by Ruskin Bond
‘The original bent of the soul…’ I accept that man has a soul, or he would be incapable of compassion.
February
We move from mind to matter:
Tried a pizza—seemed to take an hour to travel down my gullet.
Two days later: Swiss cheese pie with Mrs Goel who’s Swiss—and more adventures of the digestive tract.
Next day: supper with the Deutschmanns from Australia. Australian pie.
Following day: rest and recovery. Then reverted to good old dal bhaat.
Accompanied N—to Dehra Dun and ended up paying for our lunch. The trouble with rich people is that they never seem to have any money on them. That’s how they stay rich, I suppose.
March
Sold A Crow for All Seasons to the Children’s Film Society for a small sum. They think it will make a good animated film. And so it will. But I’m pretty sure they won’t make it. They have forgotten about the story they bought from me five years ago! (Neither film was ever made.)
April
The wind in the pines and deodars hums and moans, but in the chestnut it rustles and chatters and makes cheerful conversation. The horse-chestnut in full leaf is a magnificent sight.
Children down with mumps. I go clown with a viral fever for two days. Recover and write three articles. Hope for the best. It is not in mortals to command success.
Men get their sensual natures from their mothers, their intellectual make-up from their fathers; women, the other way round. (Or so I’m told!)
June
Not many years ago you had to walk for weeks to reach the pilgrim destinations—Badrinath, Gangotri, Kedarnath, Tungnath… Last week, within a few days, I covered them all, as most of them are now accessible by motorable road. I liked some of the smaller places, such as Nandprayag, which are still unspoilt. Otherwise, I’m afraid the dhaba-culture of urban India has followed the cars and buses into the mountains and up to the shrines.
July
The deodar (unlike the pine) is a hospitable tree. It allows other things to grow beneath it, and it tolerates growth upon its trunk and branches—moss, ferns, small plants. The tiny young cones are like blossoms on the dark green foliage at this time of the year.
Slipped and cracked my head against the grid of a truck. Blood gushed forth, so I dashed across to Dr Joshi’s little clinic and had three stitches and an anti-tetanus shot. Now you know why I don’t travel well.
M.C. Beautiful, seductive. ‘She walks in beauty like the night…’
August
Endless rain. No sun for a week. But M.C. playful, loving. In good spirits, I wrote a funny story about cricket. I’d find it hard to write a serious story about cricket. The farcical element appeals to me more than the ‘nobler’ aspects of the game. Uncle Ken made more runs with his pads than with his bat. And out of every ten catches that came his way, he took one!
October
Paid rent in advance for next year; paid school fees to end of this year. Broke, but don’t owe a paisa to a soul. Ice cream in town with Raki. Came home to find a couple of cheques waiting for me!
M.C. Quick as a vixen, but makes the chase worthwhile.
We walk in the wind and the rain. Exhilarating.
Frantic kisses.
Time to say goodbye!
When love is swiftly stolen,
It hasn’t time to die.
When in love, I’m inspired to write bad verse.
Teilhard de Chardin said it better:
‘Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.’
February 1986
Destiny is really the strength of our desires.
Raki back from the village. I’m happy he has made himself popular there, adapted to both worlds, the comparative sophistication of Mussoorie and the simple earthiness of village Bachhanshu in the remoteness of Garhwal. Being able to get on with everyone, rich or poor, old or young, makes life so much easier. Or so I’ve found! My parents’ broken marriage, father’s early death, and the difficulties of adapting to my stepfather’s home, resulted in my being something of a loner until I was thirty. Now I’ve become a family person without marrying. Selfish?
Returned to two great comic novels—H. G. Wells’s History of Mr Polly and George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of Nobody. Polly has some marvellous set-pieces, while Nobody never fails to make me laugh.
M. C. returns with a spring in the Springtime. The same good nature and sense of humour.
Three things in love the foolish will desire:
Faith, constancy, and passion; but the wise
Only an hour’s happiness require
And not to look into uncaring eyes.
(Kenneth Hopkins)
March
Getting Granny’s Glasses received a nomination for the Carnegie Medal. Cricket for the Crocodile makes friends.
After a cold wet spell, Holi brings warmer days, ladybirds, new friends.
May
So now I’m 52. Time to pare life down to the basics of doing.
a)what I have to do
b)what I want to do
Much prefer the latter.
June
Blood pressure up and down.
Writing for a living: it’s a battlefield!
People do ask funny questions. Accosted on the road by a stranger, who proceeds to cross-examine me, starting with: ‘Excuse me, are you a good writer?’ For once, I’m stumped for an answer.
Muki no better. Bangs my study door, sees me give a start, and says: ‘This door makes a lot of noise, doesn’t it?’
August
Thousands converge on the town from outlying villages, for local festival. By late evening, scores of drunks staggering about on the road. A few fights, but largely good-natured.
The women dress very attractively and colourfully. But for most of the menfolk, the height of fashion appears to be a new pyjama-suit. But I’m a pyjama person myself. Pyjamas are comfortable, I write better wearing pyjamas!
September
Month began with a cheque that bounced. Refrained from checking my blood pressure.
