by Ruskin Bond
If you want something very badly, don’t try too hard to seek it out, don’t pursue it—better still, don’t want it badly. You can generally get success if you don’t want victory.
And it is not in mortals to command success.
The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
—Eden Phillpotts
Sometimes we are easily depressed by our surroundings, and it is rarely the case that we can change our surroundings. But we only need to look around us. The pebble at our feet, the wild flower growing out of rubble, dappled sunlight on an old wall—they have as much beauty as any work of art.
If a tiny room without a view is our fate, we can either resign ourselves to life in the cell, or do something to make it less dreary. I discovered that bare walls do nothing for the spirit, so I learnt to put pictures on them—photographs of friends or scenic places; even pictures of my favourite movie stars cut out from magazines.
Plants in old cans or bottles on the window sill. An oddly shaped stone as a paperweight. A comfortable chair, and a comfortable bed.
And then there’s always the world outside. In my youth I stayed in cramped lodgings in the hot and dusty small towns of the Indian plains—perhaps the least inspiring places on earth—barely making a living by my writing. But long rambles in these towns surprised me with small miracles: moonlight on quiet alleys past midnight, for instance. Or the scent of quenched earth and fallen neem leaves after the first rains. Or the happy riot of the weekly bazaar. Or the brush of a stranger’s hand that sometimes led to friendship and love.
Romance lurks in the most unlikely places.
A day without inspiration. My thoughts turn repeatedly to the mutton curry I’ve been promised for dinner. It will be a day of no achievement.
Should I feel guilty? That is hard work for me. I’d rather take a walk.
It is twilight. I walk to the top of the hill and watch the winter line. Successful day. And now I head back home for rum and Beena’s mutton curry.
Some genuine early-monsoon rain, warm and humid, and not that cold high-altitude stuff we’ve been having all year. The plants seem to know it too, and the first cobra-lily rears its head from the ferns as I walk up to the bank and post office.
The monsoon season is one of the most beautiful times of the year in the Himalayas, with the mist trailing up the valleys, and the hill slopes a lush green, thick with ferns and wild flowers. The call of the kastura can be heard in every glen, while the barbet cries insistently from the treetops.
I wake up early after a night of thunder and rain and set out on a long walk because the sun is out. A great wild dahlia, its scarlet flowers drenched and heavy, sprawls over the hillside and an emerald-green grasshopper reclines on a petal, stretching its legs in the sunshine.
It was the first day of spring (according to the Hindu calendar), but here in the Himalayas it still seemed like mid-winter. A cold wind hummed and whistled through the pines, while dark rain clouds were swept along by the west wind only to be thrust back by the east wind.
I was climbing the steep road to my cottage when I was overtaken by nine-year-old Usha hurrying back from school. She had tied a scarf round her head to keep her hair from blowing. Dark hair and eyes, and pink cheeks, were all accentuated by the patches of snow still lying on the hillside.
‘Look,’ she said, pointing, ‘a new flower!’
It was a single, butter-yellow blossom, and it stood out like a bright star against the drab winter grass. I hadn’t seen anything like it before, and had no idea what its name might be. No doubt its existence was recorded in some botanical tome. But for me it was a new discovery.
‘Shall I pick it for you?’ asked Usha. ‘No, don’t,’ I said. ‘It may be the only one. If we break it, there may not be any more. Let’s leave it there and see if it seeds.’ We scrambled up the slope and examined the flower more closely. It was very delicate and soft-petalled, looking as though it might fall at any moment.
‘It will be finished if it rains,’ said Usha. And it did rain that night—rain mingled with sleet and hail. It rattled and swished on the tin roof; but in the morning the sun came out. I walked up the road without really expecting to see the flower again. And Usha had been right. The flower had disappeared in the storm. But two other buds, unnoticed by us the day before, had opened. It was as though two tiny stars had fallen to earth in the night.
The cosmos has all the genius of simplicity. The plant stands tall and erect; its foliage is uncomplicated; its inflorescences are bold, fresh, cheerful. Any flower, from a rose to a rhododendron, can be complicated. The cosmos is splendidly simple. No wonder it takes its name from the Greek cosmos, meaning the universe as an ordered whole—the sum total of experience. For this unpretentious flower does seem to sum it all up: perfection without apparent striving for it. Like the artistry of the South American footballer! Needless to say, it came from tropical America.
And growing it is no trouble. A handful of seeds thrown in a waste patch or on a grassy hill slope, and a few months later there they are, en masse, dancing in the sunshine. They are almost wild, but not quite. They need very little attention, but if you take them too much for granted they will go away the following year. Simple they may be, but not insensitive.
My respect for the cosmos goes back to my childhood when I wandered into what seemed like a forest of these flowers, all twice my height (I must have been five at the time) but looking down on me in the friendliest way, their fine feathery foliage giving off a faint aroma. Now when I find them flowering on the hillsides in mellow October sunshine, they are like old friends and I greet them accordingly, pressing my face to their petals.
