by Ruskin Bond
'Have you any idea who I am?' asked an elderly gentleman, sitting down beside me on a bench opposite the Cambridge Book Depot. A discarded bus ticket fluttered to the ground, settling near his feet. He was a total stranger, but I am used to being accosted by strangers, especially on the busy Mall Road.
'I'm afraid I don't,' I said, 'perhaps you could tell me.'
'If I knew, I wouldn't be asking you,' he said fretfully. And then, seeing that I was about to move on, he added: 'The trouble is, I've lost my memory.'
'It happens to the best of us. Alzheimer's. Rita Hayworth, Ronald Reagan… actors get it, authors get it. Can you remember how you lost it?'
'If I could remember that, I'd find it again, wouldn't I?'
'I suppose so. If you wanted to…'
'I should think I would.' He spoke excellent English. 'But I don't want to get into an argument about it. I hate arguments of a hypothetical nature. Have you any idea at all who I might be?'
I hadn't realised his memory loss was that bad, but I resolved to help him. Perhaps he was another author.
'Where are you staying?' I asked.
'I haven't a clue. I've been visiting all the hotels for the last two hours, looking through the registers, to see if I could recognise my name—but I haven't had any luck so far. All I can remember is this: I was sitting in the open when a large object moved across the face of the sun, blotting everything out.'
'I don't think we've had an eclipse recently. You don't remember where you were sitting?'
'It may have been outside my hotel room. Unless, of course, I live here permanently—but no one seems to recognise me… I'm afraid it's the sort of memory loss that the Emperor Shah Alam suffered from—very convenient for an emperor, but if I don't recover my memory soon, I won't have anywhere to stay tonight!'
'If you know so much about an emperor's ailments, you might be a historian,' I ventured, in my best Sherlock Holmes manner. 'A professor of history or something like that, definitely an academic.'
He seemed quite pleased. 'Perhaps you're right. All along I've had the feeling that I must be a person of some distinction.'
'You do a lot of writing and desk work,' I observed.
'How do you know?'
'Well, the elbows of your coat are rather worn, and your cuffs slightly frayed. You are wearing your reading glasses instead of distance glasses, having mislaid the latter. Two pens in your coat pocket—you don't use a computer. Yes, a person of distinction, but also a person of limited means—undoubtedly a teacher.'
'But how clever of you!'
'Elementary, my dear Professor Dutt.'
'Dutt! Is that my name? How on earth did you find out?'
'It wasn't very difficult. You see, having determined that you were a college professor, I had only to find out where you came from. Well, from the bus ticket that you threw away when you sat down, I saw that you had come from Karnal. Now I happen to know that there is an excellent college in Karnal, with as many as three professors of history—Professor Das, Mansaram and Dutt. Professor Das is well-known for his dislike of Western clothes, and as you, sir, are dressed like a British academic, you could not be Das. Nor could you be Professor Mansaram.'
'And why not?'
'Because only last month he suffered a heart attack, and a holiday at this altitude would not be recommended. You must, therefore, be Professor Dutt.'
'He's Dutt, all right,' came a stentorian voice from behind, and I turned, startled, to find a large cauliflower-shaped lady bearing down on us.
Judging from the proprietorial look in her eyes, and the cringing expression in the professor's, the advancing Nemesis was obviously his wife.
'I've been looking for you everywhere,' she snapped.
'I haven't been anywhere,' mumbled the absent-minded professor. 'Anyway, here I am, dear.'
'Did he tell you he'd lost his memory?' asked the good lady. 'He always uses that ploy to gain the sympathy of strangers.'
'He's no stranger,' cried the professor. 'He's a friend of Dr Mansaram!'
Mrs Dutt wasn't impressed. She loomed over her husband like an over-burdened rain-cloud, and all the sunshine went out of the professor's life.
'Goodbye, kind sir,' he called, as she bundled him away.
And as I watched this unhappy marital scene, I wondered if a similar fate might not have befallen me had my proposal to Sushila been accepted, long, long ago.
