Often, the local tutelary deity of an area could be a man deified even within his lifetime) According to a legend, villagers from the adjoining valley ‘stole’ one of the cedars and when Seep learnt of it, he rained a hail of iron on that village. While geologists may have other explanations for the devastated look of the hillside on the way to the golf course at Naldehra, even today people from Seep’s side of the hill do not marry in the other belt. The stolen tree is in Shanal village, and as it had been uprooted from its actual home, it has an ‘upside down’ appearance. While most deodars grow straight and stately, this has a series of multiple trunks — quite like roots — reaching for the heavens.

Who the Seep deity was is not clear. He is supposed to have been brought centuries ago when the founders of the erstwhile state of Koti are said to have migrated to the area. At the time of the migration, this tract was controlled by local strongmen, Mavis, who also wished to worship him but the people who had brought him would not allow this. The upshot was that the Mavis would desecrate the temple which had been built in the village of Nehra.

‘Speaking’ through his worshippers, Seep declared that he wished to move from Nehra, adding that a line of ants would soon march through the village and where they finally circled a mound was where he wanted to reside. The line of ants did come, the story goes, and they marched through the woods and stopped on a spur that juts out of the hillside. At the village of Deothi is Seep’s ‘actual’ temple — he only visits the glade of Sipur, which is named after him, thrice a year.

One of these times is when Sipi Fair is held in mid April and when this quiet glade comes alive with a flurry of activity. Traditionally, this fair has been a time of match-making. Some early European writings on the area declared that there was buying and selling of women at the fair. Locally known as simply reet, or custom, women who wished to leave their husbands, often developed fresh relationships at this fair. Similarly, both widowers and widows searched for mates too. What today has become institutionalised as divorce, or separation or remarriage, existed for centuries in these hills and gave women considerably greater leeway in determining their lives.

Famed for its midnight picnics, Sipur has been alluded to in the writings of Rudyard Kipling. Lady Lytton, wife of the Viceroy, Robert Edward Bulwer-Lytton, called it a ‘small teacup shaped valley’. The Sipi fair was one time when Shimla’s European residents rubbed shoulders with the area’s rural folk. Today, at the fair, there are stalls by the dozen and, interestingly, many are run by Sikhs from the Hoshiarpur area. They travel from fair to fair and claim that their ancestors have been doing this for centuries. Rebuilt at various times, and most recently in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the temple at Sipur has local architectural features.