by Ruskin Bond
In the novel, Meena dies, killed in a road accident; the alcoholic husband staggers on. This was because of the exigencies of the plot. In reality, it was my friend's father who succumbed to cirrhosis. Meena lived on to a healthy old age.
I did not see her again, but I am told that she remained beautiful into her later years. She had that classical type of Indian beauty, personified in screen stars such as Kamini Kaushal and Nargis, that does not fade with time.
At a book-reading in the Capital not long ago, a student stood up and asked me: 'How could you fall in love with a married woman who was much older than you?'
To which I could only reply: 'I just couldn't help it!'
Meena was not in love with me, that would have been expecting too much; but she was not displeased with my attention. She was like the character in Wilde's A Woman of No Importance who says: 'Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What we like is to be a man's last romance.'
And yet it was Meena who set me on the road to romance. For the next ten years I was writing love stories. But in none of them did the lovers live happily every after.
22
WHO KISSED ME IN THE DARK?
This chapter, or story, could not have been written but for a phone call I received last week. I'll come to the caller later. Suffice to say that it triggered off memories of a hilarious fortnight in the autumn of that year (can't remember which one) when India and Pakistan went to war with each other. It did not last long, but there was plenty of excitement in our small town, set off by a rumour that enemy parachutists were landing in force in the ravine below Pari Tibba.
The road to this ravine led past my dwelling, and one afternoon I was amazed to see the town's constabulary, followed by hundreds of concerned citizens (armed mostly with hockey sticks) taking the trail down to the little stream where I usually went bird-watching. The parachutes turned out to be bedsheets from a nearby school, spread out to dry by the dhobis who lived on the opposite hill. After days of incessant rain the sun had come out, and the dhobis had finally got a chance to dry the school bedsheets on the verdant hillside. From afar they did look a bit like open parachutes. In times of crisis, it's wonderful what the imagination will do.
There were also black-outs. It's hard for a hill-station to black itself out, but we did our best. Two or three respectable people were arrested for using their torches to find their way home in the dark. And of course, nothing could be done about the lights on the next mountain, as the people there did not even know there was a war on. They did not have radio or television or even electricity. They used kerosene lamps or lit bonfires!
We had a smart young set in Mussoorie in those days, mostly college students who had also been to convent schools and some of them decided it would be a good idea to put on a show—or old-fashioned theatrical extravaganza—to raise funds for the war effort. And they thought it would be a good idea to rope me in, as I was the only writer living in Mussoorie in those innocent times. I was thirty-one and I had never been a college student but they felt I was the right person to direct a one-act play in English. This was to be the centrepiece of the show.
I forget the name of the play. It was one of those drawing-room situation comedies popular from the 1920s, inspired by such successes as Charley's Aunt and Tons of Money. Anyway, we went into morning rehearsals at Hakman's, one of the older hotels, where there was a proper stage and a hall large enough to seat at least two hundred spectators.
The participants were full of enthusiasm, and rehearsals went along quite smoothly. They were an engaging bunch of young people—Guttoo, the intellectual among them; Ravi, a schoolteacher; Gita, a tiny ball of fire; Neena, a heavy-footed Bharatnatyam exponent; Nellie, daughter of a nurse; Chameli, who was in charge of make-up (she worked in a local beauty saloon); Rajiv, who served in the bar and was also our prompter; and a host of others, some of whom would sing and dance before and after our one-act play.
The performance was well attended, Ravi having rounded up a number of students from the local schools; and the lights were working, although we had to cover all doors, windows and exits with blankets to maintain the regulatory black-out. But the stage was old and rickety and things began to go wrong during Neena's dance number when, after a dazzling pirouette, she began stamping her feet and promptly went through the floorboards. Well, to be precise, her lower half went through, while the rest of her remained above board and visible to the audience.
The schoolboys cheered, the curtain came down and we rescued Neena, who had to be sent to the civil hospital with a sprained ankle, Mussoorie's only civilian war casualty.
There was a hold-up, but before the audience could get too restless the curtain went up on our play, a tea-party scene, which opened with Guttoo pouring tea for everyone. Unfortunately, our stage manager had forgotten to put any tea in the pot and poor Guttoo looked terribly put out as he went from cup to cup, pouring invisible tea. 'Damn. What happened to the tea?' muttered Guttoo, a line, which was not in the script. 'Never mind,' said Gita, playing opposite him and keeping her cool. 'I prefer my milk without tea,' and proceeded to pour herself a cup of milk.
After this, everyone began to fluff their lines and our prompter had a busy time. Unfortunately, he'd helped himself to a couple of rums at the bar, so that, whenever one of the actors faltered, he'd call out the correct words in a stentorian voice which could be heard all over the hall. Soon there was more prompting than acting and the audience began joining in with dialogue of their own.
Finally, to my great relief, the curtain came down—to thunderous applause. It went up again, and the cast stepped forward to take a bow. Our prompter, who was also curtain-puller, released the ropes prematurely and the curtain came down with a rush, one of the sandbags hitting poor Guttoo on the head. He has never fully recovered from the blow.
