The Best of Ruskin Bond (7 page)

I
was sitting on a bench in the Indian Section of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, when a tall, stooping, elderly gentleman sat down beside me. I gave him a quick glance, noting his swarthy features, heavy moustache, and horn-rimmed spectacles. There was something familiar and disturbing about his face, and I couldn’t resist looking at him again.

I noticed that he was smiling at me.

‘Do you recognize me?’ he asked, in a soft pleasant v oice.

‘Well, you do seem familiar,’ I said. ‘Haven’t we met somewhere?’

‘Perhaps. But if I seem familiar to you, that is at least something. The trouble these days is that people don’t
know
me anymore—I’m a familiar, that’s all. Just a name standing for a lot of outmoded ideas.’

A little perplexed, I asked. ‘What is it you do?’

‘I wrote books once. Poems and tales Tell me, whose books do you read?’

‘Oh, Maugham, Priestley, Thurber. And among the older lot, Bennett and Wells—’I hesitated, groping for an important name, and I noticed a shadow, a sad shadow, pass across my companion’s face.

‘Oh, yes, and Kipling,’ I said, ‘I read a lot of Kipling.’

His face brightened up at once, and the eyes behind the thick-lensed spectacles suddenly came to life.

‘I’m Kipling,’ he said.

I stared at him in astonishment, and then, realizing that he might perhaps be dangerous, I smiled feebly and said, ‘Oh, yes?’

‘You probably don’t believe me. I’m dead, of course.’

‘So I thought.’

‘And you don’t believe in ghosts?’

‘Not as a rule.’

‘But you’d have no objection to talking to one, if he came along?’

‘I’d have no objection. But how do I know you’re Kipling? How do I know you’re not an imposter?’

‘Listen, then:

When my heavens were turned to blood,
When the dark had filled my day,
Furthest, but most faithful, stood
That lone star I cast away.
I had loved myself, and I
Have not lived and dare not die.

‘Once,’ he said, gripping me by the arm and looking me straight in the eye. ‘Once in life I watched a star; but I whistled her to go.’

‘Your star hasn’t fallen yet,’ I said, suddenly moved, suddenly quite certain that I sat beside Kipling. ‘One day, when there is a new spirit of adventure abroad, we will discover you again.’

‘Why have they heaped scorn on me for so long?’

‘You were too militant, I suppose—too much of an Empire man. You were too patriotic for your own good.’

He looked a little hurt. ‘I was never very political,’ he said. ‘I wrote over six hundred poems, and you could only call a dozen of them political, I have been abused for harping on the theme of the White Man’s burden but my only aim was to show off the Empire to my audience—and I believed the Empire was a fine and noble thing. Is it wrong to believe in something? I never went deeply into political issues, that’s true. You must remember, my seven years in India were very youthful years. I was in my twenties, a little immature if you like, and my interest in India was a boy’s interest. Action appealed to me more than anything else. You must understand that.’

‘No one has described action more vividly, or India so well. I feel at one with Kim wherever he goes along the Grand Trunk Road, in the temples at Banaras, amongst the Saharanpur fruit gardens, on the snow-covered Himalayas.
Kim
has colour and movement and poetry.’

He sighed, and a wistful look came into his eyes.

‘I’m prejudiced, of course,’ I continued. ‘I’ve spent most of my life in India—not
your
India, but an India that does still have much of the colour and atmosphere that you captured. You know, Mr Kipling, you can still sit in a third-class railway carriage and meet the most wonderful assortment of people. In any village you will still find the same courtesy, dignity and courage that the Lama and Kim found on their travels.’

‘And the Grand Trunk Road? Is it still a long winding procession of humanity?’

‘Well, not exactly,’ I said, a little ruefully. ‘It’s just a procession of motor vehicles now. The poor Lama would be run down by a truck if he became too dreamy on the Grand Trunk Road. Times
have
changed. There are no more Mrs Hawksbees in Simla, for instance.’

There was a far-away look in Kipling’s eyes. Perhaps he was imagining himself a boy again; perhaps he could see the hills or the red dust of Rajputana; perhaps he was having a private conversation with Privates Mulvaney and Ortheris, or perhaps he was out hunting with the Seonee wolf-pack. The sound of London’s traffic came to us through the glass doors, but we heard only the creaking of bullock-cart wheels and the distant music of a flute.

