by Ruskin Bond
I have no intention of adopting a patronizing, moralizing tone. I did, after all, partake of Rekha’s bhang pakoras one evening before Diwali, and I discovered a great many stars that I hadn’t seen before.
I was in such high spirits that I insisted on being carried home by the two most attractive girls at the party—Abha Saili and Shenaz Kapadia—and they, having also partaken of those magical pakoras, were only too happy to oblige.
They linked arms to form a sort of chariot seat, and I sat upon it (I was much lighter then) and was carried with great dignity and aplomb down Landour’s upper Mall, stopping only now and then to remove the odd, disfiguring nameplate from an offending gate.
On our way down, we encountered a lady on her way up. Well, she looked like a lady to me, and I took off my cap and wished her good evening and asked where she was going at one o’clock in the night.
She sailed past us without deigning to reply.
‘Snooty old bitch!’ I called out. ‘Just who is that midnight woman?’ I asked Abha.
‘It’s not a woman,’ said Abha. ‘It’s the circuit judge.’
‘The circuit judge is taking a circuitous route home,’ I commented. ‘And why is he going about in drag?’
‘Hush. He’s not in drag. He’s wearing his wig!’
‘Ah well,’ I said. ‘Even judges must have their secret vices. We must live and let live!’
They got me home in style, and I’m glad I never had to come up before the judge. He’d have given me more than a wigging.
That was a few years ago. Our Diwalis are far more respectable now, and Rekha sends us sweets instead of pakoras. But those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end.
In fact, they haven’t. It’s still party time in Landour and Mussoorie.
The Walkers’ Club
THOUGH THEIR NUMBERS have diminished over the years, there are still a few compulsive daily walkers around: the odd ones, the strange ones, who will walk all day, here, there and everywhere, not in order to get somewhere, but to escape from their homes, their lonely rooms, their mirrors, themselves…
Those of us who must work for a living and would love to be able to walk a little more don’t often get the chance. There are offices to attend, deadlines to be met, trains or planes to be caught, deals to be struck, people to deal with. It’s the rat race for most people, whether they like it or not. So who are these lucky ones, a small minority it has to be said, who find time to walk all over this hill station from morn to night?
Some are fitness freaks, I suppose; but several are just unhappy souls who find some release, some meaning, in covering miles and miles of highway without so much as a nod in the direction of others on the road. They are not looking at anything as they walk, not even at a violet in a mossy stone.
Here comes Miss Romola. She’s been at it for years. A retired schoolmistress who never married. No friends. Lonely as hell. Not even a visit from a former pupil. She could not have been very popular.
She has money in the bank. She owns her own flat. But she doesn’t spend much time in it. I see her from my window, tramping up the road to Lal Tibba. She strides around the mountain like the character in the old song ‘She’ll be coming round the mountain’, only she doesn’t wear pink pyjamas; she dresses in slacks and a shirt. She doesn’t stop to talk to anyone. It’s quick march to the top of the mountain, and then down again, home again, jiggetyjig. When she has to go down to Dehradun (too long a walk even for her), she stops a car and cadges a lift. No taxis for her; not even the bus.
Miss Romola’s chief pleasure in life comes from conserving her money. There are people like that. They view the rest of the world with suspicion. An overture of friendship will be construed as taking an undue interest in her assets. We are all part of an international conspiracy to relieve her of her material possessions! She has no servants, no friends; even her relatives are kept at a safe distance.
A similar sort of character but even more eccentric is Mr Sen, who used to live in the US and walks from the Happy Valley to Landour (five miles) and back every day, in all seasons, year in and year out. Once or twice every week he will stop at the Community Hospital to have his blood pressure checked or undergo a blood or urine test. With all that walking he should have no health problems, but he is a hypochondriac and is convinced that he is dying of something or the other.
He came to see me once. Unlike Miss Romala, he seemed to want a friend, but his neurotic nature turned people away. He was convinced that he was surrounded by individual and collective hostility. People were always staring at him, he told me. I couldn’t help wondering why, because he looked fairly nondescript. He wore conventional Western clothes, perfectly acceptable in urban India, and looked respectable enough except for a constant nervous turning of the head, looking to the left, right, or behind, as though to check on anyone who might be following him. He was convinced that he was being followed at all times.
‘By whom?’ I asked.
‘Agents of the government,’ he said.
‘But why should they follow you?’
‘I look different,’ he said. ‘They see me as an outsider. They think I work for the CIA.’
‘And do you?’
‘No, no!’ He shied nervously away from me. ‘Why did you say that?’
‘Only because you brought the subject up. I haven’t noticed anyone following you.’
‘They’re very clever about it. Perhaps you’re following me too.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t walk as fast or as far as you,’ I said with a laugh,’ but he wasn’t amused. He never smiled, never laughed. He did not feel safe in India, he confided. The saffron brigade was after him!
‘But why?’ I asked. ‘They’re not after me. And you’re a Hindu with a Hindu name.’
‘Ah yes, but I don’t look like one!’
‘Well, I don’t look like a Taoist monk, but that’s what I am,’ I said, adding, in a more jocular manner: ‘I know how to become invisible, and you wouldn’t know I’m around. That’s why no one follows me! I have this wonderful cloak, you see, and when I wear it I become invisible!’