Young couples, usually honeymooners, crowd the Mussoorie Mall. It is good to see new love in full bloom. Not all of them will remain in love with each other, but today they are and it makes them all beautiful, and fearless.
I have fallen in love many times. I still keep falling in love! As a youth, loneliness always went hand in hand with a powerful pull or attraction towards another person, be it boy or girl—and very often without that individual being aware of it. I think I expressed this feeling in a short poem, ‘Passing By’, which I wrote many years ego:
Enough for me that you are beautiful:
Beauty possessed diminishes.
Better a dream of love
Than love’s dream broken;
Better a look exchanged
Than love’s word spoken.
Enough for me that you walk past,
A firefly flashing in the dark.
It was probably written as a result of unrequited love. For whenever I pursued a loved one, that person proved elusive. On the other hand, the most lasting relationships have been those that have grown slowly, without fret or frenzy.
Declarations of passionate love or undying friendship are fine in their own way, and perhaps necessary; but the important thing is to feel comfortable with someone, and not have to keep proving yourself in one way or another.
In moments of rare intimacy two people are of one mind and one body, speaking only in thoughts, brilliantly aware of each other. I have known such moments—and who knows, I may know them again!
When things aren’t going too well for me, I consult the I Ching, and usually get the right sort of wisdom and advice. Not so long ago, when I was suffering all the pangs of a rejected lover, I consulted the Book of Change and under the appropriate hexagram found the following lines:
‘If you lose your horse, do not run after it,
It will come back of its own accord.’
In this case, it did not. But I made my peace with it. There’s little point yearning after something that has been irredeemably lost. Of course, this is easier said than done. It is as hard to let go as it is to accept that something we long for intensely will never be ours. Some of us do it more successfully than others. I’m one of them. Lucky? I don’t know. But I suppose I should be grateful.
I sit
down to write. I finished a story yesterday, and that completed a book. So what should I begin today? There is a line of ants moving along the edge of the table and on to the wall. Well, then I shall record their resolute march.
The world may be in the grip of political and financial upheaval, but that does not mean the ants should stop going about their business. Their affairs are as serious as ours, and they make no noise about it.
‘The Industrious Ant’. There, I have my title. This may grow into an essay, or it may become a poem, but I have begun, and that’s half the job done.
I put down my pen, flex my fingers and lean back in my chair for a moment of rest, and the little rose begonia catches my eye. It has a glossy chocolate leaf, a pretty rose-pink flower, and it grows and flowers in my bedroom almost all the year round.
Some plants become friends. Most garden flowers are fair-weather friends; gone in the winter when times are difficult up here in the hills. Those who stand by us in adversity—plant or human—are our true friends; there aren’t many around, so we must cherish them and take care of them in all seasons.
A loyal plant is the variegated ivy that has spread all over my bedroom wall. My small bedroom-cum-study gets plenty of light and sun, and when the windows are open, a cool breeze from the mountains floats in, rustling the leaves of the ivy. (This breeze can turn into a raging blizzard in winter—on one occasion, even blowing the roof away—but right now, it’s just a zephyr, gentle and balmy.) Ivy plants seems to like my room, and this one, which I brought up from Dehradun, took an instant liking to my desk and walls, so that I now have difficulty keeping it from trailing over my notebooks when I am at work.
I like to take in other people’s sick or discarded plants and nurse or cajole them back to health. This has given me a bit of a reputation as a plant doctor. Actually, all I do is give an ailing plant a quiet corner where it can rest and recuperate from whatever ails it—they have usually been ill-treated in some way. And it’s wonderful how quickly a small tree or plant will recover if given a little encouragement. In return, there is gentle, generous friendship.
Loyalty in plants, as in friends, must be respected and rewarded. If dandelions show a tendency to do well on the steps of the house, then that is where they shall be encouraged to grow. If sorrel is happier on the window sill than on the hillside, then I shall let it stay, even if it means the window won’t close properly. And if the hydrangea does better in my neighbour’s garden than mine, then my neighbour shall be given the hydrangea. Among flower lovers, there must be no double standards. Generosity, not greed; sugar, not spite.
And what of the rewards for me, apart from the soothing effect of fresh fronds and leaves at my place of work and rest? Well, the other evening I came home to find my room vibrating to the full-throated chorus of several crickets who had found the ivy to their liking. I thought they would keep me up all night with their music; but when I switched the light off, they immediately fell silent.
Living for many years in Maplewood Cottage, at 7,000 feet in the Garhwal Himalayas, I was fortunate in having a number of trees surrounding me, giving me peace, security, the company of birds, and a variety of fruits for free.
Standing on its own was a walnut tree. In winter its branches were bare. In spring it would begin to come to life, each branch producing a hard bright spear of new leaf. By midsummer the entire tree was in leaf, and towards the end of the monsoon the walnuts, encased in their green jackets, had reached maturity.
