Had they not had time to learn their lines, I asked her.
Oh yes, they had time, but they are all in the army and very busy.
So I stumbled on the truth. This pretty little theatre survives as a sort of social club for the military. The activities of the Green Room bar and lounge upstairs subsidize the thespian activities below, the quid pro quo being that the army are offered the best parts, and the best seats.
As curtain up approaches, men trained to lead hundreds into battle are pacing about backstage, like schoolboys about to go before the headmaster, repeating the same lines over and over again. It’s a full house tonight with the local commander in chief attending. This only seems to ratchet up the tension.
I have been asked to give a short address before the play begins.
‘What is your name again, please?’ asks the young captain who’s been asked to introduce me. ‘Palin…Palin.’ He tries it out a few times before giving me an apologetic smile.
‘I’m the entertainments officer. I do bingo, mainly.’
At 7.30 precisely he pushes aside the decaying velvet curtain, tells a few nervous jokes and then I hear my moment of glory approach.
‘Ladies and Gentlemen, may I ask you to give a very warm welcome for our special celebrity guest, Mr Michael Plain!’
This sort of sets the tone for the evening. Despite the best efforts of Mrs Neelam Dewan, both as director and leading actress, some of the colonels and majors in the cast do have recollection problems, and I understand now why the two prompters are given such prominent mention in the programme and why, when they come on stage at the end, Mrs Punam Gupta and Mrs Vijaylaksmi Sood receive thunderous applause and garlands of flowers.
Afterwards we all repair to the Green Room and tell each other how wonderful we were and the Commanding Officer, Lt-General Singh, a Sikh in a handsome rose-pink turban, insists that we return to his house for a drink. It’s a short walk from the hotel and Roger is much impressed that the guards on the gate snap to attention and present arms as we enter. It’s after midnight when we leave, and they totally ignore us.
Day Thirty Five : Shimla to Dharamsala
Pack up. Take a last look out of the French windows I’m not supposed to open. Expect the monkeys to at least look up, but they’re all gathered around a rubbish skip, picking around in the contents as if it were the first day of Harrods’ sale.
Or perhaps they’ve heard what’s happening to their brothers and sisters in Delhi. The Times of India reports that the authorities there have decided to start rounding up some of the monkeys that roam the city and deport them. More controversially, they’re to take 2000 cows out of circulation as well. Not, I notice, to improve road safety, but, so they say, to curb the illegal milk trade.
We leave the bow windows, pebble-dash walls and wrought-iron balconies behind and continue north by car to another hill station, Dharamsala, best known for being the headquarters of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile.
Our driver, like many middle-aged men in India and Pakistan, has coloured his greying hair with henna, in his case so generously that it’s almost bright scarlet and a tell-tale contrast with his grey moustache. Basil has christened him ‘Red’.
Outside the village of Ghumarwin Red gives an agonized cry and swings the wheel frantically.
‘That is very bad,’ he says, in genuine distress. ‘That was a snake on the road.’
Basil is unsympathetic.
‘You swerved to avoid a snake?’
‘It is Monday. Shiva’s day. It is very bad luck.’
‘No, it’s not, it’s Tuesday.’
A great weight seems to fall from Red’s shoulder.
‘Ah, yes, that’s good. That is Hanuman’s day. He is the monkey god.’
‘So you’ve got to watch out for monkeys.’
‘Oh yes.’
Basil, proud owner of a lovely wheaten terrier called Ed, asks which day he should avoid dogs.
‘Dogs?’ Red laughs dismissively. ‘No. Always killing dogs.’
The country road is undulating and undramatic, rising and falling as we cross the valleys of modest rivers running down from the mountains into the Punjab. Reminders of worship are never far away, from brightly painted roadside shrines daubed in mauve, bright pink or orange, to busloads of pilgrims in yellow robes with red and gold sashes. They’re causing traffic jams as they converge on the temple at a place called Jawalamukhi. The attraction here is that natural gas issues from the cliff in the form of an ‘eternal’ blue flame and feeds a constantly boiling pool of water. This is considered magical proof of the power of the local gods.
By evening we’ve reached our hotel, once a tea-planter’s bungalow, with fine views over the green Kangra valley below and the Dhauladar Mountains above, on whose wooded slopes Dharamsala and its sister McLeodganj are set like Tuscan hill villages.
No monkeys to besiege us down here but caged dogs bark all night long.
Read The Art of Happiness and try to avoid feeling murderous.
Day Thirty Six : Dharamsala and McLeodganj
It’s six o’clock in the morning and the first streaks of light are in the sky as we drive along the narrow streets of Dharamsala and continue up the road that climbs through pine, oak and rhododendron woods to the less mellifluous-sounding village of McLeodganj. (‘Ganj’ means market and McLeod, presumably, was a Scotsman.) To complicate matters, this place with a Hindu-Scots name is filled with Tibetans.
The reason they’re here is that the Chinese, having invaded Tibet in 1949, began to consolidate their political power by eliminating any opposition. In 1959 this resulted in an uprising in Lhasa, which was put down with such force that, fearing for his life, the Dalai Lama, leader of Tibetan Buddhism and Head of State, decided to flee his country.
He crossed the Himalaya into India and in a brave gesture of generosity, Prime Minister Nehru gave him sanctuary and later a more permanent home in Dharamsala. (Many other countries would have had misgivings about what this would do to their relations with China.) Chinese oppression of Buddhists is less virulent now than it was at the height of the Cultural Revolution, but they have tightened their economic and political hold on Tibet and 44 years after his flight, the Dalai Lama, and the Tibetan government, remain in exile.
We’re up this early to catch a dawn ceremony at the Lhagyal Ri Temple, just a short walk down the hill from the monastery where the Dalai Lama now lives.
On a terrace of land with tall pines falling away to one side are a series of stupas, the dome-shaped shrines in which are kept scriptures or remains or clay likenesses of the gods. A great wall of prayer flags forms a backdrop behind them. There’s a residual night-time chill in the air but already a line of devotees are quietly moving along a line of brightly painted prayer wheels, which culminates in one huge wheel about eight feet high. They spin them and murmur prayers as they go. They then feed sprigs of juniper branch into small open ovens and leave gifts by the fire, a flask of tea or a bottle of barley wine. The aromatic, spicy smell of the wood smoke mingles with the pines to give a strong heady flavour to the dawn.
As the sun rises its rays hit the columns of smoke and turn them into long diagonal shafts of light. At that moment four monks, cross-legged on the floor before a microphone, begin to recite prayers.
Dogs sniff around. A herd of cows plods slowly across the front of the temple past the prayer wheels and on into the woods. No-one seems to bat an eyelid. It’s part of life and all life is sacred to the Buddhist.
The only organized part of what seems to me a delightfully laid-back, unstructured ceremony is a ritual throwing of tsampa, barley flour. I’m encouraged to join in and, picking up a handful of the flour, I take my place in line facing the stupas. Prayers are recited, hands are raised three times and then, altogether, we toss the flour forwards, an offering to the gods, and a wake-up call to their protectors.