by Ruskin Bond
Begum Para, did I say?
Not the Begum Para? The saucy heroine of the silver screen? And why not? This remarkable lady had dropped in from Pakistan to play the part of my grandmother in Shubhadarshini’s serial ‘Ek Tha Rusty’, based on stories of my childhood. Not only was she a wonderful actress, she was also a wonderful person who loved cooking. But she was defeated by the Mussoorie goat, who resisted all her endeavours to turn it into an edible rogan josh.
The Mussoorie goat is good only for getting into your garden and eating up your dahlias. These creatures also strip the hillside of any young vegetation that attempts to come up in the spring or summer. I have watched them decimate a flower garden and cause havoc to a vegetable plot. For this reason alone I do not shed a tear when I see them being marched off to the butcher’s premises. I might cry over a slaughtered chicken, but not over a goat.
One of my neighbours on the hillside, Mrs K—, once kept a goat as a pet. She attempted to throw one or two parties, but no one would go to them. The goat was given the freedom of the drawing room and smelt to high heaven. Mrs K—was known to take it to bed with her. She too developed a strong odour. It is not surprising that her husband left the country and took a mistress in Panama. He couldn’t get much further, poor man.
Mrs K—’s goat disappeared one day, and that same night feast was held in Kolti village, behind Landour. People say the mutton was more tender and succulent than than at most feasts-the result, no doubt, of its having shared Mrs K—’s meals and bed for a couple of years.
One of Mrs K—’s neighbours was Mrs Santra, a kind-hearted but rather tiresome widow in her sixties. She was childless but had a fixation that, like the mother of John the Baptist, she would conceive in her sixties and give birth to a new messenger of the Messiah. Every month she would visit the local gynaecologist for advice, and the doctor would be gentle with her and tell her anything was possible and that in the meantime she should sustain herself with nourishing soups and savouries.
Mrs Santra liked giving little tea parties and I went to a couple of them. The sandwiches, samosas, cakes and jam tarts were delicious, and I expressed my appreciation. But then she took to visiting me at odd times, and I found this rather trying, as she would turn up while I was writing or sleeping or otherwise engaged. On one occasion, when I pretended I was not at home, she even followed me into the bathroom (where I had concealed myself) and scolded me for trying to avoid her.
She was a good lady, but I found it impossible to reciprocate her affectionate and even at times ardent overtures. So I had to ask her to desist from visiting me. The next day she sent her servant down with a small present—a little pot with a pansy growing in it!
On that happy note, I leave Mrs Santra and turn to other friends.
Such as Aunty Bhakti, a tremendous consumer of viands and victuals who, after a more than usually heavy meal at my former lodgings, retired to my Indian style lavatory to relieve herself. Ten minutes passed, then twenty, and still no sign of Aunty! My other luncheon guests, the Maharani Saheba of Jind, writer Bill Aitken and local pehelwan Maurice Alexander, grew increasingly concerned. Was Aunty having a heart attack or was she just badly constipated?
I went to the bathroom door and called out: ‘Are you all right, Aunty?’
A silence, and then, in a quavering voice, ‘I’m stuck!’
‘Can you open the door?’ I asked.
‘It’s open,’ she said, ‘but I can’t move.’
I pushed open the door and peered in. Aunty, a heavily-built woman, had lost her balance and subsided backwards on the toilet, in the process jamming her bottom into the cavity!
‘Give me a hand, Aunty,’ I said, and taking her by the hand (the only time I’d ever been permitted to do so), tried my best to heave her out of her predicament. But she wouldn’t budge.
I went back to the drawing room for help. ‘Aunty’s stuck,’ I said, ‘and I can’t get her out.’ The Maharani went to take a look. After all, they were cousins. She came back looking concerned. ‘Bill,’ she said, ‘get up and help Ruskin extricate Aunty before she has a heart attack!’
