Picture This: Not a home away from home

In the consumer desert of pre-liberalisation India, filmi hotels were a salacious fantasy. Will we never see them as anything except sites of scandal? 

My BLInk column last Saturday.

Watching Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel got me thinking about hotels in our films. If you’ve never thought about it before, take a moment to close your eyes and remember what hotels were like in the imagined universe of Hindi films until the 1990s. What comes to mind? Men in suits and ladies in saris looking on in appreciation or bemusement as a scantily-clad young woman sashays expertly between the tables? Sometimes the dancer was the only bright spot in a dimly-lit space. Hindi film hotels were glossy fronts for dark dealings of all sorts — from the shady hotel in Howrah Bridge (1958) to Hotel Hilltop, from where murderous train robberies are orchestrated in The Train (1970).

As Jerry Pinto puts it in his book on Helen, Bombay cinema saw hotels “as a dreadful western invention where other ‘western inventions’ — smuggling, illicit or extramarital sex, the black market — thrived”. Respectable people, even if they went on holiday, had holiday homes to go to. Heroes only went to hotel bars for strategic purposes — in search of the vamp (Miss Ruby, Lily or Kitty, the route to the villain’s gang) — or else to drown their sorrows in alcohol when jilted by their lady-love. As the ’70s and ’80s wore on, what had been the preserve of the vamp and the villain emerged as the site of the discotheque, where a guitar-strapped hero might perform for a crazed, youthful audience, or where a misguided sister or a too-modern wife might display her waywardness by dancing with strangers.

Since most of the mainstream Hindi film audience had never been in one, it’s remarkable how much the hotel dominated our cinematic imagination. Or perhaps, it wasn’t surprising at all. Hotels were a fantasy world, which in the consumer desert of pre-liberalisation India, was both desirable and necessarily condemnable. A film that unfolded in a hotel was exciting, but the hero and heroine had to steer clear of the silken debauchery of the milieu. So Teesri Manzil (1966) was a murder mystery in which the hero must clear his name. By the time Namak Halaal (1982) hit the theatres, it was possible to combine the hotel-as-thriller-locale with a broad comic act from Amitabh Bachchan.

In the 2000s , seedy hotels continue to form part of thrillers — Johnny Gaddaar (2007), Talaash (2012). But sexcapades in them are now also a frequent site of comedy — the famous Hotel Decent in Jab We Met(2007) is the first of many. Bittoo Boss (2012) even had a photographer using a Shimla hotel to secretly shoot honeymoon porn. Still, a whiff of scandal continues to cling to the hotel. The Kay Kay Menon-Rajpal Yadav starrer Benny Aur Babloo (2010) pits the bleeding heart humanity of a dance bar against the evils of a five-star hotel. In 2014’s under-watched Bobby Jasoos, when Vidya Balan and her fiancé are ‘caught’ by her conservative Hyderabadi father, it’s their emergence from a hotel that makes all explanations useless. Balan’s other outing this year, Shaadi ke Side Effects, begins with a couple using the inherent disreputability of hotels to spice up their marriage. By the film’s end, hotels have emerged as integral to secret lives less innocuous than a play-acting married couple’s.

What I can’t think of is a single Hindi film in which a hotel is not just a locale but the emblem of an era, as in The Grand Budapest Hotel. When we first see it, the hotel of Anderson’s film has come down in the world, but it still has a threadbare majesty. And the multi-layered flashback, moving from candy-coloured animated jailbreaks to the black and white of war, evokes the civilisation that the hotel once embodied. No amount of extramarital sex within its walls can rob the Grand Budapest of its grandeur. It probably helps that the spirit of the film — zany, not always honest yet somehow always admirable — is the inimitable maitre d’hotel Gustav (Ralph Fiennes in his most freewheeling performance yet). For Gustav, as for his appointed successor Zero, the hotel is not a career but a vocation.

