Rain In the Mountains

by Ruskin Bond

  I am not a recluse. Those who have skimmed through these pages will know that for the past twenty-five years I have been living with Prem and his family, or they with me, I am not sure at this point how to put it, except that we are an interdependent and tightly-knit family unit. On with the family! . . . but I also cherish my privacy and my small study-cum-bedroom, facing the morning sun, where I live amongst my books, papers, typewriter and potted plants. The ivy on my wall, the fern on my desk, the lemon geranium, all receive my close attention.

  As a child, I hated seeing my parents quarrel, time and time again, until they separated and went their different ways. My father looked after me in extremely trying circumstances—in Air Force tents, rented apartments in Delhi, and Simla boarding- houses, until he died of cerebral malaria in 1944. Then with my mother and stepfather, life became even more chaotic, for they were perennially in debt, and had to shift (or be shifted) from house to house, so that the only fixed point for me was the large library, at Bishop Cotton School, Simla, where I lived for nine months in the year.

  Now, when I see married people quarrel, I am full of fear and trepidation, for them and for their children. An unsettled childhood can give you a terrible sense of insecurity. Perhaps it’s the real reason I never married. (Or fell into debt.)

  I owe a lot to that school library, and to whoever left me in complete charge of it, for I had the keys and could go there at odd hours, ostensibly to catalogue the books but in reality to pore through them and become familiar with both the illustrious and the unfamiliar. In stolen moments over a period of three years, I read all the novels of Dickens, Stevenson, Jack London, Hugh Walpole, J.B. Priestley, the Brontës (in no particular order), the complete plays of J. M. Barrie, Bernard Shaw, A.A. Milne, Somerset Maugham and Ben Travers, and the essays— and it was a great time for essayists—of A. G. Gardiner (Alpha of the Plough), Robert Lynd, Priestley again, Belloc, Chesterton and many others. And then, of course, there were the humorous writers—Mark Twain, Thurber, Wodehouse, Stephen Leacock, Jerome K. Jerome, W. W. Jacobs, Barry Pain, H. G. Wells (in his shorter works), Damon Runyon—I lapped them all up. My favourite humorous book, then and now, is The Diary of a Nobody by George and William Grossmith; it never fails to make me laugh, even though I must have read it over ten times. Five years ago, it cured me of a peptic ulcer.

  As you can see, most of my reading was very English (even in content); but I did not come to an appreciation of Kipling until I was in my twenties, at which time I also made forays into the worlds of R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Rabindranath Tagore (in rather treacly translation) and a neglected autobiographical writer, Sudhin Ghose, whose books And Gazelles Leaping and Cradle of the Clouds, gave me great pleasure. The American short story writer, William Saroyan (My Name Is Aaram and many others), also strongly influenced me when I was starting out as a writer. So did André Gide. And so did the poetry of Walter de la Mare. My tastes may be old-fashioned but they are never out-of-date.

  But those were writers. What of the people in my life? As a young man, I never had celebrities writing Forewords or Introductions to my books; I was really too proud to ask for them. Nor was I to experience a book being ‘released’ at a cocktail party until I had been writing for thirty-five years; writing was a lonely personal art and not an exercise in public relations.

  But of course there were influences, and childhood influences are strongest.

  My father’s death when he was forty-six (and I was just ten), was a cruel blow of fate. It was a traumatic experience for me because I had been closest to him—practically his only companion during the last two or three years of his life—and his death sent me even deeper into my cocoon of loneliness.

  I had always been a shy boy, slow to make friends of my own age, and I was to remain a loner for the first thirty years of my life. Even after forty, when I became a provider for a family, I was given to solitary walks and periods of spiritual withdrawal. Which is the greater truth—that no man is an island, or that every man is an island? When I look at some of those large urban working-class families proliferating on the outskirts of Delhi or any large town, everyone eating and sleeping and screaming in one tiny flat, it is difficult to believe in ‘islands’ of individuality. But they are often kept together by force of circumstance. Remove one of those family members from his familiar habitat and leave him with the unfamiliar, and he will perhaps discover his identity and individuality. Most humans, gregarious by nature, are, by constant co-mingling with their fellows, able to shut out all thought of their ‘island’ identities; these are the ones who find it difficult to live with themselves, who hate being alone. Most of us are extroverts except on our death-beds!

  And yet, it is equally true to say that no man is an island. Would I be half the writer I am today if I had not learnt to live with, and for, others?

  ‘Why do you make yourself suffer so?’ asked a wealthy Delhi socialite of me, not so long ago. ‘You have taken on all these people, and now you are tied down—you are afraid to make a move because one is sick or another is unhappy. Why don’t you learn to be selfish—like me?’