Bill Aitken and I bear some resemblance to Laurel and Hardy. I’m Hardy, naturally. We did our best but Aunty Bhakti couldn’t be extracted. So we called on the expertise of Maurice, our pehelwan, and forming a human chain or something of a tug of war team, we all pulled and tugged until Aunty Bhakti came out with a loud bang, wrecking my toilet in the process.
I must say she was not the sort to feel embarrassed. Returning to the drawing-room, she proceeded to polish off half a brick of ice cream.
Another ice cream fiend is Nandu Jauhar who, at the time of writing, owns the Savoy in Mussoorie. At a marriage party, and in my presence he polished off thirty-two cups of ice cream and this after a hefty dinner.
The next morning he was as green as his favorite pistachio ice cream.
When admonished, all he could say was ‘They were only small cups, you know.’
Nandu’s eating exploits go back to his schooldays when (circa 1950) he held the Doon School record for consuming the largest number of mangoes—a large bucketful, all of five kilos—in one extended sitting.
‘Could you do it again?’ we asked him the other day.
‘Only if they are Alfonsos,’ he said ‘And you have to pay for them.’
Fortunately for our pockets, and for Nandu’s well-being, Alfonsos are not available in Mussoorie in December.
You must meet Rekha someday. She grows herbs now, and leads the quiet life, but in her heyday she gave some memorable parties, some of them laced with a bit of pot or marijuana. Rekha was a full-blooded American girl who had married into a well-known and highly respected Brahmin family and taken an Indian name. She was highly respected too, because she’d produced triplets at her first attempt at motherhood.
Some of her old Hippie friends often turned up at her house. One of them, a French sitar player, wore a red sock on his left foot and a green sock on his right. His shoes were decorated with silver sequins. Another of her friends was an Australian film producer who had yet to produce a film. On one occasion I found the Frenchman and the Australian in Lakshmi’s garden, standing in the middle of a deep hole they’d been digging.
I thought they were preparing someone’s grave and asked them who it was meant for. They told me they were looking for a short cut to Australia, and carried on digging. As I never saw them again, I presume they came out in the middle of the great Australian desert. Yes, her pot was that potent!
I have never smoked pot, and have never felt any inclination to do so. One can get a great ‘high’ from so many other things—falling in love, or reading a beautiful poem, or taking in the perfume of a rose, or getting up at dawn to watch the morning sky and then the sunrise, or listening to great music, or just listening to bird song—it does seen rather pointless having to depend on artificial stimulants for relaxation; but human beings are a funny lot and will often go to great lengths to obtain the sort of things that some would consider rubbish.
I have no intention of adopting a patronizing, moralizing tone. I did, after all, partake of Rekha’s bhang pakoras one evening before Diwali, and I discovered a great many stars that I hadn’t seen before.
I was in such high spirits that I insisted on being carried home by the two most attractive girls at the party—Abha Saili and Shenaz Kapadia—and they, having also partaken of those magical pakoras, were only too happy to oblige.
They linked arms to form a sort of chariot-seat, and I sat upon it (I was much lighter then) and was carried with great dignity and aplomb down Landour’s upper Mall, stopping only now and then to remove the odd, disfiguring nameplate from an offending gate.
On our way down, we encountered a lady on her way up. Well, she looked like a lady to me, and I took off my cap and wished her good evening and asked where she was going at one o’ clock in the middle of the night.
She sailed past us without deigning to reply.
‘Snooty old b
itch!’ I called out. ‘Just who is that midnight woman?’ I asked Abha.
‘It’s not a woman,’ said Abha. ‘It’s the circuit judge.’
‘The circuit judge is taking a circuitous route home,’ I commented. ‘And why is he going about in drag?’
‘Hush. He’s not in drag. He’s wearing his wig!’
‘Ah well,’ I said, ‘Even judges must have their secret vices. We must live and let live!’
They got me home in style, and I’m glad I never had to come up before the judge. He’d have given me more than a wigging.
That was a few years ago. Our Diwalis are far more respectable now, and Rekha sends us sweets instead of pakoras. But those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end.
