Stories from Mussoorie

1. The language school

It would seem to me that after a few years, the job of conducting endless drills on grammatical fundamentals (“Translate: ‘He had a green pen.’ Now ‘She had a green pen’. Now ‘they had a green pen’. Now ‘he had a green book’… Now ‘he has a green book’…” You get the idea) would get quite boring, but the teachers at the language school conduct their drills & lessons with enthusiasm & skill. The Landour Language School has been offering formal classes in Hindi out of the Kellogg Memorial Church in Landour for over 100 years. Many of the teachers have been there for 25 or more years, and there is a familial atmosphere. To my knowledge, there are at least 3 married couples on staff, one parent-child combination, and one set of brothers. Everyone is friendly, and seems happy to be there.

Many people have told me that Hindi is an easy language to learn, and in many ways they are correct. The script is entirely phonetic, the grammar is relatively free of exceptions & irregularities, and there are loads of familiar words – English words adopted into Hindi (eg computer, train platform, doctor, ice cream, taxi), Hindi words adopted into English (pajama, jungle), Arabic words adopted similarly by both languages (monsoon), Portuguese words adopted by Hindi, and familiar to me from Spanish (mez for table), and Hindi words in widespread usage in Indian English that I’ve learned on previous trips (daal, roti, barfi, kurta, sari). On the other hand, there is a 53 character script to learn, loads of confusing conjunct characters that combine the 53, several new sounds to make, distinctions between sounds not distinguished in European languages (palatal & dental, aspirated & non-aspirated) which means there are 4 different “t”s and 6 different “d”s, and a grammatical structure that turns the logical order of things we learn in European languages on its head (the verb is always at the end of the sentence, there are postpositions instead of prepositions).

I can’t really speak Hindi after 4 weeks (20 hours/week of tutorials), but I can communicate and understand quite a bit more than I could 4 weeks ago.

The students at the school are a diverse bunch, but all share deep interest in India and a fairly long-term commitment to the country. Given the school’s Christian roots, many of the students are working or volunteering at various Christian-run charities in North India – most are primarily service oriented, but a few seem to have come more with the intention of preaching their gospel. There are also a lot of people starting or running various small businesses – primarily exporting handicrafts & fabrics to the US. There are a couple of young Indian-Americans who grew up with a basic command of the spoken language, but are trying to learn to read & speak with greater grammatical fluency. There is an Australian documentary filmmaker, and an American anthropology PhD student who is translating documents about NGOs that work with sex-workers in Varanasi. Finally, there are other students, like me, working to acquire a basic command of the language – for their masters programs at Johns Hopkins or SOAS in London (the SOAS student already speaks Mandarin and wants to study China-Indian relations – an important topic!), and a dozen undergraduates from Brown who will be enrolling in St. Stephens college, Delhi University, for the fall semester.

There are a couple women in Chardukan who make thalis by prior arrangement for lunch. By coincidence, both women are named Maneesha. Those of us who’ve been here for a while sit in the quiet little shops, eat our Daal, roti, rice, and sabzi, and feel very lucky to be here. Monday and Friday mornings, a cheerful man comes and delivers homemade whole-wheat bread to our guesthouse. We’d probably learn faster if we weren’t in a city which has deep British roots, where English is widely spoken, and if we weren’t hanging out with each other & speaking in English, however it is very nice to have company, and hear others’ stories.

2. The wedding of the daughter of the cook and the chowkidar

The eldest daughter of the cook at one of the other guesthouses that accommodates language school students got married last week. The cook’s husband works as a chowkidar – a guard – and so we have to presume that the couple doesn’t make a whole lot of money, but the elaborate wedding went on for days, with festivities apparently drawing hundreds and hundreds of people. I heard the music late in the night. Rumor has it that the cook’s employer had given her money to educate and marry all three of her daughters – but all of that money has been spent on the eldest daughter’s wedding – along with a hefty loan. There are rumored to be families here who can never earn enough money to pay even the interest on the money they borrowed for their daughter’s wedding. One curious aspect of the dowry system here in Northwest India is that it persists (and is in fact growing, in spite of it being illegal, as is the preference for having sons) in spite of a well-documented scarcity of women. In many parts of NW India there may be as few as 4 women for 5 men (for more on this, read this old article by Amartya Sen. The cook’s daughter is marrying a soldier – definitely a man of higher status – in a love marriage – and it may be that they felt pressured into the exorbitant expenditure. We can only wonder what will happen with the 2 younger daughters’ education or weddings.