Every year the tree gave me a basket of walnuts. But one year the walnuts were disappearing one by one, and I was at a loss to know who had been taking them. Could it have been the milkman’s son? He was an inveterate tree climber. But he was usually to be found on oak trees, gathering fodder for his cows. He told me that his cows liked oak leaves but did not care for walnuts.
It wasn’t the woodpecker. He was out there every day, knocking furiously against the bark of the tree, trying to prise an insect out of a narrow crack. He was strictly non-vegetarian.
One day I found a fat langur sitting on the walnut tree. I watched him for some time to see if he would help himself to the nuts, but he was only sunning himself. When he thought I wasn’t looking, he came down and ate the geraniums; but he did not take any walnuts.
The walnuts had been disappearing early in the morning while I was still in bed. So one morning, I surprised everyone, including myself, by getting up before sunrise. I was just in time to catch the culprit climbing out of the walnut tree.
She was an old woman who sometimes came to cut grass on the hillside. Her face was as wrinkled as the walnuts she had been helping herself to. In spite of her age, her arms and legs were sturdy. When she saw me, she was as swift as a civet cat in getting out of the tree.
‘And how many walnuts did you gather today, Grandmother?’ I asked.
‘Only two,’ she said with a giggle, offering them to me on her open palm. I accepted one of them. Encouraged, she climbed back into the tree and helped herself to the remaining nuts. It was impossible to object. I was taken up in admiration of her agility in the tree. She must have been close to seventy, and I was forty-five, but I knew I would never be climbing trees again.
To the victor the spoils!
You stride through the long grass,
Pressing on over fallen pine needles,
Up the winding road to the mountain pass:
Small red ant, now crossing a sea
Of raindrops; your destiny
To carry home that single, slender
Cosmos seed,
Waving it like a banner in the sun.
I am in Dehra, many years after I lived there as a boy in my grandmother’s house. I’m still young, thoughts of mortality are far from my mind, but there has been some struggle and sadness. Granny’s house has been sold, it is out of bounds for me, but Dehra is still home.
In the cemetery there are several of my relatives; most of the rest have left for foreign shores. There are marigolds flowering at the edges of the graves. And a little blue everlasting that I have always associated with Dehra. It grows in ditches, on vacant plots, in neglected gardens, along footpaths, on the edges of fields, behind limekilns, wherever there is a bit of wasteland. Call it a weed if you like, but I have every respect for a plant that will survive the onslaught of brick, cement, petrol fumes, grazing cows and goats, heat and cold (for it flowers almost all the year round) and overflowing sewage. As long as that little flowering weed is still around, there is hope for both man and nature. There is hope for me.
I leave Dehra restored, hopeful, and by the time I have trekked halfway up Rajpur road, I’m hungry. A dhaba owner is busy at his tandoor and the smell of hot rotis draws me to the wooden bench outside his little establishment. A hot meal for less than two rupees and I’m ready to soldier on…
If a hundred per cent is not possible, let us attempt the ninety-five per cent that is.
In other words, we can’t be perfect, but it is good to aim for perfection.
Which is never easy. It takes time, concentration, commitment, sacrifice. You have to give up things, certain pleasures, in order to give all your attention to the one thing that really matters—a cure for a disease, a scientific discovery, the near-perfect singing voice, mastery over a musical instrument, skill at a particular game, the completion of a literary masterpiece that people will actually read, the tilling of a field, the weaving of cloth.
In the effort lies the achievement; but only if the effort is true and made with all your heart.
Beer in the sun. High in the spruce tree the barbet calls, heralding summer. A few puffy clouds drift lazily over the mountains. Is this the great escape?
At some time during the day I must put pen to paper and produce something readable. There’s not much money left in the bank.
Yes, but look at the honeybees—look at them push their way through the pursed lips of the antirrhinum and disappear completely. A few minutes later they stagger out again, bottoms first.
Time passes and brings us all down to the level of ordinary humans (which is where all of us belong). Some of us struggle and rant against the spectre of obscurity. I think we should welcome it. We have had our hour in the sun, and now we should come in from the glare and enjoy the shade.
Many words invite many defeats. The less a man knows, the longer he takes to tell it.
I am always a bit wary of saints and godmen, preachers and teachers, who are ready with solutions for all our problems. For one thing, they talk too much. When I was at school I mastered the art of sleeping (without appearing to sleep) through a long speech or lecture by the principal or visiting dignitary, and I must confess to doing the same today. The trick is to sleep with your eyes half closed; this gives the impression of concentrating very hard on what is being said, even though you might well be roaming happily in dreamland.
In our imperfect world there is far too much talk and not enough thought.
The TV channels are awash with gurus and experts telling us how to live, and they do so at great length. TV anchors are prone to lecturing and bullying the guests on their shows. Too many know-alls. A philosophy for living? You won’t find it on your TV sets or in discourses by the loud lieutenants of the gods. You will learn more from your paan-wala or a street vendor.