India 1993

February 1993

One of the good things about moving from teaching into industry was the holidays – I could take them at a time to suit me, instead of having to take school holidays, mostly in Summer. Summer holidays are no good for going to India – they coincide exactly with the monsoon! Anyone would think it was a conspiracy to prevent teachers or schoolchildren visiting India.

In fact, Pericor were so pleased about me not wanting to take my holidays in summer, that they let me take all my ’92 and ’93 holidays in one lump in February and March ’93 – and allowed me to take an extra two weeks unpaid leave at the same time.

It was the first time I’d had a good long visit to India since ’78-’79. I did a bit of travelling around India again, this time taking two of my cousins’ children with me. We had a wonderful time. I’ll come back to that later.

Of course I spent a fair bit of time in Evansganj, too – and in Bartola, where I stayed with Sushila’s family for nearly two weeks. Sushila and her children came with me for the first couple of days, then went back home to Evansganj, leaving me in Bartola.

Sushila had told me that I could give small amounts of money to her parents, and to her younger brothers and their wives, by slipping a note into their hands when shaking hands – but that I shouldn’t give too much, say ten rupees to the men, and five to the women. I was slightly put out by the idea that I had to discriminate in this way, but held my peace. Sushila knew better than I did what was, and what was not, possible in the way of nudging the culture in what I considered a good direction. By then I’d spent enough time with Sushila to know that she and I had very similar views on this subject!

I wondered how I could really repay her family for my visit, and she and I worked out together that the best thing would be for me to buy myself a bicycle in Evansganj. I would take it on the bus to Bartola with me, use it as long as I was in Bartola, then leave it there “to use next time I visit” – but with instructions that Sushila’s parents could use it as much as they liked whenever I wasn’t there. Although it would never be actually explicit, they would know that effectively it was their bicycle, with the added protection that they’d be looking after it for me, and that therefore it wouldn’t be available for all and sundry to borrow. They had had a bicycle years before. Nobody had actually stolen it, but their four sons had very thoroughly worn it out.

It gave me a wonderful sense of freedom to have a bicycle in Bartola. I cycled all over the place.

I should say something about Indian bicycles here. These days, you do see a few modern bicycles in India, with fancy gears and sprung forks and straight handlebars and very fat tyres – or with drop handlebars and very thin tyres. All the variations you see in Europe or America.

But most bicycles in India are still the old fashioned “sit up and beg” style, with no gears and no suspension. They do often have deeply sprung saddles! They almost all have a strong pannier carrier on the back – for the rider’s wife to ride side-saddle on. No springs for her, just some folded cloth. And, very likely, a couple of small children on her knee – and maybe a bigger one sitting astride the crossbar in front of his Dad, too, with a bit of cloth wrapped round the crossbar as a tiny bit of cushioning.

These old fashioned bicycles are always black. And they are strong. They need to be – to carry the whole family, and on Indian roads at that. At best, Indian roads are full of potholes and covered in quite large loose stones. (On major routes, on bigger roads in cities, and in wealthy areas, this is no longer true. But even in places like that, it was still largely the case in 1993 – and it’s still true today everywhere else.)

Not having gears is part of the strength of these bicycles. You’d think a mountain bike would be what you need for these conditions – if you didn’t know any better. A mountain bike wouldn’t stay the course. The gears and brakes just aren’t robust enough. Oh, absolutely lovely for the first year or two. But Indian villagers expect to use their bikes for donkey’s years – day in, day out, with little or no attention. They don’t want to be cleaning grit out of complicated, oily gear mechanisms every other day. And they certainly wouldn’t even consider paying anyone else to do it for them.

Around Bartola, there aren’t really any roads in the modern sense at all – more like rough mountain tracks. A couple of them are wide enough for a jeep, but so rough that even a jeep can only negotiate them extremely slowly and with great care. Mostly they’re only fit for pedestrians and animals – and cyclists. With no gears, the family have to get off and walk up anything more than a gentle gradient, while Dad rides as far as he can before he too has to get off and push. Then he waits at the top for the family to catch up.

You can’t go more than about twelve or at most fifteen miles an hour on the flat – you simply couldn’t keep up with the pedals. Most people tend to do about eight. Downhill, of course, you can go as fast as you feel safe – or faster if you’re not too worried about safety, or haven’t thought about it.

One route I cycled just about every day was back and forth between Bartola and Rampur. There was a market in Rampur, and various shops. Absolutely fascinating – totally different from the market and shops in Evansganj, with totally different stock, totally different pricing, and altogether a totally different attitude to life.

I remember when I first arrived in Delhi, it seemed like a completely different world from England. I remembered my own childhood in Evansganj a little, but it was rather vague and dreamlike. Delhi was real – and different. Then, when I returned to Delhi after a few weeks in Evansganj, it seemed more like an outpost of Europe than part of India.

After a few days in Bartola, one realizes that Rampur and Bartola are the real India – and Evansganj itself isn’t really very different from Delhi, or even Europe.

I got to know every rut and pothole on the route between Bartola and Rampur, and exactly how to thread my wheels between them to optimize my ride. I flew back and forth along that route at breakneck speed, in a manner quite unlike any of the locals. Of course I didn’t have three or four passengers or a quintal of rice on my panniers – but not all of them did, either. Possibly more importantly, maybe I didn’t have their laid back attitude to life. Or maybe I was just used to the speeds at which I could easily ride a bicycle back home.

I rapidly got a reputation as the mad cyclist.

Just before Rampur, the track from Bartola joins a bigger track that actually carries some motorized traffic. Not a lot. Only jeeps and big trucks and buses can negotiate it. You couldn’t drive an ordinary car along there, but it’s a road of sorts. Just after that, there’s a place where the road fords a small river. I’m told that it’s impassable in the monsoon, but it’s easily forded for the rest of the year. The bottom is sandy, and that’s hard going on a bike.

Most people get off and walk through there. I learnt how to take a run at it – exactly where to put my wheels amongst the ruts and potholes down the steep descent into the ravine the river runs in. I was going fast enough to make it across before I ran out of momentum, and still going fast enough at the other side to get up out of the ravine again without having to get off.

One day I went to the market, did some shopping, and was coming back again with a bag hanging on my handlebars. Whoosh down the slope into the ravine.