3. Squatter’s deeds & lawsuits.

There is a very friendly Sikh family whose two sons run an internet café in town and live in a beautiful house in Landour. I wondered how running an internet café could get you enough money to buy a beautiful house in a place where most land is owned by corporate CEOs or famous actors. I heard this explanation from another student who had been renting a room from them before he was kicked out, as we shall see. I doubt that he has the full story, but it is an interesting illustration of what life can be like here.

Apparently, many years ago, the internet café family noticed that a house in Landour was no longer occupied. It was owned by a couple, and when the man died, the woman had stayed in the UK and stopped coming to Mussoorie. The internet café family filed a petition in court for squatter’s rights – apparently there is a provision in Indian law stating that abandoned property can be occupied by people in need of housing. The court case dragged on for years. Apparently the main opposition came not from the woman who lived in the UK, but from her neighbors, including the business family that owns the nearby store (famous for its diversity of imported food, serving the foreigner & wealthy clientele in Landour) and several hotels and boarding houses (famous for their dilapidated state – apparently the family does not believe in investing heavily in maintenance, but since they own most of the hotel space on the hilltop, they still get plenty of business). The neighbors were happy to see the land used, but thought that they, not the internet café people (who anyway owned a place in town already) should get the rights to use the property.

The court battle dragged on for years, but eventually the internet people won the case, and received an exclusive “squatters deed,” enabling them, and only them, to squat on the house. The deed restricts them from doing any construction, or from profiting from the property – by farming, renting rooms, opening a store, etc. The result is they now live in a beautiful house, with a view of the high Himalaya, and some very annoyed neighbors who complained when they started leasing out rooms to language school students, and made them cease the practice. One rumor is that the long-term plan may be to forge a deed, then wait for 30 years, until everyone forgets the court case, and then assert full ownership of the place. Neighbors tend to have long memories, and this place has a very small town feel, so I don’t know if this strategy is likely to be successful.

The other way to get property here is to be lucky, like my landlord. He grew up in the plains, where his father was a Sanskrit professor, but they were from the hills, and he always used to come to Mussoorie, even teaching here at the college for several years before going to Europe to earn his PhD in English literature. Later he taught for many years at a university in Ethiopia, where he met his wife, but he would always return to Mussoorie for the summer. Eventually he started looking for a property to buy, and found this piece in Landour, which he bought in 1980, just before, in his words, the area was discovered by the “Delhi Mafia,” and land prices went through the roof. He could never afford a property like this now – but he has done an amazing job of developing it, building gardens, and cottages to rent to language students, a major source of retirement income.

Not all is safe and easy in his retirement, however. The military, which owns most of the surrounding land, has been trying to take the property from him. I don’t know the details of the case, but it has dragged on for 25 years. The Supreme Court in Delhi is scheduled to make a final judgment in mid July this year, and then we will know if this elderly professor can stay in his mountain paradise, or will have to move somewhere else (and where else could he go? His children live in Australia now, and he talks of returning to his remote ancestral village, but one doubts that his wife would want to live in a remote village, nor whether an old man would choose to live so far away from medical care.) I for one hope that the Professor gets to keep his garden – I see & understand the happiness it brings him to watch his plants grow, even if most of the heavy work must now be done by his gardener, who earns a salary of rs. 6000 per month, about $130, for working almost every day, including Sundays, from 8-6 pm.

4. Hard lives on terraces

On the weekend I like to take long walks. Living on a Himalayan hilltop, everything (even the fruit stand) is a steep walk downhill. When I first got here I walked on the roads into and out of town, but I noticed that there were pack mules and porters, laden primarily with milk jugs or dry goods. I concluded that there must be trails down into the villages on the lower hills, and I soon had directions. Several trails lead down the mountain – and a walk of about an hour, most of which is steep switchbacks, leads down to the beginning of the villages, which extend down as far as the bottom of the nearby river valley, which I haven’t reached yet – it is probably 3 hours of downhill walking – where I can see irrigated fields. The fields I see, however, are rainfed terraces, carved into steep hillsides. A few villages have concrete irrigation ditches, but either these are unmaintained, or there is simply not enough water for them to be useful at the end of the dry season (there is, however, enough water for us rich folks on the mountain top – I found the pumping station at the bottom of a steep valley, which took me an hour and a half to hike out of (past three supplemental pumping stations). As the pre-monsoon rains have come, the farmers have planted their fields, and so while my first hikes I mostly saw dry stubble, I now see maize, beans, some smaller grains, peppers, and a large leafed tuber crop that might be taro or a related crop. There are scattered fruit trees – small pears, some of which may be wild, and a few plum trees. I also see apricots, peaches, and starting this last week, small apples, in the markets, but have not seen them in the villages. Walnuts are common - apparently the Himalayan walnut’s shell is thin enough to be crushed between the fingers.

