Becoming guests in our own home, Shimla

Shimla, fortunately, still has some delightfully eccentric souls. For better or worse, they have colourful characters and garnish the town with their harmless, and often useful, foibles. There is one wonderfully obstinate soul who is deeply distressed by the number of VIP vehicles that shuttle bored wives to kitty parties, and ferry privileged staff for grocery shopping to the Mall. “They might as well cut every tree and demolish every remaining heritage structure and make a parking lot,” he grumbles. In benevolent stubbornness, he does not move when VIP cars come blasting their horns. He has found a way out. He pretends to be deaf.

Another gentleman seemed to be able to sniff out tourists who did not use Google Maps and were in search of directions. Those whose presence, he felt, was sullying the town, were pointed the wrong way. With his able assistance, people who wanted to go to the railway station arrived at the bus stand. “Now they will go back and tell their friends not to come to Shimla and I will have achieved my goal of keeping away tourists like these,” was his take. The ones that he approved, however, found correct directions. He would chat them up. He would let them buy him coffee. Or more. Occasionally, he would get carried away and go to a friend who had a photo studio on the Mall and ask for his picture to be taken with them. As he never paid for the pictures and never came to collect a print, my friend would click away and then delete the file.

On the subject of tourists and photographs in the hills — and given our national obsession with the West — almost on a daily basis, one sees some of our Indian brethren sliding up to someone with white skin with the opening line: “Which country are you from?” This happened recently to a fair-skinned desi friend who replied in shuddh Hindi, much to the disappointment of the would-be questioner. But for the real thing, that opening gambit done, the next move is to try and get a ‘selfie’. Any age, any gender may suffice. Of course, there are preferences, but let me not broach that topic for the moment.

Needless to say, all sorts of people want to come to Shimla. As recently re-reported, even the terrorist Amir Hamza of the Lashkar-e-Taiba said in 1999: “Through the jihad waged by mujahideen people of Pakistan, and particularly those from Lahore, (we) would soon be able to (visit and enjoy) the real Chamba and Shimla.”

Most of Shimla’s elegant old estates have long gone. One, like many others, due to various reasons had to be parcelled off and sold in plots by its owners. All the plots now have big high-rises and almost every one of those buildings is a hotel. Locals refer to this as the wholesale mandi of tourists who come from all parts of our country and overseas. It is ‘season time’ now and as one of the hoteliers remarked: “When it is season time, then we use the jhatka method on their wallets. In off-season, it is halal, slow and steady.”

For many of us, to whom Shimla is home, we have an ambivalent attitude towards tourists. In the past, while it had its fair share of visitors, this was never a tourist town. The critical marker was the way civic amenities were geared. These catered to the local population and only then, if required — which was rarely — to tourists. This was a place where ordinary people with ordinary lives lived, and lived quite happily. It was a place where nothing could go wrong. How wrong we were. As we watched, sitting like flies on the wall, unnoticed, unheard and perhaps unwanted, we seem to have become guests in our own home.

A brash, if not brave, new world has overtaken our lives and swamped the town. The middle class is moving further and further away from the heart of town. They go to greater distances to live and shop. Economics has pushed them out from the increasingly expensive heart of Shimla. As in other parts of Himachal, there often is a locals versus tourists conflict. Much of this has to do with the behaviour and the rubbish (of different sorts) that is brought in. If there are any followers of the brilliant Nek Chand reading this, may I request them to create a new ‘selfie point’? This could be a pile of rubbish with the slogan: ‘My contribution to the Himalaya’.

But perhaps all is not lost. One has just witnessed a heartening sight. A middle class family of parents and three children were examining and animatedly discussing the plants growing on a stone retaining wall — the common dock leaf (our very own ‘jungli palak’), fleabane, assorted sedum and tiny pelargoniums. These were the perfect ‘aspirational tourists’. People who appreciate what the hills have to offer. People who have planned and budgeted and come to make the most of their time and the place. This family must have spent around 20 minutes taking delight in a wall that hundreds walk by, unseeing, every single day.

— The writer is an author based in Shimla