The Landour Cemetery

I love old cemeteries. And an abandoned cemetery set among pine trees and swirling, ghostly mists? Even better. This is the Landour Cemetery. It's on the road around the hill. You pass by the Four Shops and keep on walking left until you see it below you. Reasonably easy. The gate is locked up with wire, but that's no real impediment.



Walk along the old brick walls on the right, there's a crumbled spot where it's easy to scramble through. I hope I don't have to add that if you choose to do this, you'd best be respectful.



Everyone in Landour knows the cemetery, but there is remarkably little written about it. Well, at least on the Internet. Most of the graves here are of British soldiers. They came up here to take the cure in the cool mountain air, after contracting various tropical diseases in the lowlands. Some of them didn't make it.



Ah, here we go! The Internet Archive contains a very old document, complete with inscriptions from the headstones here. You can barely read them, these days.

1828— BOLTON, G., Captain. Inscription :—Sacred to the
memory of Captain George Bolton, H. C.'s 2nd European Regiment,
who after some months of painful suffering departed this life on the
13th of June in the year of the Lord 1828, aged 40 His virtuous
and amiable disposition rendered him generally beloved in life and
lamented in death This memorial is expected by his afflicted widow
as the last earthly tribute of affection and respect to an indulgent
and affectionate husband. Appointed as a lieutenant in 1804, a captain
in 1818. He was born at Dinapore in 1788 and served in Java.

1830— GRAHAM, J. R., Captain. Lueriptinn. Sacred to the
memory of John Richard Graham, Esq., late a Captain of the 5th
Regiment of Bengal Light Cavalry. This monument is erected by
his brother officers as a mark of their esteem and regard for the
character of one universally beloved for his many good and amiable
qualities. He died on the 30th day of May A. D. 1830, aged 29 years.

He was appointed cadet in 1817, lieutenant in 1819, captain in 1829. He
was the son of J. Graham of Barrock Loige, born 1800, and a relative of Sir J.
Graham. Bart.



Sacred to the memory of Major William Blundell, XI Dragoons, who was killed by falling with his horse on the south side of the Landour Hill, on the 12th November 1834, aged 54 years.

"It is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation that Jesus Christ came into the world to save us. In Him alone is our hope of salvation for this our dear brother, whose kind and affectionate heart endeared him as a son and as a brother, and whose departure hence is severely felt, and deeply mourned by his family and by many friends."



And how did William Blundell die?


"... A house called Newlands, which has been struck and burnt three
times by fire. The hill is said to contain a quantity of iron which attracts the
electric fluid.... A short time ago as Major Blundell was going to that very
house, Newlands, by some accident, his guuth (hill-pony) fell over the precipice,
and they were both dashed to pieces." This tomb is not now traceable and is
reproduced from Fiihrer's List. In the B. 0. it reads " falling with his Gkoont."
The 11th Dragoons are the present 11th (Prince Albert's Own) Hussars, who
were in India from 1819 to 1838.

(Reference: Wanderings of a Pilgrim: In Search of the Picturesque. (?)

Wanderings of a Pilgrim being a fascinating looking book by one Fanny Parkes, who spent twenty four years wandering the far East and writing about it.

However, although the Archive list of inscriptions says this is the reference, I can find nothing of the sort in the text Still worth a read. So, the mystery remains - who first reported on the unfortunate accident of Major Blundell's passing?



1835- RAISES, S. M.. Mrs. Sacred to the memory of Sophia Mary Raikes, the fondly beloved wife of Charles Raikes of the Bengal Civil Service. She departed this life on the 16th of April 1835, in the 19th year of her age.



Sad stuff, for sure. But, as final resting places go - this isn't bad, not at all. It's hard to express how happy I am that I found these inscription and now know who some of these people were. I have a habit at graveyards of looking at headstones and thinking, "I am very sorry, and I am thinking about you, and although you have been dead for a hundred and fifty years, give or take, well, I am sorry still."

They may have been awful people. But I do not know that.

I picked up some biscuit wrappers, found my umbrella, and continued my walk.

