The Political Officer to the Hill States was the first Englishman to build a house in Shimla in 1822 and soon everyone wanted an elegant villa in Shimla.
By 1880, there were scores of houses scattered over the hillside. Later, a grand house that looked like a crooked Gothic castle was built for the Viceroy and other houses with English names sprang up like wild mushrooms all over the hillsides.
Quiet, serene Shimla, a remote hill village with just a few shepherds’ huts, now grew into a bustling, elegant town, a town which reminded the English of home.”
The year is 1940 during World War II, and Mrs Maud Tweedy, who runs a little garden school and writes romantic stories for a women’s magazine in London, sits in her old cottage in Shimla, the hill station that remains “cool and aloof” during India’s hot summer months.
Somewhere in the backdrop of this idyllic landscape, a mystery awaits its unsuspecting residents.
Bulbul Sharma’s vivid descriptions and intriguing characters truly recreate the British Raj in India, reminding one of Agatha Christie’s famous whodunits.
The author’s personal connection with Shimla goes back a long way. Her grandfather worked for the British government. Her mother was born there, and Bulbul grew up listening to many stories about her English friends.
Having regularly visited Shimla as a child during her summer vacations, she says that the queen of the hills during the Raj was always full of scandals.
“The English ladies who came up for the ‘season’ really did not have much to do, and life was quite free and easy here unlike in Delhi which was very proper,” she says.
Bulbul adds that Kipling often wrote about these women and so did many other English writers who visited Shimla.
One of the relatively unknown stories in the book is a ‘hushed up’ incident about the Viceroy’s daughter who eloped with a Maharaja but came back after a week declaring that he was the most boring man in the world. Another is a tale about a ‘separation bell’ being rung at a Shimla hotel at five in the morning by a kind and considerate manager in order to warn his guests to return to their own rooms.
Researching for the book led Bulbul to read several others that were published during the period in question, such as Simla: Past and Present by Sir Edward John Buck, Charles Allen’s Plain Tales from the Raj and The Memsahibs:
The Women of Victorian India by Pat Barr. Further, she read many personal letters written by British women in the 1940s, which are in the India Office Library collection at the British Library in London.
Apart from this, she adds that the National Archives in Delhi also has quite a few interesting documents from the era.