Shamli as a town enchanted me in my childhood not because I have any ancestral association with it but I happened to read Ruskin Bond in my Junior School. His stories of boarding schools and ghosts and nature fascinated me and made my boarding school stay an amorous one. Growing up in Mussoorie had its privileges. One could see the Author come and play Badminton in our School with Principal and students of course who were good at it. This helped me associate better with his stories and I loved them. In one such short story he vividly sketches a small town called Shamli. I always wished I could take a train journey in night to Shamli all alone.Unfortunately in our term break I used to take train to the East of Dehradun. I had imagined and re-imagined the sleepy town many a times in my mind. Time passed and as all good things come to an end I too had to leave the School and the golden age .
Many years later after letting the name of the town go in milieu of my memory I got posted to Meerut Cantonment .As destiny would have it my unit was located on Meerut - Shamli Road. All my reminiscences of the Town came alive. Only thing was that the mental sketch of the town was fogged now. Soon I got an opportunity to travel to Shamli. I was tasked to make a trip to Roorkee, Dehradun and Saharanpur on an Army Truck called ALS. Army calls it 3 Tonner in their diction. Taking the Delhi - Dehradun Highway NH- 58 I reached Dehradun in the evening via Roorkee. As one was in the Army now and somebody had planned my night halt at Saharanpur so taking the Dehradun- Saharanpur Highway I reached my night halt location. Next day morning we stared off for Meerut. I had two options either travel by Deoband to Muzaffarnagar and take NH 58 back or take the road to Shamli. No extra credits for guessing that I took the road to Shamli. The journey was a comfortable one (by Army Standards @ 2008).
By 0800 hrs I reached the small town of Shamli. There was some fog in the fresh morning air. My Imagination was meeting the reality now. So many fond memories passed me that moment or say the time was by my side. In that small time frame I could recollect quite a few incidents and my friends. The town was sleepy indeed but the winds of change had caught it too. The morning tea at the local tea stall gave me a rough Idea that the lucid sketch of the town by Ruskin Bond and my imagination were a thing of the past. Time had changed and things were on an upwards in terms of population and money. I asked him did he Know who was Ruskin Bond? He had not heard of him and neither the school going children passing the tea stall.
After my tea and chit chat I moved on with my party leaving behind the Railway station of Shamli which at least had not changed much since Bond wrote his story. A part of me told me that I wanted to be a child again and read his books once more. At least they fired my imagination more than the talks of the Big Boys. In the end I quote Ruskin Bond ‘And when all the wars are done, a butterfly will still be beautiful’.
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