The lights, which had been behaving all evening, now failed us, and we had a real black-out. In the midst of this confusion, someone—it must have been a girl, judging from the overpowering scent of jasmine that clung to her—put her arms around me and kissed me.
When the light came on again, she had vanished.
Who had kissed me in the dark?
As no one came forward to admit to the deed, I could only make wild guesses. But it had been a very sweet kiss, and I would have been only too happy to return it had I known its ownership. I could hardly go up to each of the girls and kiss them in the hope of reciprocation. After all, it might even have been someone from the audience.
Anyway, our concert did raise a few hundred rupees for the war effort. By the time we sent the money to the right authorities, the war was over. Hopefully they saw to it that the money was put to good use.
We went our various ways and although the kiss lingered in my mind, it gradually became a distant, fading memory and as the years passed it went out of my head altogether. Until the other day, almost forty years later…
'Phone for you,' announced Gautam, my seven-year-old secretary.
'Boy or girl? Man or woman?'
'Don't know. Deep voice like my teacher but it says you know her.'
'Ask her name.'
Gautam asked.
'She's Nellie, and she's speaking from Bareilly.'
'Nellie from Bareilly?' I was intrigued. I took the phone,
'Hello,' I said. 'I'm Bonda from Golconda.'
'Then you must be wealthy now.' Her voice was certainly husky. 'But don't you remember me? Nellie? I acted in that play of yours, up in Mussoorie a long time ago.'
'Of course, I remember now.' I was remembering. 'You had a small part, the maidservant I think. You were very pretty. You had dark, sultry eyes. But what made you ring me after all these years.'
'Well, I was thinking of you. I've often thought about you. You were much older than me, but I liked you. After that show, when the lights went out, I came up to you and kissed you. And then I ran away.'
'So it was
you! I've often wondered. But why did you run away? I would have returned the kiss. More than once.'
'I was very nervous. I thought you'd be angry.'
'Well, I suppose it's too late now. You must be happily married with lots of children.'
'Husband left me. Children grew up, went away.'
'It must be lonely for you.'
'I have lots of dogs.'
'How many?'
'About thirty.'
'Thirty dogs! Do you run a kennel club?'
'No, they are all strays. I run a dog shelter.'
'Well, that's very good of you. Very humane.'
'You must come and see it sometime. Come to Bareilly. Stay with me. You like dogs, don't you?'
'Er—yes, of course. Man's best friend, the dog. But thirty is a lot of dogs to have about the house.'
'I have lots of space.'
'I'm sure…well, Nellie, if ever I'm in Bareilly, I'll come to see you. And I'm glad you phoned and cleared up the mystery. It was a lovely kiss and I'll always remember it.'
We said our goodbyes and I promised to visit her some day. A trip to Bareilly to return a kiss might seem a bit far-fetched, but I've done sillier things in my life. It's those dogs that worry me. I can imagine them snapping at my heels as I attempt to approach their mistress. Dogs can be very possessive.
'Who was that on the phone?' asked Gautam, breaking in on my reverie.
'Just an old friend.'
'Dada's old girlfriend. Are you going to see her?'
'I'll think about it.'
And I'm still thinking about it and about those dogs. But bliss it was to be in Mussoorie forty years ago, when Nellie kissed me in the dark.
Some memories are best left untouched.
23
A FROG SCREAMS
Sitting near a mountain stream,
I heard a sound like the creaking
Of a branch in the wind,
It was a frog screaming
In the jaws of a long green snake.
I couldn't bear its hideous cry:
Taking two sharp sticks, I made
The twisting snake disgorge the frog,
Who hopped quite cheerfully out of the snake's mouth
And sailed away on a floating log!
Pleased with the outcome,
I released the green grass-snake,
Stood back and wondered:
'Is this what it feels like to be God?'
'Only what it feels like to be English,'
Said God (speaking for a change in French),
'I would have let the snake finish his lunch.'
24
ALL YOU NEED IS PAPER
'Writing is very easy. All you have to do is sit in front of the typewriter until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.'
These immortal words of Red Smith, a forgotten freelance writer, sum up the agony and the ecstasy of those who have made writing their profession.
And it's one reason why I prefer pen and paper to typewriter or computer. A machine in front of me is rather daunting. A pen is more personal and that gives me some control over it—a feeling of power as the words flow with the electric thrill that runs down my arm, through my fingers and onto the clean white page. It is a sensuous act, writing by hand. The feel of the paper, as my hand glides over it, its touch, and its texture. The flow of ink, the gliding motion of the pen, the letters themselves as they appear as if by magic in my individual script. No two people have the same handwriting. Your character, your personality is revealed the minute you put pen to paper.
I'm a compulsive writer of course, and I'll write with whatever is handy. Even crayons will do.