A sweet girl, but strong-minded too. Would she have grown into someone resembling Mrs Dutt? On the telephone she had sounded quite determined. And I am, after all, an easy-going, tolerant, accommodating person, just a little absent-minded too.
'Goodbye!' I called to Professor Dutt, as he receded into the distance. 'Give my regards to Dr Mansaram!'
You couldn't really blame him for wanting to lose his memory. I might have done the same, given his circumstances.
21
IN PRAISE OF OLDER WOMEN
In the previous chapter I may have given the impression that I am something of a misogynist. This is not the case. While the path of true love and romance proved rather stony, and while I may have faltered at the altar or backed away from the registrar's office, I have always enjoyed the friendship and company of women. Older women, in particular, have always been stimulating, in the nicest sense of the word.
I was only twelve when I was smitten by a girl of eighteen, a kind and beautiful Anglo-Indian girl who broke many hearts before she went on to marry a Sergeant-Major in the British Army. But that was puppy love, and I soon recovered from the condition.
What I really want to do here is to recall some of the women who helped me along the way, or who were simply good companions. If you really want to know what I mean by companionship, you must get hold of J.B. Priestley's classic novel, The Good Companions—a wonderful tale of friendship growing out of shared experience, as an incongruous group of eccentric but talented people take to the road performing in little theatres across England.
Well, my own performances are limited to putting words on paper, and occasionally travelling about India, reading and talking to children in numerous schools, where almost all the principals and teachers are women. Having grown up in a boarding school dominated by male teachers who were more interested in getting us on to the sports field, it's refreshing to find schools where the children are encouraged to read and write and not only as a part of their curriculum. In spite of the rival attractions of television and the Internet, the number of book-lovers is on the increase, and this is due largely to the efforts of enlightened schoolteachers—and just occasionally enlightened parents!
Certainly my father encouraged me to read and I wish all fathers would do the same for their children. But when I became a writer, my first editors were women—Diana Athill, who encouraged me to write my first novel, and Kaye Webb, who published my stories in Young Elizabethan. Diana became a good friend and helped to make life tolerable for me during those lonely years in London. She was fifteen years older than me, but somehow I never noticed this. We had so much to talk about (books, films, music) and so many places to visit (the theatre, cinemas, restaurants, parks). When, finally, I left London to return to India, she was the only person I really missed.
A woman of similar intellectual attainments, but not as close to me, was Marie Seton, who I knew in Delhi in the early 1960s.
Today, Marie Seton is probably best remembered for her biography of Satyajit Ray. She spent many years studying his cinematic art, knew him personally and was a true enthusiast for his work.
Even before she became a devotee of Ray's work, she had been a film enthusiast, and I'd come across her name when I was a raw youth in London, in 1953. A lonely boy who had grown up on films, I would haunt the small cinemas such as the Academy, off Leicester Square, and the Everyman in Hampstead, taking in everything from silent classics to the lyrical films of Jean Renoir and the comedies of Jacques Tati. There was a season of Eisenstein, I remember. Battleship Potemkin, of course. And an edited vers
ion of the unfinished Que Viva Mexico; edited by a certain Marie Seton, of whom I knew absolutely nothing. But I remembered the name because the film had been memorable and I'd been to see it several times.
Seven years later, when I was living and working in New Delhi, I met the person behind the name. I don't remember how I met her. I was never one for going to parties, and in any case parties were a rarity in Delhi in the 1950s and 1960s. I was working for CARE at the time, and it's possible that I was introduced to her by Oden Meeker, the Chief of CARE who was an author in his own right. I had written just one novel till then—The Room on the Roof—and he would very kindly give it to people he knew and urge them to read it. That's how Marie Seton got a copy. And when, quite by chance, I bumped into her somewhere or the other, she said, 'I've read your book—it's absolutely marvellous!' and when she introduced herself to me as Marie Seton, I was able to say, 'But not as marvellous as your work on Que Viva Mexico!'
There's nothing like a little mutual admiration to set off an enduring relationship.
