What do Jim Corbett, Indira Gandhi, Shekhar Kapur, Supreme Court lawyers, TV professionals and some top advertising professionals have in common? They have all, some time or the other, stayed at The Retreat. Bruce Chatwin, in fact, wrote The Songlines here. Who would have thought this little hideaway in the hills had so much history? Wait till you hear the full story, so here goes.
Smetacek is not a surname you hear in India, leave alone in the upper reaches of Bhimtal in the Kumaon hills. Yet, the town has been home to the Smetacek family since 1951, when Czech national, Frederick Smetacek, came to settle here. How Frederick came to be here is another story in itself, and though long, needs to be told to fully understand the background of The Retreat. It has been narrated to us by his daughter-in-law, Padmini, who now runs the homestay.
A native of Sudetenland, a German-speaking enclave of Czechoslovakia, he is said to have been involved in a failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. As a result, he fled Germany and managed to board a ship sailing to India in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War. He reached Calcutta and from there to Batanagar where he picked up a job at Bata (a Czech company, as we all know). Then, when the war intensified in Southeast Asia, and Calcutta became the British centre of operations, he moved to the city where he ran three companies providing logistical support to the Allies.
That is where he met and fell in love with a local young lady, Shaheda Ahad. After a whirlwind courtship, they married in 1942, and after the war, decided to move to the mountains. After a 5-year stay in the region, they bought some 1,000 acres in a tea estate dating back to the 1840s, called Jones Estate (named after its last British owner, Colonel Bertram Owen Jones), in partnership with General Madan Shamsher Jung Bahadur Rana and the Rani of Balrampur.
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