Too late I saw that there was a pile of broken bricks lying under the water in the middle of the ford, where they’d obviously bounced out of the back of a truck.

I managed to keep the shopping out of the water. I probably shouldn’t have tried. My elbow connected with the bricks.

I cycled the rest of the way back to Bartola pouring blood, and was patched up with turmeric paste (natural antiseptic) and a large leaf for a bandage. It was clearly a good job – I don’t think the scar would have been any less with modern medical treatment, in fact I’d probably have contracted MRSA in the casualty department. I’ve still got the scar.

My sturdy Indian bike was unhurt.

Greg and I used to cycle a lot. We tried a tandem, and as a means of getting from A to B it was fine – with me on the back.

It took a bit of getting used to. Ideally, the person on the back should be like luggage with legs – legs to help push the pedals, but luggage that doesn’t try to steer, and doesn’t resist the leaning of the bike in whatever way the person on the front wants to lean it. This is apparently easy enough for someone who’s never ridden a solo bicycle, but it’s quite a challenge for a cyclist, initially at least. But Greg weighed two and a half times what I did, and didn’t notice me straining at the rear handlebars. Eventually I learnt to be luggage with legs, which made things much easier for me but made no noticeable difference to him.

We tried with Greg on the back, but it was impossible for me. It would probably have been very difficult anyway. Thirteen stone of luggage would have been hard to handle – I weighed under six stone myself. But Greg wasn’t luggage with legs, and we couldn’t stay aboard long enough for him to learn to be. We gave up after the fourth attempt. We’d not managed to get a hundred yards without falling off.

But on the back, I couldn’t see much at all. This didn’t matter just going from A to B, but for holiday touring it was no good. Thankfully we realized that before we went on cycling tours on the continent, which we did during two of my summer holidays. We took two solo machines.

That had its own problems. I’m a pretty confident and fit cyclist, but I’m a small woman and Greg was a large and equally fit man. He could average sixteen miles an hour all day; I could only manage about thirteen. I struggled to keep up with him, and he struggled to stay back with me.

Until we came to the hills. On hills, I left him in the dust. That might seem a little strange, but we worked out why it was: on the flat, it’s the ratio of power to wind resistance that matters; on hills, its the ratio of power to weight. My power to weight ratio was better, but my power to wind resistance ratio was worse.

We experimented with him taking all the luggage most of the time, and me taking it all on the hills. It was more trouble than it was worth swapping everything about all the time, and anyway he still left me behind on the flat. It did even us up on the hills, but more by slowing me down than by speeding him up.

Be all that as it may, those were wonderful holidays, and we enjoyed them immensely. For some reason, I remember especially the exhilaration of arriving at the top of the Col de l’Iseran, after the climb up from Bonneval-sur-Arc. I’d had a cup of tea and was boiling the kettle a second time by the time Greg arrived, which made a change – it was usually the other way around.

Incidentally, making tea at the top of the Col de l’Iseran doesn’t work very well. Water boils at 91°C at that altitude, which isn’t really hot enough. Not too bad if you put the tea leaves in the kettle, though, rather than pouring the water out of the kettle onto them.

Cycling up to that altitude, puffing and panting with exertion, one’s breathing adjusts naturally as one climbs. Neither Greg nor I noticed the thinness of the air at all (73% of the density at sea level). People coming up in their cars did – they got out, started to walk around, felt giddy and went and sat down. There were plenty of benches there for them. Funny, really. I suspect that some of them didn’t know why they were feeling like that.

March 1993

With a longer holiday than I usually had, I wanted to take a bit of a look around India, rather than simply hotfooting it to Evansganj, staying there for a while, and hotfooting it back to Delhi.

Shanti and Peter’s daughter Rosy had just turned ten, and so had Ravi and Sushila’s son John – Little John, everyone called him, to distinguish him from his grandfather. It seemed to me that these two oldest children were ready for a bit of an adventure, and I asked their parents whether I could offer to take them on a trip, first to visit Delhi, and then maybe Agra – to see the Taj Mahal – and Jaipur, in Rajasthan. It meant taking them out of school, but I thought that the adventure would be at least as good an education as they were likely to get at school.

Great excitement. Everyone thought I was right about the educational value of an adventure. The children were delighted at the idea.

On the train to Delhi, we got into conversation with a young Indian man. It’s a long journey, and we must have heard practically his whole life story.

His name was Sulwesi Adams. I should tell you how to say that: Sull (like pull) – way – ssy (like fussy).

If you think it’s a funny name, you’re not alone – it’s a funny name to an Indian ear, too. His mother died when he was born, and his father left him and his big sister with the local missionary’s wife, Mrs Adams. His father left the village, and they’ve never seen or heard of him since.

Sulwesi’s sister has got a sensible name, Prema, because she had it already. But Mrs Adams gave Sulwesi his name. She could have asked his auntie to give him a proper name, or she could have given him an English name; but no, she would make up what she thought was a nice Indian sounding name.

If it was Indian at all, it would probably be a girl’s name. It would be quite a nice name for a girl.

There’s an island in Indonesia called Sulawesi. Maybe that’s where Mrs Adams got the name, maybe subconsciously. The island used to be called Celebes – at least by Western atlas publishers. Celebes – Sulawesi. Different attempts by Angrezi to pronounce the same word? At least his name is pronounceable, by Indians or by Angrezi.

Mrs Adams could have asked their auntie to look after them too, and they’d have grown up like their cousins. But their father apparently wasn’t on speaking terms with their mother’s family, and he’d asked Mrs Adams to look after them, so she did. No real thought for them –her first concern was about the promise she’d made to their father. Perhaps she thought he’d check up on her, or perhaps she thought that God was watching her carefully and was more concerned with the letter of her promise than the spirit of thoughtfulness and kindness to the children.

She had no real thought for them – in one sense. In another sense, she couldn’t have been kinder. When they were little, they really were treated as part of the family. Sulwesi shared a room with David, and Prema shared a room with Susan. They were just like brothers and sisters.

Then they all went to school together in the little school in the church in the village. The teacher, Pastor Samson, tried his best to treat them all the same. None of them realized until much later that it was more than he could manage to treat the Adams children the same as he treated all the other children from the village. It was just the way things were. In Pastor Samson’s mind, Prema and Sulwesi came somewhere in between the English children and the Indians. At that stage of their lives they were closer to David and Susan than they were to the other Indian children.

