The Best of Ruskin Bond

by Bond, Ruskin

  I did not think I would find my grandfather’s grave in the wilderness of worn and weathered tombs. Many had lost their inscriptions. They represented the presence in the Doon Valley of well over a thousand Europeans, from the first soldiers and settlers of the early nineteenth century to the more recent few who ‘stayed on’—and passed on. Strangely enough, I had barely begun my search when I found myself before my grandfather’s grave. The inscription, placed there by my grandmother, stood out more clearly than most. ‘In memory of my beloved husband, William Dudley Clerke, died 9th January 1935’.

  And this was the 9th of January, too. It was becoming a day of coincidences. Or had something more than coincidence led me here on the anniversary of my grandfather’s death? And if so, why? Perhaps the coming months will give me the answer.

  Escape To Nowhere

  By the end of August, the hill-dweller has got the monsoon blues. Heartily sick of cloud and fog, drizzle and downpour, he longs for a little sunshine, some dryness in the air.

  Forsaking my jammed typewriter, and mildewed books and files, I set out for Dehradun in the valley. It was damp there too, and sultry, but at least there were occasional bursts of sunshine. I took a room in a small hotel and lay beneath a whirring fan, waiting for the cool of the evening.

  Evening walks in Dehra are not what they used to be. Speeding vehicles stop for no one, and you take your life in your hands every time you cross a road. Most of the roads came into existence over a hundred years ago, and were originally meant for pedestrians and pony-drawn tongas. Now, neither pedestrians nor ponies have any rights.

  Wait until dark and the hazards are even greater, for street lights do not exist on the smaller roads, while open ditches and other obstacles are there in abundance, just waiting to trap you. Returning to my room muddied and dishevelled, I was consoled by the old man who brought me a cup of tea. Things were much worse in Agra, he told me.

  ‘And what were you doing in Agra?’ I asked.

  ‘I was in the madhouse, the pagalkhana, for ten years. Then one day, when no one was looking, I slipped away.’

  He burst into laughter, and naturally I had to join in.

  ‘Inside or outside, there’s no difference,’ he added. ‘The roads are full of pagals these days.’

  *

  Next day, going out in search of a little sanity, I decided I’d call on Nergis Dalai, a fellow writer whom I hadn’t seen for some years.

  As I approached the Dilawar Bazaar, the area where she lived, I noticed that the traffic on the main road had come to a standstill and that smoke was issuing from a couple of small shops. A crowd had gathered and now, as a police van arrived, people began to scatter, most of them running in my direction. I always seem to be standing in the way of advancing hordes.

  Looking for some avenue of escape, I found a gap in a wall, leading into an old orchard of lichi trees. I sat beneath a lichi tree, recalling the days when Dehra was famous for its lichis. Now only a few gardens remain, for owners find it more profitable to sell their land for buildings. Will lichis vanish forever? They don’t grow anywhere else.

  When the main road seemed normal again, I left the protection of the trees and took another chance with my fellow humans. Two boys were discussing the recent incident. One said the shop had been burnt down because it had been selling brown sugar. The other said it had been burnt down because it had refused to sell brown sugar.

  My own blood-sugar level was by now distinctly low, so I hurried along to Nergis Dalal’s flat, knowing she would give me sustenance. Hadn’t she written half-a-dozen cookery books?

  Nor was I disappointed. Pullau rice, kofta curry, and a chocolate soufflé awaited me. I was on the right track again!

  *

  When I got back to my hotel, I found Mr Arora of the Green Bookshop waiting for me in the veranda. He had a surprise for me, he said. He wouldn’t tell me what it was until I got into his car.

  Ten minutes later we drove in at the gates of Welhem Girls’ School. And within minutes I found myself trapped in a classroom, surrounded by some two hundred girls, their ages ranging from fourteen to eighteen. And I was expected to talk to them! Usually tongue-tied in front of one girl, how was I to converse with two hundred? Jules Verne had a similar problem, I believe. No wonder he preferred to be 20,000 leagues under the sea—which was where I wanted to be just then!

  Bright-eyed and eager they were, waiting for words of wisdom to flow from my lips. I had none to impart! I looked around the sea of faces. Here was beauty and intelligence combined! I was struck dumb.

  Their principal, Mrs Verma, came to my rescue and said nice things about my writing. I answered a few questions, trying to be witty if not wise. The girls were kind and indulgent.

  When it was all over, I found myself back in my hotel room. A smart young Gurkha brought me a cup of tea.

  ‘Where’s the old man?’ I asked.

  ‘One of his sons came for him,’ he said. ‘They’ve taken him back to Agra.’

  So that was the end of his great escape. Was it the end of mine?

  In The Garden Of My Dreams

  The cosmos has all the genius of simplicity. The plant stands tall and erect; its foliage is uncomplicated; its inflorescences are bold, fresh, cheerful. Any flower, from a rose to a rhododendron, can be complicated. The cosmos is splendidly simple.

  No wonder it takes its name from the Greek cosmos, meaning the universe as an ordered whole—the sum total of experience! For this unpretentious flower does seem to sum it all up: perfection without apparent striving for it, the artistry of the South American footballer! Needless to say, it came from tropical America.

  And growing it is no trouble. A handful of seed thrown in a waste patch or on a grassy hill slope, and a few months later there they are, en masse, doing their samba in the sunshine. They are almost wild, but not quite. They need very little attention, but if you take them too much for granted they will go away the following year. Simple they may be, but not insensitive. They need plenty of space. And as my own small apartment cannot accommodate them, they definitely belong to my dream garden.