Marie Seton enjoyed a good conversation, provided she did most of the talking. When she found I was a good listener, she would ask me to meet her in the evenings at Nirula's coffee café at Connaught Circus. It was never boring listening to her, but I soon learnt to sit across the table from her because, if I sat beside her, I would get a crick in my neck from having to keep my head turned constantly in her direction.
Apart from her vast knowledge of films, mostly European, she was also well up on all the latest authors, artists and musicians, and seemed to be an expert on the British Royal family. She was not averse to imparting tidbits of scandal in regard to princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses. I loved listening to her gossip, although I must admit that I can't remember much of it now. She also knew several famous film stars and gave me confidential asides on who was gay, who was straight, who was sexless, and the many who were having extra-marital affairs. Gary Cooper, she told me, was the best-hung man in Hollywood; Charlie Chaplin was a sex maniac; Tyrone Power was gay; and ladies' man Errol Flynn really had nothing to write home about.
All the gossip was not without a solid foundation in fact, as I was to find out in time to come. It was Marie who told me that Somerset Maugham had disowned his daughter, that Richard Burton was an alcoholic and that Merle Oberon, the actress, had been born in Calcutta and not in Tasmania as she claimed. All true, of course!
Marie Seton was an independent woman who moved about a good deal, so I was not surprised when, a few months later, I bumped into her on the Mall in Darjeeling.
No time for coffee and gossip because she was busy watching Satyajit Ray make his new film, Kanchenjunga.
When Marie spotted me on the road, she called out: 'Have you got my Henry Green?'
'No,' I said, 'I've never read Henry Green.' And haven't done so till this day. But she seemed to think she'd lent me one of his books and continued to press me about it.
When, finally, I'd convinced her that I was not a Henry Green abduct, she took the trouble to introduce me to the great man himself, Satyajit Ray.
Mr Ray was, as always, courteous and friendly and invited me to watch the shooting of some of their outdoor scenes. I did so but couldn't see Marie again as she seemed to be having an affair with a still-photographer.
I was in Darjeeling on business for CARE and was staying at the Everest Hotel, where two film crews were in residence—Mr Ray and his unit, and Shammi Kapoor and his crew who were working on a film called Professor, if my memory serves me right.
These two production units provided a sharp contrast in their approach to filming—Ray making his film entirely on location, the Bollywood lot using the hill-station merely as a backdrop for several song and dance routines, one of them on the railway-tracks! While Ray symbolised the natural in cinematic art, Kapoor and Co. stood for the artificial.
After this encounter, I did not see Marie Seton again. I left Delhi for a somewhat reclusive life in the hills, while she continued with her multifarious activities, especially her excellent biography of Satyajit Ray.
While on the subject of older women who charmed or fascinated me, I cannot forget Lillian, or Lily as we called her, who was some twelve years my senior. Her mother was a friend of my grandmother's and Lily had grown up in Dehradun. She was a pretty, fun-loving girl who at the age of eighteen accepted a proposal of marriage from a British soldier who was stationed in Dehra during World War II. I was invited to be a page-boy at the wedding, my reward being a large slice of wedding-cake, and my duty was to fling endless supplies of confetti on the wedding guests—something I did with great gusto, being only six at the time.
She was given a wonderful wedding cake, tier upon tier of icing, spangled with all sorts of colourful sugary appendages, and within the edifice an assortment of raisins and dried fruits embedded in a scrumptious base. I can still wax poetic about such creations!
As a page-boy I was given an extra large helping, and as a result I was as enthusiastic as anyone in giving Lily and her pink-cheeked soldier boy an enthusiastic send-off.
I am writing about Lily not because I had a crush on her, but because I was to encounter her at various periods of her life and mine, and on each occasion she was married to a different person. In the course of a turbulent life, Lily went through five husbands. I admired her for her resilience, tenacity, and optimism—for she went through life in the hope that she would one day find the perfect man, partner and lover and everything else, and of course there is no such thing, man being a very imperfect creation.
