Miss Ramola and Others

Though their numbers have diminished over the years, there are still a few compulsive daily walkers around: the odd ones, the strange ones, who will walk all day, here, there and everywhere, not in order to get somewhere, but to escape from their homes, their lonely rooms, their mirrors, themselves …

Those of us who must work for a living and would love to be able to walk a little more don’t often get the chance. There are offices to attend, deadlines to be met, trains or planes to be caught, deals to be struck, people to deal with. It’s the rat race for most people, whether they like it or not. So who are these lucky ones, a small minority it has to be said, who find time to walk all over this hill station from morn to night?

Some are fitness freaks, I suppose; but several are just unhappy souls who find some release, some meaning, in covering miles and miles of highway without so much as a nod in the direction of others on the road. They are not looking at anything as they walk, not even at a violet in a mossy stone.

Here comes Miss Romola. She’s been at it for years. A retired schoolmistress who never married. No friends. Lonely as hell. Not even a visit from a former pupil. She could not have been very popular.

She has money in the bank. She owns her own flat. But she doesn’t spend much time in it. I see her from my window, tramping up the road to Lal Tibba. She strides around the mountain like the character in the old song ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain’, only she doesn’t wear pink pyjamas; she dresses in slacks and a shirt. She doesn’t stop to talk to anyone. It’s quick march to the top of the mountain, and then down again, home again, jiggety-jig. When she has to go down to Dehradun (too long a walk even for her), she stops a car and cadges a lift. No taxis for her; not even the bus.

Miss Romola’s chief pleasure in life comes from conserving her money. There are people like that. They view the rest of the world with suspicion. An overture of friendship will be construed as taking an undue interest in her assets. We are all part of an international conspiracy to relieve her of her material possessions! She has no servants, no friends; even her relatives are kept at a safe distance.

A similar sort of character but even more eccentric is Mr Sen, who used to live in the USA and walks from the Happy Valley to Landour (five miles) and back every day, in all seasons, year in and year out. Once or twice every week he will stop at the Community Hospital to have his blood pressure checked or undergo a blood or urine test. With all that walking he should have no health problems, but he is a hypochondriac and is convinced that he is dying of something or the other.

He came to see me once. Unlike Miss Romola, he seemed to want a friend, but his neurotic nature turned people away. He was convinced that he was surrounded by individual and collective hostility. People were always staring at him, he told me. I couldn’t help wondering why, because he looked fairly nondescript. He wore conventional western clothes, perfectly acceptable in urban India, and looked respectable enough except for a constant nervous turning of the head, looking to the left, right, or behind, as though to check on anyone who might be following him. He was convinced that he was being followed at all times.

‘By whom?’ I asked.

‘Agents of the government,’ he said.

‘But why should they follow you?’

‘I look different,’ he said. ‘They see me as an outsider. They think I work for the CIA.’

‘And do you?’

‘No, no!’ He shied nervously away from me. ‘Why did you say that?’

‘Only because you brought the subject up. I haven’t noticed anyone following you.’

‘They’re very clever about it. Perhaps you’re following me too.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t walk as fast or as far as you,’ I said with a laugh; but he wasn’t amused. He never smiled, never laughed. He did not feel safe in India, he confided. The saffron brigade was after him!

‘But why?’ I asked. ‘They’re not after me. And you’re a Hindu with a Hindu name.’

‘Ah yes, but I don’t look like one!’

‘Well, I don’t look like a Taoist monk, but that’s what I am,’ I said, adding, in a more jocular manner: ‘I know how to become invisible, and you wouldn’t know I’m around. That’s why no one follows me! I have this wonderful cloak, you see, and when I wear it I become invisible!’

‘Can you lend it to me?’ he asked eagerly.

‘I’d love to,’ I said, ‘but it’s at the cleaners right now. Maybe next week.’

‘Crazy,’ he muttered. ‘Quite mad.’ And he hurried on.

A few weeks later he returned to New York and safety. Then I heard he’d been mugged in Central Park. He’s recovering, but doesn’t do much walking now.

Neurotics do not walk for pleasure, they walk out of compulsion. They are not looking at the trees or the flowers or the mountains; they are not looking at other people (except in apprehension); they are usually walking away from something—unhappiness or disarray in their lives. They tire themselves out, physically and mentally, and that brings them some relief.

Like the journalist who came to see me last year. He’d escaped from Delhi, he told me. Had taken a room in Landour Bazaar and was going to spend a year on his own, away from family, friends, colleagues, the entire rat race. He was full of noble resolutions. He was planning to write an epic poem or a great Indian novel or a philosophical treatise. Every fortnight I meet someone who is planning to write one or the other of these things, and I do not like to discourage them, just in case they turn violent!

In effect he did nothing but walk up and down the mountain, growing shabbier by the day. Sometimes he recognized me. At other times there was a blank look on his face, as though he was on some drug, and he would walk past me without a sign of recognition. He discarded his slippers and began walking about barefoot, even on the stony paths. He did not change or wash his clothes. Then he disappeared; that is, I no longer saw him around.

I did not really notice his absence until I saw an ad in one of the national papers, asking for information about his whereabouts. His family was anxious to locate him. The ad carried a picture of the gentleman, taken in happier, healthier times; but it was definitely my acquaintance of that summer.

I was sitting in the Bank Manager’s office, up in the cantonment, when a woman came in, making inquiries about her husband. It was the missing journalist’s wife. Yes, said Mr Ohri, the friendly Bank Manager, he’d opened an account with them; not a very large sum, but there were a few hundred rupees lying to his credit. And no, they hadn’t seen him in the bank for at least three months.

He couldn’t be found. Several months passed, and it was presumed that he had moved on to some other town; or that he’d lost his mind or his memory. Then some milkmen from Kolti Gaon discovered bones and remnants of clothing at the bottom of a cliff. In the pocket of the ragged shirt was the journalist’s press card.

How he’d fallen to his death remains a mystery. It’s easy to miss your footing and take a fatal plunge on the steep slopes of this range. He may have been high on something or he may simply have been trying out an unfamiliar path. Walking can be dangerous in the hills if you don’t know the way or if you take one chance too many.

And here’s a tale to illustrate that old chestnut that truth is often stranger than fiction:

Colonel Parshottam had just retired and was determined to pass the evening of his life doing the things he enjoyed most: taking early morning and late evening walks, afternoon siestas, a drop of whisky before dinner, and a good book on his bedside table.

A few streets away, on the fourth floor of a block of flats, lived Mrs L, a stout, neglected woman of forty, who’d had enough of life and was determined to do away with herself.

Along came the Colonel on the road below, a song on his lips, strolling along with a jaunty air; in love with life and wanting more of it.

Quite unaware of anyone else around, Mrs L chose that moment to throw herself out of her fourth-floor window. Seconds later she landed with a thud on the Colonel. If this was a Ruskin Bond story, it would have been love at first flight. But the grim reality was that he was crushed beneath her and did not recover from the impact. Mrs L, on the other hand, survived the fall and lived on into a miserable old age.

There is no moral to the story, any more than there is a moral to life. We cannot foresee when a bolt from the blue will put an end to the best-laid plans of mice and men.