Rain In the Mountains

by Ruskin Bond

  Then the jackets began to split, revealing the hard brown shell of the walnuts. Inside the shell was the nut itself. Look closely at the nut and you will notice that it is shaped rather like the human brain. No wonder the ancients prescribed walnuts for headaches!

  Every year the tree gave me a basket of walnuts. But last 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 Biju, 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. He admitted that they had relished my dahlias, which they had eaten the previous week, but he denied having fed them 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 and none the worse for it.

  One day I found a fat langur sitting in the walnut tree. I watched him for some time to see if he was going to 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 every one, 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 about sixty, and I was a mere forty-five, but I knew I would never be climbing trees again.

  To the victor the spoils!

  The horse-chestnuts are inedible, even the monkeys throw them away in disgust. Once, on passing beneath a horse- chestnut tree, a couple of chestnuts bounced off my head. Looking up, I saw that they had been dropped on me by a couple of mischievous rhesus-monkeys.

  The tree itself is a friendly one, especially in summer when it is in full leaf. The least breath of wind makes the leaves break into conversation, and their rustle is a cheerful sound, unlike the sad notes of pine trees in the wind. The spring flowers look like candelabra, and when the blossoms fall they carpet the hillside with their pale pink petals.

  We pass now to my favourite tree, the deodar. In Garhwal and Kumaon it is called dujar or devdar, in Jaunsar and in parts of Himachal it is known as the Kelu kelon. It is also identified with the cedar of Lebanon (the cones are identical), although the deodar’s needles are slightly longer and more bluish. Trees, like humans, change with their environment. Several persons familiar with the deodar at Indian hill-stations, when asked to point it out in London’s Kew Gardens, indicated the cedar of Lebanon; and shown a deodar, declared that they had never seen such a tree in the Himalayas!

  We shall stick to the name deodar, which comes from the Sanskrit deva-daru (divine tree). It is a sacred tree in the Himalayas; not worshipped, nor protected in the way that a peepul is in the plains, but sacred in that its timber has always been used in temples, for doors, windows, walls and even roofs. Quite frankly, I would just as soon worship the deodar as worship anything, for in the beauty and majesty it represents Creation in its most noble aspect.

  No one who has lived amongst deodar would deny that it is the most godlike of Himalayan trees. It stands erect, dignified; and though in a strong wind it may hum and sigh and moan, it does not bend to the wind. The snow slips softly from its resilient branches. In the spring the new leaves are a tender green, while during monsoon the tiny young cones spread like blossoms in the dark green folds of the branches. The deodar thrives in the rain and enjoys the company of its own kind. Where one deodar grows, there will be others. Isolate a young tree and it will often pine away.

  The great deodar forests are found along the upper reaches of the Bhagirathi valley and the Tons in Garhwal; and in Himachal and Kashmir, along the Chenab and the Jhelum, and also on the Kishenganga; it is at its best between 7,000 and 9,000 feet. I had expected to find it on the upper reaches of the Alakananda, but could not find a single deodar along the road to Badrinath. That particular valley seems hostile to trees in general, and deodar in particular.

  The average girth of the deodar varies from fifteen to twenty feet, but individual trees often attain a great size. Records show that one great deodar was 250 feet high, twenty feet in girth at the base, and more than 550 years old. The timber of these trees, which is unaffected by extremes of climate, was always highly prized for house-building, and in the villages of Jaunsar Bawar, finely carved doors and windows are a feature of the timbered dwellings. Many of the quaint old bridges over the Jhelum in Kashmir are supported on pillars fashioned from whole deodar trees; some of these bridges are more than 500 years old.

  To return to my own trees, I went among them often, acknowledging their presence with a touch of my hand against their trunks—the walnut’s smooth and polished; the pine’s patterned and whorled; the oak’s rough, gnarled, full of experience. The oak had been there the longest, and the wind had bent his upper branches and twisted a few, so that he looked shaggy and undistinguished. It is a good tree for the privacy of birds, its crooked branches spreading out with no particular effect; and sometimes the tree seems uninhabited until there is a whirring sound, as of a helicopter approaching, and a party of long-tailed blue magpies stream across the forest glade.

  After the monsoon, when the dark red berries had ripened on the hawthorn, this pretty tree was visited by green pigeons, the kokla-birds of Garhwal, who clambered upside-down among the fruit-laden twigs. And during winter, a white-capped redstart perched on the bare branches of the wild pear tree and whistled cheerfully. He had come down from higher places to winter in the garden.

  The pines grow on the next hill—the chir, the Himalayan blue pine, and the long-leaved pine—but there is a small blue pine a little way below the cottage, and sometimes I sit beneath it to listen to the wind playing softly in its branches.

  Open the window at night, and there is usually something to listen to, the mellow whistle of the pygmy owlet, or the cry of a barking-deer which has scented the proximity of a panther. Sometimes, if you are lucky, you will see the moon coming up, and two distant deodars in perfect silhouette.