Landour, The Four Shops, The Language School

I ate this thali and I went up the hill to Landour again. I wanted to check out the Language School. The Landour Language School is world famous, and is used heavily by the American Fulbright progam. Instruction is conducted in Hindi, Pashto, and Urdu. Classes are either one-on-one or conducted in at most three person groups. I have dreams of coming up here to learn Hindi and finish off a book sometime in the near future. Still - it's intimidating. Talking to people at the Four Shops can fill a fairly average person with profound insecurity. So many young genius-types finishing up dissertations on Pashto poetry, research on the growth of business in Hyderabad, researching ancient Mughal art. Degrees from Harvard and Yale and Oxford. Me? Uh. I write about stuff I ate a lot. I can say "good food!" in Hindi if I'm feeling sharp.

I soon began talking to a small and extremely intense French woman. She was a photojournalist for some of the major news sources and had, of late, covered the Indian tsunami, Pakistani flooding, and a variety of assorted combat zones. For some reason, she took a shine to me. I asked her why she was at the school.

"I need to learn enough Hindi to yell DON'T SHOOT, mostly," she said.

We talked about travel, about my impending journalism career. To my relief, she seemed positive about it, or at leas t my odds of continued survival. As well as my idea of taking classes at the school.

"Your breed....no, you're not the typical American. That's a good thing. Everything about you is quick, fast. It's your physiology. Sim, rapid eye movements. You seem very creative. You'll do well."

"I feel like I'm not smart enough to be with these people," I said, making a vague gesture towards the school.

"No, everyone's smart,in different ways. You know how to survive, and that's most important. Especially for a journalist - the quality of your work, okay, but the ability to survive, that's important. My paper sent us all up for military survival camp, recently. You should try it. You learn good things, useful things - if a gun is loaded, how to deal with political unrest, land mines, stuff like that. I didn't do chemical warfare though. Not this time."

"You seem like you've made it as a journalist. It's really nice to hear all this from someone like you."

"You say, "made it." That depends on how you define made it. I don't have two houses, or a ton of money, so to many people I haven't made it. But I'd rather be out here and seeing this huge world, I'd rather have that then two houses. So it's how you define "made it."

Isn't it always?



She had to go off to class. I followed her and snuck around the school's interior for a bit. Looked lovely. Chatted with a few students who all had glowing things to say. It isn't even that expensive. Maybe I can someday convince a company to pay for it. Yeah, that'll be the day.

I went for a walk since that's what you do in Mussorie. Landour really is a little-known and profoundly interesting UN of sorts. An Indian kid and an American kid from the Woodstock School, wandering up the hill behind me and arguing about video games. Bengali film stars (Hello, Victor Banerjee!).

There were three young guys sitting at the Tip Top Tea Shop, drinking chai and finishing off their lunches. They looked American - something about the plaid shirts - and one way or another, we got to talking.

"We're from Yale, all of us. I'm from Georgia, he's from Vermont, he's from Conneticut."
Turns out one of the guys was the brother of a girl who attended Simon's Rock at the same time I did, the 300 person and very esoteric "early college" in the Berkshires.


The four shops.

There's a tiny fraternity of Americans who travel and go abroad, who are comfortable there. I have stopped being amazed by the network, and by how interconnected we all seem to be. Almost every time I meet an American overseas, they know someone I know or are related to someone I know. In the most far-flung and small places, we share buoyant stories about the personality of So and So, or the time That Girl got wasted at a party and what she did after, or the particular qualities of restaurants and bars we both know and have frequented, and so on and so on. This is comforting, of course, but is also terrifically disconcerting. I think of it in terms of numbers. The USA has over 250 million people. India has over a billion. Why do we find each other? Why are we so interconnected?

The answer, I think, lies in privilege. There are billions of people in the world, but only a vanishingly small number have the means to both receive a fancy education, finish the fancy education, and then find one's self with enough money and free-time to amble off into the wilds for a bona-fide and old school adventure. There are very few of us indeed, and we are the luckiest of the earth. No, I've stopped being shocked by how interconnected we all are. We are part of the same small and terrifically exclusive club, and we only grow aware of this gradually, and with some amount of embarrassment. We cannot pretend we live in a meritocracy. We are beneficiaries of an accident of birth. In the Karmic view, perhaps we were good and just people in our previous lives. But I am no Hindu.


