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Sherwood College - my boarding school in
Naini Tal, a very pretty hill town in the
Himalayan terai and the summer capital of
the United Provinces in the days of the
Raj - had four schoolhouses. They were
named after members of that famous band of
outlaws of yore: Robin Hood, Friar Tuck,
Alan a Dale and Little John.
Many years after leaving Sherwood I
happened to meet the film director David
Lean on a sea cruise from Karachi to Hong
Kong aboard Lloyd Trestino’s “M. V.
Asia” in January 1962. We got to talking
one day, and he was hugely amused when I
happened to mention that I had been at a
Church of England mission school in Naini
Tal which had schoolhouses named after
English outlaws.
In 1982 Lean was in India, scouting
locations for “A Passage to India” -
the movie version of E. M. Forster’s
novel, which Lean had been commissioned to
direct. Taking a break from his scouting,
Lean decided to go up to Naini Tal for a
holiday. There, he checked into a small
hotel run by Mr Hotz, a Swiss hotelier who
had settled in the town in the 1920s.
Mr Hotz’s son Mike was at school with me
at Sherwood. Mike had a youn-ger sister
named Sandra, and Lean ended up marrying
her. She was the much-married film
director’s fifth wife.
Founded in 1849 as the Diocesan Boy’s
School and renamed Sherwood College in
1895, the school was one of six mission
boarding schools in Naini Tal.
Jim Corbett, the world-famous author of
the best selling “The Man-Eaters of
Kumaon” and other classic shikar tales,
whose family had settled in Naini Tal in
the 1860s, was at Sherwood in the 1880s
(when it was still called the Diocesan
Boy’s School). Its most famous student
of later years was the Indian movie star
Amitabh Bachan. He was at Sherwood in the
1950s.
Boys coming to Sherwood could choose the
house they wanted to be in. When I arrived
at Sherwood in March 1944, I chose Robin
Hood house, assuming that because Robin
Hood had been the leader of that band of
outlaws, the house named after him would
also be the best, under the rules of the
fiercely competitive annual inter-house
championship.
In the event, Robin Hood turned out to be
the worst house - last in sports, last in
debating, last in academics. In Sherwood
slang, the house coming last was known
disparagingly as “Jhug House”. In
March 1947, at the start of the new school
year, I switched to Friar Tuck - Champion
House for the previous three years.
During my first year in Friar Tuck, all
went well and the house ended up as
Champion House yet again. In 1948,
however, my last year at Sherwood, Friar
Tuck got beaten into second place at the
very last stage of the competition,
courtesy of my cousin Ajaz Anis, who was
in Alan a Dale house.
On Founder’s Day in July 1948, Ajaz won
five track events in the under 15
competition, pulling Alan a Dale up
literally by its socks from last into
first place. Because he was my cousin, the
boys in Friar Tuck blamed me for the
defeat. That’s when I realised that life
can sometimes be very unfair.
The boys in my class at Sherwood included
Ravi Dayal, Salman Haider and Manmohan
Malhotra. Ravi was the school yo-yo
champion, and held the record for the
highest number of “Round the Worlds” -
a tricky manoeuvre involving spinning the
yo-yo round and round one’s finger in a
continuous loop. Ravi broke the record by
doing 4,000 Round the Worlds on the trot.
Ravi married the daughter of the
well-known Indian writer Kushwant Singh,
and went on to become head of Oxford
University Press in India. After retiring
from OUP in 1988, he set up his own
publishing firm in New Delhi. Whether he
still does Round the Worlds, I don’t
know.
Salman Haider, the son of the famous
Professor Haider of Aligarh University,
joined the Indian Foreign Service.
Following stints in Cairo, Kabul, New
York, London and Bhutan, Salman became
foreign secretary. After retiring as
foreign secretary in 1996, he did a short
stint on contract as India’s high
commissioner in London, quitting when the
BJP government took office.
Manmohan Malhotra was the cleverest boy in
our class. He joined the Indian
Administrative Service, but resigned in
1977 when Indira Gandhi imposed her
infamous emergency. In 1978 Manmohan
joined the Commonwealth Secretariat in
London, eventually becoming No. 2 to the
then secretary-general, Sonny Ramphal.
When I met Manmohan at his splendid office
in Marlborough House in London in 1980
(our first meeting since leaving Sherwood
in 1948), he took one look at me and said,
in his best pucca voice, “My dear
fellow, what have you been doing for the
last 32 years?”
Try though you might, you can never make
new old friends.
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