  ‘That’s just it,’ I said. ‘I am selfish—far more than you can ever be! I’m selfish because I want to be with those I love—all the time. I don’t want to be away from them even for a day!’ I was referring to Prem and his family—especially the children. And I remembered my father and how anxious he was to be with me all the time—from the moment he returned from work to the moment he set off again the next day. He was a sick man then, without any moral support, for he and my mother had separated two or three years previously. He was afraid that I might be taken from him too. He had no intention of giving me up. It was selfishness of the highest order.

  My socialite friend has a son who is an alcoholic and a daughter who is a drug-addict. She has little or no time for them. They are worthless, according to her. She is probably right. So she refuses to suffer because of them! Or so she declares. It must take a strong will to harden one’s heart against one’s own flesh and blood. Is it only in TV serials or Bombay movies that mothers are spotless, sacrificing their all?

  If I did not, as a child, receive the same love from my mother as I did from my father, it was not entirely her fault. As she had married again and was engaged in bringing up my stepbrothers, a clash of interests was only to be expected. A note of resentment creeps in here. I did resent stepfather, stepbrothers and the whole unwanted step-scene that I had to live with after my father’s death. Writing was one way of getting away from it all! Looking back, I expect they did their best for me. My stepfather was a man without any imagination, and it just did not occur to him that a child might need more than food and clothing. My mother’s sensuality was, I think, stronger than her intelligence. In me, sensuality and intelligence have been at war with each other almost all my life, and are even now at war.

  *

  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 ago:

  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; but the important thing is to feel comfortable with someone, and not have to keep proving yourself in one way or another.

  I was a good soccer goalkeeper—one of the few accomplishments that I forget to be mod
est about! And although my football-playing days ended when I left school, I have been a goalkeeper all my life—providing, protecting, defending home territory, rather than being an aggressive goal-scorer or go- getter; in other words, a stout defender rather than a dashing, flashy centre-forward. No, I never have been a dasher, and will never be one. It’s been ‘Tramp, tramp, tramp along the highway’, in the words of an old Nelson Eddy favourite. An occasional high kick to feed the forwards can always be expected; the rest of the time I’m happy to use my good reflexes in protecting my citadel (crumbling though the walls of Ivy Cottage maybe), my loved ones, my way of life, and my privacy. And when I take to the open road, it’s almost always on foot, seldom in a limousine.

  If I write my autobiography it will, I think, be called Writing For My Life. Ever since I started freelancing, on my return from England in 1955, I have been writing in order to sustain the sort of life I like to lead—unhurried, evenpaced, sensual, in step with the natural world, most at home with humble people . . . . I have never aspired to cars, houses, or even furniture. Property is for the superstitious. I have no assets except the books I have written and the few that may still be lurking in the innermost recesses of my mind. ‘I give to the world that which is in my heart,’ wrote the composer Franz Schubert, and I have tried to do the same. It should outlast the furniture.

  My response to nature has been instinctive, but my attitudes have also been influenced by Thoreau’s Walden and Richard Jefferies’ The Story of My Heart. Jefferies’ book is not simply a description of nature lore, it is a work of poetic and mystic vision. He was consumptive and he wrote in great poverty, but he wrote in the heightened consciousness that often came to those who suffered from tuberculosis.

  There were many great writers who were consumptive: Sterne, Keats, the Brontës (Emily, Charlotte, Ann and Branwell), Thoreau, Stevenson, Poe, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, numerous others. Are there certain morbid conditions, tuberculosis being one, that intensify and accelerate the growth of a creative gift? The tendency to snatch at life, to sweep together greedily, all the sensations and impressions life offers, must have been characteristic of the consumptive temperament.

  Jefferies was a solitary man, a quietist, an atheist, who did not move in literary circles. ‘To reflect that another human being,’ he wrote,

  if at a distance of ten thousand years from the year 1883, would enjoy one hour’s more life, in the sense of fullness of life, in the consequence of anything I had done in my little span, would be to me a peace of soul.

  I do not know about ten thousand years, but I can certainly say that one hundred years after Jefferies wrote those words, there was at least one reader, myself, who enjoyed many hours of delight in ‘physical emotion’ as a result of reading the work of one who was more a pagan than a gentle naturalist.

  As the reader will by now have realized, books have been a passion with me all my life, quite literally taking the place of furniture, as they lie stacked up in places where most people keep their ornamental bric-a-brac. Forty years of reading and writing have made my eyesight very weak, and now I get headaches if I read or write for too long. But I am glad I was able to get through thousands of books before this happened. At a rough calculation, I must have read over 15,000 books in my lifetime. And now, when I do read, I like to go back to old favourites, just as we like to be among old friends as we get older and the going gets tough.

  In a notebook kept in the 1950s, I had transcribed these words of Virginia Woolf, written in 1932:

  I have sometimes dreamt that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, ‘Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.’

