Curiouser

I am city-bred. My lullabies are a variety of vehicle sounds and distant construction noises, made faint only by the apartment's eighth floor perch. So when I was woken up by silence, it made for an unforgettable experience. In Landour, I could hear myself breathe.


This was my first trip to the hills. It all began when a friend asked me to help shoot a documentary in Landour - home to Ruskin Bond, an author whose writing I love. The prospect of roaming the land of his stories thrilled me. Resting in the lap of the Lesser Himalayas in India, Landour was a quaint town of Uttarakhand. Here, objects and nature seemed to be characters in a drama. Most baffling of the lot was a street lamp which flickered only when we walked past it.

March here was cold for us people from the plains. The deodars would not let winds pass without chatting up. Their banter sounded like rugs falling out of cupboards. We dressed in six layers of clothes, giving an impression of balls rolling downhill when we walked. Above us, thick clouds languidly moved past like reluctant school kids on a Monday morning. Everything beautiful happened silently, I surmised. The sky soon gave us a welcome gift with the coloured bands of the Winter Line. A rare phenomenon, which we were told, happens only in Landour and Switzerland.

One of the days, we decided to take the Panther Path. We named it so because of the 'Beware of Panthers' signs all around. We learnt from the locals that they were placed to keep trespassers away from the private cottages. We saw clouds slipping from the sky and down the slopes, swiveling to a music that mortals could not hear. The horizon soon cleared and proudly displayed the Himalayan peaks! The sight of these chunks of stately ice made us laud ourselves for taking the road less traveled.

On our last day there, we met Ruskin Bond in a bookshop downhill. We gushed and stared at our autographed books while panting and puffing uphill. The mist had smudged the lights as they spilled smokily out of streetlamps. Our rogue streetlamp stood there waiting. I deduced that the pressure, when people walked past, contributed to the flickering. We stood by to watch two men walk past the same lamp. Nothing happened. We breathed relief and strutted towards it with new-found confidence. The light dimmed and went out, throwing a patch of confused darkness on us as we fled.