In fact, they haven’t. It’s still party-time in Landour and Mussoorie.
On the Road to Delhi
Road travel can involve delays and mishaps, but it also provides you with the freedom to stop where you like and do as you like. I have never found it boring. The seven-hour drive from Mussoorie to Delhi can become a little tiring towards the end, but as I do not drive myself, I can sit back and enjoy everything that the journey has to offer.
I have been to Delhi five times in the last six months—something of a record for me—and on every occasion I have travelled by road. I like looking at the countryside, the passing scene, the people along the road, and this is something I don’t see any more from trains; those thick windows of frosted glass effectively cut me off from the world outside.
On my last trip we had to leave the main highway because of a disturbance near Meerut. Instead we had to drive through about a dozen villages in the prosperous sugarcane belt that dominates this area. It was a wonderful contrast, leaving the main road with its cafés, petrol pumps, factories and management institutes and entering the rural hinterland where very little had changed in a hundred years. Women worked in the fields, old men smoked hookahs in their courtyards, and a few children were playing guli-danda instead of cricket! It brought home to me the reality of India—urban life and rural life are still poles apart.
These journeys are seldom without incident. I was sipping a coffee at a wayside restaurant, when a foreign woman walked in, and asked the waiter if they had ‘à la carte’. Roadside stops seldom provide menus, nor do they go in for French, but our waiter wanted to be helpful, so he led the tourist outside and showed her the way to the public toilet. As she did not return to the restaurant, I have no idea if she eventually found à la carte.
My driver on a recent trip assured me that he knew Delhi very well and could get me to any destination. I told him I’d been booked into a big hotel near the airport, and gave him the name. Not to worry, he told me, and drove confidently towards Palam. There he got confused, and after taking several unfamiliar turnings, drove straight into a large piggery situated behind the airport. We were surrounded by some fifty or sixty pigs and an equal number of children from the mohalla. One boy even asked me if I wanted to purchase a pig. I do like bit of bacon now and then, but unlike Lord Emsworth I do not have any ambition to breed prize pigs, so I had to decline. After some arguments over right of way, we were allowed to proceed and finally made it to the hotel.
Occasionally I have shared a taxi with another passenger, but after one or two disconcerting experiences I have taken to travelling alone or with a friend.
The last time I shared a taxi with someone, I was pleased to find that my fellow passenger, a large gentleman with a fierce moustache, had bought one of my books, which was lying on the seat between us.
I thought I’d be friendly and so, to break the ice, I remarked ‘I see you have one of my books with you,’ glancing modestly at the paperback on the seat.
‘What do you mean, your book?’ he bridled, giving me a dirty look. ‘I just bought this book at the news agency!’
‘No, no,’ I stammered, ‘I don’t mean it’s mine, I mean it’s my book—er, that is, I happened to write it!’
‘Oh, so now you’re claiming to be the author!’ He looked at me as though I was a fraud of the worst kind. ‘What is your real profession, may I ask?’
‘I’m just a typist,’ I said, and made no further attempt to make friends.
Indeed, I am very careful about trumpeting my literary or other achievements, as I am frequently misunderstood.
Recently, at a book reading in New Delhi, a little girl asked me how many books I’d written.
‘Oh, about sixty or seventy,’ I said quite truthfully.
At which another child piped up: ‘Why can’t you be a little modest about it?’
Sometimes you just can’t win.
My author’s ego received a salutary beating when on one of my earlier trips, I stopped at a small book-stall and looked around, hoping (like any other author) to spot one of my books. Finally, I found one, under a pile of books by Deepak Chopra, Khushwant Singh, William Dalrymple and other luminaries. I slipped it out from the bottom of the pile and surreptitiously placed it on top.
Unfortunately the bookseller had seen me do this.
He picked up the offending volume and returned it to the bottom of the pile, saying ‘No demand for this book, sir’.