  Some sounds cannot be recognized. They are strange night sounds, the sounds of the trees themselves, stretching their limbs in the dark, shifting a little, flexing their fingers. Great trees of the mountains, they know me well. They know my face in the window; they see me watching them, watching them grow, listening to their secrets, bowing my head before their outstretched arms and seeking their benediction.

  Walnut Tree Revisited

  You have ripened, since last the walnut tree

  Lost its dark leaves, last autumn.

  One summer intervened between your growing

  And my importunity;

  One summer lost,

  while walnuts grew;

  I too had forgotten.

  We saw each other often,

  But gone was the magic

  Of that first encounter;

  And even the tree

  Gave little fruit last year.

  Now it stands bare-branched

  Outside the closed window,

  Touched no more by feet and questing fingers,

  But turning its own fingers

  To the slanting winter sun.

  Not one leaf left, where hundreds

  Glittered like spears in the forest of September.

 
; But I will wait until the parrots bring

  Shrill portents of another spring;

  (And I will love you with the same sweet pain,

  If you and summer care to visit me again.)

  Picnic at Fox-Burn

  IN SPITE OF the frenetic building activity in most hill-stations, there are still a few ruins to be found on the outskirts— neglected old bungalows that have fallen or been pulled down, and which now provide shelter for bats, owls, stray goats, itinerant sadhus, and sometimes the restless spirits of those who once dwelt in them.

  One such ruin is Fox-Burn, but I won’t tell you exactly where it can be found, because I visit the place for purposes of meditation (or just plain contemplation) and I would hate to arrive there one morning to find about fifty people picnicking on the grass.

  And yet it did witness a picnic of sorts the other day, when the children accompanied me to the ruin. They had heard it was haunted, and they wanted to see the ghost.

  Rakesh is twelve, Mukesh is six, and Dolly is four, and they are not afraid of ghosts.

  I should mention here, that before Fox-Burn became a ruin, back in the 1940s, it was owned by an elderly English woman, Mrs Williams, who ran it as a boarding-house for several years. In the end, poor health forced her to give up this work, and during her last years, she lived alone in the huge house, with just a chowkidar to help. Her children, who had grown up on the property, had long since settled in faraway lands.

  When Mrs Williams died, the chowkidar stayed on for some time until the property was disposed of; but he left as soon as he could. Late at night there would be a loud rapping on his door, and he would hear the old lady calling out: ‘Shamsher Singh, open the door! Open the door, I say, and let me in!’

  Needless to say, Shamsher Singh kept the door firmly closed. He returned to his village at the first opportunity. The hill-station was going through a slump at the time, and the new owners pulled the house down and sold the roof and beams as scrap.

  ‘What does Fox-Burn mean?’ asked Rakesh, as we climbed the neglected, overgrown path to the ruin.

  ‘Well, Burn is a Scottish word meaning stream or spring. Perhaps there was a spring here, once. If so, it dried up long ago.’

  ‘And did a fox live here?’

  ‘Maybe a fox came to drink at the spring. There are still foxes living on the mountain. Sometimes you can see them dancing in the moonlight.’

  Passing through a gap in a wall, we came upon the ruins of the house. In the bright light of a summer morning it did not look in the least spooky or depressing. A line of Doric pillars were all that remained of what must have been an elegant porch and veranda. Beyond them, through the deodars, we could see the distant snows. It must have been a lovely spot in which to spend the better part of one’s life. No wonder Mrs Williams wanted to come back.

  The children were soon scampering about on the grass, whilst I sought shelter beneath a huge chestnut tree.

  There is no tree so friendly as the chestnut, especially in summer when it is in full leaf.

  Mukesh discovered an empty water-tank and Rakesh suggested that it had once fed the burn that no longer existed. Dolly busied herself making nosegays with the daisies that grew wild in the grass.

  Rakesh looked up suddenly. He pointed to a path on the other side of the ruin, and exclaimed: ‘Look, what’s that? Is it Mrs Williams?’

  ‘A ghost!’ said Mukesh excitedly.

  But it turned out to be the local washerwoman, a large white bundle on her head, taking a short-cut across the property.

  A more peaceful place could hardly be imagined, until a large black dog, a spaniel of sorts, arrived on the scene. He wanted someone to play with—indeed, he insisted on playing— and ran circles round us until we threw sticks for him to fetch and gave him half our sandwiches.

  ‘Whose dog is it?’ asked Rakesh.

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Did Mrs Williams keep a black dog?’

  ‘Is it a ghost dog?’ asked Mukesh.

  ‘It looks real to me’, I said.

  ‘And it’s eaten all my biscuits,’ said Dolly.

  ‘Don’t ghosts have to eat?’ asked Mukesh.

  ‘I don’t know. We’ll have to ask one.’

