by Ruskin Bond
My encounter with the little people happened by the light of day.
One morning early in April, purely on an impulse, I decided to climb to the top of Pari Tibba and look around for myself. It was springtime in the Himalayan foothills. The sap was rising—in the trees, in the grass, in the wild flowers, in my own veins. I took the path through the oak forest, down to the little stream at the foot of the hill, and then up the steep slope of Pari Tibba, Hill of Fairies.
It was quite a scramble to get to the top. The path ended at the stream at the bottom of the slope. I had to clutch at brambles and tufts of grass to make the ascent. Fallen pine needles, slippery underfoot, made it difficult to get a foothold. But finally I made it to the top—a grassy plateau fringed by pines and a few wild medlar trees now clothed in white blossom.
It was a pretty spot. And as I was hot and sweaty, I removed most of my clothing and lay down under a medlar to rest. The climb had been quite tiring. But a fresh breeze soon revived me. It made a soft humming sound in the pines. And the grass, sprinkled with yellow buttercups, buzzed with the sound of crickets and grasshoppers.
After some time, I stood up and surveyed the scene. To the north, Landour with its rusty red-roofed cottages; to the south, the wide valley and a silver stream flowing towards the Ganga. To the west were rolling hills, patches of forest and a small village tucked into a fold of the mountain.
Disturbed by my presence, a barking deer ran across the clearing and down the opposite slope. A band of long-tailed blue magpies rose from the oak trees, glided across the knoll and settled in another copse of oaks.
I was alone, alone with the wind and the sky. It had probably been months, possibly years, since any human had passed that way. The soft lush grass looked most inviting. I lay down again on the sun-warmed sward. Pressed and bruised by my weight, the catmint and clover in the grass gave out a soft fragrance. A ladybird climbed up my leg and began to explore my body. A swarm of white butterflies fluttered around me.
I slept.
I have no idea how long I slept. When I awoke, it was to experience an unusual soothing sensation all over my limbs, as though they were being gently stroked with rose petals.
All lethargy gone, I opened my eyes to find a little girl—or was it a woman?—about two inches tall, sitting cross-legged on my chest and studying me intently. Her hair fell in long black tresses. Her skin was the colour of honey. Her firm little breasts were like tiny acorns. She held a buttercup, which was larger than her hand, and she was stroking my skin with it.
I was tingling all over. A sensation of sensual joy surged through my limbs.
A tiny boy—man?—also naked, now joined the elfin girl, and they held hands and looked into my eyes, smiling. Their teeth were like little pearls, their lips soft petals of apricot blossom. Were these the nature spirits, the flower fairies I had often dreamt of?
I raised my head, and saw that there were scores of little people all over me. The delicate and gentle creatures were exploring my legs, arms and body with caressing gestures. Some of them were laving me with dew or pollen or some other soft essence. I closed my eyes again. Waves of pure physical pleasure swept over me. I had never known anything like it. It was endless, all-embracing. My limbs turned to water. The sky revolved around me, and I must have fainted.
When I came to, perhaps an hour later, the little people had gone. The fragrance of honeysuckle lingered in the air. A deep rumble overhead made me look up. Dark clouds had gathered, threatening rain. Had the thunder frightened them away to their abode beneath the rocks and roots? Or had they simply tired of sporting with an unknown newcomer? Mischievous they were; for when I looked around for my clothes I could not find them anywhere.
A wave of panic surged through me. I ran here and there, looking behind shrubs and tree trunks, but to no avail. My clothes had disappeared, along with the fairies—if indeed they were fairies!
It began to rain. Large drops cannoned off the dry rocks. Then it hailed, and soon the slope was covered with ice. There was no shelter. Naked, I clambered down as far as the stream. There was no one to see me—except for a wild mountain goat speeding away in the opposite direction. Gusts of wind slashed rain and hail across my face and body. Panting and shivering, I took shelter beneath an overhanging rock until the storm had passed. By then it was almost dusk, and I was able to ascend the path to my cottage without encountering anyone, apart from a band of startled langoors who chattered excitedly on seeing me.
I couldn’t stop shivering, so I went straight to bed. I slept a deep, dreamless sleep through the afternoon, evening and night, and woke up next morning with a high fever.
Mechanically I dressed, made myself some breakfast and tried to get through the morning’s chores. When I took my temperature, I found it was 104. So I swallowed a Brufen and went back to bed.
There I lay till late afternoon, when the postman’s knocking woke me. I left my letters unopened on my desk—breaking a sacrosanct ritual—and returned to my bed.
The fever lasted almost a week and left me weak and feeble. I couldn’t have climbed Pari Tibba again even if I’d wanted to. But I reclined on my window seat and looked at the clouds drifting over that bleak hill. Desolate it seemed, and yet strangely inhabited. When it grew dark, I waited for those little green fairy lights to appear; but these, it seemed, were now to be denied to me.
