The Standard Hotel, Hazaribagh

In the 1950s for those who did not work for the Government and thus could stay at the Government Circuit House when on a visit, the Standard Hotel was the go-to place in Hazaribagh. It stood on the Kutcherry Road with its back to the Bazaar and if you looked carefully at the sign board it was actually the New Standard Hotel the original having been left behind in, I think, Rawalpindi by its proprietors at the time of the partition. Why two brothers from distant Rawalpindi should end up in a town of thirty thousand people and forty miles away from the nearest railway station is a story I now wish I had heard.

The Hotel stood on the main road and was faintly reminiscent of the hotels one saw in Western movies. One crossed a narrow verandah with wooden posts to a glass fronted Restaurant and to the left a thunderous flight of wooden steps led up to the rooms upstairs. I say thunderous because the steps had no carpet on them and that was exactly the noise they made when the “boys”, which was what the servants were called, ran up the stairs to attend to the hotel guests. For some reason, may be boredom, the boys would run up the stairs backwards and I never saw them miss a step let alone take a tumble.

The five rooms upstairs were of various sizes but most had a table with a large mirror, a chair, two light bedsteads where instead of plank platform for the mattress there was cotton tape that was wrapped around the frame and woven into a strong crisscross of warp and weft. It was light and cool and a great novelty to me and my sister but my mother who as a young girl had lived in Bareilly told us it was called “nayar” and was common in North India. There was an electric light and fan and a calling bell. The water was kept in a clay pitcher the clay being of a particularly sandy variety and what with Hazaribagh air being bone dry for most of the year the water was chilled to perfection. What more could one want? The linen, which was stored in large silvery galvanized iron boxes in the trunk room was surprisingly clean.  The Toilet arrangements were common consisting of a large Bathroom with its platform to sit on made of wooden slats and a large iron bucket under a tap. The town water supply tower was next door so the water came down with a force that was almost hurtful. For defecation there was a thunder box in another large and airy room. One had to climb a flight of steps rather like an Aztec pyramid and on the top of the platform there was a hole in the floor with two flat blocks on which one squatted- my scout master, an Australian, using a trench latrine during a camp in the forests once proclaimed with evident satisfaction “Man was designed to squat! ”. Below there was a bucket to catch the stuff. There was another of those forceful brass taps for washing oneself after one had done one’s thing. During the eight years from that we used to stay at the hotel on visits I never saw the place more than half full. 

In some ways the hotel was something like the English Inns that Macaulay had so lovingly described in his “A History of England”

The main business of the Hotel came from the Restaurant which, if never crowed, was always comfortably busy. The glass front of the restaurant had its Menu’s specials painted in red on the glass. One pushed past a small swing door into the main hall that was large enough to hold about six circular white marble topped tables each with its cluster of four chairs. The two fans above were brown though whether it was their original colour or it was the coating of burnt oil from the kitchen at the back I do not know. There were also two cabins- small curtained cubicles that each held a small rectangular table and four chair for customers who had ladies with them and wished to avoid being in the public gaze. On the left hand side there was a small private dining room which could seat about ten. The long rectangular table had two large mirrors at the opposite sense and Puss and I would laugh ourselves silly to see the very large number of slightly distorted images of ourselves.

If the furniture was simple the food was hearty and good. Today it would be identified as “Dhaba” food the “dhaba” being the Indian equivalent of the French “routier” -a sort of road side shack offering, often, very tasty food at very reasonable rates. At the Standard Hotel even an order for the simplest – a few “Rotis” which came for twenty-five paise each- the rotis would come with an clattering accompaniment of quarter plates being placed on the marble top containing a salad, a dish of lentils to soak the rotis in and a bit of “panchrangi” achar and a mint chutney.  The salad was nothing much more than slices of fresh cucumber and onion and a wedge or two of lemon. The dal was invariable arhar and always garnished with fresh coriander leaves. The panchrangi achar as it name suggest was a pickle made of five vegetable- raw green mango, lotus stem sliced into small lengths, a green berry about the size of a marble with small seeds inside them, strips of ginger and something that was like a cranberry but more tart than acid -all this was pickled in a mixture of mustard oil and spices.  The accompaniments would be laid as a prelude to the arrival of the rotis just out of the oven and too hot to touch, the floury surface golden with flecks of light brown where the flour had just begun to burn. It smelled of freshly baking and was heavenly.

