Eerily close, the dead
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Partition of India
12 min read
The article discusses the 1945 Simla Conference and 1946 Cabinet Mission at the Viceregal Lodge, describing how these failed negotiations 'all but ensuring the horrors of Partition.' Understanding the full scope of Partition - the largest mass migration in history with 10-20 million displaced and up to 2 million deaths - provides essential context for the historical weight of that 'small, round, entirely unprepossessing table.'
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Kalka–Shimla Railway
12 min read
The author mentions attempting to take the 'famed Himalayan Queen from Kalka' to Shimla. This UNESCO World Heritage Site railway, with its 102 tunnels and 800+ bridges climbing through the Himalayas, represents a remarkable feat of colonial engineering and remains one of India's most scenic train journeys.
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Rudyard Kipling
13 min read
The article quotes Kipling's short story 'The Other Man' from Plain Tales from the Hills, describing a corpse arriving in Shimla. Kipling spent formative years in India and his complex literary legacy - Nobel Prize winner whose work both celebrated and critiqued the Raj - provides rich context for understanding the colonial Shimla the author walks through.
I arrived back in the mountains on Saturday, fully packed and prepared for a white Christmas. Unfortunately, snow seems very unlikely. Himachal Pradesh, it turns out, is recording one of its driest Decembers on record, with large tracts of the state receiving no measurable rain or snowfall at all. On the day I arrived, Shimla, the one-time summer capital of the British Raj, was a balmy nineteen degrees. By the time I had walked out to the former Viceregal Lodge, I was sweating almost must as much as I had been after trekking to Kheerganga a month ago.
Getting to Shimla was something of a nightmare. I was once again reminded why, in the main, planning anything here is pointless. After a wonderful final evening in Delhi with Sam Dalrymple and some of his friends—an eclectic line-up of writers, filmmakers, and other gadabouts—I arrived at the railway station at six in the morning, only to learn that my train to Kalka had been delayed by several hours. I had been hoping to take the famed Himalayan Queen from Kalka into the hills, and in order to make my connection there ordered an expensive inter-city Uber. We arrived fifteen minutes too late. As a result, I hired another car to take me the remainder of the way, only to get lost, several times, in the winding roads leading into the city, a system that to my mind suggested five or six rollercoasters built haphazardly on top of one another. I went to bed almost as soon as I checked in.
Getting to Shimla has never been easy. In his short story ‘The Other Man’, collected in Plain Tales from the Hills, Rudyard Kipling describes a particularly miserable journey:
Sitting back on the back seat, very square and firm, with one hand on the awning stanchion and the wet pouring off his hat and moustache, was the Other Man—dead. The sixty-mile uphill jolt had been too much for his valve, I suppose. The tonga driver said, “This Sahib died two stages out of Solon. Therefore, I tied him with a rope, lest he should fall out by the way, and so came to Simla. Will the Sahib give me bukshish? It,” pointing to the Other Man, “should have given one rupee.”
I paid several thousand times more than that, but at least I made it
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