The lovely old church next to the Four Shops.

And what were they doing up here? One of the guys was in fact a relative of Stephen Alter, one of the big-time writers who resides up here, and they were residing at his place. "We're doing fishing outfitting, up here in Uttarkhand. Trout and the local fish. Totally untapped market. Of course, the monsoon isn't helping."

We had a very pleasant chat about nothing in particular. People we mutually knew. Places we'd been. Hipsters. Always, talking about hipsters. There was one brilliant revelation:

"I've always thought...you know, you could really sell these bhidis to hipsters."

"They're cheap, they're foreign, and they taste awful. Hipsters would lap them up."

"Yeah. They cost - what, a penny to make? You could get a shipload to the USA. Sell em' for three bucks a pack."

"You'd be rich."

"Of course, they mostly use child labor to make them. They're really tiny. Need tiny little hands."

"Yeah, I hadn't considered that angle. Well. Kids need jobs too."

"Yeah. You're helping the children!"

They had to shove off down the road, so I sat and got out my sketchbook. Just about lunch time.



I was trying to gain weight for my trek in Sikkim. Something about India seems to make me really skinny. I eat my brains out when I'm here, so not sure that it's *lack* of feeding. Thankfully, the Tip Top Tea Shop offers the perfect remedy in the form of twix bar pancakes. Normally the kind of food stuff this snob with a penchant for healthy eating would turn her nose up. But something about the elevation and the need to pack on a few pounds prior to walking 11 miles a day uphill converted me. I devoured these. This man is a pancake artist. Something about the sweet pancake, the crunchy rims on the side from the frying in butter, the oozing, delectable texture of the Twix bar lurking inside, how the cookie core gets all heated up. (This makes me sound like I am writing a dirty book. As does most food writing.

I ate my pancakes and the proprietors father, who had owned the shop before him (Sheila knows him) came up and politely asked me if I would draw a picture of him. So I did. Drawing is a fabulous icebreaker.

Victor Banerjee, the famous Bengali actor, came down here for his usual cup of tea and looked at me with what appeared to be extreme disapproval. Feel somewhat anointed. (I recall sitting next to him once in the internet cafe here and thinking about what a forceful typist he was. Like me, I admit).

I went up to Landour again the next day.

I walked around the hill again in lieu of anything better to do, and (naturally) I ran into Leon again. He had his video camera and was taping the trails. As always, he was more then happy to chat. I followed him for a while, a bit puppy-like I guess. "Ah, hey! Look over there," he said. He pointed at an old and falling apart house behind a gate, one I'd walked by a few times before and had never taken much notice of.



"Okay, come over here. You can't go inside here, not anymore, but back when I was a boy - this is Peace Cottage. This is where we lived. It was a missionaries retreat for a long time. They'd send the old bird nuns up here to recuperate or go on vacation." The fog was moving in, and we could barely see the white structure beyond. It was diplidated and looked very old. I think the mist and the wet here ages things terribly quickly, and moves quickly when it comes to returning things to the earth, again.

I peered through the gate - which wouldn't open - and thought of the scorpion cup and of the Partition. It was hard to imagine, this little white washed cottage with a mildew problem, living through all of this. But I could try.

"The one thing I want to photograph. Okay. It's a false horizon. It only occurs in two places in the world - here, and somewhere in Switzerland. It's when there's literally a second horizon, and the sun even goes down behind it. I saw it once here, in my junior year. It was like - like God had driven a golden spike into the center of the world. I thought, "Oh my god, someone has to get a photo of this." So that's my mission. Of course, it's nature photography. What do you do? You stake out. And you wait.

"I'll get it someday, I'm certain of it. Because, what does a good nature photographer spend most of his time doing?"

"Waiting," I said.

"That's right. You wait."

We walked for a few minutes more. He pointed out some ferns to me that were going yellow. "That's not good. It means they're going to die soon, and my pictures won't be as good - not like I remembered it. They're dying earlier and earlier these days."