Monsoon growth at its peak. The ladies’ slipper orchids are tailing off, but I noticed all the following wild flowers: balsam (two kinds), commelina, agrnnony, wild geranium (very pretty), sprays of white flowers emanating from the wild ginger, the scarlet fruit of the cobra lily just forming tiny mushrooms set like pearls in a retaining wall; ferns still green, which means more rain to come; escaped dahlias everywhere; wild begonias and much else. The best time of year for wild flowers.
February 1987
Home again, after five days in hospital with bleeding ulcers. Loving care from Prem. Support from Ganesh and others. Nurse Nirmala very caring. I prefer nurses to doctors.
Milk, hateful milk!
After a week, back in hospital. Must have been all that milk. Or maybe Nurse Nirmala!
March
To Delhi for a check-up. Public gardens ablaze with flowers. Felt much better.
‘A merry heart does good like a medicine, but a broken spirit dries the bones.’
‘He who tenderly brings up his servant from a child, shall have him become his son at the end.’
(Book of Proverbs)
May
Lines for future use:
Lunch (at my convent school) was boiled mutton and overcooked pumpkin, which made death lose some of its sting.
Pictures on the wall are not just something to look at. After a time, they become company.
Another bus accident, and a curious crowd gathered with disaster-inspired speed.
He (Upendra) has a bonfire of a laugh.
(Forgot to use these lines, so here they are!)
May
Ordered a birthday cake, but it failed to arrive. Sometimes I think inertia is the greatest force in the world.
Wrote a ghost story, s
omething I enjoy doing from time to time, although I must admit that, try as I might, I have yet to encounter a supernatural being. Unless you can count dreams as being supernatural experiences.
August
After the drought, the deluge.
Landslide near the house. It rumbled away all night and I kept getting up to see how close it was getting to us. About twenty feet away. The house is none too stable, badly in need of repairs. In fact, it looks a bit like the Lucknow Residency after the rebels had finished shelling it.
(It did, however, survive the landslide, although the retaining wall above our flat collapsed, filling the sitting-room with rubble.)
November
To Delhi, to receive a generous award from Indian Council for Child Education. Presented to me by the Vice-President of India. Got back to my host’s home to discover that the envelope contained another awardee’s cheque. He was due to leave for Ahmedabad by train. Rushed to railway station, to find him on the platform studying my cheque which he had just discovered in his pocket. Exchanged cheques. All’s well that ends well.
A Delhi Visit
A long day’s taxi journey to Delhi. It gets tiring towards the end, but I have always found the road journey interesting and at times quite enchanting—especially the rural scene from outside Dehra Dun, through Roorkee and various small wayside towns, up to Muzzafarnagar and the outskirts of Meerut: the sugarcane being harvested and taken to the sugar factories (by cart or truck); the fruit on sale everywhere (right now, it’s the season for bananas and ‘chakotra’ lemons); children bathing in small canals; the serenity of mango groves…
Of course there’s the other side to all this—the litter that accumulates wherever there are large centres of population; the blaring of horns; loudspeakers here and there. It’s all part of the picture. But the picture as a whole is a fascinating one, and the colours can’t be matched anywhere else.
Marigolds blaze in the sun. Yes, whole fields of them, for they are much in demand on all sorts of ceremonial occasions: marriages, temple pujas, and garlands for dignitaries—making the humble marigold a good cash crop.
And not so humble after all. For although the rose may still be the queen of flowers, and the jasmine the princess of fragrance, the marigold holds its own through sheer sturdiness, colour and cheerfulness. It is a cheerful flower, no doubt about that—brightening up winter days, often when there is little else in bloom. It doesn’t really have a fragrance—simply an acid odour, not to everyone’s liking—but it has a wonderful range of colour, from lower yellow to deep orange to golden bronze, especially among the giant varieties in the hills.
Otherwise this is not a great month for flowers, although at the India International Centre (IIC) in Delhi, where I am staying, there is a pretty tree with fragile pink flowers—the Chorisnia speciosa, each bloom having five large pink petals, with long pistula.
Adventures in Reading
1
BEAUTY IN SMALL BOOKS
You don’t see them so often now, those tiny books and almanacs—genuine pocketbooks—once so popular with our parents and grandparents; much smaller than the average paperback, often smaller than the palm of the hand. With the advent of coffee-table books, new books keep growing bigger and bigger, rivalling tombstones! And one day, like Alice after drinking from the wrong bottle, they will reach the ceiling and won’t have anywhere else to go. The average publisher, who apparently believes that large profits are linked to large books, must look upon these old miniatures with amusement or scorn. They were not meant for a coffee table, true. They were meant for true book-lovers and readers, for they took up very little space—you could slip them into your pocket without any discomfort, either to you or to the pocket.
I have a small collection of these little books, treasured over the years. Foremost is my father’s prayer-book and psalter, with his name, ‘Aubrey Bond, Lovedale, 1917’, inscribed on the inside back cover. Lovedale is a school in the Nilgiri Hills in south India, where, as a young man, he did his teacher’s training. He gave it to me soon after I went to a boarding school in Shimla in 1944, and my own name is inscribed on it in his beautiful handwriting.
