Mussoorie

Here I am, out of the ashram (from where it was more or less impossible to communicate). I will write more about the ashram in a while, but I want to tell you about the last day or two before the impressions disappear from my mind.

There just happened to be a car at the ashram on the day I decided to leave, so I hopped a ride with it - to Mussoorie. Mussoorie, at 2000 meters altitude, is called "the queen of the hill-stations" around here (especially by Mussoorians). Would you belive it, here we are, July-August, at the height of monsoon, and everybody wears some kind of jacket or sweater. My kind of weather.

But first about the road. Driving along the mountain ridge that is part of the foothills of the Himalayas, you get to see scraps of cloud in between the tree-trunks on the mountain-side (when the fog clears up enough to see anything). It looks like bits of cushion-stuffing that got scattered around by the family dog. And, believe it or not, I got to see a rainbow by looking DOWN at it, because it was inside a valley, just under the road.

Arriving in town, nobody knew anything about the hotel I was looking for, or the "world-famous" language school next to it. We finally drove back out of town, straight up the mountain, and found the Dev Dar Woods Hotel, in the middle of a forest, at a slant of about 60 degrees (mountain-side).

The hotel is in a building that evidently belonged to somebody British during the Mandate era, so I found myself stepping out of the car, straight into the 19th century, complete with drawing rooms, sitting rooms and verandas, and a ceiling high enough for a second story to be built right inside. The effect is completed by the fact that everybody else at the hotel (all seven of them) are also studying Hindi at the Landour Language School, so it's a whole parlour scene every meal, straight out of one of Kipling's stories. You just have to ignore the fact that four of them speak Italian most of the time, which doesn't really spoil the British effect, because the manners are still 19th century British.

The climate here is more dripping than pouring - we live in a constant fog, punctuated only by occasional drizzles. This, of course, has it's effect on the forest, and the trees - besides their own foliage and the obligatory vines and creepers - support any number of moss and fungus, so you can see some five, six or more different kinds of leaves on each tree. And I'm not talking about your common garden-variety of moss, that looks like a thin green carpet or a coat of paint on the tree (although we have that as well) - we're talking here about full-blown fungus, with long, broad leaves (longer than the tree's original), or the delicate kind of leaf that is divided and sub-divided into tens and tens of little leaflets, arranged artfully in a pattern bigger than your hand, all growing straight out of the tree-trunk. From my bathroom window, I saw a monkey sitting and peering at me through the hairy trees (you show me yours and I'll show you mine).

The Landour Language School has been located in the Kellogg Memorial Church (services every Sunday 10:00 AM, everyone welcome) since 1905 (the school has evidently been around, located elsewhere, at least 50 years more than that). Lessons are held in various rooms of the church, and my first lesson was in the belfry. You go into the church and climb up the stairs to the balcony, where you can look down at the altar and imagine yourself in one of those movies where the kids drop an egg onto the fat lady from the choir. Then you look around and find another set of a few very steep stairs, and you climb up to where only the bats (and your Hindi teacher) stay. And you join the bats in the belfry (God!! I've always wanted to say that!!) and say Namaste (Shalom in Hindi).

I really and truly am living in a time/space warp here. We get waffles for breakfast, and discuss Ayurvedic rejuvenating treatments that involve shutting the patient up in a room with no direct sunlight for three months. And for the first time since I've been in India, the drain-pipe from my bathroom sink does NOT lead to a hole in the floor!

I'm off to another Hindi lesson now, so I'll write more later.