It was the wife I noticed first. She was sitting with her eyes shut on the crowded railway platform. Her husband, a dry twig of a man, ran about securing a seat in the only first class compartment of the Toy Train taking us to Ooty. “We are going to see Ooty for the first time,” announced the husband. “You see I am a man from the hills. My nature permits me to be happy only when I am in the hills. I am from Almora.” “Have you tasted our apples?” he asked. “In my younger days we had the most delicious apples. There was a foreign missionary who came to Almora a long time back. I think his name was Stokes. He brought some seeds and planted them.
They were called “Golden Russet”; an apple that the gods would be happy to eat, pure golden yellow with a tinge of pink. But you don’t see that variety any more.” “Did you know,” he asked, “that when Pandit Nehru was in the Almora jail he planted fruit trees?” “I know this because I was in the Almora jail at about the same time. You see, I am a freedom fighter. I have a free rail pass. We travel by night because I can always get a first class sleeping berth." “But do you know what happened last night?” he chuckled at the memory. “The AC on the Kovai Express was so cold that I began to shiver.” “Only my wife had a warm shawl. I climbed down and got into my wife’s berth.
I hugged her so tight, she thought I had gone a little mad.” The whole compartment burst out laughing. From then on, the man from Almora regaled us with stories from the past. “Did you know that when the Nawab of Rampur wanted to destroy a temple in his area he was stopped by the local administration? Say what you like about the British but they were always fair in matters of education, or law and order.” “And you call yourself a freedom fighter?” I asked him.
“Yes, I am a freedom fighter. We believed in freedom from foreign rule. Freedom was our golden apple. We were hungry for it. But you know, sometimes I ask myself: What happened to those apples of my youth? Did they really taste better?” It’s now almost twenty years since we met the old couple on a train to Ootacamund. The man from Almora and his wife must have hung up their railway passes a long time ago. But the question he raised lingers. “Do apples still grow in Almora?”