The closest we’ve got is the Bengali film adaptation of Sankar’s bestselling novel Chowringhee (1968) and Uttam Kumar’s much-remembered turn as Satya Sadhan ‘Sata’ Bose, debonair receptionist of the Shahjahan Hotel. Sata’s initiation of Sankar, like Gustav’s of Zero, is the audience’s entry point into the hotel’s inner life. This is 1960s India, and hotel guests are either foreigners (doing important things like eradicating smallpox) or the Indian business class (wheeler-dealers all). The film’s biggest villain is a rich businessman’s wife. But, unlike in mainstream Hindi movies, the immorality of its elite clients does not taint the hotel staff. They are one big family, with class and community differences smoothed over by feudal benevolence and individual friendships. Also remarkable is the number of middle-class working women in the film — a ‘society’ journalist, a ‘hostess’ for a Marwari businessman, an air hostess. But either they’re bad girls, or if they’re good, they’re marked out for tragedy — one is tempted to read something into that. Despite some heavy-handed morality, Chowringhee is the rare Indian film that lets a hotel be something more than a den of vice. It may represent a civilisation in decline, but Shahjahan Hotel still manages to evoke nostalgia.

Published in the Hindu Business Line.

Nanda: Not So Simple

Today's Mumbai Mirror column:

The late actress Nanda is usually remembered for her girlish innocence. But that wasn't all there was to her.

Nanda's death in March this year was mourned by the industry. But as in life, so in death: she didn't really get the critical attention she deserved. 

Nanda was that rare actress whom the usually inflexible Hindi film industry allowed to graduate from one slot to another, embracing her first as a child artiste (in films like Mandir [1948], Angaarey, Jaggu [1952] and Jagriti, then as the younger sister (in V. Shantaram's Toofan Aur Diya [1956], Bhabhi [1957], Dulhan [1958], Chhoti Behen [1959] and Kala Bazaar [1960]) and finally as a romantic heroine (after Dev Anand kept a promise made during Kala Bazaar and cast her as his heroine in Hum Dono [1961]).

Despite this, there is a Nanda stereotype. We think of her as the achchhi ladki, the simple girl who could be coyly romantic but not sensual. The childlike innocence that had worked for Baby Nanda segued seamlessly into chhoti behen roles (younger sisters have always been infantilised by Hindi cinema) and seemingly clung to her even as she transitioned into playing romantic leads. Her good girl image was also a result of the sharply moral heroine-vamp divide that characterised the era. The heroine had to exemplify 'Indianness'; the vamp was 'Western', if not racially then culturally. The heroine's non-threatening sexuality meant being virginal, and putting her charms on display only for the hero. This was in stark contrast to the vamp's open display of desire (invariably unfulfilled), which in conjunction with her other sins -- smoking, drinking and alcohol – had, of course, to be punished.

One of my favourite Nanda appearances is in an unusually sophisticated version of the good girl-bad girl narrative: Teen Devian [1965]. Nanda plays the wholesome middle class girl, literally the girl next door, but her rivals are not cabaret dancers – a category the audience knows can never succeed with a hero -- but liberated memsahibs. Both Simi the well-connected socialite and Kalpana the famous actress flirt outrageously with our music-shop-salesman-turned-poet. Whereas with Nanda, it is Dev who flirts and Nanda who coyly accepts his overtures. Though perhaps this is not quite true either. In an adorable and surprising early scene, on their first coffee date, Dev asks to see Nanda's hardworking secretarial fingers. “Is this just an excuse to hold my hand?” asks Nanda. “Aur agar kahoon haan?” says the unflappable Dev. “Then I will oblige you,” says Nanda in English.

In the more mainstream Gumnaam (1965) and The Train (1970), Nanda's good girl Indianness is produced at least partially by being pitted against our most memorable vamp: Helen. Usually the heroine and the vamp never share the same space, it being a given that the vamp's netherworld of lowlit restaurants and hotel bars is not one in which a respectable Indian woman would ever find herself.

But both Gumnaam and The Train are slightly unusual in this respect. In Gumnaam (a pretty awful cannibalising of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None), Nanda and Helen, bearing the religiously-marked names Miss Asha and Miss Kitty, appear in the same frame quite early on. They are both on the fateful plane ride that will seal the fate of its ten passengers. Of course, Nanda wears white, and Helen red. Then, though both swiftly acquire boyfriends among the men they're marooned with, they keep their distance from each other. The bad girl spends most of her time with a drunken Pran, the good girl with a constipated-looking Manoj Kumar. But having put this effort into keeping them apart, the filmmakers decided some frisson would arise from having them bond. So we get Helen, who has spent many scenes before this refusing to drink with Pran, deciding to get drunk -- with Nanda! And they have a blast, until Nanda is violently shaken back to reality by Manoj Kumar, who being Mr. Bharat cannot be expected to enjoy himself. What I thought was fascinating was MK's sarcastic heroine-shaming dialogue, uttered in full hearing range of the vamp: “Ab bhi tum mein aur Kitty mein thoda sa fark baaki hai”.

