The Blue
Hills Where
the Sun
Never Sets
story by HUGH GANTZER
translated by KHUSHWANT SINGH
The range starts far to the north and comes sweeping down India’s western edge, leaving a narrow fertile coastal belt where legendary princes welcomed traders, fought invaders who, in turn, became princes themselves. To this rich belt came the Arabs and the Chinese, the Dutch and the Portuguese. And finally, the John Company of Britain: history’s only body of commercial men who carved out an empire and ruled it for a century as their personal property. They traded in jute and spices, timber, ivory and, here, in tea. The Scotsmen – some from the Highlands with a swagger and a skirl of pipes, others from the low lands with Presbyterian determination, black cloth and account books – came and settled in the High Ranges of the Blue Hills… the Nilgiris… and they put the place in order. And when a Scotsman puts a place in order – that is the way it stays.
The tea estates still have a very manicured look: whole hillsides covered in neatly clipped tea bushes with their long lines of pluckers snipping the proverbial two-leaves-and-a-bud (and a little bit more nowadays because America is a big market and appearance does not matter much in a tea bag).
Our road snake-coiled up the mountains and the air had a nip in it because we had left the 5,000-ft line down below and were still climbing. The dusty deciduous trees of the plains gave way to shiny evergreens, but now even they were left behind and the tall trunks of conifers rose round us and the air was sharp with the tang of resin. For a while, we had caught glimpses of the tiny mountain train chugging away and then we had lost sight of it again, but now it had come into its own and was puffing clouds of indignant steam as we waited respectfully for it to pass across the road.
And when the steam cleared, we saw Coonoor, red roofs stapled on the blueing hills, and we stepped back into another time…
Coonoor is a tea town or, rather, it was a tea town till 1947, when the old Indian Army split into two and the Indian half went searching for a new Staff College to replace the old one left behind in Pakistan. They found it in the coniferous hills between Coonoor and the summer capital of the old Madras Presidency, Ootacamund. From then on, Coonoor became a Services town. Hundreds of keen young officers (and the terribly smart military wives) troop into Wellington and Coonoor every year and, though the names on the gateposts change, the accents alter only slightly, the manners not at all: the young men sport very bristly moustaches, their wives have brittle coffee parties in their bay-windowed cottages or, more daringly, join SCADS for a sly amateur dramatic dig at the local brass. And then there’s golf of an afternoon or, if the spirit has really got into your blood, fishing in the excellent trout waters deep in the mountains.
Or then, again, you can ride to hounds if you would care to resurrect the Ooty Hunt. We were a bit puzzled at first when we saw the number of hunting prints displayed in the Staff College: each with the name of its donor carefully inscribed. We thought that a General had, in a moment of rashness, donated the first one and his junior officers had loyally followed their leader. We later learnt that, while this was partially true, it was also a fact that there used to be thriving hunt tally-ho-ing over the downs. One of the last Masters of the Hunt was a Neptune-like naval officer from the Staff College who found nothing more delightful than donning his flaming jacket and tooting his horn as his beard fluttered in the early morning breezes of the Nilgiris.
And if that is not enough to establish the atmosphere, they have even laid out a croquet court for the Staff College children. Flamingos, we presume, are provided by the Queen.
The spirit of the Cheshire Cat was smiling insanely at us the next evening when Colleen and I met a very new-generation English couple: he, granny glasses, shoulder-length hair; she, close-cropped, black eyeliner, an expression of great weariness; both in baggy sweaters and leather belted jeans. We stood in the centre of a cocktail party and spoke of transcendental meditation, yoga and the efficacy of vegetarianism. They were, they told us, in search of peace. We asked them, politely, if they had found it in Coonoor.
He stared into the middle horizon and she looked around languidly. The polished teak table gleamed with English silver and a white-liveried bearer wound his way through the chattering crowd. A very feminine girl, with lustrous black hair, undulated past, trailing a cloud of Intimate. A burly young officer, wearing a regimental tie, guffawed loudly. Someone began to play the piano. The English girl’s tired eyes returned to me. She sniffed slightly and drawled: ‘Not peace. We haven’t found peace.’ She sniffed again and her husband smiled wanly. ‘But we have found history,’ she added. ‘Empire history.’ I might have been mistaken but there seemed to be a hint of wistfulness in her voice.
Not that the chaiwallahs are far behind. Most of the young men who ‘go into tea’ are products of India’s public schools, and what the schools leave undone the companies complete. Down in the valley, at one end of the golf course, we danced on the wooden floors of the old Wellington Gymkhana. Mounted trophies of the hunt glared, glassy-eyed, down from the walls, and near the little bar was an Honours List of the Regiments that had manned the garrison.
The secretary of the club is a retired Indian Army Brigadier, sabre straight, carnation in his buttonhole and no damned nonsense tolerated. Things don’t quite seem the same in the club as they are outside it. We were having chhota pegs with a young chaiwallah with a very Indian name, when someone brought a letter for his signature. He looked at it and then went cold with rage. ‘How many times do I have to tell you,’ he said, in a very proper accent, ‘that gentlemen are always addressed as “Esq.”, never, never, never as “Mr”?’ So compelling was the atmosphere of the club that we felt angry along with him, quite forgetting that Esquires and Misters had formally gone with the Raj twenty-seven long years ago…
By Saturday, when we were driving into Ooty, I found myself referring to Colleen as ‘old girl’ – a term I hadn’t used for over two decades. It seemed to be appropriate in that hamlet with its undulating roads, bright gardens, velvet lawns and sudden glimpses of red brick and Tudor houses set amidst stands of tall conifers. We stopped at the village square… or what would have been the village square in another time and another land… and went through a little gate into a garden wild with British flowers, fronting a cottage as English as Victorian embroidery. Mrs Carter, whitehaired, brisk, very informative, has lived in the Nilgiris for years. She makes the most sought-after cheeses in the South – possibly in all India – and, in certain tea circles, no formal dinner is quite formal enough unless one follows it with Carter’s cheese.
Mrs Carter is not the only Briton in the Nilgiris but most of them live out in the estates, managing properties as large as European principalities. Once a year, however, they all congregate for the wild UPASI week: seven days of parties and a general free-for-all hosted by the United Planters’ Association of South India. All tea trading in the Cochin auction stops and the up-and-coming young men in the brokerage firms make it a point of pilgrimage to be there and show the senior chaiwallahs that they have what it takes. During the UPASI week, Coonoor and Ooty become more Empire than one of Flashman’s more vivid memoirs.
Our friend was manager of an estate, though he wasn’t British…at least not technically so… and we were sitting out on the lawns of his bungalow on our last day in the Nilgiris, watching the twilight touch the distant hills when the conversation turned to the UPASI week. Our host had a tweed jacket, grey bags, a clipped moustache and an even more clipped accent.
‘UPASI’s not what it used to be, ol’ boy. Not a patch.’ He puffed on his pipe reflectively. ‘Can’t be, of course. Times change. Pity.’ The briar glowed again. ‘Wonder if Charlie Brown’ll be there. God’s own Charlie Brown. Brick. Absolute brick.’ And then he looked across at me and barked: ‘Sundowner?’ I nodded and looked at the setting sun. I heard him clap his hands and yell: ‘Koi hai!’
In spite of the hour, there are some places where the sun never sets.
