by Ruskin Bond
In all the sixty-five years that I have lived in India, my grandparents abode was the only house that gave me a feeling of some permanence, as neither my parents nor I were ever to own property. But India was my home, and it was big enough.
Grandfather looked after the mango and lichi orchard at the back of the house, grandmother looked after the flower garden in front. English flowers predominated — philox, larkspur, petunias, sweetpeas, snapdragons, nasturtiums; but there was also a jasmine bush, poinsettias, and of course, lots of colourful bougainvillaea climbing the walls. And there were roses brought over from nearby Saharanpur. Saharanpur had become a busy railway junction and an industrial town, but its roses were still famous. It was the home of the botanical survey in northern India, and in the previous century many famous botanists and explorers had ventured into the Himalayas using Saharanpur as their base.
Grandfather had retired from the Railways and settled in Dehra around 1905. At this period, the small foothills town was becoming quite popular as a retreat for retiring Ango-Indian and domiciled Europeans. The bungalows had large compounds and gardens, and Dehra was to remain a garden town until a few years after Independence. The Forest Research Institute, the Survey of India, the Indian Military Academy, and a number of good schools, made the town a special sort of place. By the mid-fifties, the pressures of population meant a greater demand for housing, and gradually the large compounds gave way to housing estates, and the gardens and orchards began to disappear. Most of the estates were now owned by the prospering Indian middle classes. Some of them strove to maintain the town's character and unique charm — flower shows, dog shows, school fetes, club life, dances, garden parties — but gradually these diminished; and today, as the capital of the new state of Uttaranchal, Dehra is as busy, congested and glamorous as any northern town or New Delhi suburb.
My father was always on the move. As a young man, he had been a schoolteacher at Lovedale, in the Nilgiris, then an assistant manager on a tea estate in Travancore-Cochin (now Kerala). He had also worked in the Ichhapore Rifle Factory bordering Calcutta. At the time I was born, he was employed in the Kathiawar states, setting up little schools for the state children in Jamnagar, Pithadia and Jetpur. I grew up in a variety of dwellings, ranging from leaky old dak bungalows to spacious palace guesthouses. Then, during the Second World War, when he enlisted and was posted in Delhi, we moved from tent to Air Force hutment, to a flat in Scindia House, to rented rooms on Hailey Road, Atul Grove, and elsewhere! When he was posted to Karachi, and then Calcutta, I was sent to boarding-school in Shimla.
Father had, in fact, grown up in Calcutta, and his mother still lived at 14, Park Lane. She outlived all her children and continued to live at Park Lane until she was almost ninety. Last year, when I visited Calcutta, I found the Park Lane house. But it was boarded up. Nobody seemed to live there any more. Garbage was piled up near the entrance. A billboard hid most of the house from the road.
Possibly my boarding school, Bishop Cotton's in Shimla, provided me with a certain feeling of permanence, especially after I lost my father in 1944. Known as the 'Eton of the East', and run on English public school lines, Bishop Cotton's did not cater to individual privacy. Everyone knew what you kept in your locker. But when I became a senior, I was fortunate enough to be put in charge of the school library. I could use it in my free time, and it became my retreat, where I could read or write or just be on my own. No one bothered me there, for even in those pre-TV and pre-computer days there was no great demand for books! Reading was a minority pastime then, as it is now.
After school, when I was trying to write and sell my early short stories, I found myself ensconced in a tiny barsati, a room on the roof of an old lodging house in Dehra Dun. Alas! Granny's house had been sold by her eldest daugher, who had gone 'home' to England; my stepfather's home was full of half-brothers, stepbrothers and sundry relatives. The barsati gave me privacy.
A bed, a table and a chair were all that the room contained. It was all I needed. Even today, almost fifty years later, my room has the same basic furnishings, except that the table is larger, the bed is slightly more comfortable, and there is a rug on the floor, designed to trip me up whenever I sally forth from the room.
Then, as now, the view from the room, or from its windows, has always been an important factor in my life. I don't think I could stay anywhere for long unless I had a window from which to gaze out upon the world.
Dehra Dun isn't very far from where I live today, and I have passed granny's old bungalow quite often. It is really half a house now, a wall having been built through the centre of the compound. Like the country itself, it found itself partitioned, and there are two owners; one has the lichi trees and the other the mangoes. Good luck to both!
I do not venture in at the gate, I shall keep my memories intact. The only reminders of the past are a couple of potted geraniums on the veranda steps. And I shall sign off with another little haiku:
Red geranium
Gleaming against the rain-bright floor...
Memory, hold the door!
Sixteen
Return To Dehra
This is old Dehra
Of mangoes and lemons
Where I grew up
Beside the jacaranda
Planted by my father
On the sunny side Of the long veranda.
This is the house
Since sold
To Major-General Mehra.
The town has grown,
None knows me now
Who knew
My mother's laughter.
Most men come home as strangers.