  *

  My first attempt at a novel or memoir was at school in Simla, when I was thirteen. It was called Nine Months, but had nothing to do with a pregnancy; it referred merely to the length of the school term, the beginning of March to the end of November, and it detailed my friendships, escapades, ambitions, and views on life in general, as well as describing the foibles of some of our masters. It filled two exercise books and lay in my desk for a couple of months, before it disappeared—pinched, no doubt, by an early collector of original manuscripts.

  It was a sentimental account of school life, an extension of the diaries I had learnt to keep as a child. It had been my father, much earlier, who had encouraged me to keep a diary of sorts—and this I did in a desultory fashion during those long hot summer days in Delhi, while he was away at Air Headquarters and I lay on a cot beneath a ceiling-fan, waiting for the cool of the evening to bring him home. Then, when life became tolerable outside, he would take me to Connaught Place (quite new and glistening in 1943) to see a film or eat ice- cream at Wenger’s or down milk-shakes at the Milk Bar. Those early diary entries were often just lists of books I had read or records I had bought or films I had seen (casts included), but they served to give me a good memory for detail and even today I can rattle off the cast of any film made in the 1940s, and not just the authors, but also the publishers of books brought out in the first half of this century. Yes, I read all the Hugh Lofting books, but I can also tell you that they were published by Jonathan Cape, and that William Saroyan’s publishers were Faber and Faber, and that if anyone wrote a book about cats he’d find a sympathetic publisher in Michael Joseph!

  This habit of keeping a diary did get me into trouble later on— not at school, but in my aunt’s house in Jersey (in the Channel Islands) where I went to stay when, at the age of seventeen, I went to the UK. Some critical remarks about my relatives’ diehard colonial attitudes were read by my uncle—who, unable to contain his curiosity, had dipped into my diary—and there was an awful row. I packed my suitcase and took the boat to Southampton, from where I journeyed up to London. That was when I wrote my first novel, The Room on the Roof.

  I think I have always been pretty much in charge of my own life (made easier by the fact of not having any expectations from family of relatives)—leaving home to go to England, leaving Jersey to go to London, leaving London after three years and returning to India to freelance from Dehra and New Delhi; taking jobs when I had to, but always returning to my first love, which was full-time writing; leaving Delhi to live in the hills; and now, who knows, maybe it’s time to move on again.

  But all those early moves and decisions were taken when I was alone and unencumbered: living in that small attic room in north-west London and scribbling away at night, determined to get published; walking the streets of that great city until I discovered where almost every writer of note had lived, from Samuel Johnson to Hugh Walpole! And yet, I did not meet any living authors. Over the years, I have met very few writers. I seem to have been sustained by the ghosts of yesterday’s greats.

  And I needed that sustenance, for in a place like Dehra in the mid-Fifties, there were few if any literary influences and certainly no literary atmosphere. By day, I lived for my friendships and affairs; by night, I lived for my books and writing. It is difficult to write on a hot and humid afternoon; better to use that time for sleeping or making love, and keep the nights free for literature!

  But I must not forget my friend, William Matheson, a Swiss journalist, who lived in Dehra for a time. He would dissect and tear my stories to bits, and this had a salutary effect on my over-writing. His praise was so sparing, so rare, that when he did say something was good, I knew it was good.

  It has not been very different these many years in the hill- station. The mountains are magic; but, let’s face it, hill-stations are by now tawdry, tatty places, and Mussoorie is no exception. Tourism and private schools are its raison d’être. The odd writer has come this way but has usually hurried on elsewhere. I stayed on because of my personal relationships. It had n
othing to do with my writing. Although I love to sit in the shade of a friendly chestnut tree, notebook on my knee, I can write just as well in a crowded railway compartment or seedy hotel veranda—and have frequently done so.

  I live in simple, even austere conditions. Prem and the family have two small rooms, I have two small rooms. One of these is taken up by books and a few chairs for the occasional visitor. The other, smaller, is my bedroom-cum-study. It is bright and sunny, and the windows open out on the mountains and valley. There is a road below where people and vehicles pass by.

  Most of the essays written since 1980 and included in this book, were written in this room. So were a number of my children’s books. (The majority of my short stories belong to an earlier period.) Here I have written the odd poem, and here I listen to music, and here I talk to the children, and here I grow ivy on my walls. It is a good room for indoor plants, and I get on well with plants, particularly climbers.

  There is an old and faded rug on the floor. My wooden bed has done service for twenty years. My typewriter has done service for forty years; it is used to my touch; it has acquired a soul and I wouldn’t exchange it for a word-processor.

  My books are old, my pictures are old, my shoes are old, my only suit is very old.

  Only I am young.

  Growing up was always a difficult process for me, and I gave up trying many years ago. I decided that there was little point in becoming an adult, if I could remain a child and still make a living.

  I have the temper of a child, and a tendency to be mischievous. And I still retain a childlike trust in grown-ups, which sometimes works to my detriment. But it doesn’t matter. In the long run, the exploiters and manipulators meet with their come-uppances; they are their own worst enemies.