He was talking to himself, repeating a passage from one of his stories. ‘And the last puff of the daywind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, that man will at the last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die.’

A mist seemed to have risen between us—or had it come in from the streets?—and when it cleared, Kipling had gone away.

I asked the gatekeeper if he had seen a tall man with a slight stoop, wearing spectacles.

‘Nope,’ said the gatekeeper. ‘Nobody been by for the last ten minutes.’

‘Did someone like that come into the gallery a little while

ago?’

‘No one that I recall. What did you say the bloke’s name was?’

‘Kipling,’ I said.

‘Don’t know him.’

‘Didn’t you ever read
The
Jungle
Books
?’

‘Sounds familiar. Tarzan stuff, wasn’t it?’

I left the museum, and wandered about the streets for a long time, but I couldn’t find Kipling anywhere. Was it the boom of London’s traffic that I heard, or the boom of the Sutlej river racing through the valleys?

I
’d had this old and faded negative with me for a number of years and had never bothered to make a print from it. It was a picture of my maternal grandparents. I remembered my grandmother quite well, because a large part of my childhood had been spent in her house in Dehra after she had been widowed; but although everyone said she was fond of me, I remembered her as a stern, somewhat aloof person, of whom I was a little afraid.

I hadn’t kept many family pictures and this negative was yellow and spotted with damp.

Then last week, when I was visiting my mother in hospital in Delhi, while she awaited her operation, we got talking about my grandparents, and I remembered the negative and decided I’d make a print for my mother.

When I got the photograph and saw my grandmother’s face for the first time in twenty-five years, I was immediately struck by my resemblance to her. I have, like her, lived a rather spartan life, happy with my one room, just as she was content to live in a room of her own while the rest of the family took over the house! And like her, I have lived tidily. But I did not know the physical resemblance was so close—the fair hair, the heavy build, the wide forehead. She looks more like me than my mother!

In the photograph she is seated on her favourite chair, at the top of the veranda steps, and Grandfather stands behind her in the shadows thrown by a large mango tree which is not in the picture. I can tell it was a mango tree because of the pattern the leaves make on the wall. Grandfather was a slim, trim man, with a drooping moustache that was fashionable in the twenties. By all accounts he had a mischievous sense of humour, although he looks unwell in the picture. He appears to have been quite swarthy. No wonder he was so successful in dressing up ‘native’ style and passing himself off as a street-vendor. My mother tells me he even took my grandmother in on one occasion, and sold her a basketful of bad oranges. His character was in strong contrast to my grandmother’s rather forbidding personality and Victorian sense of propriety; but they made a good match.

But here’s the picture, and I am taking it to show my mother who lies in the Lady Hardinge Hospital, awaiting the removal of her left breast.

It is early August and the day is hot and sultry. It rained during the night, but now the sun is out and the sweat oozes through my shirt as I sit in the back of a stuffy little taxi taking me through the suburbs of Greater New Delhi.

On either side of the road are the houses of well-to-do Punjabis, who came to Delhi as refugees in 1947 and now make up more than half the capital’s population. Industrious, flashy, go-ahead people. Thirty years ago, fields extended on either side of this road, as far as the eye could see. The Ridge, an outcrop of the Aravallis, was scrub jungle, in which the black buck roamed. Feroz Shah’s fourteenth century hunting lodge stood here in splendid isolation. It is still here, hidden by petrol pumps and lost within the sounds of buses, cars, trucks and scooter-rickshaws. The peacock has fled the forest, the black buck is extinct. Only the jackal remains. When, a thousand years from now, the last human has left this contaminated planet for some other star, the jackal and the crow will remain, to survive for years on all the refuse we leave behind.

It is difficult to find the right entrance to the hospital, because for about a mile along the Panchkuin Road the pavement has been obliterated by tea-shops, furniture shops, and piles of accumulated junk. A public hydrant stands near the gate, and dirty water runs across the road.

