"A marvellous change from the usual Indian choice between a Mogalised concrete block or an elaborately done-over Maharajas Palace"

"There are also good walks and rides, dazzling birds and butterflies, and a marvellous old Hotel, The Lords Central."

"For a taste of the Raj stay in Lords Central Hotel"

"The Lords Central Hotel… cool, clean, comfortable rooms with attached terrace…overlooking an incomparable breathtaking view. For this terrace alone the whole trip had already been worthwhile.

By Lillian Carter

October 9th 1967

Lords Central Hotel Matheran

Aloo took me to catch the big train in Bombay, and we stopped somewhere and changed to a little train with an electric engine.

I was the only American among all the Indians and I pretended I was in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, going towards an intriguing destination as the little train went up and up, around and around the mountain for hours with its eerie whistle shrilling around every curve.

A storm is raging outside this old rambling hotel, and down the mountainside below my window, I can see lightning flashing. It is simply breathtaking.

Since I am the only "Rich American" here, I have been getting deluxe service, and I'm just going to relax and enjoy it. The meals are lavish, even meat and butter, but I can't eat much, I fill up so quickly.

October 12th 1967

I do nothing except rest in my room and walk in the garden. It is thrilling to be idle and bored for a change.

I have two buckets of hot water every morning. I sit on a stool in a sink which has a drain, and use one bucket to soap myself, then pour the other over me to rinse-it's the best and cleanest bath I've ever had.

Monkeys on the roof are making such a racket. They sound like a football team in the attic.

It's the laziest I have ever been in my life and I'm actually enjoying it.

By Salman Rushdie.

Mahabaleshwar, Lonavla, Khandala, Matheran… O cool beloved hill-stations I shall never see again, who's names echo for Bombay folk with the memory of childhood laughter, sweet love-songs and days and nights in cool green forests, spent in walking and repose! In the dry season before the rains these blessed hilltops seem to float lightly on a shimmering magic haze: after the monsoon, when the air is clear, you can stand, for example, on Matheran's Hart Point, or One Tree Hill, and sometimes in that supernatural clarity, you can see, if not for ever, atleast a little way into the future, may be one or two days ahead.

On the day of Abraham's collapse however, the hill stations' quaint slow ways were not what the doctor ordered. The family was booked in for the season at the Lord's Central House in Matheran which meant that after Abraham's collapse they had to drive over twenty miles on a slow untended road, and then, at the road's end, leave Hanuman in charge of the Buick and take the toy train upto the hill from Neral through the One Kiss Tunnel and beyond, a crawling two-hour journey during which Aurora her relaxed ironclad rules and stuffed the girls with pieces of sugar-and-nut chikki-toffee to keep them quiet, while miss Jaya wet handkerchiefs from a water surahi so that Aurora could spread them on Abraham's weakened brow. "Takes longer to get off to this Lord's House," Aurora complained, "then to Paradise itself."

But at least the Lord's Central House was real, it had an empirically provable basis in fact, whereas heavenly Paradise has never been something by which my family set much store…the narrow-gauge train puffed up the hill, pink curtains flapping at the first-class windows, and finally it stopped, and monkeys swung down from its roof and tried to steal the chikki from the Zogoiby girls' startled hands. It was the end of the line; and that night, in a room in the Lord's House newly heavy with odours of spice, and while lizards watched from the walls, Aurora Zogoiby on a noisy spring bed under a slow-moving ceiling fan caressed her husband's body until his return to life was complete; and four and a half months later, on New Year's day 1957,she gave birth to their fourth and final child.