To go with the rotis one could always order the Hotels special- Seekh Kebabs which I did not like too much because they used too much lentil paste as a binder but cheap at two annas apiece, curried eggs, and of course the Chicken -tender and deliciously perfect, cooked in a rich red gravy. The Chicken was, of course, free range or what is now called country chicken, but of course we did not think of it as anything to note-chicken was then somewhat of a novelty and of course it was “free range”-was there any other kind? I cannot remember the price of a dish of chicken, perhaps a rupee and four annas but a whole roast chicken tandoori with a dish of its own sauce was all of five rupees. The was also “dry meat” which I ordered once thinking it would be the dry meat or “boucan” that the pirates in my story books ate but I was disappointed. It turned out to be ordinary meat cooked till all the gravy had dried to almost a spicy paste clinging to the pieces; Father had to eat it as I would not. Though Hazaribagh had a number of large lakes there were no perennial rivers and possibly because of that the fish was not particularly good. The carp that was served was brought from some distance and duly suffered in the process it being before the days of “rock hard” refrigeration. Mother gamely put up with the indifferent quality because of a childhood distaste of for mutton or chicken-she had seen them slaughtered when she was still a little girl and it permanently put her off flesh or fowl; fish was acceptable.

The Hotel did not offer desserts but that was not a problem because across the tree shaded street was the Mohan Mistanna Bhandar which ran a delightful range of North Indian sweets. Their range of savouries and sweets were large but their  Kheer Mohan being absolutely to die for. The Kheer Mohan was essentially cottage cheese kneaded till it became aerated and then shaped into a small patty boiled in a sugar syrup until the cheese patties firmed to a soft chewy texture and became a honeycomb of cottage cheese meringue soaked in sweet syrup. This was then topped off with a layer of clotted cream on the top the slight saltiness of the clotted cream offsetting the almost too sweetness of the syrupy confection. It was sinfully rich and came for four annas apiece or four to a rupee because one was never quite enough. No one had heard of cholesterol in Mohan Mistanna Bhandar and would not have cared even if they had. The breakfast we used to order from our room. The calling bell would have Ganesh or Munna or Jamna Prasad thunder up the stairs -backwards, you will remember- and the orders would be placed and the money paid because the Hotel did not do much by way of breakfast or at least we never made use of it. Instead, we had it brought over from the Mohan Mistanna Bhandar. Since it was across the street, we could see the stuff in the glass cases and use that as a menu. Order taken the man would depart and return after a few minutes, Samosas, Katchoris with their savoury stuffing, all fresh from the deep frying wok, wheaten puris with an accompaniment of quartered potatoes stewed in a thick gravy of salt and turmeric along with various kinds of sweets all in bowls made of green sal leaves stitched together with twigs. The tea whose boast was “not a drop of water in it” was rich and strong and came in little tumblers. Even with the tip it rarely cost more than three rupees.

Since my parents used to visit me twice a year in early March for the prize distribution and once in August for my birthday, we must have stayed at the hotel about sixteen times, Naturally a sort of ownership crept into our relations as these two incidents will indicate. In the Puja holidays of 1959  the school was not able to organize the usual “school party” for returning to Calcutta and so my mother had to come to Hazaribagh to collect me. My father wrote to the Hotel giving Mother’s expected travel plans and possible arrival at the bus stand and the Hotel had a relay of servants waiting there and Mother was safely collected and brought to the Hotel. The other was once on an unscheduled visit in 1963 Father ran short of money or rather, he had less money than he would be comfortable with. It was the most natural thing for both my father and the hotel owners for my father to borrow money from the hotel and repay it with a money order on his return.