Reflections
Horror in the hills
RANJIT LAL
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Up in the hills, be prepared for a few surprises.
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ILLUSTRATION: SURENDRA
WHAT'S the one thing you must pray most fervently for when setting out for a holiday in the hills? That you won't be driven off the road into a 1,000 ft. gorge by a rabid truck or bus or Sumo driver? That it won't rain buckets right from the moment you check into your hotel till the moment you check out? That giant, hairy spiders won't charge at you in the bathroom while you are naked and vulnerable and cold? That the TV in your hotel room has at least 125 channels you can surf from dawn to dusk?
Pray hard
No. The one thing you must pray for — even if you know full well your prayer will not be answered — is that you get decent, ordinary people staying in the rooms adjoining yours. Now of course, most people would indignantly claim that they are decent and ordinary; the trouble is that when they go off to the hills for a holiday something terrible seems to happen to them. Like there were these three, perfectly decent, ordinary — they would claim no doubt — families staying in the rooms next to us in Kasauli this year. They never talked to each other, they shouted and bellowed. It didn't matter when — it could be the middle of the afternoon or middle of the night. Like the mad mewling great barbets, they had to let the whole of the district know that they were in residence and mattered (even if only to themselves) and to be counted. They tried to prove to the monkeys bouncing on the hotel roof that they really had evolved (very recently albeit) from them, but got a little intimidated when the monkeys obviously put it to them that the reverse had really happened. Their method of garbage disposal was simple: just toss the stuff — nappies, plastic bottles and empty packets of chips — over the garden hedge on to the hillside below. The men didn't walk, they strutted and swaggered and yes, sashayed like drunken gunslingers, swinging their shoulders chimpanzee style, no offence to the apes. They clearly believed that they were the centre of the universe. And you could see that their three little girls — who could have been three sweet little girls — were developing into horrific replicas of their parents, and whom you were itching to smack. They screeched and screamed and tore about the place till well after midnight and you had to remind yourself fiercely that it was not their fault.
We watched, with hopes rising as they finally began packing, shouting out plans for their next holiday and throwing more garbage over the hedge. At last they departed, and one of the women, who seemed to notice perhaps for the first time that there were other people present too, laughingly acknowledged that they had made a lot of halla and maybe we would be glad to see them go (she got that dead right). The quiet that descended after they had gone was unbelievable.
But again, the tension was rising. I knew from bitter experience that one lot of loudmouths was usually replaced by another, usually louder. For a couple of days, the rooms next door remained blissfully empty and quiet. And then another family appeared — parents and two grown children. To our great relief they kept their voices down and smiled and nodded at us politely. Was this a miracle or what! Had I been overly harsh and hasty in judging holidaying families? We went off for a walk and returned to find that our new quiet neighbours had swiped the easy chairs outside our rooms and were now ensconced comfortably in them, playing cards. Politely we retrieved them and suggested that if they needed more chairs they approach the management. We went off for a meal and returned to find the chairs had been swiped again. We called the management, and they swiped our chairs back for us. It reached such a ridiculous state that we just had to go into our rooms for five minutes and our chairs would be brazenly swiped. Ultimately we found ourselves standing outside our rooms in the verandah like a herd of cows, completely chairless. This time the management brought down two more chairs and swiped two. While obviously it was stupid that the hotel couldn't provide enough chairs for its guests, what was equally astounding was the sheer brazenness with which our polite neighbours took them away, as if they had personally brought them all the way up from Delhi, from their house. I really can't decide which lot were ruder — the loudmouths or chair swipers.
Mysterious transformation
But really what is it that makes us behave like this when on holiday? Is it some deep down inferiority complex or feeling of insecurity? If we don't shout at 90 decibels, people won't hear us, and if they don't hear us, we do not exist, so to make sure that everyone knows that we are around and have made it big and can afford this hotel and holiday, SHOUT! The clichéd American tourist had a reputation of talking loudly and cracking politically incorrect jokes at hallowed tourist sites around the world — and that, it was said, was in order to cover up the fact that they didn't have much of a history or culture of their own. But us? We've got 5,000 years or more of history and culture oozes out of every corner of the country and the pore of every patriotic soul. What excuse do we have to behave so boorishly?
Or do we need an excuse at all?
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