Kullu, in the State of Himachal Pradesh, is a small sleepy little town, serving as Headquarters of the district of the same name. When we go towards the shopping centre of Akhara Bazar from Sarvari, where the main Bus Stand is, we have to round a sharp, almost 90 degree bend to the left. This bend is locally known as ब्यासा मोड़ (Beasa Mour, translates as Beasa Bend). Shops at this bend proudly display their address as Beasa Mour, Kullu. The Beas river is at a fair distance from here - in fact, the Sarvari rivulet is much nearer - so I used to often wonder why they call this bend in the road as Beasa Mour. Late Purohit Chandrashekhar (1905-1996), a renowned writer and poet of the town, told me the tale of how this bend in the road got its name.
The bend is named after a local girl named Beasa.
She wasn't exactly a VIP, royalty or freedom fighter. She was just a free spirited girl who lived in some nondescript house in the Sarvari locality. In 1925 the first motor vehicle came to Kullu by the new road blasted out of the Pandoh-Aut gorge. Soon after, the local commerce got a boost by carriage of goods by motorised trucks in addition to the traditional mules hauling goods over the Kandi Pass. Of course, those days the trucks were few and far between, coming maybe at the rate of one or two a month.
The drivers of these trucks were glamorous show-offs, strutting about like peacocks. Local boys all wanted to grow up to be truck drivers, and the local girls had their eyes on them too. Young, carefree Beasa was one of them. She went a step further and flirted with them (Hill girls are a lot more independent than their sisters in the plains).
One fine day a truck with a driver of whom she was exceptionally fond drove up to her part of town in a cloud of dust and petrol smoke. Beasa ran up to greet him. The driver, understandably, wasn't displeased. He offered her a ride in the vehicle but Beasa had other ideas. She mounted up on the mudguard in front of the driver and began teasing him through the windshield. With a silly leer on his face, the driver enjoyed watching her antics, as she kept shifting from side to side to block his view.
And then the truck approached the bend in the road. The driver was so busy watching Beasa, he didn't watch the road more carefully. And the truck toppled over the side, crushing Beasa underneath.
This was the first road accident fatality in the region and people talked about nothing else for months afterwards. (Nowadays the fatalities are so common nobody seems to remember after a few days). Anyway, this bend in the road has become immortalised as Beasa Mour, in dubious honour of the first fatal road accident that took place here.
The bend is named after a local girl named Beasa.
She wasn't exactly a VIP, royalty or freedom fighter. She was just a free spirited girl who lived in some nondescript house in the Sarvari locality. In 1925 the first motor vehicle came to Kullu by the new road blasted out of the Pandoh-Aut gorge. Soon after, the local commerce got a boost by carriage of goods by motorised trucks in addition to the traditional mules hauling goods over the Kandi Pass. Of course, those days the trucks were few and far between, coming maybe at the rate of one or two a month.
The drivers of these trucks were glamorous show-offs, strutting about like peacocks. Local boys all wanted to grow up to be truck drivers, and the local girls had their eyes on them too. Young, carefree Beasa was one of them. She went a step further and flirted with them (Hill girls are a lot more independent than their sisters in the plains).
One fine day a truck with a driver of whom she was exceptionally fond drove up to her part of town in a cloud of dust and petrol smoke. Beasa ran up to greet him. The driver, understandably, wasn't displeased. He offered her a ride in the vehicle but Beasa had other ideas. She mounted up on the mudguard in front of the driver and began teasing him through the windshield. With a silly leer on his face, the driver enjoyed watching her antics, as she kept shifting from side to side to block his view.
And then the truck approached the bend in the road. The driver was so busy watching Beasa, he didn't watch the road more carefully. And the truck toppled over the side, crushing Beasa underneath.
This was the first road accident fatality in the region and people talked about nothing else for months afterwards. (Nowadays the fatalities are so common nobody seems to remember after a few days). Anyway, this bend in the road has become immortalised as Beasa Mour, in dubious honour of the first fatal road accident that took place here.
