Jakhu Temple, Shimla

What Jakhu holds is not the flight but the promise. Hanuman could have flown on — Lakshmana was dying and the night running out, and none would have counted it a fault. He turned back for a word given to a rishi on a hill: strength that is never its own errand, and a bhakta who keeps the smallest promise as he keeps Rama's command.

Tuesdays and Saturdays are his days, and the summit fills on both. On the full moon of Chaitra, Hanuman Jayanti, the Chalisa is sung here through the day. Dussehra is Jakhu's own festival — on the tenth of Ashvin's bright fortnight, when the Ramkatha closes, Shimla keeps the day up here. Darshan is free the year round.

The hill is not the pilgrims' alone. Deodars stand thick over the summit and the vanaras of Jakhu live in them, bold and quick and entirely at home, kin by the katha's reckoning to the lord of the place. Himachal's tourism department gives the only counsel needed: they are fond of spectacles, cameras and food. Keep a hand on your glasses and enjoy their company.

The temple on Shimla's highest summit tells its own story on a board by the shrine. At Lanka, Meghnad's shakti-astra laid Lakshmana senseless, and Hanuman went up through the sky towards the Himalaya for the Sanjivani. Flying north, his eye fell on a rishi at tapasya on this peak — Yaksha Rishi, whom these hills came to call Yaku — and he came down to ask after the herb. The summit, far higher then, was pressed half into the earth by that descent; and from the rishi's name the place took its own — Yaksha, Yaku, Jakhu.

Before rising again for Dronagiri he gave the rishi his word to return by this hill. Kalnemi's trickery then cost him time he did not have, and he went back by the shorter road past Ayodhya. The rishi waited and grew troubled; then Hanuman gave him darshan, told him why he had not come, and passed from sight — and in that instant a swayambhu murti appeared, the murti of the sanctum still. Yaksha Rishi raised the temple around it, left his charan-padukas and was seen no more; a kutiya behind the shrine keeps in marble the footprints where he came down.

No record dates the shrine; the district administration calls it simply the most ancient temple of Hanuman ji on the highest peak of Shimla. The Shri Hanuman Temple Trust Committee, Jakhu, keeps it, the Deputy Commissioner in the chair.

The temple is a hill shrine and does not pretend otherwise: a low square sanctum under steeply pitched roofs of sindoor orange, painted woodwork about the doorway, the dhwaja above and deodars close on all sides. It has been renovated more than once — Himachal's own account calls it exhaustively renovated — so the fabric is recent around the swayambhu murti within.

Above it stands the Hanuman of Jakhu: a hundred and eight feet of saffron, upright with the gada in his hand, seen from half of Shimla. The state's tourism department calls him a colossal 108-feet tall saffron-coloured idol just outside the temple. It is a wonder, and it is a work of our own time; it should be known as both — the foundation laid in 2008, the murti unveiled on 4 November 2010.

What makes the ground holy is the katha and the murti in the sanctum; the figure above is Shimla's offering, laid over an old shrine in gratitude and scale.