‘Can you lend it to me?’ he asked eagerly.
‘I’d love to,’ I said, ‘but it’s at the cleaners right now. Maybe next week.’
‘Crazy,’ he muttered. ‘Quite mad.’ And he hurried on.
A few weeks later he returned to New York and safety. Then I heard he’d been mugged in Central Park. He’s recovering, but doesn’t do much walking now.
Neurotics do not walk for pleasure, they walk out of compulsion. They are not looking at the trees or the flowers or the mountains; they are not looking at other people (except in apprehension); they are usually walking away from something—unhappiness or disarray in their lives. They tire themselves out, physically and mentally, and that brings them some relief.
Like the journalist who came to see me last year. He’d escaped from Delhi, he told me. He had taken a room in Landour Bazaar and was going to spend a year on his own, away from family, friends, colleagues, the entire rat race. He was full of noble resolutions. He was planning to write an epic poem or a great Indian novel or a philosophical treatise. Every fortnight I meet someone who is planning to write one or the other of these things, and I do not like to discourage them, just in case they turn violent!
In effect he did nothing but walk up and down the mountain, growing shabbier by the day. Sometimes he recognized me. At other times there was a blank look on his face, as though he were on some drug, and he would walk past me without a sign of recognition. He discarded his slippers and began walking about barefoot, even on the stony paths. He did not change or wash his clothes. Then he disappeared; that is, I no longer saw him around.
I did not really notice his absence until I saw an ad in one of the national papers, asking for information about his whereabouts.
His family was anxious to locate him. The ad carried a picture of the gentleman, taken in happier, healthier times; but it was d
efinitely my acquaintance of that summer.
I was sitting in the bank manager’s office, up in the cantonment, when a woman came in, making inquiries about her husband. It was the missing journalist’s wife. Yes, said Mr Ohri, the friendly bank manager, he’d opened an account with them; not a very large sum, but there were a few hundred rupees lying to his credit. And no, they hadn’t seen him in the bank for at least three months
He couldn’t be found. Several months passed, and it was presumed that he had moved on to some other town; or that he’d lost his mind or his memory. Then some milkmen from Kolti Gaon discovered bones and remnants of clothing at the bottom of a cliff.
In the pocket of the ragged shirt was the journalist’s press card.
How he’d fallen to his death remains a mystery. It’s easy to miss your footing and take a fatal plunge on the steep slopes of this range. He may have been high on something or he may simply have been trying out an unfamiliar path. Walking can be dangerous in the hills if you don’t know the way or if you take one chance too many.
And here’s a tale to illustrate that old chestnut that truth is often stranger than fiction.
Colonel Parshottam had just retired and was determined to pass the evening of his life doing the things he enjoyed most: taking early morning and late evening walks, afternoon siestas, a drop of whisky before dinner, and a good book on his bedside table.
A few streets away, on the fourth floor of a block of flats, lived Mrs L, a stout, neglected woman of forty, who’d had enough of life and was determined to do away with herself.
Along came the Colonel on the road below, a song on his lips, strolling along with a jaunty air; in love with life and wanting more of it.
Quite unaware of anyone else around, Mrs L chose that moment to throw herself out of her fourth-floor window. Seconds later she landed with a thud on the Colonel. If this was a Ruskin Bond story, it would have been love at first flight. But the grim reality was that he was crushed beneath her and did not recover from the impact. Mrs L, on the other hand, survived the fall and lived on into a miserable old age.
There is no moral to the story, any more than there is a moral to life. We cannot foresee when a bolt from the blue will put an end to the best-laid plans of mice and men.
Love Thy Critic
HAVING JUST READ a nasty review of my last book in India Today, I take heart by recalling Hemingway’s direct action against critic Max Eastman in 1937. Eastman had questioned Hemingway’s manhood in his review of Death in the Afternoon, which he had sarcastically titled ‘Bull in the Afternoon’.
When Hemingway saw Eastman, he bashed him over the head with a copy of the book and then wrestled him to the ground. Trouble is, my critic is a woman. I’d lose the wrestling match.
This sort of response is rare, but exchanges between authors and critics can get nasty, with reputations maligned and genuine talents belittled. The worst sort of reviewers are those who make personal attacks on authors, usually a sign of envy coupled with malice. Thomas Carlyle called Emerson ‘a hoary-headed and toothless baboon’ and wrote of Charles Lamb: ‘a more pitiful, rickety, gasping, staggering Tomfool I do not know.’ But we still read and enjoy Lamb and Emerson; who reads Carlyle?
Of Walt Whitman, one reviewer said: ‘Whitman is as unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics.’ Swift was accused of having ‘a diseased mind’ and Henry James was called an ‘idiot and a Boston idiot to boot, than which there is nothing lower in the world’. Their critics have long been forgotten, but just occasionally an author turns critic with equal virulence. There was the classic Dorothy Parker review which read: ‘This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.’