At home, Dr Adams gave the four of them extra lessons. All four did exactly the same stuff. They learnt all kinds of geography and English history and grammar that no one else in the village was doing. Their spelling and the breadth of their vocabulary mattered; and of course the conversation in the home was quite different from everyone else’s, but they didn’t realize that until years later. At school they were the four star pupils, but there was never any sign of ill feeling. It was just the way things were. Pastor Samson, himself Indian but raised in a missionary household, taught everything in English, with Hindi just another subject. Their first language was English, but for the other children it was an extra hurdle.

A lady, Muni her name was, used to come up from the village to cook and clean for the Adamses, and sometimes look after the children if Mrs Adams was out or busy. The four children learnt Hindi from Muni when they were little, and looking back Sulwesi thinks she knew it was going to be more important for him and Prema than for the other two, or perhaps she just loved them a little more. Sulwesi and Prema certainly got better at Hindi than Susan and David did. But Muni was illiterate, and it was Dr Adams who taught them Hindi writing and grammar, long before Pastor Samson started on it at school. David and Susan were just as good at written Hindi as Prema and Sulwesi were, but in speech they always sounded like English kids talking Hindi, and Sulwesi thinks he and Prema never did.

The first time Sulwesi and Prema realized that they were not really part of the family was when they all went to Mussoorie to look at the boarding school. David and Susan were going to go there – and Sulwesi and Prema weren’t. You couldn’t really blame the Adamses: the Mission Society was paying the fees, and the Mission Society didn’t accept Sulwesi and Prema as their children. The fees were too much for the Adamses to pay out of their own pocket – they wouldn’t have sent David and Susan if the Mission Society hadn’t been paying. And why should the local church spend a large part of its meagre income sending Sulwesi and Prema to boarding school? Why them rather than any of the other Indian kids?

The final blow came when the Adamses had to go back to England. Mr Adams was too sick to stay in India. The Indian immigration rules had changed, and there wasn’t going to be another English missionary to replace him. The Indian staff were going to have to carry on the work without support from England – not even any money.

Sulwesi and Prema had never been properly adopted. I don’t know if it would have been any different if they had been adopted. They were Indian citizens, and there was no way they were going to be allowed to go to England.

Perhaps they’d have been misfits in England. They didn’t feel much different from David and Susan, but by then those two had had four years in a posh boarding school, while Sulwesi and Prema had carried on in the local school system. They certainly felt like misfits among their Indian peers, but they were probably more Indian than English by then. After David and Susan went to boarding school they were left much more to their own devices, and got to know their real relatives properly for the first time.

It was only after the Adamses left that Sulwesi and Prema discovered that the Adamses had been paying fees for them at the local school. All the other kids who passed their exams were getting their fees paid by the Government under a tribal support scheme; but they weren’t tribal – not so far as the authorities were concerned. Their parents were English and therefore not tribal; more to the point, they were regarded as rich kids. When the Adamses left they felt like orphans. Who was going to pay their fees now?

Auntie sorted that one out. She just filled the forms in for them as Prema and Suleman, with her own surname instead of Adams, and that was that. Their headmaster knew, but he also knew why. After that, everyone called Sulwesi Suleman for years, which he was quite happy about because it saved a lot of explaining, but he still felt like Sulwesi inside.

They’d had a good start in their education, of course, so they did well. They passed all their exams and got every scholarship that was going, and they’ve both ended up in good posts. Sulwesi’s in Delhi now and Prema’s in Bhopal, and they see each other whenever they can, and write to each other a lot. They keep hoping Prema will be able to get a transfer to Delhi but there never seems to be a chance. Both of them miss their Auntie and their cousins a great deal. They only manage to see them once a year.

For a long time they missed the Adamses too. David and Susan had promised they’d write to them, but they never did, and Prema and Sulwesi didn’t even have their address. Dr Adams sent them Christmas cards for years, but he never thought of giving them his address. The first few times he wrote a few lines of family news, but then it was just a card, and then it stopped coming altogether – or maybe Auntie started hiding them and pretending they hadn’t come, because she knew how much they always upset Sulwesi and Prema.

Sulwesi wondered what would happen if he was too sick to stay in India, or Prema was. It was a purely rhetorical question, of course: what happens to anyone who’s too sick for the available health service to cope with?

I promised to try to trace the Adamses for Sulwesi. He probably thought that nothing would come of it, but I’m not like that. I did manage to trace them.

When I found them, I wasn’t sure whether to tell him their news, but decided that however badly it might affect him and his sister, I’d better keep to my word. I didn’t know whether that was the right decision, but it’s what I did.

The easiest way to tell the story is to copy part of my letter to him:

The Adamses were in a car crash five years ago, and David was killed. Dr Adams has been in a wheelchair ever since, but Susan and Mrs Adams weren’t seriously hurt. Dr Adams has kept on sending you Christmas cards, so presumably Auntie has been hiding them. He is old and frail now. His mind is still sharp, but Mrs Adams isn’t all there at all. How they manage at all is a miracle: he’s her brains, and she’s his feet.

Dr Adams never managed to get a job after they came back to England, so they’ve not been well off at all. Mrs Adams did a cleaning job for a few years, and then she worked as a school dinner lady until she got too confused to cope. David started at University but dropped out. He did a couple of dead-end jobs, then he was training as an electrician until he was killed. Susan went to University and got a degree, and now she’s married and has two small children.

Dr Adams was very pleased to hear how well you two are doing. I gave him your address in Delhi so that he could avoid the Auntie trap, but he was very unsure about whether it would be a good thing to write to you, after so long, or not. Like I say, he was very pleased to hear how you were doing, but he’d made a decision when they left that it would be fairer to you two not to let you have their address, and force you to find your own way. He knew you’d have to anyway, and he thought it would be better for you not to have an illusory lifeline.

I don’t know how to put this, but he still seems to think the same way a bit. He asked me not to give you his address, and let him make his own mind up.

