by Ruskin Bond
He has outlived the trees. He is like an old tree himself, gnarled and twisted. I have the feeling that if he falls asleep in the orchard, he will strike root here, sending out crooked branches. I can imagine a small bent tree wearing a black waistcoat; a living scarecrow.
He closes his eyes again, but goes on talking.
‘The English memsahibs would buy great quantities of elastic. Today it is ribbons and bangles for the girls, and combs for the boys. But I do not make much money. Not because I cannot walk very far. How many houses do I reach in a day? Ten, fifteen. But twenty years ago I could visit more than fifty houses. That makes a difference.’
‘Have you always been here?’
‘Most of my life, huzoor. I was here before they built the motor road to Mussoorie. I was here when the sahibs had their own carriages and ponies and the memsahibs their own rickshaws. I was here before there were any cinemas. I was here when the Prince of Wales came to Dehra Dun . . . Oh, I have been here a long time, huzoor. I was here when that house was built,’ he says pointing with his chin towards my grandfather’s house. ‘Fifty, sixty years ago it must have been. I cannot remember exactly. What is ten years when you have lived seventy? But it was a tall, red-bearded sahib who built that house. He kept many creatures as pets. A kachwa (turtle) was one of them. And there was a python, which crawled into my box one day and gave me a terrible fright. The sahib used to keep it hanging from his shoulders, like a garland. His wife, the burra mem, always bought a lot from me—lots of elastic. And there were sons, one a teacher, another in the air force, and there were always children in the house. Beautiful children. But they went away many years ago. Everyone has gone away.’
I do not tell him that I am one of the ‘beautiful children’. I doubt if he will believe me. His memories are of another age, another place, and for him there are no strong bridges into the present.
‘But others have come,’ I say.
‘True, and that is as it should be. That is not my complaint. My complaint—should God be listening—is that I have been left behind.’
He gets slowly to his feet and stands over his shabby tin box, gazing down at it with a mixture of disdain and affection. I help him to lift and balance it on the flattened cloth on his head. He does not have the energy to turn and make a salutation of any kind; but, setting his sights on the distant hills, he walks down the path with steps that are shaky and slow but still wonderfully straight.
I wonder how much longer he will live. Perhaps a year or two, perhaps a week, perhaps an hour. It will be an end of living, but it will not be death. He is too old for death; he can only sleep; he can only fall gently, like an old, crumpled brown leaf.
I leave the orchard. The bend in the road hides my grandfather’s house. I reach the canal again. It emerges from under a small culvert, where ferns and maidenhair grow in the shade. The water, coming from a stream in the foothills, rushes along with a familiar sound; it does not lose its momentum until the canal has left the gently sloping streets of the town.
There are new buildings on this road, but the small police station is housed in the same old lime-washed bungalow. A couple of off-duty policemen, partly uniformed but with their pyjamas on, stroll hand in hand on the grass verge. Holding hands (with persons of the same sex, of course) is common practice in northern India, and denotes no special relationship.
I cannot forget this little police station. Nothing very exciting ever happened in its vicinity until, in 1947, communal riots broke out in Dehra. Then, bodies were regularly fished out of the canal and dumped on a growing pile in the station compound. I was only a boy, but when I looked over the wall at that pile of corpses, there was no one who paid any attention to me. They were too busy to send me away. At the same time they knew that I was perfectly safe; while Hindus and Muslims were at each other’s throats, a white boy could walk the streets in safety. No one was any longer interested in the Europeans.
The people of Dehra are not violent by nature, and the town has no history of communal discord. But when refugees from the partitioned Punjab poured into Dehra in their thousands, the atmosphere became charged with tension. These refugees, many of them Sikhs, had lost their homes and livelihoods; many had seen their loved ones butchered. They were in a fierce and vengeful frame of mind. The calm, sleepy atmosphere of Dehra was shattered during two months of looting and murder. Those Muslims who could get away, fled. The poorer members of the community remained in a refugee camp until the holocaust was over; then they returned to their former occupations, frightened and deeply mistrustful. The old boxman was one of them.
I cross the canal and take the road that will lead me to the riverbed. This was one of my father’s favourite walks. He, too, was a walking man. Often, when he was home on leave, he would say, ‘Ruskin, let’s go for a walk,’ and we would slip off together and walk down to the riverbed or into the sugarcane fields or across the railway lines and into the jungle.
On one of these walks (this was before Independence), I remember him saying, ‘After the war is over, we’ll be going to England. Would you like that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Can’t we stay in India?’
‘It won’t be ours any more.’
‘Has it always been ours?’ I asked.
‘For a long time,’ he said, ‘over two hundred years. But we have to give it back now.’
‘Give it back to whom?’ I asked. I was only nine.
‘To the Indians,’ said my father.
The only Indians I had known till then were my ayah and the cook and the gardener and their children, and I could not imagine them wanting to be rid of us. The only other Indian who came to the house was Dr Ghose, and it was frequently said of him that he was more English than the English. I could understand my father better when he said, ‘After the war, there’ll be a job for me in England. There’ll be nothing for me here.’
