Subir Roy: A letter from Himachal

Dear Baba,

I am glad I didn't listen to you and went ahead with the hectic one-day visit to Chail. It revalidated for me your love for Himachal, something that I almost lost when I revisited the Swiss-like alpine meadow of Khajjiar and found it savaged in parts by the tourism industry. I was probably too small during our first visit to Chail to remember much, but what beckoned me was this picture you took of Bhaiya and me on the lawns of the Chail Palace Hotel with snowflakes falling around us.

This was a charmed trip right from the word go. You can't see much from a night bus, but I knew we were headed right when with passing distance the night sky got clearer and more and more stars began to pop up. We made a mistake by going through Shimla, which I would rather forget, and I was glad to be on the road to Chail via Kufri. (You know a tourist spot by the roadside heaps of what the mules carrying visitors have left behind!)
 

Chail, I found, was a spic-and-span little town of about three streets centred around a tiny market, the right atmosphere created by a picture-postcard post office nicely preserved from the British days. The secret of how this little idyllic place has not overgrown, I found out, was that it was part of a forested area where you couldn't keep cutting down trees.

There is a garish new hotel all right, but we found a fine modest one run by the owning family, clean with Western-style loos and flat-screen TV in every room. The owner gent had doubts about letting in college boys and girls travelling together, but he was overruled by his wife who loved us because, she said, we kept saying "please" and "thank you". Their little daughter was an absolute darling. On being asked her name, she retorted: "Why should I tell you?" Then, on second thoughts: "You can call me 'anda' [egg]; that's what papa does."

The air was so bracing. It was cold, clear, sunny and dry - so different from the damp cold of Delhi. The deodars all around were really the signature of the place. We found we couldn't walk enough. After doing our quota for the daytime, we decided to go out again after nightfall. There was a sliver of a crescent moon, but the air was so clear that it was a moonlit night with the deodars standing like silent friendly sentinels to protect us.

Come early morning, it was time for me to detach from the group and set out for Chandigarh to attend a friend's wedding. The weather was so bracing that, would you believe it, I had a cold-water bath. If Chail was great, equally so was the journey by local bus from its little bus stand to Kandaghat where you got on to the highway to the plains.

The bus was full of cheery schoolchildren, office-goers, farmers headed for markets with sackfuls of potatoes - and no tourists. Mama was worried that I was travelling alone, but I couldn't have felt more secure. Every so often, a sign would pop up by the roadside, giving the name of a village, its altitude and population - 80, 400, 150! And sometimes people would come out of a village to wave at the passengers. They all knew each other. And the forest was divine, so much better than what we had passed on the Kufri road.  

At Kandaghat, I changed into a much bigger Haryana Roadways bus. As we went down, the air began to change and the charm began to wither. It was somewhat OK till Solan, but thereafter the hills part of my holiday was effectively over. There were the usual couple of people puking out of the bus windows, unable to take the sharp mountain road turns. And as we began to descend towards the plains, the crowd in the bus got louder and rougher.

I got a bit depressed, but the sight of Parwanoo cheered me up. I remembered what had happened so long ago when you tried to explain to us kids, Bhaiya and me, the marvel of the cable car. After hearing you out patiently, all that came to Bhaiya's mind was: "What if someone cuts off the cable [indicating with his hand the plying of scissors]!" We knew from then that he would not grow up to be an ordinary mortal.  

In Chandigarh, the wedding was great fun, posh and Punjabi, but that will take another letter.

Your loving,
disobedient daughter