Recounting all the reasons he hates driving here – no parking, no roads, aggressive drivers, mean policemen – Bharat settled down to trying to find the Viceregal Lodge. I think he’d never heard of the place because he didn’t know what I was talking about. I eventually just told him was past the Cecil, a very famous and swank hotel, and he got directions from there.
Well, almost. We still got lost several times, and I finally spotted on old sign in English pointing up a footpath. It looked steep, but it was better than trying to turn our awkwardly maneuverable Ambassador around in the middle of a crowded, narrow street of two-way traffic. He parked, and I started the climb.
Whew! Hugely upward! And I couldn’t breath, either. After getting off on several wrong paths, I finally came to a big, locked gate that I suspected was the old entrance. I had no intention on going back down and turning the car around again, though, so I backtracked a little and heaved my way up a little path and over a big wall. I found a path on the other side and started following it.
I soon came to a scene out of the Wizard of Oz. The path turned to yellow bricks, and I was surrounded by beautiful beds of flowers in full bloom that were attracting clouds of different butterflies. OK…the path wasn’t yellow brick, but it felt like it among the butterflies, flowers and sunlight.
Then the path made a turn, and behind an old, tall cedar, I found the Emerald City – a three-story, Scottish Revival baronial estate with a huge clock tower and a sprawl as big as Buckingham Palace. This had been the summer residence of the Viceroy of India, the seat of British administration of all of India during the summer months. And regal it was.
Since I’d sneaked in the back way (I later found out), I went walking in the grounds. Here, the comparison is to Versailles as the formal gardens and lawns descend the side of the ridge in a series of terraces, each lined with balustrades and flower gardens. It was a magnificent garden that afforded impressive views back up to the Viceregal Lodge. You could easily see a hundred years of British soldiers, diplomats, and businessmen meeting with maharajas and administrators in these gardens…along with their spouses. (With all the information available about the men who ran the empire, I was stuck after seeing a large photo of the wife of one of Viceroys that I knew next to nothing about half the Brits in India. What were the spouses doing while the men were administering? What was life like for them?)
My book tipped me to a half-hour tour of the Lodge, which is now the Institute for Higher Studies, so I walked back up the gardens and to the entry hall. The tour was short with a couple of interesting points, but I think it would have been especially interesting to Lou. I don’t believe they’ve done much with the furnishings here since Independence, and there was a lot of really ornate furniture setting around with a lot of very faded fabric. One room had silk-covered walls with brocade at the seams of the cloth.
The one furnishing I (and most of the tour) was interested in was the little round office table where some clever clerk worked out how to divide India to most separate the Muslims and the Hindus. We were all slightly awed to see the little table in the big palace where that auspicious decision was made, a decision that cost tens of thousands of lives. In this setting you could see how it would look so logical, though we were all thinking of the practical horror that logical decision would unleash. My thoughts went to the US in Iraq. I wonder where we’ll make the decision to partition that country, and I wonder what the practical consequences will be of our logical planning.
After seeing a large exhibit of photos of famous people visiting the Lodge, I went back out to the gardens. There, I found my footpath, went back down to the paved path I’d started on, and back to modern India. Almost to modern India, I came across a little troupe of monkeys. There are monkeys everywhere in Shimla; one of the biggest Hanuman temples in the country is here (I’m NOT walking up to it), and it’s hard to say what caused what, if the temple was built because of the monkeys or if the monkeys have had a nice life because of the temple. Whatever, there are a lot of them.
I decided it was time to get my monkey pic, so I focused my camera on one that was at eye level because it was on a retaining wall. Unfortunately, I crossed into the animal’s personal space while focusing, and it howled and put on the meanest face ever. Simultaneously, one of his 40 lb troupe-mates landed on my back pack and scared the shit out of me! I backed off fairly quickly, nursing a scratch on my arm from the ambushing monkey, and I spent the next three days awaiting the first symptoms of monkey-scratch fever, a disease I’m sure must exist.
When I got the rest of the way down the hill, Bharat was reluctant to leave, having finally found a place to put the car that wasn’t blocking traffic. However, we weren’t staying among the cannibal monkeys because my driver had found a parking space, so I had him take me around the ridge to the proper entrance of the Lodge. I wanted to visit the aviary there.
The bird park was a piddling affair; I see more birds on a Spring morning in my back yard, and that’s counting the aviary’s collection of roosters. And my back yard smells better. Since it was close, I decided to continue on and taste the high life of lunch at the swank Cecil.
Which wasn’t all that swank. I thought this was an old, heritage hotel, but I guess I was in the spiffy new wing. It was after noon, but the restaurant wasn’t open yet, so I had a sandwich and beer in the bar. Gotta say, though, great service! One person to bring the menu, one to bring the bar snacks, one to take the order, one to bring the beer while another set up my silver. And while I was sitting there, someone else in an apron on the way to do another job even made a detour to refill the half of my glass that I’d emptied. Hard to beat. There was pretty much nobody there, and I suspect it was the music: Zamphir doing covers of Titanic and “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You.”
Back in my Ambassador, I put on my ipod (Oscar Peterson) and went back to the foot of the ridge below my hotel. I told a relieved Bharat that I was done for the day and that we’d meet in the morning, and I struggled up to the hotel and took my usual siesta.
Then it was time for my evening promenade. Same routine: walk, coffee, walk, tea, look, look, look, look. Strolled until well past dark, and headed back to the hotel. A kid in one of the intensely-lit booths in the Lakkar Bazaar asked me to take his photo, so I did.
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