And so I returned to my desk, my typewriter, my newspaper articles and correspondence. It was a lonely period in my life. My marriage hadn’t worked out: my wife, fond of high society and averse to living with an unsuccessful writer in a remote cottage in the woods, was pursuing her own, more successful career in Mumbai. I had always been rather halfhearted in my approach to making money, whereas she had always wanted more and more of it. She left me—left me with my books and my dreams. . .
Had it all been a dream, that strange episode on Pari Tibba? Had a too-active imagination conjured up those aerial spirits, those siddhas of the upper air? Or were they underground people, living deep within the bowels of the hill? If I was going to preserve my sanity, I knew I had better get on with the more mundane aspects of living—going into town to buy groceries, mending the leaking roof, paying the electricity bill, plodding up to the post office and remembering to deposit the odd cheque that came my way. All the routine things that made life so dull and dreary.
The truth is, what we commonly call life is not really living at all. The regular and settled ways which we accept as the course of life are really the curse of life. They tie us down to the trivial and monotonous, and we will do almost anything to get away, ideally for a more exalted and fulfilling existence, but if that is not possible, for a few hours of forgetfulness in alcohol, drugs, forbidden sex or even golf. So it would give me great joy to go underground with the fairies. Those little people who have sought refuge in Mother Earth from mankind’s killing ways are as vulnerable as butterflies and flowers. All things beautiful are easily destroyed.
I am sitting at my window in the gathering dark, penning these stray thoughts, when I see them coming—hand-in-hand, walking on a swirl of mist, suffused with all the radiant colours of the rainbow. For a rainbow has formed a bridge for them from Pari Tibba to the edge of my window.
I am ready to go with them to their secret lairs or to the upper air—far from the stifling confines of the world in which we toil. . .
Come, fairies, carry me away, to experience again the perfection I did that summer’s day!
Acknowledgements
My publishers and I would like to acknowledge Penguin Books India for permission to reproduce copyright material—An extract (p. 73 to 80) from Delhi Is Not Far, chapter twelve from The Room on the Roof and the story ‘On Fairy Hill’ from the collection Dust on the Mountain.
no man is an island
Ruskin Bond has been writing for over sixty years, and has now over 120 titles in print—novels, collections of stories, poetry, essays, anthologies and books for children. His first novel, The Room on
the Roof, received the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys award in 1957. He has also received the Padma Shri, and two awards from the Sahitya Akademi—one for his short stories and another for his writings for children. In 2012, the Delhi government gave him its Lifetime Achievement award.
Born in 1934, Ruskin Bond grew up in Jamnagar, Shimla, New Delhi and Dehradun. Apart from three years in the UK, he has spent all his life in India, and now lives in Mussoorie with his adopted family.
A shy person, Ruskin says he likes being a writer because ‘When I’m writing there’s nobody watching me. Today, it’s hard to find a profession where you’re not being watched!’
Published by
Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2013
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Copyright © Ruskin Bond 2013
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Typeset in Utopia Std 10.5/14.8
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For
Mahendra Prasad
and family,
with thanks for many
kindnesses to me and my family.
Contents
Introduction
Untouchable
The Thief
The Last Truck Ride
The Window
The Fight
The Crooked Tree
The Flute Player
Calypso Christmas
The Story of Madhu
The Prospect of Flowers
My Father’s Trees in Dehra
Friends of My Youth
The Playing Fields of Shimla
From Small Beginnings
The Pool
The Tunnel
The Woman on Platform No. 8
‘Let’s Go to the Pictures!’
And Now We Are Twelve
Remember the Old Road
All Is Life
Introduction
In a sense, every man and woman is an island. We communicate with each other, sometimes we share each other’s lives, but our inner selves remain inviolate, our very own. There are some things, some thoughts, we do not share. But life can be very lonely on our individual islands. We need to reach out, touch each other, feel the warmth of another personality, enjoy another’s company, recognize a kindred spirit—find a friend! And then, you are no longer an island.
Friendship had been a theme in many of my stories. It was there in one of my earliest stories, ‘Untouchable,’ which was published in The Illustrated Weekly of India in 1952, the year after I left school. Over the next seven or eight years, the Weekly’s editor, an amiable Irishman named C.R. Mandy, published at least twenty-five of my short stories, and many of them—‘The Thief’, ‘The Crooked Tree’ ‘Madhu,’ ‘The Woman on Platform No. 8’—were about friendships, bonding, developing out of shared experience, or sometimes two people just being thrown together at random.
I think of my father as a friend, because he gave me so much companionship, so much of his time, even when he was desperately ill. When I lost him, I retreated to my island, living in my own head most of the time. Slowly, I began to respond to overtures of friendship from other boys. You can read about some of them in ‘The Pool,’ ‘Friends of my Youth’ and ‘The Playing Fields of Shimla’. As I grew older, I realized how important it was for me to befriend those who were lonely or without support.