The people in the villages are friendly, if a little prone to staring at the strange pale-skinned foreigner with a broad-brimmed hat (no one in India seems to wear sun hats…), but my Hindi is still poor enough that I can’t ask them the questions I would like to ask – what crop is this? How does it grow? Where do you find firewood & fodder for your cows? How does the water supply work? How long have you lived in this house? Where did you find the timber, the clay, and the slate it is made of? How is it built? Have members of your family left the village seeking work? Where do they go? How, in these remote villages, does it happen that a few families are building modern concrete homes, complete with satellite dishes on the roof? Do you like your life here?

While walking through a village last Saturday afternoon, a man wearing a well worn “I love NY” t-shirt hollered hello to me in English. I came over, and he invited me to share chai with him, again in English. I followed him up the steep path to his home – a typical low mud house with a slate roof. A couple very healthy buffaloes & cows, and two mules were tethered in the front yard, a puppy lay chained in the shade, and several children ran around. He sat down to make some tea, and told me his story.

This was his father’s house, where he was born. They were poor, and after he completed the 8th grade, his parents could not afford to keep him in school. This was 1993, and he decided to see if he could make his way on his own. He left the village, and eventually made his way to Delhi, where he must have found whatever work he could to start with. He learned driving, and worked as a driver, and then learned English & computers, eventually obtaining some kind of computer degree from NIIT. Now he had a job as a quality controller in an export company. Earlier he had done this work for a European clothing manufacturer, but now he works for a company that exports coffins to the US. He earns rs. 20,000 ($450) per month at this job – 4 times what he could earn as a skilled laborer in Mussoorie – and lives in govt. subsidized housing in a nice part of South Delhi. He dislikes the heat, dust and crowds of Delhi, but he doesn’t know how he could find similarly remunerative work closer to home. And after nearly 20 years away from his village, living in the big city, it is not clear how much home these hills are to him – he could not remember the names of some of the crops his family was growing, and he complained about how difficult it was for a city resident like him to hike in these steep, high altitude hills.

He was home on a holiday, but he was supposed to have returned to Delhi. Instead, he had gone to Mussoorie – a 2 hour hike – to get medicine for his father, who lay near the little wood fireplace where he was preparing the tea, coughing horrible body wracking chest coughs. His father’s face was sunken and it looked like it was difficult for him to move. The hope was that the medicine would help him enough that he could walk to the hospital on his own. The son told me that in his 55 years, his father had never seen a train or an airplane – had never been farther from his village than Mussoorie, a few hours hike away. I’m no doctor, but the not-so-old, but very weak looking man did not look very good. I have no doubt, however, that with access to proper medical care, his health would be quite different.

Life in these villages, my new friend told me, was very difficult. Of course it is beautiful, and there are none of Delhi’s crowds and filth and heat. But there are no services or facilities – beyond a grade school – except in Mussoorie, a long and tiring walk away. Children after 5th grade walk there for school. There is no medical care, water supplies are erratic, electricity is weak. The land is steep and rocky – hardly suitable for growing anything – and crops are dependent on erratic rainfall. I can see, from the people I’ve met there, that aging comes quickly, that teeth are lost. Seeing this through the eyes of my Delhiite friend, I see that these villages would not be the most wonderful place. It is strange, and I think deeply ironic, that these people live an hour’s walk from some of India’s most valuable real estate, in Landour, and the vacation homes of some of its wealthiest people, yet seem to get little benefit from their neighbors’ wealth.

I can’t assume that there aren’t people in the village who are happy to live in a spectacularly beautiful place, to follow the traditions of their family, to work hard physically for part of the day, and to sit and relax at other times. I see people carrying big milk jugs up the mountain with tump lines on their foreheads, but I also see people sitting by the trailside, chatting and in no rush. My view of the village comes only from the man who left, seeking other opportunities, and learned to speak my language, and from my own ignorant prejudices. To me living in a place with such impaired access to services, and in a home possessing so few material goods, would seem incredibly difficult, and I'm an American who grew up in a way that taught me to be comfortable without many of the normal amenities of American life. On the other hand the view is uplifting. Is this meaningless to people who live a fragile life, close to subsistence? Or do they, like me, appreciate the value of the things that they do have? Once I've learned more Hindi, I hope to at least be able to ask these questions.