In The Train [1970], which like Gumnaam was a murder mystery, cabaret dancer Helen (Lily) is the rotten apple, and Nanda (Nita) the misjudged goody-goody one. So Helen gets to throatily proposition Rajesh Khanna, while Nanda only gets to lie with his head in her lap. But then Nita gets a job as a hotel receptionist, letting her into the same space as Lily. And then the film does something truly unexpected: it gives us a glimpse of the 'bad' Nanda. Instead of the saree-clad version with a long choti, we suddenly see a 'Westernised' Nanda with a stylish haircut, the hushed voice and swaying derriere now those of a seductress in a murderous plot.

It seems to me that Nanda's overt innocence was precisely what enabled directors to use her to play on this “fark” between the heroine and vamp -- clearly thrilling male audiences but being careful to eventually re-establish moral order so as not to alarm them.

But remarkably, Nanda didn't stop there. In order to see where this fascinating trajectory took her, watch Yash Chopra's Ittefaq. The vamp-virgin divide is hopefully gone forever, but Nanda needs to be given some posthumous credit for having crossed the line when she did.

Published in the Mumbai Mirror.

Spirit of Place: a grand old hotel rises from the ashes

The refurbished Hotel Savoy offers an atmospheric window into Mussoorie. My article for Outlook Traveller magazine.

The Savoy at night. Photo: Puneet Paliwal.

I had been to Mussoorie twice before. But this time, instead of coming to an end at Library Chowk, the Mall seemed to lead further up the hill, into the mist. A steep driveway curved into the massive grounds of what could well have been a castle. The taxi driver looked a bit sceptical when Puneet, the photographer, and I said this was indeed our hotel. One couldn’t really blame him. With the Savoy’s fairy-tale turrets as backdrop, we looked even scruffier than we were.

It remained a slight concern throughout the trip, this business of living up to the Savoy. Even freshly bathed (under a superbly luxurious shower), I never quite felt I could match up to what these corridors have been used to. After all, this isn’t just any old hotel. From 1902, when a Lucknow-based barrister called Cecil D. Lincoln decided to pull down the old Mussoorie School and build a massive English Gothic structure in its place, the Savoy has been the hotel of choice for a succession of Indian and international grandees. The Princess of Wales, later Queen Mary, attended a garden party in the Savoy grounds in 1906. Later, the hotel played host to several other royals: Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia and Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia. The Gaekwads of Baroda and the Wodeyars of Mysore were known to take over entire blocks for the summer (the Gaekwad ladies were ardent tennis players, apparently, and would insist on the block adjoining the courts).

The grande dame of Urdu writing, Qurratulain Hyder, spent a lot of her childhood in Mussoorie, seeing the British hill station through what was probably its biggest historical transition—Indian independence. “Throughout the day English sahibs, memsahibs, and their baba log cross the bridge on mules and horses or riding in rickshaws and dandis. In the evening, the same bridge becomes the site of milling crowds of Indians,” begins Hyder’s story ‘Beyond the Fog’. Of course, the Savoy remained preserved from any milling crowds until much later. Its Indian guests were either maharajas and maharanis, or taluqdars, or Anglophiles of the Nehru-Gandhi variety. Like his father Motilal, Jawaharlal Nehru stayed here, as did Indira Gandhi and, later, Rajiv Gandhi.

And yet, the Savoy isn’t quite the daunting place you think it might be. That might have much to do with Mussoorie itself. Unlike a Shimla, where the official presence of colonial government meant that Appearances had to be Maintained, Mussoorie-Landour was always an unstuffy place. Reputed as a place for romantic assignations, Mussoorie was all about being British without the stiff upper lip. And the Savoy was at the centre of the party. Travel writer Lowell Thomas, in India: Land of the Black Pagoda (1930), described the Savoy’s (in)famous Separation Bell: “There is a hotel in Mussoorie where they ring a bell just before dawn so that the pious may say their prayers and the impious get back to their own beds.” As Hyder’s short story has it: “In the ballroom of the Savoy the Anglo-Indian crooner and his band will soon start ‘Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.’”

