RECLAIMING A LOST MUSSOORIE

For a few quiet years, I lived in a cottage in Mussoorie with my three dogs. It was built in 1864 with the typical corrugated tin roof and overhanging eaves, overlooking a pine forest amidst the long breath of a vanished world. It stood within the leafy sanctum of the ITBP complex in the hill station. t was one of the few spaces in the hills where the past still lived unbothered. The windows looked out over the town’s present—traffic snarls winding like centipedes, diesel exhaust darkening the deodar branches, and neo-colonial monstrosities masquerading as hotels. But within those stone walls, time behaved differently.  It is tempting, now, to ask: what if we had left Mussoorie alone? From my window, I watched the madness: a procession of honking cars inching up Mall Road, choking the mountain’s lungs, turning the sky to soot.

Picture it. No new construction permits. No glass-and-steel hotels incongruously climbing up hillfaces. No “hill view” apartments built by erasing the very hills they claim to honour. Instead, a conscious refusal: a decision to preserve the town as a heritage site—India’s own hilltop Petra, frozen not in sand, but in cloud and stone. In this Mussoorie of my dreams, restoration and not reinvention is the only accepted mode of building. A carpenter’s hand, not a cement mixer’s roar, shapes the skyline. The Mall Road is not a carnival of neon signs, cheap jackets, and selfie sticks, but a gentle promenade. At twilight, it glows not with headlights but with the warm flicker of gas lamps, or better still, nothing at all.

The tourists don’t arrive by the thousands. They don’t arrive at all.

What if Mussoorie had been preserved not as a theme park for tourists, but as a sanctuary for memory?

Imagine this.

No concrete hotels strangling the ridgelines. No LED-lit cafés named after continents they have never seen. No love locks on rusted railings. No drone shots of Landour in monsoon mist, followed by a thousand feet marching over fallen deodar cones. This last redoubt of quiet dignity, is now crumbling under its own popularity. What was once the sleepy residence of retired colonels, missionaries, and writers, is now a hashtag. The stories are all true: the selfie crowds at Char Dukan, the queues outside cafés serving American breakfasts to people who forgot they were in India. But in the alternate Mussoorie I envision, Landour holds. The chinars are not photographed; they are lived with. St. Paul’s bells still echo across the ridges, not drowned by Bluetooth speakers. Ruskin Bond walks to the post office without being waylaid by autograph hunters. The air tastes of eucalyptus and ink. There are no Instagram reels here, only long walks. No curated experiences, only discovery. No curated selves, only you.

The winking of cameras would be replaced by the silence of grass growing between flagstones. The only queues would be of cloud-shadow and cowherds on Camel’s Back Road. In this other Mussoorie, the Savoy Hotel still holds its dignity. No Mughal imitation banquet halls. No photo boards showing off badly tailored businessmen and uncouth politicians, Just a pianist playing something soft and English in the ballroom, its notes drifting softly through its long corridors,. You’d hear the creak of leather boots on wooden staircases, the scent of paper in its library, the tea arriving in porcelain with gold filigree. Do you know of the ghost of Lady Garnett-Orme?  She died at the Savoy in 1911 under mysterious circumstances, and her spirit, they say, still moves through the corridors, dragging her poisoned gin and lace parasol. Today, she must be mortified watching as her once-aristocratic haunt hosts garish wedding parties with laser lights and butter chicken. No séance could summon her now. She has fled, perhaps to Landour, or deeper into the mist.  But maybe others remain unseen and unheard. Perhaps retired colonel who still waits for his post from Rawalpindi. A missionary’s wife who reads the Book of Psalms beside the fireplace, unaware her house is now a café with Himalayan quinoa on the menu.  Even the trees are haunted by the absence of those who once sat beneath them, reading Hardy, waiting for telegrams, or merely listening to the wind. The cottages of Charleville and Barlowganj would be homes again, not hotels. Instead of fluorescent signboards, you'd have moss on walls of venerable buildings their facades violated by either government signage of local establishments. Instead of jarring hoardings, jacaranda blooms. And in the evening, when the light thins like gauze, you’d hear, really hear, the call of the whistling thrush, unchallenged by the hum of generators or the guttural warble of a Bluetooth speaker. When I would go for a walk with my canine companions, I often would have to pull them aside to save them from rushinhgmotorcycles or careening cars.

What if a town could exist because it said No?  No to malls, resorts, cable cars, adventure parks, and the gentrified simulation of wilderness. No to development defined by concrete and capital. What if the highest form of respect we could offer Mussoorie was refusal?  Refusal to consume. Refusal to construct. Refusal to forget. In doing so, we might have gifted ourselves something rarer than a holiday: a true encounter with history—unpackaged, unfiltered, unsponsored. 

In the evenings, in that 1864 cottage, I’d often watch the shadows lengthen across the hills, the mist weaving its silent tapestry over lichen-covered rooftops. And I’d think of Mussoorie not as a place, but as a fragile question:  Can beauty survive us?  It could have. It still might. But only if we leave it alone.No new structures. Just careful restoration.  It would be a place one did not visit, but inherited.

Where memory mattered more than money.

Where the past was not a tourist brochure but a vow.

Imagine this Mussoorie: one sealed off from construction permits and tourism packages. A protected heritage zone, like Bruges in Belgium or Rothenburg in Germany. Sure the Mall Road once meant for promenading, shopping, dining,  for white men and woman, and most importantly excluding. Indians were forbidden, except those carrying burdens: rickshaw-pullers, bearers, and the occasional princely exception in brocade. It was apartheid by altitude. But the British are gone, but the architecture of racism remains but not as a present caste hierarchy but as the impersonal elegance of an era that is as much part of our past aa Sher Shah Suri's Grand Trunk Road is. In some towns, the buildings stand elegant but exhausted, like retired civil servants. In others, they’ve been mutilated by neon signage, plastic awnings, and the crushing entropy of mass tourism. Today, the Mall Road is no longer a promenade but a bazaar—clogged with budget tourists, plastic toys, tikki stalls, and selfie-takers. What was once an imperial catwalk is now a carnival of chaos., A place not for everyone but for those who can feel history. No parking lots. No drone footage. No influencers. Just walks. Where dogs walk in safety as the men and women. Rain on tin roofs. Footsteps on gravel. A narrow bed in an old lodge where the only music is the wind creaking the rafters. It would not make money. It would make meaning. It would not trend. It would endure. And in that Mussoorie—untouched by our need to consume and curate, the winds would still speak in Victorian verse, the roads would follow the contour of the mountain’s will, and the cottage from 1864 would not be an exception, but the rule. A town saved not by development, but by denial.By saying no, we might have preserved a kind of Yes.Yes to beauty. Yes to silence. Yes to the long shadow of history falling softly on stone.