It seems to me that you have more to offer him than vice versa these days, but that’s really equally illusory. He can no more go to live in India again than you could have come to England, and even though you’re well off in India, you can’t send him money. Even if you could, a lot of rupees doesn’t come to many pounds and would go nowhere in England at English prices.

I gave Sulwesi my own address. It was a while before he replied. Amongst other things he wrote was this:

Auntie was funny. After all those years of pretending not to have had any post from the Adamses, and without me saying anything, she told us this year that Dr Adams hadn’t sent a card – and went and got the old ones. She’d kept them all. She thought that perhaps Dr Adams had died, and I told her about you, and all the news. She cried when she heard about David and Dr Adams.

What upset her most, though, was the fact that in England, Dr and Mrs Adams are obviously nobody special at all.

We’ve been corresponding ever since, and we’ve met in Delhi again a couple of times. A quite charming young man, now with an equally charming young wife.

Dr Adams died a couple of years later, and Mrs Adams went to live with Susan and her family. Susan found my address in Dr Adams’s papers and wrote to me to let me know. I gave Susan Sulwesi’s address and she wrote to Sulwesi too, and asked him to tell Prema – as if she needed to tell him! Sulwesi told me that it was strange to read Susan’s letter, and it made him feel very peculiar. He said that her handwriting was just the same as it used to be, but he could tell that her way of thinking had changed completely. At long last, she sent him her address.

Nowadays apparently the Christmas cards go both ways, with little bits of news. Sulwesi wonders if he and Prema will ever see Susan again – to quote one of his letters to me, “Changed though she is, she seems a very nice person.”

I’ve never met Susan myself – I met Dr and Mrs Adams just once.

March 1993

Back to that train trip when I first met Sulwesi, when I was taking Rosy and Little John for their big adventure.

We told Sulwesi about our planned adventure, and he discouraged us from going to Agra.

“It’s horrible. Agra attracts India’s rip-off artists like wasps to a picnic. It’s bad enough for an Indian, unless they look like a beggar – but for Angrezi? Horrible. It would be especially horrible for you, Penny, because all the rip-off artists will see you as just another Angrezi woman, without even a man to protect you.”

“Worse than Connaught Place?”

Connaught Place is the centre – conceptually though not geographically – of New Delhi. It’s a magnet for tourists, for Indians from other parts of India as much as for foreigners. Sulwesi’s description would almost have fitted Connaught Place – a bit of an exaggeration, but with a certain amount of truth to it.

“Oh, Connaught Place is all right. No, Agra is a thousand times worse. You can’t trust the taxis or autorickshaws to take you where you want to go. The only way to visit Agra safely is on an organized tour, and then you’ll spend more time in malodorous souvenir shops than at the Taj Mahal or any other site you actually want to see.”

What he said rang true, and we decided to change our plan. Rosy and Little John were very pleased to be involved in discussion about it. With Sulwesi’s encouragement, we eventually decided that we’d try to visit Mussoorie.

“It’s a lovely place. Prema and I were so jealous of David and Susan going there, but it’s probably just as well that we didn’t. We’d have been in real trouble when the Adamses left if we had.”

Sulwesi wasn’t able to give any advice about where to stay when we got to Mussoorie; but our hosts in Delhi gave me a list of guest houses. “It might be pretty cold there though – winter isn’t always over yet up there at this time of year!”

The very next morning, long before dawn, we got a taxi to the Interstate Bus Terminus, where we were to catch a bus to Mussoorie. It’s possible to go by train as far as Dehradun, but it takes longer and is more expensive. Next time I go to Mussoorie – and there’s got to be a next time, it’s a lovely place – I might try the train. You’ll probably understand why.

Almost all the buses in India, and all but one of the buses we saw in the Interstate Bus Terminus, are pretty much the same shape and size as typical English single decker buses. The seats are smaller, and there are more of them crammed into the available space – except in the tour buses, which give passengers much the same space as you’d get in England.

But our bus, when it arrived, was different. It was little more than half the length of the others. Ah, I thought, a mountain bus, designed for tight bends on narrow roads with precipitous drops over the edge of the road.

The bus wasn’t overcrowded like the buses around Evansganj. We actually got a bank of three narrow seats to ourselves.

We set off. I could sense something about this bus – something about the noise of the engine. It wasn’t until we got onto the main road outside the city that I knew what it was. We had an engine like a big truck, and it was well maintained. The bus didn’t weigh nearly as much as a big truck – it was a much smaller than average bus. Ah, I thought, a mountain bus, designed for steep hills.

The road was busy, with a lot of slow traffic in both directions. But our driver was in a hurry, and he had the performance of a sports car at his disposal. The slightest gap in the traffic in the opposite direction, and he was over the other side of the road, hand on horn and foot to the floorboards.

So the chap coming the other way had to slam on his brakes? Not our problem. Oh dear, that chap had to swerve right off the road? He’ll be okay, it’s good firm ground there and that’s a jeep he’s driving.

At least this road was two lanes wide.

In the Evansganj area, the main roads are one lane wide, with a sort of hard shoulder of gravel each side in most places. When you meet anything coming the other way, either one of you has to get off the road completely, or each gets halfway off the road. You creep past each other.

This isn’t usually too bad, but sometimes the hard shoulder isn’t as hard as it might be – especially during the monsoon. It’s not that unusual to see a truck or a bus lying on its side, when the ground has given way under it. Serious injuries and even deaths often result.

On the other hand, I’ve seen a truck (the one in the picture) righted by a large crowd of men with ropes, little the worse for its experience – a couple of broken windows and some minor dents. I didn’t see it go over. It was already down by the time I arrived at the scene on my bicycle. On that occasion apparently nobody had been hurt. There had been a lot of people riding on the load and in the cab, but all except the driver had got down before the attempt to pass the other vehicle – they’d anticipated the possibility of a fall!

I didn’t get any usable pictures of the righting, because it was dark by that time. They had to top up the engine oil because a lot had leaked out, but then the engine started without trouble, and off they went.

Although I’ve ridden in buses quite a lot in India, this was by a wide margin the scariest ride. Not only was the bus being driven by a would-be rally driver, the road was neither one thing nor the other: it wasn’t a single track road that you have to take slowly, creeping past the occasional vehicle that you meet coming the other way, and nor was it a good road with smooth-flowing traffic. It was fast and bad. We saw the aftermath of more accidents in a few hours on that road than I’ve seen in the whole of the rest of my life. Literally.