Senior journalist Saeed Naqvi recently reminisced about having gone to Mussoorie as a schoolboy, in a gang of four that included Vinod Mehta. The young men from Lucknow saved up money to stay in a cheap hotel so that they could wear their ill-fitting suits and “peep into the grandest dining hall in the Empire.” But the Savoy’s glory days ended at least thirty years ago. Looking at the sheer scale of the property, it is easy to imagine how a place like this could have gone to seed. In fact, one doesn’t need to imagine it. One can see it.

On our second morning, Puneet and I took our post-breakfast coffee out into an open area adjoining the Grand Dining Room (it is now officially called that, while the hotel is officially called ‘Fortune The Savoy’). We’d spent a few minutes pleasurably looking out over the small-town business of Mussoorie far down below when we both realised that to our left was a wall, and behind that wall was a half broken-down building—with a turret exactly like the ones above us. “There’s another wing!” said Puneet. 

After lunch, a member of the invariably friendly Savoy staff took us round to the unrestored wing. Piles of old furniture lie around: a lovely large dresser, a nice little table (missing a leg), several broken chairs, even an old post box. The buildings are in absolute disrepair, seemingly without electricity. It was day, but as we climbed up the creaky wooden stairs, we could barely see where our feet were going. It felt a little like a re-run of R.L. Stevenson’s famous scene in Kidnapped: the next step, I was sure, was going to be into thin air. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Stepping out into a kind of gallery, we found we were above the old ballroom. One of the oldest photographs of the Savoy still in circulation is of an after-party image of this very same room filled with people in masquerade, the women’s ‘fancy dress’ costumes for New Year’s Eve unable to quite disguise their 20s flapper aesthetic. The grand old wooden floor still exists, but apart from that there is little sign of the room’s original avatar. A mammoth Santa Claus sprawls lopsidedly over one wall, from a children’s Christmas party before the property last changed hands. A badminton net is strung across the centre of the room: the staff currently use it to entertain themselves on a free afternoon.

Standing in the overhanging gallery, I first ask about the Savoy ghosts. Like Mussoorie itself, the hotel has long had a reputation for haunters. The most famous of these is Lady Frances Garnett-Orme, a 49-year-old spiritualist who was found dead in her room at the Savoy in 1910. The cause of death was poisoning, but the poisoner was never caught. But the technique—adding bromides to the lady’s own bottle of medicine to cause the strychnine already in it to sink to the bottom, where it was consumed by the victim herself in one single lethal dose—was so convolutedly foolproof that Rudyard Kipling apparently wrote to Arthur Conan Doyle, suggesting that he incorporate it in a story. He didn’t, but Agatha Christie did. In The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Christie had her English country-house murder of one Lady Inglethorpe achieved by the same method, to be solved by Hercule Poirot in his first-ever fictional appearance.

Lady Garnett-Orme, according to media sources as varied as Aaj Tak and NatGeo Traveller, still wanders the corridors, sometimes offering a blank stare, and sometimes singing softly. The Savoy staffer I asked said he hadn’t seen her. But he had once spied a couple of ghostly children. On the other hand, none of the spooks had made an appearance of late, he said, and anyway the management had forbidden all talk of ghosts. “There are no spirits,” was the hotel’s official policy.

Later, wandering through the premises, abutting the main wing, I found what looked like a little Sufi shrine, complete with a green silk chadar. “Who is buried here? Is it a saint?” I asked a passing kitchen helper. “No, no, it’s for Sai Baba. And he’s not buried here. This is to stave off the spirits.”