I wasn’t going to tell him I was the author. But just to prove him wrong, I bought the poor neglected thing.
‘This is a collector’s item,’ I told him.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘At last I meet a collector.’
The number of interesting people I meet on the road is matched only by the number of interesting drivers who have carried me back and forth in their chariots of fire.
The last to do so, the driver of a Qualis, must have had ambitions to be an air pilot. He used the road as a runway and was constantly on the verge of taking off. Pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers of smaller vehicles scattered to left and right, often hurling abuse at my charioteer, who seemed immune to the most colourful invectives. Trucks did not give way but he simply swerved around them, adopting a zigzag approach to the task of getting from Delhi to Dehra Dun in the shortest possible time.
‘There’s no hurry,’ I told him more than once, but his English was limited and he told me later that he thought I was saying ‘Please hurry!’
Well, he hurried and he harried until at a railway-crossing where we were forced to stop, an irate scooterist came abreast and threatened to turn the driver over to the police. A long and heated argument followed, and it appeared that there would soon be a punch-up, when the crossing-gate suddenly opened and the Qualis flew forward, leaving the fuming scooterist far behind.
As I do not drive myself, I am normally the ideal person to have in the front seat; I repose complete confidence in the man behind the wheel. And sitting up front, I see more of the road and the passing scene.
One of Mussoorie’s better drivers is Sardar Manmohan Singh who drives his own taxi. He is also a keen wildlife enthusiast. It always amazes me how he is able, to drive through the Siwaliks, on a winding hill road, and still be able to keep his eye open for denizens of the surrounding forest.
‘See that cheetal!’ he will exclaim, or ‘What a fine sambhar!’ or ‘Just look at that elephant!’
All this at high speed. And before I’ve had time to get more than a fleeting glimpse of one of these creatures, we are well past them.
Manmohan swears that he has seen a tiger crossing the road near the Mohand Pass, and as he is a person of some integrity, I have to believe him. I think the tiger appears especially for Manmohan.
Another wildlife enthusiast is my old friend Vishal Ohri, of State Bank fame. On one occasion he drove me down a forest road between Haridwar and Mohand, and we did indeed see a number of animals, cheetal and wild boar.
Unlike our car drivers, he was in no hurry to reach our destination and would stop every now and then, in order to examine the footprints of elephants. He also pointed out large dollops of fresh elephant dung, proof that wild elephants were in the vicinity. I did not think his old Fiat would out-run an angry elephant
and urged him to get a move on before nightfall.
Vishal then held forth on the benefits of elephant dung and how it could be used to reinforce mud walls. I assured him that I would try it out on the walls of my study, which was in danger of falling down.
Vishal was well ahead of his time. Only the other day I read in one of our papers that elephant dung could be converted into good quality paper. Perhaps they’ll use it to make bank notes. Reserve Bank, please note.
Other good drivers who have taken me here and there include Ganesh Saili, who is even better after a few drinks; Victor Banerjee who is better before drinks; and young Harpreet who is a fan of Kenny G’s saxophone playing. On the road to Delhi with Harpreet, I had six hours of listening to Kenny G on tape. On my return, two days later, I had another six hours of Kenny G. Now I go into a frenzy whenever I hear a saxophone.
My publisher has an experienced old driver who also happens to be quite deaf. He blares the car horn vigorously and without respite. When I asked him why he used the horn so much, he replied, ‘Well, I can’t hear their horns, but I’ll make sure they hear mine!’ As good a reason as any.
It is sometimes said that women don’t make good drivers, but I beg to differ. Mrs Biswas was an excellent driver but a dangerous woman to know. Her husband had been a well-known shikari, and he kept a stuffed panther in the drawing room of his Delhi farmhouse. Mrs Biswas spent the occasional weekend at her summer home in Landour. I’d been to one or two of her parties, attended mostly by menfolk.
One day, while I was loitering on the road, she drove up and asked me if I’d like to accompany her down to Dehra Dun.