Of course like most roads in India, progress is not helped by the presence of cows, pigs, chickens, children, cyclists carrying impossible loads on their bicycles, potholes and so forth wandering randomly all over the road. Or, looked at another way, all these legitimate road users are not helped by the presence of motorized vehicles driven as fast as they’ll go by maniacs. “As fast as they’ll go” varies from quite as fast as similar vehicles might go in England, to little more than a crawl – or, not infrequently, oops, I’ve stopped right in the middle of the road, I wonder what’s gone wrong now?

Twice, we detoured completely off the road to bypass snarl-ups around recent accidents. What happens in such circumstances in wet weather when the land beside the road is too soft for such detours, I don’t know.

In another place, everything in both directions had to go half off the road because there was a lorry right in the centre of the road with its back axle supported on a substantial chunk of rock, with not only a pair of wheels removed from one side, but the entire drum brake assembly in pieces on the road. There was no-one working on it and I assumed they’d hitched a ride to somewhere to obtain some part or other. How long that truck would be there, I’d no idea. It had gone a few days later when we passed on our way back.

I think most if not all the remains of accidents that we saw on the way back were new ones. The older ones seemed all to have been cleared up, so the large number of them reflected the number of incidents over a relatively short period. Ho hum.

I’m not a hundred percent sure of that observation. I wasn’t taking careful note of them! Another time maybe I might.

Some people got snacks or even chai when we stopped at bus stands in the various small towns – but generally we didn’t stop long enough for me to be bothered.

We did stop once for a reasonable time at a roadside halt in the middle of nowhere, for everyone to stretch their legs and get a drink – chai for the adults, and fruit juice for the children. Some people were getting snacks too, but we didn’t fancy anything that was on offer. I did rather wonder whether the bus drivers were being given a kickback to stop at this particular spot, rather than in the bus stands in town, where there were plenty of little stalls – or maybe it was the bus companies themselves who arranged it, to avoid overcrowding in the town bus stands.

As far as Roorkee and a little beyond, it was hot and dusty. John and Rosy were excitedly watching the scenery, and life on and around the road. It was quite unlike the world around Evansganj, which is well up in the hills. We saw large fields of sugar cane growing, which you never see around Evansganj.

Not long after Roorkee, we went through the Siwalik hills – steep, unstable piles of weak conglomerate, quite different from the hills around Evansganj. They look just like great piles of beach cobbles – and of course that’s exactly what they originally were, millions of years ago. Very interesting for me, as well as for the children. And we’d left the heat and the dust behind.

The climb up from Dehradun to Mussoorie is something else. It is steep, and goes on and on and on being steep. It winds back and forth, with tight bends at frequent intervals, sometimes where the hillsides are dissected by deep ravines alternating with sharp edged spurs, sometimes where the road doubles back on itself to head in the other direction across the face of the hill.

This is why the Mussoorie bus has twice as big an engine as most buses have, and half the weight. We roared up that hill at twenty odd miles an hour, passing big trucks crawling up in bottom gear as if they were stationary.

Unlike the bus, the trucks aren’t specially made for that route, but a truck’s bottom gear is low enough to crawl up the steepest hill, very slowly. So slowly that drivers can get out of their cabs, go for a wee, then go and catch up with their truck again without even having to run.

Okay, I’m sure someone else in the cab takes over the steering! Indian trucks usually have quite a crowd in the cab, some just hitching a ride, others there to assist the driver in various ways – such as dealing with bandits on some routes.

We arrived at the bus stand in Mussoorie just after noon. By that time we were all ravenous. There were foodstalls right there by the bus stand, with the food cooking right there in front of our eyes. We had samosas and chai for lunch.

Stalls like that might seem like risky places to eat, but they’re not – they’re a good deal safer than fancy restaurants where you can’t see what they’re doing in the kitchen. Those samosas came straight out of very hot fat – we saw them cooking, so we knew. And the chai was boiling when it went into the glasses, quite hot enough to sterilize the glasses as well.

While I’m going on about safe eating, here’s the other useful tip: eat things that come in “God’s own packaging”. Okay, I’m pretty much an atheist, but it’s still a good description. Bananas, oranges, and hard boiled eggs are all pretty safe – as long as you make it clear that you want to peel them yourself! And as long as your own hands are clean of course. I don’t mind washing my hands in water that’s been sterilized with chlorine tablets, but I’d rather not drink the foul stuff. Not that I’m paranoid about dirty hands anyway – as long as you know what kind of dirt they’ve got on them. Your immune system can handle most things in moderation really. We didn’t wash our hands before eating our samosas. They were probably cleaner than any readily available water.

We followed the instructions we’d been given at the Blue Triangle in Delhi. First we went to the most recommended guest house, Edgehill, although it wasn’t the nearest to the bus stand. It did have a room for the three of us. If you’re ever in Mussoorie, I recommend it. Assuming it’s still there and is still a guest house.

It’s quite a climb up from the bus stand to Edgehill. At six thousand feet or so, the air is only twenty percent thinner than at sea level, so it shouldn’t make a lot of difference, but it seemed to. Or was it that the air was colder than I’d got used to? Whatever the reason, we all got more breathless on the walk than seemed right.

A ten year old boy, his ten year old female cousin, and their parents’ female cousin, aged forty-four, all in one room? Not a problem, we’re Indian. Okay, so I’m white, but I was dressed like an Indian and talked like an Indian and those two really are my cousins’ children and they were old enough to confirm it themselves. Oh, and my passport, although it’s a British one, says Place of Birth: Evansganj, India.

We booked in, arranged to have dinner in the guesthouse that evening, left our things in our room, and went and investigated Mussoorie. It was beautifully sunny, but it wasn’t warm. In fact, it was downright chilly. I bought us each a warm jacket, and socks and shoes – we’d all been wearing sandals without socks – in the bazaar.

In some ways, much of Mussoorie is like any other small Indian town. In other ways, it’s extraordinary. It’s the only place I’ve ever been in India that is quite so precipitous, with many buildings that are several storeys high on one side, and just one storey high on the other. The roads twist and turn to follow the shape of the hills, and most of them are steep. There are no cycle rickshaws, and very few bicycles.