  ‘It can’t be any fun being a ghost if you can’t eat,’ declared Mukesh.

  The black dog left us as suddenly as he had appeared, and as there was no sign of an owner, I began to wonder if he had not, after all, been an apparition.

  A cloud came over the sun, the air grew chilly.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ said Mukesh.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Rakesh.

  ‘Come along, Dolly,’ I called.

  But Dolly couldn’t be seen.

  We called out to her, and looked behind trees and pillars, certain that she was hiding from us. Almost five minutes passed in searching for her, and a sick feeling of apprehension was coming over me, when Dolly emerged from the ruins and ran towards us.

  ‘Where have you been?’ we demanded, almost with one voice.

  ‘I was playing—in there—in the old house. Hide and seek.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘No, there were two children. A boy and a girl. They were playing too.’

  ‘I haven’t seen any children,’ I said.

  ‘They’ve gone now.’

  ‘Well, it’s time we went too.’

  We set off down the winding path, with Rakesh leading the way, and then we had to wait because Dolly had stopped and was waving to someone.

  ‘Who are you waving to, Dolly?’

  ‘To the children.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Under the chestnut tree.’

  ‘I can’t see them. Can you see them, Rakesh? Can you, Mukesh?’

  Rakesh and Mukesh said they couldn’t see any children. But Dolly was still waving.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she called. ‘Goodbye!’

  Were there voices on the wind? Faint voices calling goodbye? Could Dolly see something we couldn’t see?

  ‘We can’t see anyone,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Dolly. ‘But they can see me!’

  Then she left off her game and joined us, and we ran home laughing. Mrs Williams may not have revisited her old house that day but perhaps her children had been there, playing under the chestnut tree they had known so long ago.

  A Wayside Teashop

  THE JAUNPUR RANGE in Garhwal is dry, brown and rocky. Water is hard to find, and green fields are to be seen only far down in the valley, near the Aglar or some smaller stream. Elsewhere only monsoon crops are grown.

  I have walked five miles without finding a spring or even a shady spot along the sun-blistered path, and I am beginning to wonder if the only living creatures in the area are the big lizards, who slither about on the hot surface of the rocks and stare at me with unwinking eyes. Just as I am asking myself if it is better to be a lizard than a thirsty trekker, I round a bend and discover a small mountain oasis: a crooked little shack tucked away in a cleft of the hillside. Growing beside the shack is a single pine tree, humming softly in the faint breeze that drifts across the mountains.

  When one tree suddenly appears in this way, lonely and dignified in the midst of a vast treeless silence, it can be more beautiful than a forest.

  There is no glamour about the shack, a loose stone structure with a tin roof held down by stones. But it is a teashop, one of those little pockets of pioneering mankind that spring up in the mountain wilderness to serve the weary traveller. Go where you will in Garhwal, you will always find a teashop to sustain you just when you feel you have reached the end of your tether.

  A couple of mules are tied to the pine tree, and the mule- drivers, handsome men in tattered clothes, sit on a bench in the shade, drinking tea from brass tumblers. The shopkeeper, a man of indeterminate age—the cold dry winds from the snows have crinkled his face like a walnut but his teeth are sound and his eyes are clear—greets me as a long-lost friend, although we are meeting for
the first time.

  As a concession to my shirt and trousers, he produces a chair for me. It is a period chair, possibly even a Sheraton, but the stuffing has come out of the seat. It must have escaped from the nearby hill-station of Mussoorie, where the sahibs foregathered in years gone by. The shopkeeper apologizes for its condition: ‘The rats have been nesting in it.’ And then, to reassure me, ‘But they have gone now.’

  I would just as soon be on the bench with the mule-drivers, but do not wish to offend the shopkeeper, who has already given me his name, Megh Chand, and taken mine. So I take his chair into the shade and gently lower myself into it.

  ‘Do you live here alone?’ I ask.

  ‘Sometimes I am alone,’ he says. ‘My family is down in the village, looking after the fields. It is quite far, six miles. So I go home once a week, and then my son comes up to look after the shop.’

  ‘How long have you had the shop?’

  ‘Oh, ten–fifteen years, I do not remember exactly.’

  Why bother to count the years? In remote mountain areas, time has a different meaning, you may count the days, but not the hours. And yesterday, today, and tomorrow merge into one long day. When there is nowhere to go, you have no need of a clock. You eat when you are hungry, and sleep when you are tired.

  But the mule-drivers have somewhere to go and something to deliver: pumpkins and potatoes. They are busy men of the world, and presently they lead their pack-animals away down the dusty path.

  ‘Tea or lassi?’ Megh Chand gives me a choice, and I take the lassi, which is sharp and refreshing. The wind soughs gently in the upper branches of the pine tree and I relax in my Sheraton chair like some eighteenth century nabob who has brought his own chair into the wilderness.