About an hour's drive from Mussoorie, towards Kempty Falls, there's a road leading to Lakemist. If you don't descend to Lakemist, and keep going towards Binog Temple Hill and the Mountain Quail Sanctuary, you come to what was evidently once a city gentleman's farmhouse. It is now Brentwood's Sanctuary.
Advance reservations and secure electronic transfers, as well as detailed exchanges of e-mail with the Manager got us the upstairs room with (what's that again?) a massive bookshelf filled with paperbacks ranging from Sir Walter Scott and Daniel Defoe to Wittegenstein and Slavoj Zizek, to Enid Blyton and Goosebumps, to Louis L'Amour and Len deighton; Paul Theroux, Ian Rankin...
The next thing we knew, all three of us were sitting on rocks by the gentle stream next door, feet dipping in ice-cold mountain-spring water, toes nibbled by fish (or were they just tadpoles?), reading away happily.
Not for long. They had slave-drivers on the staff that subjected us to rapelling, the...
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