The centre of the town, like other Indian towns, is densely built up. The buildings have narrow frontages onto the road, jammed together in tight higgledy-piggledy terraces broken by the occasional narrow alleyway or tiny side street.

Away from the centre of town, the buildings are mainly detached and rambling, seemingly built as a series of random extensions to the original construction. A large proportion of the roofs of these rambling buildings are corrugated iron, most of them painted – you can see this because you’re looking down on the top of the ones on the downhill side of the road.

Between them, the hillsides are clad with mature woodland, mostly pine. Nowhere is flat. Everywhere the ground slopes around forty-five degrees, except immediately each side of each road, where on one side the ground has been cut away for the road, and on the other side it’s been built up for the road. We saw several places where part of the road had collapsed down the hill, or where there had been a landslip onto the road, often undermining a tree, leaving its roots exposed.

Up and down, up and down we went exploring. Our bags weren’t heavy, but without them we felt much lighter. Nonetheless, in the thin cold air we exhausted ourselves quite quickly, and around sunset we arrived back at Edgehill ready for supper and bed. We were conscious that we hadn’t reached the top of any of the hills, and while we’d had spectacular views to the south, over the Doon valley and of Mussoorie itself and the hillsides below it, we hadn’t seen to the north, or the high Himalayan mountains.

Apart from us, there were two groups staying at Edgehill: an American family, and a small group of students from Delhi. We all ate supper together.

The Americans weren’t actually missionaries as far as I could tell, but they certainly believed in trying to ram their Christianity down everybody’s throats.

I’ve met missionaries in India several times, and they seem to fall into two categories.

There are those who live and work for years in remote villages, running little hospitals and helping people around them, and only mentioning their Christian convictions when asked why on Earth they spend their lives serving others. Their obvious sincerity and dedication cannot fail to impress, and a few of the people who ask them this question are so impressed that they are converted to Christianity. Converts like that stay converted, generally. These missionaries don’t make huge numbers of converts, but those they do convert are real converts.

I don’t share their beliefs, but I can’t help admiring them.

Then there are those who visit India for a few days, weeks or even occasionally months, hold massive rallies and preach to thousands. They often offer little gifties – maybe a sari or a dhoti or a towel – to attendees. They invite people to come forward and declare their conversion, or receive the Holy Spirit, or whatever, and a few prepared supporters come forward to encourage others. They “convert” hundreds to Christianity at their rallies, and then go back to their comfortable guest houses in Delhi or Mumbai – where they boast to each other about how many converts they’ve made. I’ve heard them. It’s excruciating.

The pain is somewhat eased by the thought of all the recipients of the little gifties saying “thank you very much”, and then going home and doing puja. I’ve met quite a few of them, too, and had a good laugh with them.

And then the pain comes back when you think of the impecunious congregation in some some small American town, scrimping and saving to fund the missionary’s trip. Little realizing that what their precious missionary is really doing is having a nice little holiday in India at their expense.

Which is all complicated by the fact that a tiny minority of Hindus have the idea that they should “reconvert” Indian Christians to Hinduism. They typically also hold huge rallies, offer gifties to attendees, and boast to each other about the numbers reconverted. And again, the recipients of the little gifties typically say, “thank you very much”, and then go back to their church to pray for forgiveness.

The majority of the people they’re trying to convince themselves they’re reconverting are either Adivasi or Dalit.

The Adivasis mostly weren’t Hindu before they were Christian anyway – except in the sense that Hinduism is quite happy to include any other religion, or even agnosticism and atheism, under its umbrella. They’d be quite happy to add Christ to their pantheon – many of them do. The problem they have with Christianity, and Islam for that matter, is that Christians and Muslims reject all the other Hindu gods.

The Adivasis never minded in the slightest if any god or gods they might or might not have believed in got included in someone else’s pantheon, even if only as some sort of second rank deities. They just went on their own sweet way regardless. Whether they even had gods is moot. Christians and Hindus came along and insisted on seeing everybody’s cultures in terms of religion, but what the truth is, who knows?

I’ve heard some Hindus claim the Adivasis were Hindu before the Christian missionaries came; and I’ve heard Christians – calling themselves “anthropologists” – say “No, no, they were animists.” I’ve talked at length with Adivasis myself, and what they mostly say is, “Oh, we’ll tell the nutcases anything to keep them happy” and then we share a good belly laugh. (This is real. See what Jacinta Kerketta, an Adivasi friend of mine from the same area, says on the subject.)

That’s not my Adivasi relatives. Chhoti and her family are all Christian, as are Sushila’s, Jyoti’s and Peter’s – although many of them are culturally Christian but agnostic or atheist in actual belief, like both Uncle John and me. But in Bartola where Sushila comes from only about two thirds of the people are Christian, and in Jyoti’s village Navadih only about one third of them are. It’s no problem to talk about these things with anyone in either village. Everybody’s perfectly friendly. Very often even the Christians have a similar view of things – the Adivasi Christians, that is, and Christians of Dalit origins. Upper caste Christians – which seems to me to be a bit of a contradiction in terms, but its reality on the ground is undeniable – often seem to have a very different view, much more like that of the European, American or Australian anthropologists.

It’s scarcely surprising that Adivasis and Dalits feel little attachment to Hinduism, a religion that puts them at the bottom of the pile! That’s not to say they don’t enjoy the Hindu festivals – but then the less uptight Christians enjoy the Hindu festivals too, and the less uptight Hindus enjoy Christmas as well. They’d all happily celebrate Chinese New Year with the Chinese, given half a chance. Any excuse for a good time – it doesn’t mean you have to believe in anything at all.

Of course the more uptight Christians frown on their fellow Christians enjoying Holi or Diwali or Dussehra or whatever; and the more uptight Hindus, who are a tiny minority, frown on their fellow Hindus enjoying Christmas day, or even worse, St Valentine’s day. Both groups are fighting a losing battle, and thank the deity of your choice for that.

I’ll happily join with anyone frowning on celebrating Mammon on any of these occasions. Am I being inconsistent?

I was talking about the dinner that first night at Edgehill, if I remember aright. There was the evangelizing American family – Dad, Mum, small son and daughter – and there was the group of Delhi students. And there was us.