I find my mother in a small ward. It is a cool, dark room, and a ceiling fan whirrs pleasantly overhead. A nurse, a dark pretty girl from the South, is attending to my mother. She says, ‘In a minute,’ and proceeds to make an entry on a chart.

My mother gives me a wan smile and beckons me to come nearer. Her cheeks are slightly flushed, due possibly to fever; otherwise she looks her normal self. I find it hard to believe that the operation she will have tomorrow will only give her, at the most, another year’s lease on life.

I sit at the foot of her bed. This is my third visit, since I flew back from Jersey, using up all my savings in the process; and I will leave after the operation, not to fly away again, but to return to the hills which have always called me back.

‘How do you feel?’ I ask.

‘All right. They say they will operate in the morning. They’ve stopped my smoking.’

‘Can you drink? Your rum, I mean?’

‘No. Not until a few days after the operation.’

She has a fair amount of grey in her hair, natural enough at fifty-four. Otherwise she hasn’t changed much; the same small chin and mouth, lively brown eyes. Her father’s face, not her mother’s.

The nurse has left us. I produce the photograph and hand it to my mother.

‘The negative was lying with me all these years. I had it printed yesterday.’

‘I can’t see without my glasses.’

The glasses are lying on the locker near her bed. I hand them to her. She puts them on and studies the photograph.

‘Your grandmother was always very fond of you.’

‘It was hard to tell. She wasn’t a soft woman.’

‘It was her money that got you to Jersey, when you finished school. It wasn’t much, just enough for the ticket.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘The only person who ever left you anything. I’m afraid I’ve nothing to leave you, either.’

‘You know very well that I’ve never cared a damn about money. My father taught me to write. That was inheritance enough.’

‘And what did I teach you?’

‘I’m not sure. . . . Perhaps you taught me how to enjoy myself now and then.’

She looked pleased at this. ‘Yes, I’ve enjoyed myself between troubles. But your father didn’t know how to enjoy himself. That’s why we quarrelled so much. And finally separated.’

‘He was much older than you.’

‘You’ve always blamed me for leaving him, haven’t you?

‘I was very small at the time. You left us suddenly. My father had to look after me, and it wasn’t easy for him. He was very sick. Naturally I blamed you.’

‘He wouldn’t let me take you away.’

‘Because you were going to marry someone else.’

I break off, we have been over this bef ore. I am not there as my father’s advocate, and the time for recrimination has passed.

And now it is raining outside, and the scent of wet earth comes through the open doors, overpowering the odour of medicines and disinfectants. The dark-eyed nurse comes in again and informs me that the doctor will soon be on his rounds. I can come again in the evening, or early morning before the operation.

‘Come in the evening,’ says my mother. ‘The others will be here then.’

‘I haven’t come to see the others.’

‘They are looking forward to seeing you.’ ‘They’ being my stepfather and half-brothers.

‘I’ll be seeing them in the morning.’

‘As you like.

And then I am on the road again, standing on the pavement, on the fringe of a chaotic rush of traffic, in which it appears that every vehicle is doing its best to overtake its neighbour. The blare of horns can be heard in the corridors of the hospital, but everyone is conditioned to the noise and pays no attention to it. Rather, the sick and the dying are heartened by the thought that people are still well enough to feel reckless, indifferent to each other’s safety! In Delhi there is a feverish desire to be first in line, the first to get anything. . . . This is probably because no one ever gets around to dealing with second-comers.

When I hail a scooter-rickshaw and it stops a short distance away, someone elbows his way past me and gets in first. This epitomizes the philosophy and outlook of the Delhi-wallah.

So I stand on the pavement waiting for another scooter, which doesn’t come. In Delhi, to be second in the race is to be last.

I walk all the way back to my small hotel, with a foreboding of having seen my mother for the last time.

And the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages, the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, that man will at the last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die.

—Rudyard Kipling

O
n the first clear September day, towards the end of the rains, I visited the pine-knoll, my place of peace and power.

