Epistaxis!’ or an ordinary nosebleed - during a trek - spiralled out of hand and I found myself in hospital. A day later, on opening my eyes from a morphine-induced stupor, I thought: ‘This is it! I must be dead!’ For at the foot of my bed stood a St. Peter look-alike: flowing grey beard, skullcap, brown hooded cassock, rosary in hand chanting a Latin prayer over me. ‘I’m at the Pearly Gates!’ Thought I.
Of course the Italian drawl gave-it-all-away. Father Alyocious of St Emilian’s Church was doing his rounds; offering prayers for anyone who looked far-gone as I looked.
Though Mussoorie’s Capuchin connect dates back to 1853, when St. George’s, our second oldest school, ran for forty-one years before the Brothers moved on in pursuit of their religious calling. They left the school to the ministrations of the Patrician Brothers. During the Second World War, the Doon valley was awash with Italian and German prisoners-of-war from the African campaign. Among them was Heinreich Harrer, who escaped on April 22, 1944 to write Seven Years in Tibet.
‘Wherever I live,’ he said, ‘I shall feel homesick for Tibet. I often think I can still hear the cries of the wild geese and cranes and the beating of their wings as they fly over Lhasa in the clear cold moonlight.’
Under the dappled shadow of the Sal forest in 1936, another Italian priest, Father Clement was busy putting together a housing colony for Anglo-Indians in Clement Town. That was until the government acquired the land, only temporarily to house enemy aliens.
But what happened to Father Clement?
‘I do hope to come back and see you all once again in the spot, which is dear to my heart,’ he wrote to a friend on July 24, 1952. But it was not fated to be. Three days after reaching Italian shores, he passed away. And Clement Town’s ‘temporary’ camps became permanent, never to be returned. Father Clement’s dream project died ere it was born.
The Chaplain of the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, persuaded the Italian painter Nino La Civita, interned in Premnagar, to paint the interior of his church. This he did perched atop scaffolding, rubbing paint by hand on to the columns supporting the roof so that it resembled veined marble. Below the four panels depicting are stories from the life of St Francis of Assisi. At the bottom, he put the medallions of the four evangelists.
Our Landour connect? Hidden on a slope below the Upper Mall are cenotaphs made of local slate and their chimney flues pierce the mountain air. It is here our early Italian priests rest in peace.
