I met Shimla after penetrating darkness, and clouds that I mistook for fog, in a Himachal state transport bus. It seemed like yet another two horse town with pandering hotel touts and alarmingly only vegetarian momos.
That night poured its guts out to wash into a morning where the veil of clouds lifted to reveal a façade of human greed for habitation thrown like acid on a mountain's face. The British apparently built a summer capital called Shimla to grow up to a healthy twenty-five odd thousand as population in its middle age. Fast food and obesity was not a rage then. Now, the main city of Shimla crams in more than, a reported, 2.5 lakhs and then tops it up with a teeming infestation of tourists during 'season'. Sweet!
The population obesity muffin tops and spills over the mountainsides to places like 'New Shimla' and other inevitable additions. From a distance, my first morning in Shimla, smelt crisp and clean as a sun dried bedsheet after the Mumbai air. Then, Shimla 2.0 showed up like a scab on bruised mountainsides.
Imagine a seven layered wedding cake--with the layers kept up on tooth picks. That, is a building perched in 'new' Shimla. A night of torrential mountain rain gave way to a morning of soil gouged mountains. The inhabitants of my guest house excited thronged the balcony to speculate whether the alarmingly tilting building on the mountainside would topple and exterminate the inhabitants. The inhabitants of the afflicted construct in turn all gathered together, and unlike rational mortals, craned over the tilting edge to peer at the underside of their building. Underside? No really! Somebody wanted to build some more. So, the vegetation and pine trees holding the mountain surface around (translated to 'below' in mountain parlance) the building was cleared. The rain thought "Whee!" and pissed down and washed the soil away. Tada! Precarious building.
An army of people were clambering around in the disintegrating soil shovelling the draining soil one shovel at a time while others were draping livid blue tarpauline in fervent hope of denying the rain gods glee.
Ask someone and the response comes pat... Shimla has Mall Road. And assorted temples. A very sharp transition from British architecture to concrete invocations to a pantheon of gods and goddesses atop mountains. The local patois pronounces Mall Road as Maal Road. The ironic realization hit me when I first paid a tenner to ride an elevator to the roughly kilometre long stretch that sells and displays 'maal' of every hue colour and description in rows of shops. The trade then cascades down to Lakkar Bazar and Lower Bazaar that makes the cynosure of trading in the city.
Shimla is a prime example of an opportunity lost for telling a story. The railway station lists the 'points of interest with a distance next to it like a take-away menu card has prices sans descriptions. I asked the gentleman at the Mall Road tourist office why the Scandal Point is called so and received repeated directions to it and exhortations to read the plaque there.
Yet, Shimla discovered on foot and experienced in contemplations the version I will recall.
The Clouds...
Stay long enough and the clouds you seen in the distance will come sniffing at you like a dog sniffing you awake on a cold morning. The warm sunshine snuffed for a while, the clouds will envelope you in a dampish cold steamish embrace... Once done sniffing, they will move away or even aerosol you a little before losing interest in you and moving away. The clouds make some of the most surreal lightscapes I have seen outside of an aircraft flying thousands of feet aloft. Travelling between Solan and Shimla, the sunsets are breathtaking with the clouds swirling around an orange orb. Edward Munch made ice cream in the sky with a swirling cloud strokes that swirled a palette from orange and magenta to lilac, purple, and mid night blue to bring in the evening. The clouds play peek-a-boo with our solar lantern and glow edge of the hills to fire with a brooding grey on top. Then night comes, the cloud curtain draws back to show the sky ablaze with a billion stars on an inky blue-black night.
The Flora and the rocks...
It is in the space between habitation that Himachal comes into its own. I experienced Himachal in a cusp of seasons as the rains furied, then abated leaving behind soft sunshine before the roll on to winter starts. Left alone, the conifers tower on either side of the black tarmac ribbon. The deodars reach out to the skies and make the sunshine glimmer in your eye. The creepers cascade down the boughs of the tallest trees like a cataract frozen as leaves. The cheel sprouts a livid young bottle brush green covering the mountainside. The sunshine spurts out in fingers of god through a cloud filigree to paint the rolling green landscape in light and shade.
Little wild flowers sparkle pink, orange, red, yellow, lilac, indigo, and white like stars on earth through the fern fronds, grass, and green carpet shivering in the mountain breeze.
