Don’t you think our bar should have a name? asked Nandu, our friend of old.
I think the thought had crept upon him like a thief at night, while on a visit to the legendary Raffles Hotel in Singapore. It was there that he had seen plaques celebrating writers like Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad and Graham Green.
‘Let’s call it the Writers’ Bar?’ he wondered aloud.
‘You must be joking!’ we said, Ruskin and I. ‘Where would you get writers from?’
‘Well! Ruskin’s one and you too write Ganesh!’
Now while I know I’m good at typing but what I can writing was still a long way away.
After much dithering and more tippling, we capitulated. Who’s to tell? Here was a hotel with more than a hundred years of history behind it. Heaven knows who all could have dropped by — if only for a nimbu-paani!
Over the weekend, the deed was done.
Our local coffin-maker made the wooden plaques on his lathe and we hammered them on to the wall. They do, in a way, celebrate the Savoy’s tenuous association with authors — past and present: John Lang, author and a friend of India, spent the last five years of his life in Mussoorie (1859-64). Did he have a sun-downer with Rev. Maddock, the Principal, when the hotel was still Maddock’s School?
Jim Corbett’s father, the Postmaster of Mussoorie, met his wife in the ballroom during the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and married in Landour on 2nd of May 1926.
Philip Mason, Commissioner of Garhwal, wrote seven books including The Wild Sweet Witch & A Matter of Honour.
Lowell Thomas describes the Savoy separation bell in Land of the Black Pagoda (1930): ‘They ring a bell just before dawn so that the pious may say their prayers and the impious get back to their own beds.’
John Masters, the popular best-selling author of Bhawani Junction, Bugles and a Tiger, served with the Gurkha Regiment in Dehradun.
Charles Allen, author of Plain Tales from the Raj & A Mountain in Tibet stayed at the Savoy in Suite No.1 in the 1960s.
Pearl S. Buck, Nobel Laureate 1931, author of The Good Earth came to meet His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Only two things are pucca: she never tippled and never wrote a word about Mussoorie.
Stephen Alter, Mussoorie — born author has written over twenty books — fiction and non-fiction. Peter Hopkirk was here in 1994 researching for his In Search of Kim. His sketches of the hotel reveal he didn’t spend time in the bar.
It was a strange phase in our lives. We survived it. Nandu survived it. And the Writers’ Bar carried on.