And yet,
The trees my father planted here —
These spreading trees —
Are still at home in Dehra.
Seventeen
Joyfully I Write
I AM A FORTUNATE PERSON. FOR OVER FIFTY YEARS I HAVE BEEN able to make a living by doing what I enjoy most — writing.
Sometimes I wonder if I have written too much. One gets into the habit of serving up the same ideas over and over again; with a different sauce perhaps, but still the same ideas, themes, memories, characters. Writers are often chided for repeating themselves. Artists and musicians are given more latitude. No one criticized Turner for painting so many sunsets at sea, or Gauguin for giving us all those lovely Tahitian women; or Husain, for treating us to so many horses, or Jamini Roy for giving us so many identical stylized figures.
In the world of music, one Puccini opera is very like another, a Chopin nocturne will return to familiar themes, and in the realm of lighter, modern music the same melodies recur with only slight variations. But authors are often taken to task for repeating themselves. They cannot help this, for in their writing they are expressing their personalities. Hemingway's world is very different from Jane Austen's. They are both unique worlds, but they do not change or mutate in the minds of their author-creators. Jane Austen spent all her life in one small place, and portrayed the people she knew. Hemingway roamed the world, but his characters remained much the same, usually extensions of himself.
In the course of a long writing career, it is inevitable that a writer will occasionally repeat himself, or return to themes that have remained with him even as new ideas and formulations enter his mind. The important thing is to keep writing, observing, listening, and paying attention to the beauty of words and their arrangement. And like artists and musicians, the more we work on our art, the better it will be.
Writing, for me, is the simplest and greatest pleasure in the world. Putting a mood or an idea into words is an occupation I truly love. I plan my day so that there is time in it for writing a poem, or a paragraph, or an essay, or part of a story or longer work; not just because writing is my profession, but from a feeling of delight.
The world around me — be it the mountains or the busy street below my window — is teeming with subjects, sights, thoughts, that I wish to put into words in order to catch the fleeting moment, the passing imag
e, the laughter, the joy, and sometimes the sorrow. Life would be intolerable if I did not have this freedom to write every day. Not that everything I put down is worth preserving. A great many pages of manuscripts have found their way into my waste-paper basket or into the stove that warms the family room on cold winter evenings. I do not always please myself. I cannot always please others because, unlike the hard professionals, the Forsyths and the Sheldons, I am not writing to please everyone, I am really writing to please myself!
My theory of writing is that the conception should be as clear as possible, and that words should flow like a stream of clear water, preferably a mountain-stream! You will, of course, encounter boulders, but you will learn to go over them or around them, so that your flow is unimpeded. If your stream gets too sluggish or muddy, it is better to put aside that particular piece of writing. Go to the source, go to the spring, where the water is purest, your thoughts as clear as the mountain air.
I do not write for more than an hour or two in the course of the day. Too long at the desk, and words lose their freshness.
Together with clarity and a good vocabulary, there must come a certain elevation of mood. Sterne must have been bubbling over with high spirits when he wrote Shandy. The sombre intensity of Wuthering Heights reflects Emily Bronte's passion for life, fully knowing that it was to be brief. Tagore's melancholy comes through in his poetry. Dickens is always passionate; there are no half measures in his work. Conrad's prose takes on the moods of the sea he knew and loved.
A real physical emotion accompanies the process of writing, and great writers are those who can channel this emotion into the creation of their best work.
"Are you a serious writer?" a schoolboy once asked.
"Well, I try to be serious," I said, "but cheerfulness keeps breaking in!"
Can a cheerful writer be taken seriously? I don't know. But I was certainly serious about making writing the main occupation of my life.
In order to do this, one has to give up many things — a job, security, comfort, domesticity — or rather, the pursuit of these things. Had I married when I was twenty-five, I would not have been able to throw up a good job as easily as I did at the time; I might now be living on a pension! God forbid. I am grateful for continued independence and the necessity to keep writing for my living, and for those who share their lives with me and whose joys and sorrows are mine too. An artist must not lose his hold on life. We do that when we settle for the safety of a comfortable old age.
Normally writers do not talk much, because they are saving their conversation for the readers of their books — those invisible listeners with whom we wish to strike a sympathetic chord. Of course, we talk freely with our friends, but we are reserved with people we do not know very well. If I talk too freely about a story I am going to write, chances are it will never be written. I have talked it to death.
Being alone is vital for any creative writer. I do not mean that you must live the life of a recluse. People who do not know me are frequently under the impression that I live in lonely splendour on a mountain-top, whereas in reality, I share a small flat with a family of twelve — and I'm the twelfth man, occasionally bringing out refreshments for the players!
I love my extended family, every single individual in it, but as a writer I must sometimes get a little time to be alone with my own thoughts, reflect a little, talk to myself, laugh about all the blunders I have committed in the past, and ponder over the future. This is contemplation, not meditation. I am not very good at meditation, as it involves remaining in a passive state for some time. I would rather be out walking, observing the natural world, or sitting under a tree contemplating my novel or navel! I suppose the latter is a form of meditation.