It was months since I’d last been there. Trips to the plains, a crisis in my affairs, involvements with other people and their troubles, and an entire monsoon had come between me and the grassy, pine-topped slope facing the Hill of Fairies (Pari Tibba to the locals). Now I tramped through late monsoon foliage—tall ferns, bushes festooned with flowering convolvulus—crossed the stream by way of its little bridge of stones—and climbed the steep hill to the pine slope.

When the trees saw me, they made as if to turn in my direction. A puff of wind came across the valley from the distant snows. A long-tailed blue magpie took alarm and flew noisily out of an oak tree. The cicadas were suddenly silent. But the trees remembered me. They bowed gently in the breeze and beckoned me nearer, welcoming me home. Three pines, a straggling oak, and a wild cherry. I went among them, acknowledged their welcome with a touch of my hand against their trunks—the cherry’s smooth and polished; the pine’s patterned and whorled; the oak’s rough, gnarled, full of experience. He’d been there longest, and the wind had bent his upper branches and twisted a few, so that he looked shaggy and undistinguished. But, like the philosopher who is careless about his dress and appearance, the oak has secrets, a hidden wisdom. He has learnt the art of survival!

While the oak and the pines are older than me and have been here many years, the cherry tree is exactly seven years old. I know, because I planted it.

One day I had this cherry seed in my hand, and on an impulse I thrust it into the soft earth, and then went away and forgot all about it. A few months later I found a tiny cherry tree in the long grass. I did not expect it to survive. But the following year it was two feel tall. And then some goats ate its leaves, and a grass cutter’s scythe injured the stem, and I was sure it would wither away. But it renewed itself, sprang up even faster; and within three years it was a healthy, growing tree, about five feet tall.

I left the hills for two years—forced by circumstances to make a living in Delhi—but this time I did not forget the cherry tree. I thought about it fairly often, sent telepathic messages of encouragement in its direction. And when, a couple of years ago, I returned in the autumn, my heart did a somersault when I found my tree sprinkled with pale pink blossom. (The Himalayan cherry flowers in November.) And later, when the fruit was ripe, the tree was visited by finches, tits, bulbuls and other small birds, all come to feast on the sour, red cherries.

Last summer I spent a night on the pine-knoll, sleeping on the grass beneath the cherry tree. I lay awake for hours, listening to the chatter of the stream and the occasional tonk-tonk of a nightjar; and watching, through the branches overhead, the stars turning in the sky, and I felt the power of the sky and earth, and the power of a small cherry seed. . . .

And so, when the rains are over, this is where I come, that I might feel the peace and power of this place. It’s a big world and momentous events are taking place all the time. But this is where I have seen it happen.

This is where I will write my stories. I can see everything from here—my cottage across the valley; behind and above me, the town and the bazaar, straddling the ridge; to the left, the high mountains and the twisting road to the source of the great river; below me, the little stream and the path to the village; ahead, the Hill of Fairies, the fields beyond; the wide valley below, and then another range of hills and then the distant plains. I can even see Prem Singh in the garden, putting the mattresses out in the sun.

From here he is just a speck on the far hill, but I know it is Prem by the way he stands. A man may have a hundred disguises, but in the end it is his posture that gives him away. Like my grandfather, who was a master of disguise and successfully roamed the bazaars as fruit-vendor or basket-maker; but we could always recognize him because of his pronounced slouch.

Prem Singh doesn’t slouch, but he has this habit of looking up at the sky (regardless of whether it’s cloudy or clear), and at the moment he’s looking at the sky.

Eight years with Prem. He was just a sixteen-year-old boy when I first saw him, and now he has a wife and child.

I had been in the cottage for just over a year. . . . He stood on the landing outside the kitchen door. A tall boy, dark, with good teeth and brown, deep-set eyes; dressed smartly in white drill—his only change of clothes. Looking for a job. I liked the look of him. But—

‘I already have someone working for me,’ I said.

‘Yes, sir. He is my uncle.’

In the hills, everyone is a brother or uncle.

‘You don’t want me to dismiss your uncle?’

‘No, sir. But he says you can find a job for me.’

‘I’ll try. I’ll make enquiries. Have you just come from your village?’

‘Yes. Yesterday I walked ten miles to Pauri. There I got a bus.’

‘Sit down. Your uncle will make some tea.’