Much of my writing is autobiographical, and that is especially true of the stories in this collection. There really was a Calypso Christmas, a pool in the forest, a kind manager of a cinema, a khilasi who befriended a leopard; and Omar and Madhu and Miss Mackenzie were real people. Some of them are still around. What I have done is to try to make them live again on the written page. People who have led humble but meaningful lives deserve to be remembered as much as the rich and the famous. Their lives run deep. In writing about them I pay tribute to the human soul. Every other man is a piece of myself, for I am a part of mankind. Life only begins to make sense when we admit, with John Donne, that ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’
Ruskin Bond
January 2013
Untouchable
he sweeper boy splashed water over the khus matting that hung in the doorway and for a while the air was cooled. I sat on the edge of my bed, staring out of the open window, brooding upon the dusty road shimmering in the noonday heat. A car passed and the dust rose in billowing clouds.
Across the road lived the people who were supposed to look after me while my father lay in hospital with malaria. I was supposed to stay with them, sleep with them. But except for meals, I kept away. I did not like them and they did not like me.
For a week, longer probably, I was going to live alone in the red-brick bungalow on the outskirts of the town, on the fringe of the jungle. At night the sweeper boy would keep guard, sleeping in the kitchen. Apart from him, I had no company; only the neighbours’ children, and I did not like them and they did not like me.
Their mother said, ‘Don’t play with the sweeper boy, he is unclean. Don’t touch him. Remember, he is a servant. You must come and play with my boys.’
Well, I did not intend playing with the sweeper boy; but neither did I intend playing with her children. I was going to sit on my bed all week and wait for my father to come home.
Sweeper boy…all day he pattered up and down between the house and the water tank, with the bucket clanging against his knees.
Back and forth, with a wide, friendly smile.
I frowned at him.
He was about my age, ten. He had short-cropped hair, very white teeth, and muddy feet, hands, and face. All he wore was an old pair of khaki shorts; the rest of his body was bare, burnt a deep brown.
At every trip to the water tank he bathed, and returned dripping and glistening from head to toe.
I dripped with sweat.
It was supposedly below my station to bathe at the tank, where the gardener, water-carrier, cooks, ayahs, sweepers, and their children all collected. I was the son of a ‘sahib’ and convention ruled that I did not play with servant children.
But I was just as determined not to play with the other sahibs’ children, for I did not like them and they did not like me.
I watched the flies buzzing against the windowpane, the lizards scuttling across the rafters, the wind scattering petals of scorched, long-dead flowers.
The sweeper boy smiled and saluted in play. I avoided his eyes and said, ‘Go away.’
He went into the kitchen.
I rose and crossed the room, and lifted my sun helmet off the hatstand.
A centipede ran down the wall, across the floor.
I screamed and jumped on the bed, shouting for help.
The sweeper boy darted in. He saw me on the bed, the centipede on the floor; and picking a large book off the shelf, slammed it down on the repulsive insect.
I remained standing on my bed, trembling with fear and revulsion.
He laughed at me, showing his teeth, and I blushed and said, ‘Get out!’
I would not, could hot, touch or approach the hat or hatstand. I sat on the bed and longed for my father to come home.
A mosquito passed close by me and sang in my ear. Half-heartedly, I clutched at it and mis
sed; and it disappeared behind the dressing table.
That mosquito, I reasoned, gave the malaria to my father. And now it was trying to give it to me!
The next-door lady walked through the compound and smiled thinly from outside the window. I glared back at her.
The sweeper boy passed with the bucket, and grinned. I turned away.
In bed at night, with the lights on, I tried reading. But even books could not quell my anxiety.
The sweeper boy moved about the house, bolting doors, fastening windows. He asked me if I had any orders.
I shook my head.
He skipped across to the electric switch, turned off the light, and slipped into his quarters. Outside, inside, all was dark; only one shaft of light squeezed in through a crack in the sweeper boy’s door, and then that too went out.
I began to wish I had stayed with the neighbours. The darkness worried me—silent and close—silent, as if in suspense.
Once a bat flew flat against the window, falling to the ground outside; once an owl hooted. Sometimes a dog barked. And I tautened as a jackal howled hideously in the jungle behind the bungalow. But nothing could break the overall stillness, the night’s silence…
Only a dry puff of wind…
It rustled in the trees, and put me in mind of a snake slithering over dry leaves and twigs. I remembered a tale I had been told not long ago, of a sleeping boy who had been bitten by a cobra.
I would not, could not, sleep. I longed for my father…
The shutters rattled, the doors creaked. It was a night for ghosts.
Ghosts!
God, why did I have to think of them?
My God! There, standing by the bathroom door…
My father! My father dead from the malaria, and come to see me!
I threw myself at the switch. The room lit up. I sank down on the bed in complete exhaustion, the sweat soaking my nightclothes.