Ghosts of the Savoy

The clock over the Savoy Bar is stationary at 8.20 and has been like that since the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima fifty years ago. That’s what Nandu tells me, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. Many of his more outlandish statements often turn out to be true.

Almost any story about this old hotel in Mussoorie has a touch of the improbable about it, even when supported by facts. A previous owner, Mr McClintock, had a false nose—according to Nandu, who never saw it. So I checked with old Negi, who first came to work in the hotel as a room boy back in 1932 (a couple of years before I was born) and who, sixty years and two wives later, looks after the front office. Negi tells me it’s quite true.

‘I used to take McClintock sahib his cup of cocoa last thing at night. After leaving his room I’d dash around to one of the windows and watch him until he went to bed. The last thing he did, before putting the light out, was to remove his false nose and place it on the bedside table. He never slept with it on. I suppose it bothered him whenever he turned over or slept on his face. First thing in the morning, before having his cup of tea, he’d put it on again. A great man, McClintock sahib.’

‘But how did he lose his nose in the first place?’ I asked.

‘Wife bit it off,’ said Nandu.

‘No, sir,’ said Negi, whose reputation for telling the truth is proverbial. ‘It was shot away by a German bullet during World War I. He got the Victoria Cross as compensation.’

‘And when he died, was he wearing his nose?’ I asked.

‘No, sir,’ said old Negi, continuing his tale with some relish. ‘One morning when I took the sahib his cup of tea, I found him stone dead, without his nose! It was lying on the bedside table. I suppose I should have left it there, but McClintock sahib was a good man, I could not bear to have the whole world knowing about his false nose. So I stuck it back on his face and then went and informed the manager. A natural death, just a sudden heart attack. But I made sure that he went into his coffin with his nose attached!’

We all agreed that Negi was a good man to have around, especially in a crisis.

Mr McClintock’s ghost is supposed to haunt the corridors of the hotel, but I have yet to encounter it. Will the ghost be wearing its nose? Old Negi thinks not (the false nose being man-made), but then he hasn’t seen the ghost at close quarters, only receding into the distance between the two giant deodars on the edge of the Beer Garden. Those deodars have been there a couple of hundred years, before the hotel was built, before the hill station came up.

 

A lot of people who enter the Bar look pretty far gone, and sometimes I have difficulty distinguishing the living from the dead. But the real ghosts are those who manage to slip away without paying for their drinks.

I don’t have to slip away. In the five or six years during which I have helped to prop up the Savoy Bar, I have seldom paid for a drink. That’s the kind of friend I have in Nandu. You won’t find a harsh word about him in these pages. I think he decided long ago that I was an adornment to the Bar, and that, draped over a bar stool, I looked like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. (He won an Oscar for that, remember?)

As for the Man-from-Sail, who is usually parked on the next bar stool, he’s no adornment, in spite of the Jackie Shroff-moustache. But I have to admit that he’s skilful at pouring drinks, mixing cocktails and showing tipsy ladies to the powder room. He doesn’t pay for his drinks either.

How, then, does dear Nandu survive? Obviously there are some real customers in the wings, and we help them feel at home, chatting them up and encouraging them to try the Royal Salute or even a glass of Beaujolais. I can rattle off the history of the hotel for anyone who wants to hear it; and as for the Man-from-Sail, he provides a free ambulance service for those who can’t handle the hotel’s hospitality. The Man-from-Sail is the town’s number one blood donor, so if you come away from your transfusion with a bad hangover, you’ll know whose blood is coursing around in your veins. But it’s real Scotch, not the stuff they make at the bottom of the Sail mountain.

Nandu tells me that Pearl Buck, the Nobel laureate, stayed here for a few days in the early fifties. I looked up the hotel register and found that he was right as usual. As far as I know, Miss Buck did not record her impressions of the hotel or the town in any of her books. It’s the sort of place people usually have something to say about. Like the correspondent of the Melbourne Age who complained because the roof had blown off his room during one of our equinoxal storms. A frivolous sort of complaint, to say the least. Nandu placated him by saying, ‘Sir, in Delhi you can only get a five-star room. From your room here you can see all the stars!’ And so he could, once the clouds had rolled away.

It’s a windy sort of mountain, and in cyclonic storms our corrugated iron roofs are frequently blown away. Old Negi recalls that a portion of the Savoy roof once landed on the St George’s School flat, five miles away, at the height of the midsummer storm. In its flight it decapitated an early-morning fitness freak. Had anyone else told me the story, I wouldn’t have believed it. But Negi’s word is the real thing—as good as a sip of Johnnie Walker Blue Label.

 

And here’s a limerick I wrote for Nandu and the Man-from-Sail:

 

There was a young man who could fix
Anything in five minutes or six;
His statue is found
On Savoy’s hallowed ground,
With Nandu beside him, transfix’d!