The war had at first been a distant event; but somehow it kept coming closer. My aunt, who lived in London with her two children, was killed with them during an air raid; then my father’s younger brother died of dysentery on the long walk out from Burma. Both these tragic events depressed my father. Never in good health (he had been prone to attacks of malaria), he looked more worn and wasted every time he came home. His personal life was far from being happy, as he and my mother had separated, she to marry again. I think he looked forward a great deal to the days he spent with me; far more than I could have realized at the time. I was someone to come back to; someone for whom things could be planned; someone who could learn from him.
Dehra suited him. He was always happy when he was among trees, and this happiness communicated itself to me. I felt like drawing close to him. I remember sitting beside him on the veranda steps when I noticed the tendril of a creeping vine that was trailing near my feet. As we sat there, doing nothing in particular—in the best gardens, time has no meaning—I found that the tendril was moving almost imperceptibly away from me and towards my father. Twenty minutes later it had crossed the veranda steps and was touching his feet. This, in India, is the sweetest of salutations.
There is probably a scientific explanation for the plant’s behaviour—something to do with the light and warmth on the veranda steps—but I like to think that its movements were motivated simply by an affection for my father. Sometimes, when I sat alone beneath a tree, I felt a little lonely or lost. As soon as my father rejoined me, the atmosphere lightened, the tree itself became more friendly.
Most of the fruit trees round the house were planted by Father; but he was not content with planting trees in the garden. On rainy days we would walk beyond the riverbed, armed with cuttings and saplings, and then we would amble through the jungle, planting flowering shrubs between the sal and shisham trees.
‘But no one ever comes here,’ I protested the first time. ‘Who is going to see them?’
‘Some day,’ he said, ‘someone may come this way . . . If people keep cutting trees, instead of planting them, there�
��ll soon be no forests left at all, and the world will be just one vast desert.’
The prospect of a world without trees became a sort of nightmare for me (and one reason why I shall never want to live on a treeless moon), and I assisted my father in his tree planting with great enthusiasm.
‘One day the trees will move again,’ he said. ‘They’ve been standing still for thousands of years. There was a time when they could walk about like people, but someone cast a spell on them and rooted them to one place. But they’re always trying to move— see how they reach out with their arms!’
We found an island, a small rocky island in the middle of a dry riverbed. It was one of those riverbeds, so common in the foothills, which are completely dry in the summer but flooded during the monsoon rains. The rains had just begun, and the stream could still be crossed on foot, when we set out with a number of tamarind, laburnum and coral-tree saplings and cuttings. We spent the day planting them on the island, then ate our lunch there, in the shelter of a wild plum.
My father went away soon after that tree planting. Three months later, in Calcutta, he died.
I was sent to boarding school. My grandparents sold the house and left Dehra. After school, I went to England. The years passed, my grandparents died, and when I returned to India I was the only member of the family in the country.
And now I am in Dehra again, on the road to the riverbed. The houses with their trim gardens are soon behind me, and I am walking through fields of flowering mustard, which make a carpet of yellow blossom stretching away towards the jungle and the foothills.
The riverbed is dry at this time of the year. A herd of skinny cattle graze on the short brown grass at the edge of the jungle. The sal trees have been thinned out. Could our trees have survived? Will our island be there, or has some flash flood during a heavy monsoon washed it away completely?
As I look across the dry watercourse, my eye is caught by the spectacular red plumes of the coral blossom. In contrast with the dry, rocky riverbed, the little island is a green oasis. I walk across to the trees and notice that a number of parrots have come to live in them. A koel challenges me with a rising who-are-you, who-are-you . . .
But the trees seem to know me. They whisper among themselves and beckon me nearer. And looking around, I find that other trees and wild plants and grasses have sprung up under the protection of the trees we planted.
They have multiplied. They are moving. In this small forgotten corner of the world, my father’s dreams are coming true, and the trees are moving again.
The Room of Many Colours
Last week I wrote a story, and all the time I was writing it I thought it was a good story; but when it was finished and I had read it through, I found that there was something missing, that it didn’t ring true. So I tore it up. I wrote a poem, about an old man sleeping in the sun, and this was true, but it was finished quickly, and once again I was left with the problem of what to write next. And I remembered my father, who taught me to write; and I thought, why not write about my father, and about the trees we planted, and about the people I knew while growing up and about what happened on the way to growing up . . .
And so, like Alice, I must begin at the beginning, and in the beginning there was this red insect, just like a velvet button, which I found on the front lawn of the bungalow. The grass was still wet with overnight rain.
I placed the insect on the palm of my hand and took it into the house to show my father.
‘Look, Dad,’ I said, ‘I haven’t seen an insect like this before. Where has it come from?’
‘Where did you find it?’ he asked.
‘On the grass.’
‘It must have come down from the sky,’ he said. ‘It must have come down with the rain.’
Later he told me how the insect really happened but I preferred his first explanation. It was more fun to have it dropping from the sky.
