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Coming Home to Love and Rest in India

The letter was a strange one and the request in it even stranger. “I am assisting the National Trust with the administration of the late Yvonne Le Rougetel’s estate,” it read. “Sadly, Ms. Le Rougetel passed away in July 2005 and I understand from the National Trust that Ms. Le Rougetel was a friend of yours.

Before she died, Ms. Le Rougetel expressed a wish that some of her ashes be scattered on Mahasu Peak above Simla in India and felt you would be the best person to do this. I understand this is an unusual request. However, the National Trust would like to honour Ms. Le Rougetel’s wishes as far as possible.” The letter was from the executors of the will.

Yvonne Le Rougetel was my father’s secretary when he was working at the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, Unesco, in Paris in the mid-1950s. He later moved back to India and started research on a history of the Sikhs. He needed an assistant and contacted Yvonne in Paris. She accepted and came to India. After the two-year assignment was over, she stayed on in India, but my father lost touch with her - until I showed him the letter.

“The executors of her will must have thought I was long dead,” laughed my father, who is 94, “so they wrote to you.” He recalled Yvonne as “rather eccentric and impulsive, enthusiastic about everything she took up, and always wanting to help people.”

Yvonne never married but my father suspected she became romantically attached to an Indian while she was assisting him with his research. “The Mahasu Peak must have had something to do with that romance,” he speculated.

I wrote back to the executors of the will saying that though my father was still alive, he was too old to honour his late secretary’s wishes and that I would try to do so.

Fortunately, I was going to be in London. The ashes were delivered to me in a small enough parcel to take as hand luggage on my return trip home.

What about customs clearance in Britain and India? I had no idea how they would react to what was, after all, the exit and entry of body parts. So, I got a note from the funeral directors stating that the parcel contained “the cremated remains of Yvonne Le Rougetel, who died at Kingston Hospital, Galsworthy Road, Kingston, Surrey, England on July 29, 2005, aged 89 years.”

I needn’t have worried. The x-ray machines showed up nothing to make the customs officials question me.

Now, to locate Mahasu Peak. Simla, the town mentioned in the letter, is in the Himalayas, 6,500-feet high and was the summer capital of India when the British ruled the country. It is not too far from Kasauli, a smaller town, also in the Himalayas. Inquiries about Mahasu Peak from the locals drew a blank. Then, one evening a young couple who were dining with us and who lived in Simla told me, to my delight, that they knew where the peak was.

I arranged to meet them a few days later outside Simla at Kufri, a place popular with skiers in winter. I abandoned my taxi and got into their four-wheel-drive vehicle, suited to negotiate steep hills and bumpy roads. After a hair-raising drive that took us up to 9,000 feet, even this all-purpose vehicle could go no further. We had to walk up the last 500 feet.

Huffing and panting from the exertion and the thin mountain air, I managed to find a board announcing our arrival at Mahasu Peak. I looked around. The monsoon clouds hid the snow-clad mountains of Tibet but the panorama of hills and valleys was breathtaking, a sight for the gods. Appropriately enough, there was a Hindu temple right at the top of the peak. A Yak grazed nearby. I had finally found the spot that had enchanted Yvonne and where romance had perhaps bloomed. The hillside was covered with small white and pink wild flowers and fir trees.

I opened the parcel. There was a note inside from the “North East Surrey Crematorium,” certifying that she had been cremated on Aug. 15, 2005. The ashes were in a plastic urn. I opened it and, after choosing a clump of flowers surrounding a fir sapling, scattered the ashes. I recited the only Christian prayer I knew, the Our Father. Being a Sikh, I also said a few verses from the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book, while my Hindu friends intoned from the Vedas.

I think Yvonne, the eclectic adventurer that she was, would have approved. She was finally at rest at the place she so loved.

Rahul Singh is a former editor of Khaleej Times and Reader’s Digest (India)

· International Herald Tribune