My name is Clare Penny . We visited Shimla in September 2022 for one main reason ; to trace my mother’s roots .My mother was born there in 1930 , the seventh child of ten children born to Anglo-Indian parents . My grandfather worked for the Press department attached to the ruling British Government , based at Viceregal Lodge , at that time . Owing to Independence and Partition of India in 1947, my mother’s family felt they had little option to remain in India and therefore left en masse to settle in the UK and in Australia .
From the moment we met Sumit our guide until we left 3 days later, we were in amazing knowledgeable hands . Sumit showed us all the places that meant so much to my mother and her family; the Ridge, the bazaar, the Gaiety Theatre , Scandal Point, Viceregal Lodge and many other places that they spoke about. I came armed with the sketchiest of information about the family’s years in Shimla and had just one contact who I had never met or spoken to but who could , I was assured , point us to the right places the family had lived and worshipped. Within a few hours Sumit had found our contact , as he knew him! Things then moved very swiftly and the house where the family grew up , the school they went to and the church they worshipped at were all located . I must point out that other members of my family have come to Shimla to trace their roots and have not been able to find these places.
Seeing the house my mum grew up in was a surreal experience, one I will never forget. The lady occupier of the house came out, had a dialogue with Sumit and before long we were invited in to look around ,and , to our surprise, we found it largely unchanged since my mum’s time . It was a very special experience .
Our contact in Shimla was connected to the Catholic Church where the whole family worshipped in the 1920s up until they left in the 1950s onwards . Again with Sumit’s help we were able to find the baptismal records of not only my mother, but some of her siblings too, including one brother who died. This was another surreal moment .
I had one other reason to visit Shimla ; I had brought my late mother’s ashes with me to leave in Simla . Again, with Sumit’s invaluable help, we located the cemetery of some family ancestors . Sumit fought the tall weeds covering the graves with the rest of us, trying to locate a particular grave . Eventually we found it and the next day we were able to have a simple and personal ceremony to lay my mother’s ashes in the place of her birth .
I always told people that my mother left Shimla but Shimla never left my mother . She spoke about Shimla with love and longing until it became akin to hearing about a legend or a fairytale passed down through the generations . I was so happy to have finally come to Shimla and found it to be exactly how it was described ; stunning, beautiful , historic and indeed quite legendary . I cannot thank our guide Sumit enough; without his help we would have never had had the experience we had