The Americans initially assumed I was another of their kind, and I certainly didn’t want to have any arguments with anyone, so I didn’t disabuse them. For one thing, I knew that the guest house owners themselves had missionary connections – they were, after all, the establishment that got the highest recommendation from the Blue Triangle in Delhi. And of course Rosy and Little John were being brought up in the Christian community in Evansganj, although I had a suspicion that they were growing up as fairly secular Christians, very possibly agnostic ones. But I hadn’t discussed the questions with them, and over dinner in a very Christian guest house didn’t seem the right moment to do so.

The Americans equally seemed to assume that the Delhi students were Hindu – not by any means a safe assumption, since they were staying in a distinctly Christian establishment, which the students probably hadn’t chosen at random.

The Delhi students were very polite. They were obviously as conscious as I was that they were guests in a Christian establishment, but they did seem to be avoiding rising to any of the American bait. Perhaps they were Hindu after all – they obviously weren’t Muslims, and didn’t seem to be Sikhs either – or perhaps they just found the Americans a bit embarrassing. After all, I was avoiding rising to any of the bait, either – and my cultural background is Christian.

Eventually the Americans went off, probably to bed. We’d been tired when we first arrived at dinner, but squirm as I might, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the goings-on. As soon as the Americans had gone, one of the students turned to me, and nearly collapsed in giggles.

“Weren’t they hilarious!” In English. I had said the odd word in English, so it was a fair guess – although it’s a general assumption in India that a white person will speak English. But thank goodness for that reaction, anyway!

“They were. We’re from a Christian background, but they were embarrassing.”

“We could see you were thinking that. We’re a mixed bunch, two Hindus and a Sikh, but the rest of us are Christians. But they had a terrible attitude.”

“Well, exactly.”

Ice broken, we got chatting about all kinds of things, and ended up staying up late. Once dinner was over, the guest house owners and staff had disappeared, and we all let our hair down rather.

I know not all Americans are like that! They don’t even have a monopoly on it, although somehow in India at least, it does seem to be Americans more often than anyone else.

The students mentioned that they’d visited Surkanda Devi the day before, and enthused about it. It’s the highest peak in the area, and quite accessible. You can get a bus to a point just over a mile from the summit. It’s a steep climb, but a good path. From the top, you get good views of the high Himalayas.

They’d also visited various waterfalls in the area. All in all, they’d enjoyed their visit. They were leaving the following day, which they said was a pity, “We’d have enjoyed having your company!”

I thought that was a very nice thought, especially considering that I was twice their age, and Rosy and Little John half. We said our goodnights on the very best of terms. We had decided to visit Surkanda Devi the following day, and a waterfall or two the day after that.

The following morning, the students left for the Delhi bus straight after breakfast. We bid each other farewell in a very friendly fashion, somewhat to the bewilderment of the Americans, who stood and waved from the verandah as they left.

We went down to the bus stand not long after the students, to catch our bus to Surkanda Devi. The bus actually heads from there past a point much closer to Edgehill, where the bus will stop on request – but we were told at the guest house that if it’s already full, it doesn’t always stop, so we didn’t take any chances.

It wasn’t full at all. There were plenty of spare seats.

The sky was grey. We should perhaps have taken more notice. If it was chilly in the sunshine the previous afternoon, it was doubly so under grey skies in the morning. We huddled together in the unheated bus.

It wasn’t just unheated. Half the windows were missing, too.

We sped along the narrow, rough road, with sharp bends left and right, in and out of the gulleys down the steep wooded slopes. We were probably never doing much over thirty miles an hour, often less, but it seemed like breakneck speed on that road. In places, the surface was just loose stones or mud, and most of the way there was barely room for two vehicles to pass. In some places, it wasn’t even that wide. On our left, it was often almost vertically upwards, and on our right, almost vertically downwards for the first dozen feet, and then forty-five degrees or steeper after that. At least there were plenty of trees to break our fall should we have left the road.

Reassuringly, there was no sign of crashed vehicles amongst the trees, or even of damaged trees where a vehicle had crashed but been recovered. Somehow I couldn’t imagine anyone attempting to recover a vehicle anyway. Strip it for parts, certainly, but recover it? Doubtful. The battered body shell would stay there rusting until it rusted away completely. Years and years and years.

Along the road, we saw children waiting for a bus in the other direction, presumably going to school in Mussoorie. That was for the first dozen miles. After that, we started picking children up. They were going to school in Dhanaulti. I know that for sure. They had their school bags with them, and they all got off in Danaulti. They chattered cheerfully, as children do. We couldn’t help listening in. Their Hindi wasn’t quite the same as either Evansganj or Delhi Hindi, but the difference was slight, more in pronunciation than anything else, so they were perfectly comprehensible. We didn’t hear anything very enlightening!

After Dhanaulti, we started seeing children waiting to go the other way again, but from there it’s not far to the Surkanda Devi stop.

The bus stop at Surkanda Devi is at a col, with the climb to Surkanda Devi on one side, and a small hill on the other. I don’t know what it’s like now, years later, but at that time there was a gravelly, muddy parking area beside the road, almost filling the relatively level area in the col, with room for maybe fifteen or twenty cars at a squeeze. Around the edge of the parking area there was a semicircle of little “hotels” – ramshackle shelters with mud floors, a table or two, some benches or chairs, crude cooking facilities, and cheerful proprietors who’d serve you chai and a snack or even a simple meal. All freshly cooked right there in front of your eyes, and undoubtedly absolutely delicious.

That’s what hotel has come to mean in much of India. Language changes like that. Our word “camera” comes from Latin camera, a room, and that from Greek κάμαρα (kamara), an arch. Where the obviously related Hindi word कमरा (kamara), also a room, fits in, I don’t know; but I have to suspect it’s originally from Sanskrit, which would predate the Greek. And I’ve heard it suggested in India that कंबल (kambal), a blanket, is really the origin of कमरा – via an intermediate meaning as a room within a tent, constructed of blankets in the fashion of a Mongolian yurt. This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds, given the way MB and M, and R and L have a tendency to mutate into each other over time.