He sat down on the steps, removed his white keds, wriggled his toes. His feet were both long and broad, large feet, but not ugly. He was unusually clean for a hill boy. And taller than most.

‘Do you smoke?’ I asked.

‘No, sir.’

‘It is true,’ said his uncle, ‘he does not smoke. All my nephews smoke, but this one, he is a little peculiar, he does not smoke—neither beedi nor hookah.’

‘Do you drink?’

‘It makes me vomit.’

‘Do you take bhang?’

‘No, sahib.’

‘You have no vices. It’s unnatural.’

‘He is unnatural, sahib,’ said his uncle.

‘Does he chase girls?’

‘They chase him, sahib.’

‘So he left the village and came looking for a job.’ I looked at him. He grinned, then looked away, began rubbing his feet.

‘Your name is?’

‘Prem Singh.’

‘All right, Prem, I will try to do something for you.’

I did not see him for a couple of weeks. I forgot about finding him a job. But when I met him again, on the road to the bazaar, he told me that he had got a temporary job in the Survey, looking after the surveyor’s tents.

‘Next week we will be going to Rajasthan,’ he said.

‘It will be very hot. Have you been in the desert before?’

‘No, sir.’

‘It is not like the hills. And it is far from home.’

‘I know. But I have no choice in the matter. I have to collect some money in order to get married.’

In his region there was a bride price, usually of two thousand rupees.

‘Do you have to get married so soon?’

‘I have only one brother and he is still very young. My mother is not well. She needs a daughter-in-law to help her in the fields and with the cows and in the house. We are a small family, so the work is greater.’

Every family has its few terraced fields, narrow and stony, usually perched on a hillside above a stream or river. They grow rice, barley, maize, potatoes—just enough to live on. Even if they produced sufficient for marketing, the absence of roads makes it difficult to get the produce to the market towns. There is no money to be earned in the villages, and money is needed for clothes, soap, medicines, and recovering the family jewellery from the moneylenders. So the young men leave their villages to find work, and to find work they must go to the plains. The lucky ones get into the army. Others enter domestic service or take jobs in garages, hotels, wayside tea-shops, schools. . . .

In Mussoorie the main attraction is the large number of schools, which employ cooks and bearers. But the schools were full when Prem arrived. He’d been to the recruiting centre at Roorkee, hoping to get into the army; but they found a deformity in his right foot, the result of a bone broken when a landslip carried him away one dark monsoon night; he was lucky, he said, that it was only his foot and not his head that had been broken.

He came to the house to inform his uncle about the job and to say goodbye. I thought: another nice person I probably won’t see again; another ship passing in the night, the friendly twinkle of its lights soon vanishing in the darkness. I said ‘come again’, held his smile with mine so that I could remember him better, and returned to my study and my typewriter. The typewriter is the repository of a writer’s loneliness. It stares unsympathetically back at him every day, doing its best to be discouraging. Maybe I’ll go back to the old-fashioned quill pen and marble ink-stand; then I can feel like a real writer, Balzac or Dickens, scratching away into the endless reaches of the night—Of course, the days and nights are seemingly shorter than they need to be! They must be, otherwise why do we hurry so much and achieve so little, by the standards of the past. . . .

Prem goes, disappears into the vast faceless cities of the plains, and a year slips by, or rather I do, and then here he is again, thinner and darker and still smiling and still looking for a job. I should have known that hill men don’t disappear for ever. The spirit-haunted rocks don’t let their people wander too far, lest they lose them forever.

I was able to get him a job in the school. The Headmaster’s wife needed a cook. I wasn’t sure if Prem could cook very well but I sent him along and they said they’d give him a trial. Three days later the Headmaster’s wife met me on the road and started gushing all over me. She was the type who gushes.

‘We’re so grateful to you! Thank you for sending me that lovely boy. He’s so polite. And he cooks very well. A little too hot for my husband, but otherwise delicious—just delicious! He’s a real treasure—a lovely boy.’ And she gave me an arch look—the famous look which she used to captivate all the good-looking young prefects who became perfects, it was said, only if she approved of them.

I wasn’t sure if she didn’t want something more than a cook, and I only hoped that Prem would give every satisfaction.