                                                                          ***

Photo: Puneet Paliwal

Much of Mussoorie’s early British spirit is to be found in its graveyards. Landour, where most of these “villages of silence” are, is less than half an hour up from Mussoorie: but the trees feel mossier, the mist thicker. The cemetery on Camel’s Back Road is locked and deserted, and the other cemetery on Landour’s Upper Mall is guarded by a chowkidar and his host of dogs. But the Savoy’s Siddharth Nautiyal, who has driven us there, grew up in Mussoorie and has a friend on literally every street corner. The chowkidar is slowly but surely wooed; he even lets in Puneet and his camera. By the time we return after seeing the graves of the Alters—Tom and Stephen Alter’s father and uncle—Siddharth and the chowkidar have found a village connection. Next up is the Mussoorie Library, where again we only manage entry because of a special request made to Mussoorie chronicler Ganesh Saili. The library is a massive, many-roomed structure that occupies pride of place at the Gandhi Bazaar end of the Mall, off-limits to everyone except its seventy members, and there’s a Mussoorie residence requirement for membership ever since an “Angrez” flew out with some ten precious books. The deep red doors lead into a musty high-ceilinged space, where the old glass-fronted bookshelves reveal carefully arranged collections of history and literature dominated by titles from at least fifty years ago: Nelson’s History of the War (in 25 volumes), The Rise of Rail Power in War and Conquest 1833-1914 by E.A. Pratt. The Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck, who once stayed at the Savoy and is listed on a plaque at the hotel’s wood-panelled Writers’ Bar, is represented by her China books, of course—but also by East Wind: West Wind, which appears to be a royal Rajasthani romance.

We returned to the hotel, exhausted. After choosing Col. Skinner’s Fish and Chips (over the Bycullah Club Koftah Curry) in the admirably restored Grand Dining Room, I retired for a nap in my rather stately Suite, all blue and white and gold. When I woke up, it was around a quarter to five, and the Mussoorie mist had come calling. Wispy fingers of cottonwool had wrapped themselves round the green turrets, and were slowly descending to stretch across my balcony, forming themselves into a woolly white canopy. In the paved courtyard below, the fountain began to play. As I watched, the misty twilight dissolved into slate-gray night. Down in the Beer Garden, still slushy from the rain, two ancient mossy deodars stood mute witness to the proceedings, as they have done for the last hundred years or more. The spirit of the Svoy does live on. Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.

***

                                                                             

The information

Getting there
Mussoorie is around 32km from Dehradun Railway Station and 55km from Jolly Grant Airport. The best overnight train is the New Delhi-Dehradun AC Express, which leaves New Delhi at midnight and reaches Dehradun at 5.40am the next day. The Dehradun Shatabdi is another option.

The Savoy
The Savoy (+91-135-2637000, is located at the Library end of the Mall Road. It has 50 rooms available in three categories: Savoy Chambers, Fortune Exclusive Rooms and Fortune Suites. All rooms open out onto the large front balcony, but the small individual wooden sit-outs at the back have better views. Weekday packages range from Rs 8,499 to Rs 14,999 per night (plus taxes). Weekend packages range from Rs 10,499 to Rs 16,4999 per night (plus taxes). Breakfast is complimentary. The Savoy Christmas package (2 nights, 3 days) starts at Rs 26,555. The New Year’s Eve package (2 nights, 3 days) starts at Rs 41,999.

What to see & do
The walk from Library Bazaar up to the Savoy is short but steep, and goes past the Savoy Post Office—this is probably the only hotel in the world to have its own post office. Mussoorie is very much a walking town. You can amble down the Mall, eating momos, buying woollen socks at streetside stalls and stopping off at the Aquarium. You can also take a long and pleasant walk down the Camel’s Back Road: look out for the point from which you can see the rock shaped like a camel’s hump that gives the road its name.

Mussoorie’s two other old colonial hotels still exist, but barely: the Hakman’s Grand Hotel on the Mall has gone to seed, while the Charleville Hotel in Happy Valley has become the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy, where Indian civil servants are trained. In Landour, inspect St Paul’s Church, where Jim Corbett’s parents were married, and the cemeteries. Look out for the houses of Landour’s famous residents: the writer Ruskin Bond, the actor Victor Banerjee, Tom Alter and Vishal Bhardwaj. It is traditional to buy jam from Prakash Brothers at Sisters Bazaar, and stop for waffles at Char Dukaan. For great Tibetan food in cheery surroundings, try Doma’s Inn (Ivy Cottage Landour Cantt, 0135-2634873). For a posher (very good) meal, stop by the restored Rokeby Manor hotel.

Published in Outlook Traveller magazine, 21 Apr 2014.

Hotel Review: Amber Vermont Estate, Mussoorie

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Sleepy Hollow

Nestle-up in the Himalayan mountains in the beautifully serene rooms of the Amber Vermont Estate.

Neither bustling Dehra Dun, where we arrive by train from Delhi, nor the winding drive up through Mussoorie town, chock-a-block with hotels, leads us to expect the startling peace of the Amber, Vermont Estate. Barely 10 minutes’ drive up from the Mall, we find ourselves walking down a pebbled outer courtyard, the only sound that of stones crunching underfoot.

