless and occasionally confront approaching trains, with tragic results for the poor elephants. The railway line runs through the sanctuary, as it has done for over a century, and sometimes accidents do take place.
Rants and Raves
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I visit the little Kansrao railway station, which is right in the heart of the jungle. Could it be the world’s smallest railway station? It’s just one small room and a platform no more than 10 feet long. No vendors or even passengers on this platform. There’s not a soul in sight except for the station master and his assistant.
The station master greets me like a long-lost friend. And in fact I am a long-lost friend. His name is Shahid Alam and he grew up in Mussoorie, often passing me on the road to his school when he studied at Rama Devi. He reminds me that he played cricket for Tom Alter’s legendary cricket team. Now, he lives in his lonely little station, taking time off to visit his family in Doiwala once or twice a month.
Only one train stops at Kansrao, and a five-rupee ticket to Dehradun will see you insured for Rs 10 lakh. But don’t try jumping off the train. Only genuine accident victims are eligible for compensation. A number of trains pass through Kansrao, day and night, for there are two sets of tracks here; and our station master has to see to their safety, as well as the safety of the elephants who often wander along the railway tracks. He still uses the old lamp, red on one side for danger, green on the other for safety. He seems happy enough. Ex-cricketers usually have some good philosophy to fall back on.
Rants and Raves
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My old friend Upendra Arora of Dehra’s Green Bookshop is waiting for me at the rest house. He produces a bottle of Haig. Nothing vague about it. It goes well with our dinner, taken on the veranda of the bungalow. No electricity, but a full moon rises above the sheesham trees. The forest is silent but for the distant trumpeting of elephants.
"Cheers!" they seem to say. Sometimes, we hear exactly what we want to hear. Forest-refreshed, I return to Mussoorie to find the town preparing for what it expects will be a busy Easter weekend. New restaurants keep springing up everywhere. And all of them offer variants of what appears to have become our national dish—chow mein! At least in this, there seems to be no economic slowdown.
Rants and Raves
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