When brickbats are flung at an author it is usually a sign that he or she is successful, has reached the top. No one received more abuse than Shakespeare. Hamlet was described by Voltaire as ‘the work of a drunken savage’, and Pepys said A Midsummer Night’s Dream was ‘the most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life’. Macaulay sneered at Wordsworth’s ‘crazy mystical metaphysics, the endless wilderness of dull, flat, prosaic twaddle’, a description that would aptly describe Macaulay’s own meandering and monotonous style.
Should authors really have to put up with this sort of thing? Politicians do, and actors and sportsmen, so why not writers? As E.M. Forster once said: ‘No author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along.’
Of course, some reviewers do go a little too far, like the one who once referred to ‘that well-known typist Harold Robbins’.
That was a remark truly deserving a bash over the head, on behalf of typists everywhere.
Writing for a living: it’s a battlefield!
People do ask funny questions. Accosted on the road by a stranger, who proceeds to cross-examine me, starting with: ‘Excuse me, are you a good writer?’ For once, I’m stumped for an answer.
Those Simple Things
IT’S THE simple things in life that keep us from going crazy.
Like that pigeon in the skylight in the New Delhi Nursing Home where I was incarcerated for two or three days. Even worse than the illness that had brought me there were the series of tests that the doctors insisted I had to go through—gastroscopies, endoscopies, X-rays, blood tests, urine tests, probes into any orifice they could find, and at the end of it all a nice fat bill designed to give me a heart attack.
The only thing that prevented me from running into the street, shouting for help, was that pigeon in the skylight. It sheltered there at various times during the day, and its gentle cooing soothed my nerves and kept me in touch with the normal world outside. I owe my sanity to that pigeon.
Which reminds me of the mouse who shared my little bed-sitting room in London, when I was just seventeen and all on my own. Those early months in London were lonely times for a shy young man going to work during the day and coming back to a cold, damp, empty room late in the evening. In the morning I would make myself a hurried breakfast, and at night I’d make myself a cheese or ham sandwich. This was when I noticed the little mouse peeping out at me from behind the books I had piled up on the floor, there being no bookshelf. I threw some crumbs in his direction, and he was soon making a meal of them and a piece of cheese. After that, he would present himself before me every evening, and the room was no longer as empty and lonely as when I had first moved in.
He was a smart little mouse and sometimes he would speak to me—sharp little squeaks to remind me it was dinner time.
Months later, when I moved to another part of London, I had to leave him behind—I did not want to deprive him of friends and family—but it was a fat little mouse I left behind.
During my three years in London I must have lived in at least half a dozen different lodging houses, and the rooms were usually dull and depressing. One had a window looking out on a railway track; another provided me with a great view of a cemetery. To spend my day off looking down upon hundreds of graves was hardly uplifting, even if some of the tombstones were beautifully sculpted. No wonder I spent my evenings watching old Marx Brothers films at the Everyman Cinema nearby.
Living in small rooms for the greater part of my life, I have always felt the need for small, familiar objects that become a part of me, even if sometimes I forget to say hello to them. A glass paperweight, a laughing Buddha, an old horseshoe, a print of Hokusai’s Great Wave, a suitcase that has seen better days, an old school tie (never worn, but there all the same), a gramophone record (can’t play it now, but when I look at it, the song comes back to me), a potted fern, an old address book… Where have they gone, those old familiar faces? Not one address is relevant today (after some forty years), but I keep it all the same.
I turn to a page at the end, and discover why I have kept it all these years. It holds a secret, scribbled note to an early love:
‘I did not sleep last night, for you had kissed me. You held my hand and
put it to your cheek and to your breasts. And I had closed your eyes and kissed them, and taken your face in my hands and touched your lips with mine. And then, my darling, I stumbled into the light like a man intoxicated, and did not know what people were saying or doing…’
Gosh! How romantic I was at thirty! And reading that little entry, I feel like going out and falling in love again. But will anyone fall in love with an old man of seventy-five?
Yes! There’s a little mouse in my room.
A Good Philosophy
THE OTHER DAY, when I was with a group of students, a bright young thing asked me, ‘Sir, what is your philosophy of life?’
She had me stumped.
There I was, a seventy-five-year-old, still writing, and still functioning physically and mentally (or so I believed), but quite helpless when it came to formulating ‘a philosophy of life’.
How dare I reach the venerable age of seventy-five without a philosophy; without anything resembling a religious outlook; without arming myself with a battery of great thoughts with which to impress my young interlocutor, who is obviously in need of a little practical if not spiritual guidance to help her navigate the shoals of life.
This morning I was pondering on this absence of a philosophy or religious outlook in my make-up, and feeling a little low because it was cloudy and dark outside, and gloomy weather always seems to dampen my spirits. Then the clouds broke up and the sun came out, large, yellow splashes of sunshine in my room and upon my desk, and almost immediately I felt an uplift of spirit. And at the same time I realized that no philosophy would be of any use to a person so susceptible to changes in light and shade, sunshine and shadow. I was a pagan, pure and simple; a sensualist; sensitive to touch and colour and fragrance and odour and sounds of every description; a creature of instinct, of spontaneous attractions, given to illogical fancies and attachments. As a guide, philosopher and friend I am of no use to anyone, least of all to myself.