Smoke on th' valley.

We ran into some friends of his - some California boys with Indian family who were studying at the Language School. And so I asked him more about his life. He'd been an accountant before, and then his wife had passed, and then he'd given his house to his son and came here. But, the in-between. He was happy to oblige.

"Well. After I left India, graduated, went to San Jose State for college. I played in a country western band in St. Helena. I taught music for a long time at San Jose state. Then I fell afoul of the administration, so I gave them the one fingered salute, and I went to Montana. I've done a lot of things in my life. I got married. I was a pumpkin, and she was a mouse. I was playing a Halloween party. That's how I met my wife. "

He had mentioned his late wife the first time I had met him. But there hadn't been details.

"We were going to come back here, for a Woodstock School reunion. To see the hills again. Then she got lung cancer, so we put it off for the next year. The year afte that, we wanted to go again, and then she was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. One more year, and she seemed better, and we started planning again. Then, breast cancer. We decided we couldn't plan any trips together, because they caused cancer. She always had a good sense of humor, like that."

"She didn't see the following year."



We turned a corner and there they were, the snows. The sun was just thinking about going down, and the rain had washed away the clouds and the haze. I took as many pictures as I could.

"My parents were missionaries, you know, and so I grew up an atheist in revolt."

(The sun going through the pine-trees. If there be paradise on earth).

I had my epiphany, as I remember. Before then I thought believing in God was a pretty silly thing. Then I'm out here, one night at Woodstock - i'm looking at the mountains, up at the stars, millions upon millions of them. And thinking, "Okay. Someone had to do this."

"Take that as you will."

"I agree," I said. And really meant it. This, the final allure and danger of the Himalaya. That it can turn you from a jaded and constantly irritated skeptic into an agape nature lover. Staring out at the view for days on end and gawping, and making comments about how astounding it all is.

It does make you wonder, why humanity is so specifically programmed. That mountain ranges and marvelous vistas move us on such a primal, elemental state. The mountains, especially. Down in lowland Bengal or in Florida, in the Cambodian river delta or in the Australian desert - wherever there are no mountains, people keep pictures of them on their wall and dream of going someday. Indian Buddhists placed Mt. Meru, the center of the world, in the Himalaya. It is only befitting.

Leon, too. A striking person. Another theme of this trip. Running into people whose spouses have passed, who have encountered an aspect of life I am too young to approach or know. A succession of them, all traveling after the deaths of their spouses, walking with no particular destination and talking to me because I am lucky. The references dropped in conversation are subtle and sad and make one consider the future, far-impending and far off This too myself in forty years or so, maybe, creaking and sleeping on budget-basement beds, thinking always of the person I have left irrevocably and inert behind me. Better then slipping into depression and inertia in a house full of mementos that gradually gather dust and cat piss. Better to go wandering again.

Walking to Landour

We decided to spend the day going up. Upwards to Landour, at least. That's the only real way to get there. Thankfully, Mussorie isn't exactly a big place, and there's just enough sign-posts to keep you on the right track. And what a lovely, atmospheric walk. Sure, it's steep, but there's plenty to see. Small shops selling ornate wooden canes, vegetable sellers, men urging pissed-off donkeys up hills, wave after wave of private school brats in identical uniforms. The mist rolling down the mountain, walking through little pockets of cloud. The wildflowers here look like a kid's drawing: a single hill putting up flowers in red and orange and pink and purple, all the colors you'd want, right below yet another stand of tall and lovely pines. You can stop for chai whenever you get tired. We were talking to each other, too, and things went even faster.



Laura, Eric, and I dawdled for a while at this lovely overlook, down into the valley and Mussorie town proper. Some small girls from the area were hanging out in the shelter with us. Eric's a photographer, and he has an absolutely brilliant method of getting to know people abroad.

He's got a donkey hand puppet. Turns out a donkey hand puppet is a fantastic ice breaker, even with adults. He can even crack a smile from endlessly jaded teenagers, which is no mean feat. And kids, needless to say, find the donkey puppet absolutely hilarious. "I had a white seal puppet for a while, in Africa," Eric told me. "But the African kids were scared of it, they had no idea what a seal was. I figured I'd get a donkey. It's a little more...universal."



