A Room with a View

In A Room with a View, the 1985 film based on EM Forster's novel, the heroine, Lucy Honeychurch stays at a hotel while on holiday in Florence. She was disappointed that her room lacked a view of the Arno, the most important river of Italy, as promised. She exchanges rooms with another person and as it turns out Lucy finds her room with a view after all, both literally and figuratively - by marrying the guy. But on a holiday you'll neither have the time nor the chance to meet the perfect guy to exchange your room. Poet and writer Swapan K Banerjee, (an authority on Ruskin Bond; his book is included in Boston University's Special Collection Library) explains here his uncanny trick and tips of always getting a room with a view.

- Swapan K Banerjee

There were times when I booked a hotel room over the phone or through an agent only to regret it later. Not because there's usually many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, but because of the fact that the room allotted to me could not offer a breathtaking view from the window or the balcony. But on occasions when the trip was taken on an impulse and I had to book it on the spot, I managed to get a room of my choice and came back home with memories to fall back on.

Let me briefly recount what happened at Kausani, a hill-station in Uttarakhand, and then at Manikaran in Himachal Pradesh. On reaching Kausani from Almora we tried a few hotels but somehow none of them could satisfy us in terms of the unobstructed view of the mountain ranges from the room itself. Then one steep bend above Gandhi Ashram, up a very narrow approach road, our car entered the Hotel Krishna compound. By then it was already dark. When we went to check the room we could see the mist hanging low in the Someshwar Valley and beyond it the faint silhouette of undulating massif all across the horizon. You had just to draw the blinds aside, and there it was, eloquently silent and imposing.

After dinner, I took a leisurely walk at the lawn fronting the rooms all of which were mountain-facing, and then sat under a shed, soaking in the profound stillness oozing out of the valley and the pine trees. I went back to our room and remained awake till midnight watching the night fall as I felt distinctly the presence of an all-encompassing spirit getting hold of my being. I left the curtains partially open before going to bed.