This Above all
Farewell visit to the Shivaliks
KHUSHWANT SINGH

Last year when I came up to the Shivaliks for the summer months, I swore it would be for the last time. The journey by road turned out to be a day-long nightmare. Eight long hours of crawling behind snail-paced trucks, tractors, buses, cars, oil tankers and scooters with frequent standstills every few miles proved too much for me. However, I had happy memories of over 90 summers spent in the hills of Shimla, Mashobra, Narkanda, Tatapani and Kasauli, and felt I owed them a proper farewell salute. I decided to run the gauntlet once again for the last time.

I undertook the journey in the style I am not accustomed to. Seated in a brand new Mercedes Benz (courtesy Nanak Kohli), led by two police cars with blazing red lights and sirens (courtesy Governor of Haryana A.R. Kidwai), we set out at 8 am through spitting rain past Amaltas trees, dripping molten gold on either side of the road. There was the same sort of heavy, barely moving, traffic of vehicles but the police sirens blasted their way through it, as if screaming ‘‘get out of the way, you blithering idiots, and make way for the dirty old man of Delhi whose godless sermons have ruined the morals of an entire generation. He is on a farewell visit to the Shivaliks.’’ And so they did.

A view of Kasauli which has always been under the charge of a Brigade Commander

I found myself in McDonald’s eatery in Karnal in two-and-a-half hours. I was recognised, given a free pizza and coffee, and was on my way again. No toll taxes, no hold-ups. We sped past a 30-km stretch of stationary vehicles into Himachal Pradesh. I was expecting to reach Kasauli by 4 pm. I was there at 2.30 pm. The travelling time was five-and-a-half hours, including the brief halt at Karnal. A record of sorts. It occurred to me that our roads can never keep pace with the increase in traffic. When Nanos appear on them, matters will go from bad to worse.

A better alternative would be by rail to Chandigarh or Kalka, then by taxi to your hilly destination. If Laloo does succeed in putting superfast trains on the track, Chandigarh will be within an hour’s reach from Delhi (at present it takes three). But almost certainly, the future of tourist travel from the Capital to hill resorts like Shimla, Manali, Kulu, Dalhousie, Kasauli, Nainital, Almora, Mussoorie and Ranikhet will be helicopter taxi services. All these sylvan resorts will be accessible by air in an hour. Don’t we have entrepreneurs willing to stake their money on safe bets?

The Shivaliks have been my summer abode since I was a boy at school—Shimla, Mashobra, Naldera and Narkanda, but most of it Kasauli. I have special affection for Kasauli because my father built the Pasteur Institute for making anti-rabies vaccines and treating people bitten by mad dogs. In my younger days, as soon as you mentioned Kasauli, someone was sure to ask you: Kyon? Pagal kuttey nay kaata hai? (Why? Have you been bitten by a mad dog?) .

The Pasteur Institute has grown into a mammoth size—an ugly, pink edifice called the CRI (Central Research Institute). It overlooks Kasauli bazaar and is a veritable eyesore. It has been producing many, many kinds of vaccines against snake bite, small pox, typhoid etc. It gave employment to some 700 locals in junior grades.

The other permanent feature of Kasauli is the cantonment created by the British in preparing for war against the Sikh kingdom after Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Ever since the bandobast of the town has been in the hands of the Brigade Commander. What I saw of Kasauli on this last visit both gladdened my heart and filled it with sorrow. It was packed with visitors. The upper bazaar, which had a row of gunny sack kiosks held by bamboo sticks in which Tibetan refugees sold woollens and artefacts, had been made pucca with neon lights. They were happy. A barricade guarded by a sepoy had been put up to prevent people driving up and down the hill roads, endangering lives of people who like strolling along the flower-decked hill sides. All this in one year under the command of Brigadier Thomas George.

The story of the CRI is a sad one. A team of the World Health Organisation inspected it and reported that its methods of preparing vaccines were outdated. As is his habit, Health Minister Ramadoss ordered it to cease operations. The future of hundreds of employees has been put in jeopardy. Large stocks of vaccines worth crores of rupees lie rotting in its godowns.

Lonely lives

My pen-friend J.M. Rishi, industrialist of Jalandhar, often fires salvos of thoughts that touch him. One of his pals remarked: "Man comes alone in the world, lives alone and dies alone". Rishi was touched by the words, and in his turn fired them off at me with a few appropriate couplets in Urdu about the singleness of birth, life and death. At first I too was impressed by the seeming profundity of the words. But when I examined them more closely, they did not amount to much beyond a feeling of loneliness.

Does a man come alone into the world? Yes, most do. But they are occasionally born in pairs (twins), threes (triplets), fours (quadruplets) and even fives (quintuplets). Does he live his life alone? No. He lives with his family, friends, colleagues and, perhaps, one in a million goes into solitary confinement in a Himalayan cave to do tapasya, which is considered a compulsory exercise to achieve gurudom. Does he die alone? Most do. But some die en masse as in earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, plane crashes, rail and road accidents. So what remains of this poetic statement? Seems to me like the sob stuff of one who is constantly moaning, ‘no one loves me’. It touches the heart but not the brain.

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