A rain storm suddenly burst - not a surprise in the midst of the Weirdest Monsoon Ever - and we dashed to the covered entry-way to one of the hillside homes. A man with an umbrella and head phones took refuge with it. "It's strange weather, isn't it?" he said, and we began conversing. The Eternal Icebreaker, the crappiness of the monsoon.

Leon had moved to Landour with his missionary parents in the 1940's, taking up residence in the Peace Cottage, a gentle stroll from where Sheila and Baldev have their own spread. He attended the Woodstock School in the 40's and 50's, working on a video project. He was trying to map all of Landour's trails, on video, document the area where he spent his childhood and formative years. A video record of his memories. He liked to talk, and if you were williing to let him monologue some, you'd be happy you listened.

"What was life in Landour like, back in the 40s?" I asked. This would have been Sheila's Landour too, after all, her origin point and Leon's alike.

"I spoke Hindustani, for one thing. It's a mix of Hindi and Urdu - this was before partition. I'm having to relearn all my words. But there's one word I still remember. "Scorpion". We had a lot of them in these days, up here. Still do. I found one the other day, and I got my groundskeeper to take care of it. The Hindu word for scorpion - I hadn't said it in years and years - well, it just came out. When you need it. "

"But we had a lot more of them back in the 40's and 50's, a lot more. Less development. Less people. We collected 6 lakh scorpions at our house one year. We'd dump them all in a tin-can. One day, a friend came to see my mother, and she walked into the kitchen. She saw the cup and asked, "What is THAT?"

My mother replied pleasantly, "Oh, that? It's our scorpion cup."

We put the legs of our beds in water, to stop the scorpions from crawling up them at night. It didn't always work. I remember being six years old or so, lying in bed. I wake up and I see a scorpion on the wall, a few feet from my face. I start screaming, "MMOOOOMMMM!"

My father took the scorpion away.


I think they call that right there Ambience.

People who have lived through Partition almost always seem willing to talk about it - the Indian urge to purge, to talk it out, to get it out there. To argue. Living through Partition was terrible but more terrible still would be not-talking about, is what's implied, and By God you're going to listen. And I asked him, "What was the Partition like?"

"Well, we moved here in 1947, when i was six years old. My parents were missionaries. This was back before Landour was a quiet, gentle place - this was during partition. The Muslims and the Hindus were fighting in the streets, and I remember seeing dead bodies on the ground."

It was hard to fathom: this gentle hill station being subject to the same time as savage violence as the rest of India. But history and climate do not produce exceptionalism: people are cruel and easily excitable anywhere.



"You'd hear stories. Conversations overheard. Two Muslims walking down the street somewhere near here. One says to the other, walking by a home: "There's a lot of Hindus hiding in this house. Should we kill them?"

His friend shrugs his shoulders. "Ah, naah. Let's go to the next one." As casual as that.

When we first got here, we didn't leave the house of three months. But I remember - one day, my dad coms to me and he asks, "Well, want to see the fighting?" Of course I did. I came with him to the town. There's nothing more bloodthirsty then an eight year old. Nothing in the world."


This makes it look much more creepy and horrifying-alien-movie like then it actually is up there. I assure you that there are no fog monsters waiting to slurp up your eyeballs out there, or if they are, they are very good at hiding.

The rain was beginning to die down a little, and a couple of locals tentatively restarted their walk up the impossibly steep hill, throwing their backs into it. "I suppose we should be going," Laura said. "We should catch up with our friends for lunch, up at the four shops."

"There's that new restaurant up there. The Roorkee Manor. There's this incredibly wealthy guy, from Woodstock. He made a fortune in iT, and he came back up here. He's a decent guy, but he's kind of misguided. He tried to buy the Four Shops, and he said, "I'll take them off your hands. I'll give you any amount of rupees you want. All but one of the owners refused to sell, of course. He was so pissed off he decided to buy that place up the hill, the Manor, and run them out of business. Everyone says the food is really good, but a lot of us are boycotting. You can't mess with the Four Shop

I made a mental note to avoid the Roorkee. Who doesn't love striking a blow in the face of big-time billionaires with ego problems? And we bid Leon farewell.