The other night I woke up at about two in the morning, having had a vivid dream about discovering a town where the sun never penetrated, the valley being so deep and precipitous; and yet, apparently, people lived there. There was even a bus service bringing in tourists who wanted to look at the town where people lived in a perpetual shadow. In the dream I left, or rather woke up, before it could get too depressing. But I wanted to remember the dream, as I thought it had the makings of a good story, so I switched on the night light and groped around for a pen or pencil. Both were missing, having been commandeered by Siddharth, Shrishti and Gautam the previous evening. Two in the morning is no time for typing, so I looked around for other means of notation and found Gautam's box of coloured crayons lying on my desk.
I selected a bright orange crayon—a psychological choice, as I wished to disperse the gloom of that sunless town—and made my notes on the back of a large envelope. This is one page of notes that I won't misplace, it stands out so vividly; and some day I might even write the story.
I should use crayons more often!
Desperate writers like me will seize upon any bit of writing material when in need. And I recall that my first literary production was inscribed on sheets of toilet paper.
I was at Prep School in Shimla, and in those days boarders were provided not with rolls of toilet paper but with flat packets of tissue. As there was a wartime paper shortage, boys would often use these bits of tissue for writing letters, doing rough work, or simply making paper aeroplanes. There were no spare exercise books.
Feeling the urge to write a detective story (inspired by a film about the Brighton Strangler), I used up an entire packet of toilet paper in penning my masterpiece. In my story, the mysterious strangler got a job as games' master in our school and went about eliminating all the teachers we disliked. He met his match in the food matron who sprinkled rat poison on his cornflakes.
Unfortunately, one of my friends was overcome by the call of nature. He grabbed my sheets of manuscript and rushed to the toilet, bolting the door, and a little later, when I heard the flush in action, I knew that my story would not reach a publisher.
There have been other lost stories over the years. I don't think any of them have been a great loss to literature, but for personal reasons I would have liked to preserve one or two of them. Like the one about the tikkee-eating contest behind Dehradun's clock tower back in 1956. I wasn't just a spectator, I was a participant, and came a close second having consumed twenty-six fried potato tikkees to Sahib Singh's thirty-two. Sahib was a young Sikh friend who went to England a few years later and did much to popularise samosas, tikkees and chaat in the UK, making a fortune in the process.
I wrote a story about the contest and published it in The Tribune, which appeared from Ambala in those far-off days; Chandigarh was only just coming into existence. A clipping of the story went into my scrapbook, but that particular scrapbook was lost when I moved to Delhi and with it several of my early stories. The Great Tikkee-Eating Contest was not one of my more memorable works, but it was fun writing it.
As Gautam says, with inexorable logic, 'You can always write it again!'
That is, if it's worth the effort…
Another runaway story was The Runway Bus, which appeared in Sport and Pastime at about the same time. A bus driver in the metropolis spots his wife riding pillion on a scooter with a stranger, and gives chase, heedless of the convenience of his passengers. He catches up with them near the Qutub Minar, only to find that he has been chasing his wife's double. The bus passengers beat him up.
Then there was Gone Fishing, in which the narrator (me) meets a village boy and promises to go fishing with him the next day. But he has to leave town suddenly to take up a job in the Capital. As his train passes over a small bridge, he catches a glimpse of the boy sitting on the banks of a stream, rod and line in hand, fishing by himself. The narrator feels that he has missed something—something more than just a day's fishing—and knows that happiness can be as elusive as a small fish darting away in a mountain stream.
That's a story that I might like to write again.
The invention of the Xerox copying machine meant that I could make as many copies as I wished and the days of lost clippings and typescripts were (almost) over. In my early freelancing days, when I had to use a typewriter, you
could take a couple of carbon copies but you could hardly submit these to publishers. Of course, in those days publishers took the trouble to return unwanted manuscripts, so you did not always lose your fair copy. Like most writers, I collected my fair share of rejection slips. Some editors were kind enough to make helpful comments such as 'try again' or 'shows promise', and thus encouraged I would bombard them with articles, stories and poems.
Most publications paid the writer for his work if it was accepted. The sums may have been small but they came in on time. This is not the case today; many successful publications will avoid making payments if they can get away with it.
Many of my rejects (written when I was in my teens) would end up in the pages of a little magazine called My Magazine of India, published from Chennai (then called Madras). They would send me a five-rupee money order for every item published. I looked forward to these money orders. With five rupees I could see three films or buy a couple of paperbacks or indulge in a bottle of beer.
If a writer is any good he should expect to be paid for his work. Those who go to vanity publishers and pay to have their books published are doomed to disappointment; they will end up forcing their books upon their unfortunate friends, who will wish they could have had something better for Christmas.
'I have brought you a present!' boomed a retired Brigadier-General the other day, shaking me vigorously by the hand.
'Ah,' I thought, 'perhaps he's brought me a bottle of whisky.' And aloud: 'Do sit down, sir. It's so kind of you to drop in.' And with a flourish he produced two volumes of his memories, all done up in handloom cloth, and with a frontispiece showing the General with a tremendous moustache which would have scared the wits out of me twenty years ago. He still scares the wits out of me, although the moustache has lost much of its early elasticity.