Day 14: July 22, 2019

Having a less than flattering first impression of Dharamshala, especially the horrible hotel stay after the very exhausting day long bus journey from Manali, I had already modified my plans for the rest of my stay in Himachal before finally returning to Delhi. Dalhousie had at first seemed more like an impulsive attempt to escape my unbearable situation rather than a well thought out plan. But as the bus carried me nearer my latest destination I felt the sudden rush of affection for it. And every minute of my subsequent experiences after having reached Dalhousie has just cemented that affection to a deep rooted love affair. Coming here was the best decision I made in the last 24 hours. Now I'll rest, read and rest. And then as someone said - tomorrow is another day.

My tomorrow came in a couple of hours.  I felt rested and the insidious urge for a smoke, which I had been resisting as the altitude at which I now found myself demanded unqualified respect and forbearance from suffusing my lungs with anything but oxygen. But now that I felt rested, the devil came to the party. So I went out to the common terrace overlooking the greenest mountains, covered every inch by the tall conifers, and in that dusk setting amidst the nature's finest, I indulged in my vice.

Inside, which combined the reception and the dining area with a sitting zone, the other travellers, already bonded by the days that had been and the times they had shared and the funs they had had together, were playing a game which I had no idea of although its name rang a bell in some obscure recess of my mind but no clear or definite remembrance surfaced. Mafia was the game called and I was invited to observe the rules and gameplay before joining.

It's best played with at least eight to ten people and consisted of three to four mafia guys and the rest innocent villagers, with two of them marked as a police and a doctor. Playing with lesser number of people actually takes some of the sheen from the game as the ratio needs to be proportionate between the mafia and the innocents with the police's and the doctor's involvement not to be compromised. The person conducting the game is called Godfather and he has to be like a magician, the greater his skills the more enjoyable the game for everyone, and so his skills required a lot of talking, stage presence, crowd management, and misdirections manipulated into the psyche of others by clever innuendos and warnings that they were making mistakes. While all this sounds intriguing, the game itself is far from prefect as its essence is supposed to be based on observation of body language, logical reasoning and psychological deduction, but with too little information and too many restrictions, combined with varying degree of observation, logic and reasoning employed by the players involved, the game can plummet to mere guesswork and prior knowledge of the players often trumps pure psychology. Because the game must run its course and has to be completed within a minimum of two and a maximum of five rounds, the arbitrary nature of the gameplay was what struck me and I didn't wish to play.