When I casually told a journalist that I planned to write a book consisting of my meditations, he reported that I was writing a book on Meditation per se, which gave it a different connotation. I shall go along with the simple dictionary meaning of the verb meditate — to plan mentally, to exercise the mind in contemplation.
So I was doing it all along!
I am not, by nature, a gregarious person. Although I love people, and have often made friends with complete strangers, I am also a lover of solitude. Naturally, one thinks better when one is alone. But I prefer walking alone to walking with others. That ladybird on the wild rose would escape my attention if I was engaged in a lively conversation with a companion. Not that the ladybird is going to change my life. But by acknowledging its presence, stopping to admire its beauty, I have paid obeisance to the natural scheme of things of which I am only a small part.
It is upon a person's power of holding fast to such undimmed beauty that his or her inner hopefulness depends. As we journey through the world, we must inevitably encounter meanness and selfishness. As we fight for our survival, the higher visions and ideals often fade. It is then that we need ladybirds! Contemplating that tiny creature, or the flower on which it rests, gives one the hope — better, the certainty — that there is more to life than interest rates, dividends, market forces, and infinite technology.
As a writer, I have known hope and despair, success and failure; some recognition but also long periods of neglect and critical dismissal. But I have had no regrets. I have enjoyed the writer's life to the full, and one reason for this is that living in India has given me certain freedoms which I would not have enjoyed elsewhere. Friendship when needed. Solitude when desired. Even, at times, love and passion. It has tolerated me for what I am — a bit of a drop-out, unconventional, idiosyncratic. I have been left alone to do my own thing. In India, people do not censure you unless you start making a nuisance of yourself. Society has its norms and its orthodoxies, and provided you do not flaunt all the rules, society will allow you to go your own way. I am free to become a naked ascetic and roam the streets with a begging bowl; I am also free to live in a palatial farmhouse if I have the wherewithal. For twenty-five years, I have lived in this small, sunny second-floor room looking out on the mountains, and no one has bothered me, unless you count the neighbour's dog who prevents the postman and courier boys from coming up the steps.
I may write for myself, but as I also write to get published, it must follow that I write for others too. Only a handful of readers might enjoy my writing, but they are my soul mates, my alter egos, and they keep me going through those lean times and discouraging moments.
Even though I depend upon my writing for a livelihood, it is still, for me, the most delightful thing in the world.
I did not set out to make a fortune from writing; I knew I was not that kind of writer. But it was the thing I did best, and I persevered with the exercise of my gift, cultivating the more discriminating editors, publishers and readers, never really expecting huge rewards but accepting whatever came my way. Happiness is a matter of temperament rather than circumstance, and I have always considered myself fortunate in having escaped the tedium of a nine to five job or some other form of drudgery.
Of course, there comes a time when almost every author asks himself what his effort and output really amounts to? We expect our work to influence people, to affect a great many readers, when in fact, its impact is infinitesimal. Those who work on a large scale must feel discouraged by the world's indifference. That is why I am happy to give a little innocent pleasure to a handful of readers. This is a reward worth having.
As a writer, I have difficulty in doing justice to momentous events, the wars of nations, the politics of power; I am more at ease with the dew of the morning, the sensuous delights of the day, the silent blessings of the night, the joys and sorrows of children, the strivings of ordinary folk, and of course, the ridiculous situations in which we sometimes find ourselves.
We cannot prevent sorrow and pain and tragedy. And yet, when we look around us, we find that the majority of people are actually enjoying life! There are so many lovely things to see, there is so much to do, so much fun to be had, and so many charming and interesting people to meet... How can my pen ever run dry?
Eighteen
His Last Words
Seeing Ananda weeping, Gautama said,
'Do not weep, Ananda. This body of ours
Contains within itself the powers
Which renew its strength for a time
But also that which leads to its destruction.
Is there anything put together
Which shall not dissolve?'
And turning to his disciples, he said
'When I am no longer with you,
I will still be in your midst.
You have my laws, my words, my very essence.
Beloved disciples,
If you love my memory, love one another.
I called you to tell you this.'
These were the last words of the Buddha
As he stretched himself out
And slept the final sleep
Under the great Sal tree
At Kusinagara.
Nineteen
Thoughts on Approaching Seventy
" WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE TO BE SEVENTY?" ASKED A YOUNG friend, just the other day.
"No different to what it felt like to be seventeen," I replied. And, as an afterthought, added, "Except that I can't climb trees any more."
Not that I was ever much good at climbing trees, or riding bicycles or ponies, doing the high jump, climbing ropes, or doing the swallow dive. My best effort at the swimming pool was a belly-flop which emptied half the pool.
No, I was never very supple or acrobatic. But I could walk long distances, and still can on a fine day, and it was probably this ability to plod on, over hill and dale, that has enabled me to be here today, at the fast approaching age of three score and ten.