He looked cheerful enough when he came to see me on his off day.

‘How are you getting on?’ I asked.

‘Lovely,’ he said, using his mistress’s favourite expression.

‘What do you mean—lovely? Do they like your work?’

‘The memsahib likes it. She strokes me on the cheek whenever she enters the kitchen. The sahib says nothing. He takes medicine after every meal.’

‘Did he always take medicine—or only now that you’re doing the cooking?’

‘I am not sure. I think he has always been sick.’

He was sleeping in the Headmaster’s veranda and getting sixty rupees a month. A cook in Delhi got a hundred and sixty. And a cook in Paris or New York got ten times as much. I did not say as much to Prem. He might ask me to get him a job in New York. And that would be the last I saw of him! He, as a cook, might well get a job making curries off Broadway; I, as a writer, wouldn’t get to first base. And only my Uncle Ken knew the secret of how to make a living without actually doing any work. But then, of course, he had four sisters. And each of them was married to a fairly prosperous husband. So Uncle Ken divided up his year among them. Three months with Aunt Ruby in Nainital. Three months with Aunt Susie in Kashmir. Three months with my mother (not quite so affluent) in Jamnagar. And three months in the Vet Hospital in Bareilly, where Aunt Mabel ran the hospital for her veterinary husband. In this way he never overstayed his welcome. A sister can look after a brother for just three months at a time and no more. Uncle K had it worked out to perfection.

But I had no sisters, and I couldn’t live forever on the royalties of a single novel. So I had to write others. So I came to the hills.

The hill men go to the plains to make a living. I had to come to the hills to try and make mine.

‘Prem,’ I said, ‘why don’t you work for me?’

‘And what about my uncle?’

‘He seems ready to desert me any day. His grandfather is ill, he says, and he wants to go home.’

‘His grandfather died last year.’

That’s what I mean—he’s getting restless. And I don’t mind if he goes. These days he seems to be suffering from a form of sleeping sickness. I have to get up first and make his tea . . .’

Sitting here under the cherry tree, whose leaves are just beginning to turn yellow, I rest my chin on my knees and gaze across the valley to where Prem moves about in the garden. Looking back over the seven years he has been with me, I recall some of the nicest things about him. They come to me in no particular order—just pieces of cinema—coloured slides slipping across the screen of memory . . .

Prem rocking his infant son to sleep—crooning to him, passing his large hand gently over the child’s curly head—Prem following me down to the police-station when I was arrested,
^*
and waiting outside until I reappeared—his smile, when I found him in Delhi—his large, irrepressible laughter, most in, evidence when he was seeing an old Laurel and Hardy movie.

Of course there were times when he could be infuriating, stubborn, deliberately pig-headed, sending me little notes of resignation—but I never found it difficult to overlook these little acts of self-indulgence. He had brought much love and laughter into my life, and what more could a lonely man ask for?

It was his stubborn streak that limited the length of his stay in the Headmaster’s household. Mr Good was tolerant enough. But Mrs Good was one of those women who, when they are pleased with you, go out of their way to help, pamper and flatter; and who, when they are displeased, become vindictive, going out of their way to harm or destroy. Mrs Good sought power—over her husband, her dog, her favourite pupils, her servant. . . . She had absolute power over the husband and the dog; partial power over her slightly bewildered pupils; and none at all over Prem, who missed the subtleties of her designs upon his soul. He did not respond to her mothering; or to the way in which she tweaked him on the cheeks, brushed against him in the kitchen, or made admiring remarks about his looks and physique. Memsahibs, he knew, were not for him. So he kept a stony face and went diligently about his duties. And she felt slighted, put in her place. Her liking turned to dislike. Instead of admiring remarks, she began making disparaging remarks about his looks, his clothes, his manners. She found fault with his cooking. No longer was it ‘lovely’. She even accused him of taking away the dog’s meat and giving it to a poor family living on the hillside: no more heinous crime could be imagined! Mr Good threatened him with dismissal. So Prem became stubborn. The following day he withheld the dog’s food altogether; threw it down the khud where it was seized upon by innumerable strays; and went off to the pictures.