The hotel’s sloping green roofs sit serenely atop three separate blocks of rooms, all with glorious views of the Happy Valley. The older block, with three deluxe rooms and a luxurious suite that opens out into the flower-filled back garden, also houses a poolroom, a TV room, a private dining room and a chic but comfortable lobby. This block, we are told, retains much of the original structure, with the wooden panelled walls and some of the lovelier old pieces of furniture restored to perfection, but the rooms (apart from the suite) are usually reserved for the owner’s special guests. We are given a first floor room in the new block, a contemporary stone-and-wood structure built on the site of the old servants’ quarters. Fortified by a luxurious hot shower and a hearty breakfast of aloo and paneer paranthas with pickle and dahi, we deliberate the prospect of a walk, but are defeated by the combination of approaching rain and an irresistibly cosy room: wooden floors, a warm bed and a glass-walled balcony through which you can see the mountains whenever they choose to reappear through the fog.

Every room at the Vermont gets its own balcony, which is priceless. But the high point of the five-acre property is undeniably the Deck: an open area adjoining the lobby where guests are welcome to dine, read or just gaze into the distance, watching the mist slowly wrap itself around the mountains, or listening to the langurs chatter in the trees. There is a dining table for four, a space for low seating, as well as two reclining chairs.

A post-breakfast siesta is followed by lunch on the Deck, after which we are driven down to Mussoorie town (the hotel provides a very welcome shuttle service to and from Library Chowk). We walk first along the picturesque Camel’s Back Road, and then along the length of the Mall, stopping to look at the wrought iron bus stops, the tired ponies lined up for potential tourists to ride. It is off-season, though, and no hordes of cantering children appear. Business is slow in general, whether for ponies or cable cars, or the many photographers offering to capture couples at ‘Bunty-Babli Point’ — which turns out to be outside the Continental Hotel, where Abhishek Bachchan and Rani Mukherjee are shown conning a hotel owner in the 2005 film.

We return to the hotel, where off-season manages to seem like a quiet state of readiness rather than despair or desperation. Yes, the spa is still being built, the regular chauffeur is unavailable and the continental chef has decided to take a holiday, but things seem entirely under control. The brisk and cheerful general manager doubles up to drive guests to town and the waiters volunteer desi alternatives to the western-style snacks we ask for (wonderfully crisp paneer pakoras). The service is slightly slow, but always courteous and mostly thoughtful — though someone needs to take care of the little things, like remembering to provide a strainer on the tea tray, and a tea cosy to ensure that the tea doesn’t get cold by the time it’s found its way up to the guests. The food itself is good: carefully prepared, non-greasy and spiced mildly enough to cater to the most sensitive palate. I recommend the tandoori platter, as well as the Kashmiri rogan josh with home-style tawa rotis. (Oh, and the gulab jamuns.) There isn’t any alcohol available, though the manager suggested he would arrange to have some bought in town if we wanted.

When it isn’t pouring, you can drive up to atmospheric Cloud’s End, among the oldest estates in the area, which seems less like a functioning hotel and more like a museum to Mussoorie past, with its tiger skins and sepia-toned pictures of the Mall and Kulri Bazaar. You could also spend a day in nearby Landour, visiting the old St Paul’s Church, the cemetery or, if you’re lucky, Ruskin Bond’s house. But if you end up at the Vermont in the middle of the monsoon, as we did, there are going to be long stretches of rain during which you can do not much except eat, drink, read, sleep — or watch TV. I watched more TV in two-and-a-half days than I have in a whole year. I also read half a biography of Samuel Pepys, feeling a strange link to foggy London as I sat in my cloud-sheathed balcony, watching the rain come down in sheets. And yet, life seemed to move much faster in 17th-century London than it did at the Vermont. How often does a contemporary holiday offer you such stillness?

The Information
* Location Hathi Paon Road, Mussoorie
* Accommodation 12 deluxe double rooms and one deluxe suite
* Tariff Rs 6,500 (rooms), Rs 13,000 (suite). Includes breakfast and dinner. Valid till last weekend of September. High-season tariff: Rs 8,500 (rooms), Rs 15,000 (suite)
* Contact 0135-2630202; www.theamber.in