Another beautiful little prayer-book in my collection is called The Finger Prayer Book. Bound in soft leather, it is about the same length and breadth as the average middle finger. Replete with psalms, it is the complete book of common prayer and not an abridgement; a marvel of miniature book production.
Not much larger is a delicate item in calf-leather, The Humour of Charles Lamb. It fits into my wallet and often stays there. It has a tiny portrait of the great essayist, followed by some thirty to forty extracts from his essays, such as this favourite of mine: ‘Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that “Such as he is now, I must shortly be”. Not so shortly friend, perhaps as thou imaginest. In the meantime, I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters!’
No fatalist, Lamb. He made no compromise with Father Time. He affirmed that in age we must be as glowing and tempestuous as in youth! And yet Lamb is thought to be an old-fashioned writer.
Another favourite among my ‘little’ books is The Pocket Trivet, An Anthology for Optimists, published by The Morning Post newspaper in 1932. But what is a trivet? the unenlightened may well ask. Well, it’s a stand for a small pot or kettle, fixed securely over a grate. To be right as a trivet is to be perfectly right. Just right, like the short sayings in this book, which is further enlivened by a number of charming woodcuts based on the seventeenth century originals; such as the illustration of a moth hovering over a candle flame and below it the legend—‘I seeke mine owne hurt.’
But the sayings are mostly of a cheering nature, such as Emerson’s ‘Hitch your wagon to a star!’ or the West Indian proverb: ‘Every day no Christmas, an’ every day no rainy day.’
My book of trivets is a happy example of much concentrated wisdom being collected in a small space—the beauty separated from the dross. It helps me to forget the dilapidated building in which I live and to look instead, at the ever-changing cloud patterns as seen from my bedroom windows. There is no end to the shapes made by the clouds, or to the stories they set off in my head. We don’t have to circle the world in order to find beauty and fulfilment. After all, most of living has to happen in the mind. And, to quote one anonymous sage from my trivet, ‘The world is only the size of each man’s head.’
2
WRITTEN BY HAND
Amongst the current fraternity of writers, I must be that very rare person—an author who actually writes by hand!
Soon after the invention of the typewriter, most editors and publishers understandably refused to look at any mansucript that was handwritten. A decade or two earlier, when Dickens and Balzac had submitted their hefty manuscrips in longhand, no one had raised any objection. Had their handwriting been awful, their manuscripts would still have been read. Fortunately for all concerned, most writers, famous or obscure, took pains over their handwriting. For some, it was an art in itself, and many of those early manuscripts are a pleasure to look at and read.
And it wasn’t only authors who wrote with an elegant hand. Parents and grandparents of most of us had distinctive styles of their own. I still have my father’s last letter, written to me when I was at boarding school in Shimla some fifty years ago. He used large, beautifully formed letters, and his thoughts seemed to have the same flow and clarity as his handwriting.
In his letter he advises me (then a nine-year-old) about my own handwriting; ‘I wanted to write before about your writing. Ruskin…sometimes I get letters from you in very small writing, as if you wanted to squeeze everything into one sheet of letter paper. It is not good for you or for your eyes, to get into the habit of writing too small… Try and form a larger style of handwriting—use more paper if necessary!’
I did my best to follow his advice, and I’m glad to report that after nearly forty years of the writing life, most people can still read m
y handwriting!
Word-processors are all the rage now, and I have no objection to these mechanical aids any more than I have to my old Olympia typewriter, made in 1956 and still going strong. Although I do all my writing in longhand, I follow the conventions by typing a second draft. But I would not enjoy my writing if I had to do it straight on to a machine. It isn’t just the pleasure of writing longhand. I like taking my notebooks and writing-pads to odd places. This particular essay is being written on the steps of my small cottage facing Pari Tibba (Fairy Hill). Part of the reason for sitting here is that there is a new postman on this route, and I don’t want him to miss me.
For a freelance writer, the postman is almost as important as a publisher. I could, of course, sit here doing nothing, but as I have pencil and paper with me, and feel like using them, I shall write until the postman comes and maybe after he has gone, too! There is really no way in which I could set up a word-processor on these steps.
There are a number of favourite places where I do my writing. One is under the chestnut tree on the slope above the cottage. Word-processors were not designed keeping mountain slopes in mind. But armed with a pen (or pencil) and paper, I can lie on the grass and write for hours. On one occasion, last month, I did take my typewriter into the garden, and I am still trying to extricate an acorn from under the keys, while the roller seems permanently stained yellow with some fine pollen-dust from the deodar trees.
My friends keep telling me about all the wonderful things I can do with a word-processor, but they haven’t got around to finding me one that I can take to bed, for that is another place where I do much of my writing—especially on cold winter nights, when it is impossible to keep the cottage warm.
While the wind howls outside, and snow piles up on the window-sill, I am warm under my quilt, writing pad on my knees, ballpoint pen at the ready. And if, next day, the weather is warm and sunny, these simple aids will accompany me on a long walk, ready for instant use should I wish to record an incident, a prospect, a conversation, or simply a train of thought.