The road we’re on is a four-lane intercity highway, yet it’s also a country road with farm vehicles, and indeed farm animals, crossing it whenever they feel like it.
At any given time we’re sharing the NH-1 with cars, trucks, battered Tata buses (driven like the wind), auto-rickshaws, pedal rickshaws, scooters, horse-drawn carts, buffalo-drawn carts, tractors, dogs, bicycles, motorbikes, pedestrians and unattended cows, sheep and goats.
A roadside billboard cheers me up. ‘Youghal and Sons. Where Fashion Ends.’
We take a short cut off the main road along an avenue of eucalyptus trees, which leads promisingly quietly through a green and pleasant countryside of rice and barley fields dotted with elegant white cattle egrets. Quite out of the blue we’re brought to a halt by a traffic jam ahead of us. I ask my driver what’s going on and he shakes his head in exasperation. It’s a police check.
When we finally pull up alongside the policeman he swaggers slowly over to our driver. He looks like the corrupt cop out of central casting. Overweight, ponderous and self-important. He sniffs loudly as he examines our driver’s papers, but when he sees us in the back he becomes a little more animated. After a couple more questions he hands the papers back and waves us quickly on.
My driver chuckles.
‘He’s fleecing people. Taking their money to drive along his road. I told him we were making a film for BBC Television. That’s why we got through so fast!’
Arrive on the leafy ring roads of Chandigarh about six. And, miraculously, in one piece.
Day Thirty Two : Chandigarh to Shimla
Chandigarh seems to consist entirely of roundabouts. Beautiful, well-kept, florally abundant roundabouts, sending the traffic spinning from one to another like some endless Scottish reel.
Verdant avenues of peepul, ashoka and mango trees connect this gently swirling system, leading, presumably, to a city of some substance, for Chandigarh is the capital of two states, Punjab and Haryana. I say presumably, because in our short stay here it is difficult to see much beyond the roundabouts and dead-straight, repetitive avenues.
What I do see reminds me of Islamabad. Both are post-Independence cities, built in a self-consciously modern style to replace the architecture of the Raj with something new and fresh, and more in keeping with what Nehru called ‘the nation’s faith in the future’. Both are discreet, tidy and a little cheerless.
At least Chandigarh secured the services of the top man. Swiss architect Le Corbusier designed the grid-plan layout and the boxy, modular buildings in concrete and red brick that can be glimpsed every now and then between the trees.
When I enquire what sort of person lives in this mecca of modernism I’m told that it’s mostly wealthy Punjabi farmers approaching retirement.
My local informant summed up Chandigarh as ‘a town of white beards and green hedges’. And sadly I’m not here long enough to disprove it.
It’s time to return to the mountains, and we begin the journey dramatically, aboard the Himalayan Queen railway service to Shimla, a town high in the Shiwalik foothills, from where the British Empire in India was run during the hot summer months and which is now the capital of Himachal Pradesh (Himalaya Province).
The 2‘6” narrow-gauge railway to Shimla climbs 7000 feet (2130 m) in 57 miles (92 km) and there is barely a level stretch of track on the entire route.
Midday at Kalka station. Ten minutes before the Queen leaves, the express from Delhi arrives, disgorging yet more passengers for the Shimla train. Half-term holidays have just begun and sturdy schoolgirls with backpacks and walking sticks are fighting with harassed family groups for a place in one of the seven small coaches.
The stationmaster, a stout man with a shiny bald head, ignores the helpless cries of his staff as he rolls out a liturgy of statistics.
‘Indian Railways is the biggest employer in the world, you know. We move ten million people a day, over 6000 kilometres of track.’ He dabs a handkerchief at his forehead, then tucks it in his pocket and produces a small scrapbook.
‘You want to film the viaduct?’ he asks. ‘You can do that.’
He opens the book to reveal a grainy photograph of the railway line running over a multi-storey stone bridge, and holds it up to the camera.
‘There,’ he smooths down the page, ‘you film that.’
‘We’d rather film the real thing,’ says Nigel with a trace of irritation. The stationmaster, undeterred, riffles through the pages.
‘Look at that!’ he holds the book up again. A wintry scene of the same viaduct. ‘That is snow!’
Somehow, everyone squeezes aboard and, on time at 12.10, the Himalayan Queen pulls out past Kalka signal box, rounds a curve and heads for the hills, passing by a mix of factories and rust-stained housing blocks surrounded by lush sub-tropical vegetation. A line-side tree sways beneath the weight of a family of monkeys the size of small Labradors.
‘Langurs,’ says the woman opposite me. ‘They’re the biggest monkeys of all.’
I offer some sweets to her and her family and we start talking. She’s a large very jolly lady and her name is Deepti. She works for the ministry of defence in Delhi and is on a week’s holiday with her husband and two boys. I ask her if the Britishness of Shimla is still an attraction for Indian tourists.
She frowns and shakes her head.
‘They’re not so interested in all that, no.’
She reminds me that vital conferences between Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah aimed at getting the British out of India also took place in Shimla.
We rattle into a tunnel. One of 103 on the line, their entrances all numbered and marked with the exact length.
Deepti opens plastic containers and gets out lunch for the family. She was up at four this morning, she says, preparing pooris and aloo for the journey, and she insists on sharing them with me.
The deep-fried fluffy pooris mix deliciously with the curried potato. There are four more hours of the journey to go and I feel in no hurry at all, which is just as well, for the progress of the Himalayan Queen is dogged rather than dashing. We rarely make much more than 20 miles an hour, which is all you want with good food, good company and a good view.
I stand at the open door and let the gradually cooling air blow over me as we snake round corners and in and out of trim stone tunnels dug into the hillside like rabbit holes. As we climb, the date palms, rubber trees and bougainvillea give way to grassy meadows, oak scrub and then spindly deciduous woodland.
I have a knowledgeable companion in Raaja Bhasin, a neat, theatrical, young man who has written books on Shimla. The British, he tells me, had discovered the spot in the 1820s, and it was so much to their liking that in 1864 it was declared their summer capital.
‘At that time one-fifth of the human race was administered from Shimla.’
As the railway was not opened for another 39 years, the entire apparatus of government had to be moved up from Calcutta on bullock carts.
When it was eventually decided to go ahead with a railway they moved fast. The line was built in little more than two years, and the basic structures remain in good order a hundred years later. The high standards expected took their toll. Raaja tells the story of a Colonel Barog who supervised the construction of one of the tunnels working from each end simultaneously. Unfortunately, they failed to meet in the middle and Barog, distraught at the miscalculation, shot himself.
Half an hour out of Shimla we’re into alpine forest and there is a cool, refreshing scent of pine in the air. The railway runs between tall rhododendron trees and the big cedars they call deodars, until all at once we’re among the half-timbered villas and cottages with verandahs and cast-iron canopies that comfortably conform to my image of Shimla. But as we pull away clear of the trees and get our first glimpse of the town itself I realize I’ve got it very wrong.