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Tusker’s Last Stand

Mussoorie, India, 1990: Tibetan guest-house canteen meals have had an unfortunate effect on my digestive system and several more weeks of turbulence lie in prospect before I leave. The only food available from the nearby shop is packeted biscuits and salted peanuts, the latter sold in paper cones made of discarded test sheets from the government college opposite. I consider myself fairly practical about food but even I prefer not to contemplate two months of nothing but custard creams. So I take a walk along the wooded track towards the town and call at the Carlton Hotel.

Fortunately, in 1990 I hadn’t yet encountered Paul Scott’s novel Staying On (though it should have been essential preparatory reading for a visit to a hill station). If I had, my delight in discovering the Carlton might have been diluted by unavoidable comparisons and time-wasting attempts to identify its role as a model for Smith’s, the hotel in the novel. Instead, I happily immersed myself in its frayed colonial charm for a few hours each weekend, eating lunch alone at a dining-table large enough to seat twelve and retiring afterwards to a cane chair on the enclosed veranda that ran along one side of the building. There were rarely other guests.

The Carlton, like the fictional Smith’s Hotel, was a relic of British rule in India and of the British taste for life in the Himalayan foothills. The damp mountain climate and limited business had left it a little dilapidated but, in common with Scott’s female protagonist in the novel, Lucy Smalley, it kept up appearances and retained its dignity. Smith’s, by contrast, is seedy, unkempt and owned by a scheming egotist, Mrs Bhoolaboy, who is concerned not with her hotel’s character or even its viability, but with its value as a redevelopment site. Many poignant moments in the novel arise as a result of the cultural chasm t

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Mussoorie, India, 1990: Tibetan guest-house canteen meals have had an unfortunate effect on my digestive system and several more weeks of turbulence lie in prospect before I leave. The only food available from the nearby shop is packeted biscuits and salted peanuts, the latter sold in paper cones made of discarded test sheets from the government college opposite. I consider myself fairly practical about food but even I prefer not to contemplate two months of nothing but custard creams. So I take a walk along the wooded track towards the town and call at the Carlton Hotel.

Fortunately, in 1990 I hadn’t yet encountered Paul Scott’s novel Staying On (though it should have been essential preparatory reading for a visit to a hill station). If I had, my delight in discovering the Carlton might have been diluted by unavoidable comparisons and time-wasting attempts to identify its role as a model for Smith’s, the hotel in the novel. Instead, I happily immersed myself in its frayed colonial charm for a few hours each weekend, eating lunch alone at a dining-table large enough to seat twelve and retiring afterwards to a cane chair on the enclosed veranda that ran along one side of the building. There were rarely other guests. The Carlton, like the fictional Smith’s Hotel, was a relic of British rule in India and of the British taste for life in the Himalayan foothills. The damp mountain climate and limited business had left it a little dilapidated but, in common with Scott’s female protagonist in the novel, Lucy Smalley, it kept up appearances and retained its dignity. Smith’s, by contrast, is seedy, unkempt and owned by a scheming egotist, Mrs Bhoolaboy, who is concerned not with her hotel’s character or even its viability, but with its value as a redevelopment site. Many poignant moments in the novel arise as a result of the cultural chasm that lies between Mrs Bhoolaboy and her tenants, the Smalleys, the British couple who are ‘staying on’. Tusker and Lucy Smalley are remnants of the fictional world of Scott’s famous Raj Quartet. While acquaintances such as the Laytons return to England at Independence in 1947, the Smalleys move only from the military to the civilian world, opting for life as ‘boxwallahs’ in India rather than one of drab penury back home. Their retirement visit to the hill station of Pankot turns into permanent residence in the lodge at Smith’s Hotel, and it is here that the novel is set, during the last three months of Tusker’s life in early 1972. Despite the apparent confines of the setting, the reader may well lose track of time. Scott is meticulous about the chronology, but the dates he provides are densely interspersed with the minutiae of the Smalleys’ lives, past and present, as well as those of the secondary characters, in the form of their own unspoken reflections and memories. Thus a chapter that begins on a Monday morning in 1972 and moves no further forward than lunchtime may, through the apparently unedited private thoughts of Lucy, for example, range back to 1925 and end in 1947, flowing unchecked through the personal experiences that form her view of life. For this reason alone, the book is best read at a sitting or two when you can allow yourself to be carried along on the streams of consciousness of the various characters. There is Lucy Smalley, almost permanently adrift in the past, both real and imagined; the hapless Mr Bhoolaboy, in thrall to his ghastly wife; and the incomparable Ibrahim, Tusker Smalley’s bearer, who takes a respectful but dispassionate interest in his impoverished employers and has learned to play a good-humoured minor role in the tortured game of manners by which they communicate with each other. Alternatively, you can force yourself to be a little more objective and admire Scott’s discreetly controlling hand as he tells a story that is both richly comic and terribly sad. Gradually revealing more and more detail via thoughts and conversations, he lays bare the complex, inarticulate relationship between Tusker and Lucy and prompts tears as easily with humour as with poignancy. The farcical activities of the Bhoolaboys are particularly enjoyable, as in the chapter in which Mr Bhoolaboy tries to reconcile his religious impulses with his carnal desires, with its detailed description of his escape from the clutches of his sleeping wife:
He had a technique for this which he used occasionally in the middle of the night to return to his own room without waking her. Mostly she chucked him out with no ceremony. She preferred to sleep alone and he had learned from experience that the morning glory of Mrs Bhoolaboy’s conjugal contentment (a rare bloom) withered rapidly if she did not find herself alone, even if she had not personally dismissed him because incapable of doing so (pole-axed, he liked to think, by a particularly passionate five-star performance on his part).
The immediate framework of the story is the relationship between the Smalleys and Mrs Bhoolaboy, tenants and landlady respectively, as they struggle to achieve very different aims: the Smalleys to remain in the lodge at Smith’s Hotel as legitimate tenants, Mrs Bhoolaboy to evict them in order to profit from the redevelopment of her property in partnership with the owners of the neighbouring Shiraz Hotel. In the course of this tussle, Tusker is driven to a level of apoplexy that proves fatal, his demise forming the opening sentence of the book. However, the larger picture is of Tusker and Lucy’s existence as they move from the relatively sheltered waters of colonial India out into the open seas of an independent country where Tusker’s inadequacies are horribly exposed. By 1972, when a sudden collapse suggests his days may be numbered, he has retreated into pathological obstinacy, and Lucy’s frustrations find expression as she finally faces up to the prospect of being left alone in India, without the means to return ‘home’. Over the setting of the novel looms the modern five-storey block of the Shiraz Hotel, a metaphorical and literal shadow that has fallen over the Smalleys’ lives as their own settle into a steady decline. Scott offers no cosy solution to their problems; and yet you close the book finally not with a sense of gloom but with the satisfaction of having shared with the author ‘the comedy of life’. I don’t know whether Mussoorie’s Carlton Hotel has its own Shiraz Hotel to contend with these days, but I hope the comedy of life is still playing there too.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 9 © Annabel Walker 2006

 

About the contributor

Annabel Walker is the author of Aurel Stein: Pioneer of the Silk Road, a biography of a once famous archaeological explorer.

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