For example, Hindi has four consonants in the space where English only has L and R – one of which can confuse the English ear no end until it gets used to it. Is it an L or an R? English people can’t tell. I can, of course, having learnt Hindi at my Ayah’s knee. Just to confuse still further, it’s often written as D in transliteration into English – and the Hindi letter, ड़, is just the same as the Hindi letter ड – one of Hindi’s four Ds (all with distinct pronunciation, although again the English ear might have a hard time distinguishing them) – but with a dot underneath.

If you think that with those etymological speculations I’m straying into areas where I’m no scholar, you’re right, but I make no apologies for it. Real scholars are usually pretty tentative, especially about anything very far back in the mists of time. Somehow their tentative conclusions have a tendency to become much firmer by the time they arrive in less scholarly publications, often much to the annoyance of the original scholars, if they take any notice at all of the popularizations. The speculations I’m reporting are very tentative, and I’m more than happy to be shot down in flames by anyone who knows, or even who thinks they know, better. But seriously, I doubt if it’s possible to know one way or the other.

Sorry, I digressed again. It wasn’t long since we’d had breakfast. We thought maybe we’d have time to get lunch here between arriving back from the summit, and the arrival of our bus back to Mussoorie.

The path up to the summit is very easy to follow. It’s steep and quite rough, but not difficult at all as long as you’re reasonably fit. By the top, you’re almost exactly at ten thousand feet above sea level, and the air is noticeably thin – only seventy percent the pressure of air at sea level – or is it just the cold and the exertion that makes one feel a little light headed and breathless?

It was really cold at the top. The wind had been light at the bus stop, but up at the top is was blowing quite hard. The students had seen the high Himalayas from up there the previous day, but the day we were up there, they were shrouded in cloud. We did get a wonderful view of the Himalayan foothills round about us, though, and little villages and terraced fields in the valleys below us.

There’s a famous temple at the summit, I know, but somehow it’s expunged itself from my memory entirely. I simply don’t remember even seeing it, although I must have been aware of it at the time. I have photographs that I took from the summit, but not a sign of the temple in any of them.

No, that’s not a prejudice against Hindu temples. I remember plenty of others perfectly clearly, and I’ve nothing against them at all, any more than I’ve anything against stupas, mosques, synagogues or churches. Many of them, of whichever religion, are stunning pieces of architecture, and I’ve taken lots of photographs of them.

It’s just a hole in my memory. I reckon my memory’s generally pretty good, but now I know it’s got holes. Well, one at least.

I do have good reason to suspect that the current temple on the site is a great deal bigger than what was there in 1993, however.

I took a few photographs, but we were all getting very cold, and the cloud base wasn’t very far above us – in fact, there were wisps of cloud below us in some directions. We decided it was time to set off down again.

It began to snow before we were even half way down. Fortunately it wasn’t a real blizzard, and the path and its potholes and pitfalls remained easy to see.

By the time we got back to the bus stop, it was time for lunch. We had plenty of time before the bus back to Mussoorie would arrive, so we ate in one of the hotels. It was good to be down out of the wind, but we were still very cold. And it was still snowing, maybe a little harder.

I asked one of the men in the hotel whether it often snowed as late in the spring as that, and he just gave a noncommital gesture, as if to say, “Sometimes it snows, sometimes it doesn’t, I’ve never thought about when.”

By the time the bus arrived, there was a covering of two or three inches of snow. The bus arrived pretty much on time, though. We didn’t seem to go much slower on the way back than we had on the way out, except that the driver had to stop every now and then for one of his colleagues to remove the snow from the windscreen. The windscreen wipers weren’t working.

It was the same bus we’d caught in the morning, now on its way back from Tehri. And of course it still had half its windows missing.

The road was even scarier with inches of snow on it, but the driver didn’t seem the least concerned. He probably thought it more important to get to Mussoorie before the snow got deep enough to risk us getting stuck somewhere, and he was probably right.

We were very, very cold indeed by the time we got back to Mussoorie. The bus dropped us off at the point on the road nearest to Edgehill, and we climbed the steep path through the woods with our feet feeling like lumps of ice. You can imagine how pleased we were to find a blazing fire in the hearth in the lounge.

During the night it snowed more, and by the morning it was clear that we weren’t going to go anywhere that day. The American family had been intending to leave for Delhi, but it was clear there would be no bus down to Dehradun. It took a while for our hosts to persuade them that there was no possible means by which they could make the journey, but eventually they resigned themselves to being stuck in Mussoorie for as long as the snow remained. If it was more than two more days, they’d miss their flight back to the USA. They weren’t sure whether their insurance would cover it.

Had they noticed our unresponsiveness to their religious zeal? Maybe they had – in fact, I began to wonder whether maybe our hosts had had a word with them. At any rate, they didn’t mention religion again in our presence, and we got on just fine. Various combinations of us played Scrabble all morning, the older amongst us taking turns to play various games with the two little Argents.

In the afternoon the sun came out. Mr Argent, Little John, Rosy and I went out together for a walk, if walk is really the right word. We struggled through the snow for a while. It was over a foot deep almost everywhere, and considerably deeper in some places where it had drifted. We didn’t get very far, but the woods were stunningly beautiful in the snow and the sunshine. I explained to Little John and Rosy about making a snowman, which they did, after rolling a couple of huge snow rolls. Then we had a bit of a snowball fight, and all got very cold.

We went back and warmed up again by the fire in the lounge.

The snow lasted three days, then one night it rained and rained and rained. The combination of heavy rain and the consequent thawing of a considerable amount of snow resulted in several impressive landslips, some of which had to be at least partly cleared before some of the roads could be used – including the one down to Dehradun. It was astonishing how quickly that was done. Well, astonishing to me; but apparently routine to the inhabitants of Mussoorie.

The Argents had missed their flight, of course. We exchanged addresses, but I never wrote to them, and they never wrote to me.

We spent three days in Delhi before catching the train back to Evansganj. We visited the Red Fort, Qutab Minar, and the railway museum. We went window shopping in Connaught Place, and actual shopping in Chandni Chowk. But I don’t need to tell you about those places, there’s a million people can tell you about them.

We never got to see any of the wonderful waterfalls near Mussoorie, and we never saw the high Himalayas. But Little John and Rosy saw snow – lots of it – and played in it. They were very impressed, and apparently they’ve remembered it as a wonderful holiday ever since.

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