We walked up to the Four Shops, or the Char Dukaan. Char Dukaan being, shockingly enough, the Hindi for "four shops." And that's really all it is. All it has been. I've seen photos from the 60's and 70's that show the shops looking approximately the same. They have added an internet cafe with a very wonky internet connection. Other then that? You sit down, order tea and cheese toast or pancakes, and you watch the world go by. I'm a Tip Top Tea Shop partisan myself. One: I like to reward adorable alliterations whenever possible. Two: they have fantastic food and the owner likes to come out and chat with me about minutiae. You can't tell the difference between the tea and the coffee, but that's pretty much the deal in India.

We thought we were going to eat there, but, no. A language school student sitting in the cafe flagged us down. "Hey, you're with that group from Delhi, right?"

Yes, we were. "They're up the hill at the Roorkee," he said. "They told us to wait for you."

"How'd you know it was us?" Laura asked.

"They mentioned boots. Red cowboy boots." What I was wearing, of course. I guess they're a trademark.

Laura, Eric, and I shot each other somewhat embarrassed looks - The Corporate Maw! But we had to meet them anyway.

I was irritated to find that the Roorkee was absolutely lovely. The owner has taken an old Raj-era mansion and transformed it into a smart yet homy little hotel, with lots of wood and exposed stone accents. It wouldn't look entirely out of place in Aspen. The prices, needless to say, aren't in the "budget" range. 100 bucks a night for a hotel room is probably not going to get the Language School crew (except for the professionals) in the door.

The restaurant, as we discovered, was entirely reasonably priced. I was further irritated when the food turned out to be good. Flipping the bird to the specter of capitalism and big-bidnes was proving harder then I'd thought. The menu is a combination of Indian standards and Western food. A good call in this startlingly diverse little hill station. That's thanks to the internationally famous language school, of course.



I had an epiphany in Australia. Not a major one. I just found that I liked mashed potatoes again. Hadn't eaten them in four years, but all of a sudden, manna of the gods. Anyhow, the Roorkee had a pretty good creamy lamb stew with mash. Very mild and very English in execution. Sometimes, what you want on a cold day. The height of Mussorie and the cool temperatures make the human organism interested in eating things like mash and tea and cheese toast, I suppose. Warms the soul. Though nothing warms you up quite like really good chai.




Those are some mighty fine looking lamb chops. Considering the amount of lamb Indians consume, it's surprising how hard it is to find a decent frenched chop in these parts. Not a problem at the Roorkee. I came back to have these chops the next day and was very sad when they were out. They should have gone out and whacked a lamb just for me. Honestly.



They have a bakery on site here. The profusion of breads that comes out when you order soup is truly memorable. And they do western style desserts. A god-send for those with a sweet tooth and an inability to enjoy traditional Indian sweets. Having no interest in most desserts, I didn't partake, but apparently this cheesecake was very serviceable.

Caught in the rain again. And getting darker, too. Four or five of us stood under an awing with some computer delivery boys, who had come all the way from Delhi. Nothing better to do. We talked. And I had a question, since I had everyone cornered and all. "When do you feel you've really lived somewhere? How long does it take?"

"I used to live in Africa," Lauren said, "and I was teaching school there. Every day, these little kids who lived next door would have dinner with me, whether I liked it or not. I just got used to it. And one day, I had dinner, and I'm sitting with my food, and I realize: the kids aren't there. And I kind of miss them! That's when I knew I'd adapted."

Or maybe it's the shipment, she said. Getting that shipment from overseas - your entire life in some boxes - and thinking (as many of the travel inclined do), "How the hell did I get all this stuff? And why do I have it?" And having no answer, but continuing to cart around puffy jackets and take-out menus because they were in the box and you can't bring yourself to throw them away, you might need them sometime. The rain died down some and we walked to the Four Shops to get a taxi - easier then you'd think out here. I sat under the awning and watched the rain go down and the sun go down with it, and wondered how and when I'd define Living There in Phnom Penh. Impossible to say.