mullingar's ghost

At the drop of a drop from a glass, anyone in Landour will tell you a ghost story. The place is full of them. Some spirits are harmless kleptomaniacs, like the bhoot which haunts Mussoorie historian and photographer Ganesh Saili’s house in Mullingar. All it does is steal his wife Abha’s Dunhill cigarettes. There must be an explanation. In 1834, an Irish captain named Frederick Young of Dehradun constructed a shooting lodge in Mussoorie to hunt game. Two years later, the East India Company built a convalescent home in the thickly forested ridge they named Landour. Presumably the cigarette-stealing spook is the ghost of an ill British officer who liked good English tobacco. Any ghost detective worth his planchette would tell you that the soldier must have died after 1907, which was when Alfred Dunhill opened shop in London. Shouldn’t be difficult to locate him if you have the patience to peruse colonial government records for a consumptive officer who stole the nurse’s fags. Or check out the names of dead Englishmen dozing in the timeless calm of the Landour cemetery and co-relate with medical records.

Just saying, you know.

Captain Young is considered the father of Mussoorie, having built Sisters Bazar and the nastiest vertical climb in any hill town the angrez established. Landour is Mussoorie’s Lutyen’s zone where all the Indian sahibs and memsahebs live now, drinking lemonade and afternoon gimlets on green lawns that were carved out generations ago under sleeping deodars and rhododendron bushes, to gossip about how everyone is gossiping about one another. Gossip is the great class divider—the world is divided into people worth gossiping about and people worth ignoring. Which is why every wannabe with a fat pocket wants a piece of Landour and get their kids into Woodstock. Woodstock is a pine cone’s throw away from my cottage and another few meters from the Mullingar crossing.

Captain Young brought potatoes to Mussoorie. He built his house on the butte of a small hill that lords over the incline. He named the area Mullingar after his roots—an eponymous town in Ireland. Though Young did return to Ireland to die at home, they say his ghost haunts the street on moonless nights astride a white charger, but hey, after staggering down the slope to Doma after a few whiskies at my publisher friend Pramod Kapoor’s gracious home, St Asaph’s, it is not a white horse you saw but a Delhi tourist in his white Toyota Fortuner looking for lodging. Ghosts look for people who are lost. Be careful.

The only ghost I’ve spotted in Mullingar so far is a glorious Triumph motorcycle the colour of Salma Hayek’s eyes with extra gold. It is parked inside a motor workshop owned by the well dressed but taciturn Imran. He lets me sit on it, but I know, like him, it isn’t going anywhere. It is a memento of better days he does not wish to share. He tells me that his father bought it from an Englishman sometime in the 1040s. Imranbhai doesn’t drive it, though he hints that he does, which I don't believe because the exhaust is all rusty. But that is what historic towns are—gleaming and attractive to look at until you catch the decay. At night, the bukhari drain pipes in the best renovated house near Char Dukan will groan in the wind like an old Yorkshire drill sergeant reluctant to go gently into the good night, but then can you blame the ghosts for loving Mullingar?That Triumph is a ghost from Imran’s childhood. As a boy he rode pillion with his dad. He watched his mother cling to his father’s waist as it roared down Mullingar street towards Mall Road. As long the Triumph stands in his neat garage that smells of lube, rubber and all such delicious workshop aromas, the ghosts of Landour own the street. They will promenade through the anxious dreams of outsiders who have lost their way.

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