I was seven at the time, and my father was thirty-seven, but, right from the beginning, he made me feel that I was old enough to talk to him about everything—insects, people, trees, steam engines, King George, comics, crocodiles, the Mahatma, the Viceroy, America, Mozambique and Timbuctoo. We took long walks together, explored old ruins, chased butterflies and waved to passing trains.
My mother had gone away when I was four, and I had very dim memories of her. Most other children had their mothers with them, and I found it a bit strange that mine couldn’t stay. Whenever I asked my father why she’d gone, he’d say, ‘You’ll understand when you grow up.’ And if I asked him where she’d gone, he’d look troubled and say, ‘I really don’t know.’ This was the only question of mine to which he didn’t have an answer.
But I was quite happy living alone with my father; I had never known any other kind of life.
We were sitting on an old wall, looking out to sea at a couple of Arab dhows and a tram steamer, when my father said, ‘Would you like to go to sea one day?’
‘Where does the sea go?’ I asked.
‘It goes everywhere.’
‘Does it go to the end of the world?’
‘It goes right round the world. It’s a round world.’
‘It can’t be.’
‘It is. But it’s so big, you can’t see the roundness. When a fly sits on a watermelon, it can’t see right round the melon, can it? The melon must seem quite flat to the fly. Well, in comparison to the world, we’re much, much smaller than the tiniest of insects.’
‘Have you been around the world?’ I asked.
‘No, only as far as England. That’s where your grandfather was born.’
‘And my grandmother?’
‘She came to India from Norway when she was quite small. Norway is a cold land, with mountains and snow, and the sea cutting deep into the land. I was there as a boy. It’s very beautiful, and the people are good and work hard.’
‘I’d like to go there.’
‘You will, one day. When you are older, I’ll take you to Norway.’
‘Is it better than England?’
‘It’s quite different.’
‘Is it better than India?’
‘It’s quite different.’
‘Is India like England?’
‘No, it’s different.’
‘Well, what does “different” mean?’
‘It means things are not the same. It means people are different. It means the weather is different. It means tree and birds and insects are different.’
‘Are English crocodiles different from Indian crocodiles?’
‘They don’t have crocodiles in England.’
‘Oh, then it must be different.’
‘It would be a dull world if it was the same everywhere,’ said my father.
He never lost patience with my endless questioning. If he wanted a rest, he would take out his pipe and spend a long time lighting it. If this took very long I’d find something else to do. But sometimes I’d wait patiently until the pipe was drawing, and then return to the attack.
‘Will we always be in India?’ I asked.
‘No, we’ll have to go away one day. You see, it’s hard to explain, but it isn’t really our country.’
‘Ayah says it belongs to the king of England, and the jewels in his crown were taken from India, and that when the Indians get their jewels back the king will lose India! But first they have to get the crown from the king, but this is very difficult, she says, because the crown is always on his head. He even sleeps wearing his crown!’
Ayah was my nanny. She loved me deeply, and was always filling my head with strange and wonderful stories.
My father did not comment on Ayah’s views. All he said was, ‘We’ll have to go away some day.’
‘How long have we been here?’ I asked.
‘Two hundred years.’
‘No, I mean us.’
‘Well, you were born in India, so that’s seven years for you.’
‘Then can’t I stay here?’
‘Do you want to?’
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‘I want to go across the sea. But can we take Ayah with us?’
‘I don’t know, son. Let’s walk along the beach.’
We lived in an old palace beside a lake. The palace looked like a ruin from the outside, but the rooms were cool and comfortable. We lived in one wing, and my father organized a small school in another wing. His pupils were the children of the raja and the raja’s relatives. My father had started life in India as a tea planter, but he had been trained as a teacher and the idea of starting a school in a small state facing the Arabian Sea had appealed to him. The pay wasn’t much, but we had a palace to live in, the latest 1938-model Hillman to drive about in, and a number of servants. In those days, of course, everyone had servants (although the servants did not have any!). Ayah was our own; but the cook, the bearer, the gardener, and the bhisti were all provided by the state.
Sometimes I sat in the schoolroom with the other children (who were all much bigger than me), sometimes I remained in the house with Ayah, sometimes I followed the gardener, Dukhi, about the spacious garden.
Dukhi means ‘sad’, and though I never could discover if the gardener had anything to feel sad about, the name certainly suited him. He had grown to resemble the drooping weeds that he was always digging up with a tiny spade. I seldom saw him standing up. He always sat on the ground with his knees well up to his chin, and attacked the weeds from this position. He could spend all day on his haunches, moving about the garden simply by shuffling his feet along the grass.
I tried to imitate his posture, sitting down on my heels and putting my knees into my armpits, but could never hold the position for more than five minutes.
Time had no meaning in a large garden, and Dukhi never hurried. Life, for him, was not a matter of one year succeeding another, but of five seasons—winter, spring, hot weather, monsoon and autumn—arriving and departing. His seedbeds had always to be in readiness for the coming season, and he did not look any further than the next monsoon. It was impossible to tell his age. He may have been thirty-six or eighty-six. He was either very young for his years or very old for them.