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Every city which I go to talks to me. Each has a story to tell, each has a personality for me to discover. There are cities full of joy, some full of promise, and many which look onto the future. But a few want to cling on to a moment of their past, and retell glories which they were once witness to. Few cities are quite as misunderstood as Shimla. Viewed as an easy to get to tourist destination, for all who want an escape from the simmering plains of India, a place to visit and to forget, an expedient holiday. But there exists another city, one tucked away in the folds of its lanes, seeping out from the houses straggled along the mountainside. Shimla was once the majestic summer capital of the largest Empire that the world had ever seen, a city which was poised on the ridge of a range of mountains, from where it looked down onto the multitudes whose fates it decided. But the days of Empire passed, and when the British Raj went, it took a part of that magniloquence of Shimla with it. As I move away from the main tourist spots of the city, I can see a pensive city, one in disrepair, but proud, and leavened with glimmers of what once made it great. A moment, imperfectly, haltingly, preserved in time. I am wandering for no particular reason. Trying to find something by not looking for it. There is something enthralling in the solitude that I experience here. My mind flits through all that it knows of the city, sourced from the fervid imaginations of a childhood fed on a diet of Kipling. As I walk around the old Mall, I can picture myself as Kim, getting myself mired in the intrigues of Imperial espionage. The road turns around a bend, and I can half sense a horse carriage rush past me, maybe heading with some message for Lurgan Sahib, in his vanished shop of mysteries. I turn the bend, and the apparition disappears into the recesses of my mind, just as rapidly as it had emerged. I walk out away towards where the Mall empties out onto the "Khybher Pass" of the city, a narrow defile winding through the old, commanding houses of power and further to Chhota Shimla. Just as I am about to leave a shop window catches my eye. Swaddled between two shops selling those anonymous souvenirs that Indian hill station pander to travellers, there is a small bookstore. I go closer to better examine the ramshackle establishment. "Maria Brothers, Antique Booksellers" reads the signboard. It further tells me that they have been in the business since 1946, and the shop looks each one of those years. I go inside and it's a tiny space, bursting with books. They cover every available space, with the proprietor perched in the only small alcove not fully swathed in old print. The place smells of the past. A musty odour permeates every inch of space. It is the sort of place that makes you lose sight of the immediate universe surrounding you. I glance through books that line its shelves, some dog earned, all yellowed. The titles reflect passions that once held the world in their sway, now forgotten. I can see Burnaby's Ride to Khiva, A memoir of Hodson, whose names lives on in the cavalry unit he formed, A travel guide to an Ottoman Turkey that can no longer be found on maps. In an upper corner stand old copies of Simla Times, chronicling the city from a century ago, and some old editions of Shakespeare. Sandwiched between these hefty tombs is a sliver of book. It's an old, fusty copy of Kim. I open it and see that it's been heavily inscribed in pen. The cover-page tells me that it belongs to "J.B.". Each page has that same scrawl writing excitably about the story as it unfolds. I remember once having known that feeling, the joy of getting lost in Kim's world. As I flip through it, I can feel the ghost of very happy young boy haunting these pages. It's JB, and it's me.