Eleven years after attending Lily's marriage in Dehra, I was in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, where I met her again. The soldier boy had vanished leaving her with a small son. She was now married to a greengrocer, who had given her two strapping daughters. Unfortunately the greengrocer could not live up to Lily's high standards of husbandry and soon began hitting the bottle. If he was too inebriated she would lock him out of the house. On one occasion he climbed up a drainpipe to attempt an entry through a second-floor window. She pushed him out and he landed in some hydrangea bushes and had to be hospitalised. I did not see much of her during this period but got all the inside information from her aunt, who was fond of me and often had me over for meals.
After my return to India, I heard (from the same aunt) that Lily had divorced the greengrocer and left the children with the aunt. She had then proceeded to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where she had married a wealthy white farmer who had two grown sons from his previous marriage, the first wife having succumbed to yellow fever. Lily remained in Rhodesia for three or four years surviving all forms of fever, but finally grew bored with the lonely farm life, and left the land and her husband in order to return to India for a short spell.
This was where I met her again, shortly after her fourth marriage to a former big-game hunter who had now, in his early sixties, taken up fishing. Lily could not get excited about fishing but while dear Frank was away on his trips, she entertained quite lavishly at the old family home, and as an old family friend I was invited to these junkets. Lily would occasionally drop in at my place for a gin and tonic and to talk about old times in Dehra. We joined a few picnic parties—those were the days when picnics were still in vogue—and had some great times. She was a fun-loving person who seemed to have fallen into the bad habit of marrying individuals whose temperaments were totally opposed to hers.
Finally, tiring of the quiet hill-station life, she told Frank he could spend the rest of his life fishing and took off for America, where she worked as a private nurse. She married one of her patients, a wealthy man who lived on a large estate in New Orleans, who was swept away in his wheel-chair when Hurricane Katrina flooded the city. Hurricane Lily inherited his fortune.
This brief sketch does not do justice to Lily. She deserves an epic novel to herself. And it would have to include her family history, which is equally fascinating. Her grandfather, a British Civil Servant stationed in old Madras, with a wife and children in England, fe
ll in love with a fourteen-year-old Muslim girl and insisted on marrying her. As a result, he had to give up his job and leave Madras. The couple settled in Dehradun, where they started a family of their own. They had two sons and two daughters, and each of the children was given a house in Dehra and Mussoorie, for their father had an independent income. I never saw him because he died before I was born, but I saw his widow when she was an old woman in her late seventies—a tiny little lady with dark smouldering eyes, who must have used them to bewitch the Englishman who had thrown up career, family and social standing in order to marry her.
One of the children (Lily's aunt) had wanted to adopt me when I was a toddler but my parents would not part with me. Had they done so, I might have inherited one of the houses, quite possibly The Parsonage, now owned by my friend Victor Banerjee, the well-known thespian.
Victor is no parson, but we like to call him the Vicar. There is an aura of sanctity around his dwelling, surrounded as it is by sacred deodars, flying squirrels and retired company executives.
Someone who did go into a novel—my first—was 'Meena', the older woman with whom young Rusty falls in love in The Room on the Roof.
In the novel she is the mother of Kishen, who befriends the runaway Rusty. As many readers have inferred, the novel is autobiographical in essence, and Rusty is the author as a boy. It's true that I was infatuated with Meena (not her real name), who was some fifteen years older than me, the mother of three children, Kishen being the eldest. Her husband, a PWD engineer who had been suspended on a corruption charge, was hitting the bottle in a big way.
Tea and sympathy were the order of the day. Meena gave me tea and I gave her sympathy. She also made wonderful pakoras and I have always believed that the best way to a young man's heart is through his stomach.
Apart from that, she was a beautiful woman, and I was quite smitten, ready to carry out her slightest wish. I ran errands for her, typed out her husband's appeals for reinstatement, gave English lessons to her ten-year-old son and even held the baby when she was busy with other things. This dog-like devotion was rewarded with amusement, affection and even companionship, but she was ever faithful to her husband who seldom emerged from a drunken stupor.