My Imaginary Life 1

This is a picture of the town I grew up in. I didn't take it, all my pictures are B/W. It's pretty much the view from my front yard looking west. What you can see is Mussoorie stretching west along the top of the ridge draped like a blanket on a cloths line. I actually lived in a sort of suburb called Landour which ran east from the cluster of houses just above to the red roofed white building on the right side of the picture. Landour was the foreign missionary community and Woodstock School.

From Jabber Khat at the east end to Cloud End in the west Mussoorie is about 12 miles long and a quarter mile wide. Almost all of the town is on the south slope, the north side get very little sun most of the year and the full force of the cold dry winter monsoon blowing out of the Tibetan plateau. Horizontal roads and foot paths run from end to end in fairly level lines like like contours on a map. Zigzags connect the horizontals vertically.

All the houses have names. The house I lived in for most of my childhood was called Zigzag. The story is that the British officer that built the house also built the first vertical path from the top of the ridge down passed Zigzag to Tehri road. Tehri road runs west from Mussoorie along the ridge for 30 or 40 miles until it connects with the road the connects the Doon valley on the south side up and over the ridge and down again to Tehri city on the north side where the Maharaja of Tehri-Gahrwahl lived. (Google Tehri, Mussoorie, Landour, and Woodstock School. )

Zigzag was originally a summer hunting lodge, four big rooms with 16 foot ceilings surrounded with a wide veranda. Later the veranda was walled in making a number of small rooms when Zigzag was turned into permanent housing.

An interesting place to grow up. I turned 3 on a tramp steamer called the City of Bristol on our first trip out. I like to say it was in the Suez canal but I don't know exactly where the ship was. I was 20 when I left India for the final time. I had my 21st birthday in London. I don't think I'll ever go back.

I intend to tell a number of tales in this blog but, when asked what my life was like, after 30 years the best answer still is " kind of a cross between Leave It To Beaver and Lord Of The Flies."