Gone are the days when the tongas were the only public conveyance. There were very few cars in the town in the 1960s and 1970s. The scooters were greater in number. But most of the people either walked, rode bicycles or enjoyed tonga rides while reaching their destinations.
The trotting of horses was a very familiar sound to us as the day we began going to school, we went in a tonga and that continued for several years.
Each tongawallah had a fixed group of schoolchildren whom he dropped off at their school gates and brought them back home in the afternoon. For many years, we never knew that the tongawallah was being paid to take us to school. We treated him as a friendly uncle who looked after us and took personal interest in all the children. He solved our little problems many times. And the horse of our tonga was a chestnut brown one with a beautiful tail and limpid brown eyes. He was a gentle soul with whom we shared a close relationship. We fed it sugar cubes that we carried in our blazer pockets. When we realised that the tongawallah had given no name to the horse, all of us kept our own names for it — someone called it Sultan, another called it Rustam and yet another liked to call it Tintin!
For many years, till the eighties, the tongas could be seen everywhere in the town but gradually, autos made an entry as a threat to the existence of the exciting and interesting way of travelling around the town. The number of cars had increased manifold and scooters and motorcycles pushed out cycles and tongas both of which had helped keep the town free from pollution to a great extent. Colourfully done up tongas no longer could be seen standing at school gates in the valley eagerly awaiting the group of chirpy kids who would go back to their homes with them. Autorickshaws took their place and by the 90s, the tongas going about in the town could be counted on one’s fingers. The noisy, diesel-spewing “Vikrams” (tempos) had taken over and the pollution grew at a very fast rate in the valley where once gentle horses and their owners had been responsible for reaching people to their places of work, their friends’ houses or to the bazaar.
Every Saturday morning (Saturdays were off for us in junior school), my mother and our landlady called a tongawallah at 10 am and took us (and the landlady’s children) to the market for the weekly shopping and outing. We looked forward to these weekly trips with great excitement. This tonga had a white-grey horse which was a little difficult to manage. We loved to watch the tongawallah (named Girdhar) manipulating the wayward horse and trying to control it with a bit of love and a lot of strictness. This horse was not the friendly kind like our school tonga horse. But it looked better than that one. We reached Clock Tower from Race Course in less than a rupee. The loud commands which the tongawallahs gave to their horses, the clean fresh breeze touching our faces and the rhythm of the horses’ steps together made these tonga rides memorable.
In the mid-90s, there were two tongas left, which could be seen plying on Inder Road. The horses and the tongawallahs looked starved and sickly, struggling for survival in a Maruti-driven world. Some tourists would take a ride sometimes just to get the feel of a tonga ride. I could see these two tongas often going up and down this road. But one fine day, I could see them no more as they had finally been pushed out in the race for development. Once the symbol of the beauty and tranquility of our little town, the tongas simply vanished long before the town prepared to become the capital of a newly carved out hill State. A lot of things consequently vanished — the little bookshops, the old cinemas, many teashops and dhabas, houses with huge gardens and hedges, rice fields and litchi orchards. Along with all these, the tongas of Dehradun were what made the town so special and relaxed.
Today, when we all look out for ways to reduce air pollution and save on petrol, those tongas are really missed and how I wish there was some way to revive them and begin the joyrides again.