Mussoorie Diary

Pumpkin Cowboys

“I first saw Mussoorie in 1940, when I was six years old,” I told Gautam, who is twelve.
“I didn’t know you were so ancient,” said Gautam. “A bit of history,” said his sister Shristi, all of fourteen. “And what were you doing here when you were six?” asked brother Siddarth, now sixteen.

“I was incarcerated in a boarding school,” I told them. “And of course I hated it. The food was terrible. Always boiled meat with pumpkin. No Chinese, Tibetan or Italian cuisine those days. No TV, no internet, no video games. But we were taken to the pictures twice a year. Reverend Mother liked westerns. So the first films I saw were Billy the Kid, starring Robert Taylor, and They Died With Their Boots On starring Errol Flynn. In both films the heroes came to a sticky end. That’s why Reverend Mother took us to see them. She didn’t like heroes, didn’t like boys.” “So she gave you pumpkin every day,” said Gautam, “I would have run away.” “You can’t run far without money,” I said. “And Rs 2 a month was what we were allowed as pocket money.” “But there are no cinemas in Mussoorie,” said Siddarth. “How did you watch those films?”

Halls of Dust

So I told him how the old Mussoorie once had six cinemas, right up to 1980, and now of course, there wasn’t a single cinema left in town. One by one they closed down—put out of business by television, DVDs and the entertainment tax. The halls are still there, locked up because the law prevents them from being used for anything else. Rows of empty seats gather dust while the silver screen grows green with mildew. You may not see the ghosts of Robert Taylor and Errol Flynn, but you might well meet the ghost of Arthur Fisher, who, for most of his adult life, was the proud projectionist at the Picture Palace—which is at the other end of Library—in Mussoorie.

The Electric Picture Palace, to give it its original name, opened in 1912, the year electricity came to the hill station. One of the country’s earliest cinemas, it survived for well on ninety years. Longer than Fisher, a poor Anglo-Indian who rests in a pauper’s grave in the Camel’s Back cemetery.

The Man-Eaters of Majestic

Below the magnificent Hakman’s Grand Hotel was the Capitol, where I saw those early westerns. It survived into the late 1970s, but by then the projector and sound system were in bad shape and the constant death-rattle from the projection room drowned out the sound. It was like watching a silent film without subtitles.

Further on, the Majestic was small and intimate. Too intimate, because you came out infested with fleas and khatmals. The seats were wonderful sanctuaries for insect life. I wonder where the bugs went when there were no longer any moviegoers to feed on. Plenty of hotels in the vicinity....

And then there was the Roxy, situated near the Rink. Here the sound was so loud you could hear it out on the street. Perhaps it was trying to compete with the rumble of roller-skates. Up to ten or fifteen years ago, the Rink would be packed with skaters—youngsters, teenagers, even middle-aged enthusiasts.

Today the vast hall is almost empty, just a handful of solitary roller-skaters looking as though they would rather be elsewhere. What happened to roller-skating? There was a time when every youngster wanted a pair of roller-skates. “Would you like a pair of skates?” I asked Gautam. “No way,” he said. “But you can get me a laptop.” That says it all, I suppose.

The simpler pleasures have given way to play-stations, sophisticated video games, personal computers and the internet. Even filmstars must learn to twitter. Politicians would be wise not to.

Digi Raja

Family picnics and stamp-collecting are pastimes of the past, but everyone is now a photographer. And if you don’t have a digital camera, your cellphone will do the job for you. The other morning there was a loud banging on my front door, and I opened it to find a gaggle of tourists grinning at me. Click! And they had captured my image while I was still in my kachcha-banyan. Instant immortality! And an end to privacy. If, indeed, there is still such a thing as privacy in our digitised world.

Lights, Camera, Action

The nice thing about the old cinemas was that you could sit there alone in the dark for a couple of hours, and nobody bothered you. And if you had the right companion, you could hold hands for as long as you liked—or until the lights came on. Of course, if the film is very exciting you might end up holding the wrong hand. This happened to me once, and I still have a broken tooth to show for it!