Cantonment towns in the hills evoke images of India's colonial past. In Ranikhet, out on my regular apology of a morning run, I came across a smart green board with ‘Old Grant Bungalow' written in tidy white letters. It was a pleasant morning. Slight nip in the air, winding narrow road with plenty of fallen pine needles. A couple of soldiers ran by effortlessly, glances spared for the stranger struggling on in private ecosystem of flared nostrils, bulging eyes and panting aplenty. Minutes before, I had been a minor spectacle for a clutch of smartly dressed school children as well. That's why Old Grant Bungalow captured my attention.
At that given moment of huffing and puffing up the road, the green board encapsulated the exact opposite of my condition. It had a ring of unruffled colonial elegance. On a sunlit wooden balcony on a chair placed in early morning-lawn, the daily newspaper lowers just enough to reveal inquiring eyes framed by glasses, pipe held firmly in the mouth. “Another one of them,” he mutters, looking at the unsteady runner and the paper goes back up returning focus to the state of the larger world. In the distance, Trishul and Nanda Devi glisten like gold.
“Who is Old Grant?” I thought.
He could be a retired army officer, maybe government administrator or a writer. He could also be one of those naturalists who opted to call their area of study home. Is he James, maybe William, perhaps Edward? He won't be Ulysses; that's so much Grant yet the only Grant so I know in history. Would there be a prefix — a Sir or a Lord? Who indeed was this Old Grant owning a bungalow here? Then there was that other image in my head — a take on the word ‘ old.' It had the tenor of something maturing for long, the way they talk of wine and whiskey.
Uninteresting truth
Maybe Old Grant was this treasure trove of vintage brews maturing through the years in a hidden cellar in the Himalaya, while outside, armies and their cantonment towns changed, a road appeared, children went to school and eventually freelance journalists struggled up the path on a feigned morning run? I passed a bend and a second board appeared announcing Old Grant Bungalow. Well, colonial mansions sprawl; their estates even more. Perhaps I had just trotted past the rear gate of a sprawling estate with a mansion within? A while later, I passed another green board, then another, then yet another — till Old Grant seemed either a con of a land owner putting up boards wherever he wanted or the owner of an entire hill side! The question wasn't anymore who is he; it was what is he? It took me a few days to find out the identity of Old Grant. It was neither man nor ale but what they literally meant — an old grant of property, often as old as British India. What's more, as subsequent research on the Internet showed, across cantonment towns in India the ownership of some of these properties and the uses they were put to by residents seemed a bone of contention between longstanding occupants and the army.
Somehow that tale of property ownership and legal battles doesn't engage me. I wish Old Grant was a person and Old Grant Bungalow was, well, his residence. If there was something brewed and maturing in his cellar, I would call that a bonus. The newspaper lowers, smile graces old rugged face and we discuss his times and mine over a glass of sunlit Old Grant.