  My respect for the cosmos goes back to my childhood when I wandered into what seemed like a forest of these flowers, all twice my height (I must have been five at the time) but looking down on me in the friendliest way, their fine feathery foliage giving off a faint aroma. Now when I find them flowering on the hillsides in mellow October sunshine, they are like old friends and I greet them accordingly, pressing my face to their petals.

  Not everyone likes the cosmos. I have met some upper-class ladies (golf club members) who complain that it gives them hay fever, and they use this as an excuse to root out all cosmos from their gardens. I expect they are just being snobbish. There are other flowers which give off just as much pollen dust.

  I have noticed the same snobbishness in regard to marigolds, especially the smaller Indian variety. ‘Cultivated’ people won’t cultivate these humble but attractive flowers. Is it because they are used for making garlands? Or because they are not delicately scented? Or because they are so easily grown in the backyards of humble homes?

  My grandparents once went to war with each other over the marigold. Grandfather had grown a few in one corner of the garden. Just as they began flowering, they vanished—Granny had removed them overnight! There was a row, and my grandparents did not speak to each other for several days. Then, by calling them ‘French’ marigolds, Grandfather managed to reintroduce them to the garden. Granny liked the idea of having something ‘French’ in her garden. Such is human nature!

  Sometimes a wildflower can put its more spectacular garden cousins to shame. I am thinking now of the commelina, which I discover in secret places after the rains have passed. Its bright sky-blue flowers take my breath away. It has a sort of unguarded innocence that is beyond corruption.

  Wild roses give me more pleasure than the sophisticated domestic variety. On a walk in the Himalayan foothills I have encountered a number of these shr
ubs and climbers—the ineptly named dog rose, sparkling white in summer; the sweet briar with its deep pink petals and bright red rose-hips; the trailing rose, found in shady places; and the wild raspberry (the fruit more attractive than the flower) which belongs to the same family.

  A sun-lover, I like plenty of yellow on the hillsides and in gardens—sunflowers, Californian poppies, winter jasmine, St. John’s Wort, buttercups, wild strawberries, mustard in bloom. . . . But if you live in a hot place, you might prefer cooling blues and soft purples—forget-me-nots, bluebells, cornflowers, lavender.

  I’d go far for a sprig of sweetly-scented lavender. To many older people the word lavender is as good as a charm; it seems to recall the plaintive strain of once familiar music—

  Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly,

  Lavender’s green,

  When I am king, dilly dilly,

  You’ll be my queen.

  This tame-looking, blue-green, stiff, sticky, and immovable shrub holds as much poetry and romance in its wiry arms as would fill a large book. Most cultivated flowers were originally wild and many take their names from the botanists who first ‘tamed’ them. Thus, the dahlia is named after Mr Dahl, a Swede; the rudbeckia after Rudbeck, a Dutchman; the zinnia after Dr Zinn, a German; and the lobelia after Monsieur Lobel, a Flemish physician. They and others brought to Europe many of the flowers they found growing wild in tropical America, Asia and Africa.

  But I am no botanist. I prefer to be the butterfly, perfectly happy in going from flower to flower in search of nectar.

  Owls In The Family

  One winter morning, my grandfather and I found a baby spotted owlet by the veranda steps of our home in Dehradun. When Grandfather picked it up the owlet hissed and clacked its bill but then, after a meal of raw meat and water, settled down under my bed.

  Spotted owlets are small birds. A fully grown one is no larger than a thrush and they have none of the sinister appearance of large owls. I had once found a pair of them in our mango tree and by tapping on the tree trunk had persuaded one to show an enquiring face at the entrance to its hole. The owlet is not normally afraid of man nor is it strictly a night bird. But it prefers to stay at home during the day as it is sometimes attacked by other birds who consider all owls their enemies.

  The little owlet was quite happy under my bed. The following day we found a second baby owlet in almost the same spot on the veranda and only then did we realize that where the rainwater pipe emerged through the roof, there was a rough sort of nest from which the birds had fallen. We took the second young owl to join the first and fed them both.

  When I went to bed, they were on the window ledge just inside the mosquito netting and later in the night, their mother found them there. From outside, she crooned and gurgled for a long time and in the morning, I found she had left a mouse with its tail tucked through the netting. Obviously she put no great trust in me as a foster parent.

  The young birds thrived and ten days later, Grandfather and I took them into the garden to release them. I had placed one on a branch of the mango tree and was stooping to pick up the other when I received a heavy blow on the back of the head. A second or two later, the mother owl swooped down on Grandfather but he was quite agile and ducked out of the way.

  Quickly, I placed the second owl under the mango tree. Then from a safe distance we watched the mother fly down and lead her offspring into the long grass at the edge of the garden. We thought she would take her family away from our rather strange household but next morning I found the two owlets perched on the hatstand in the veranda.

  I ran to tell Grandfather and when we came back we found the mother sitting on the birdbath a few metres away. She was evidently feeling sorry for her behaviour the previous day because she greeted us with a soft ‘whoo-whoo’.

  ‘Now there’s an unselfish mother for you,’ said Grandfather. ‘It’s obvious she wants us to keep an eye on them. They’re probably getting too big for her to manage.’

  So the owlets became regular members of our household and were among the few pets that Grandmother took a liking to. She objected to all snakes, most monkeys and some crows—we’d had all these pets from time to time—but she took quite a fancy to the owlets and frequently fed them spaghetti!

  They loved to sit and splash in a shallow dish provided by Grandmother. They enjoyed it even more if cold water was poured over them from a jug while they were in the bath. They would get thoroughly wet, jump out and perch on a towel rack, shake themselves and return for a second splash and sometimes a third. During the day they dozed on a hatstand. After dark, they had the freedom of the house and their nightly occupation was catching beetles, the kitchen quarters being a happy hunting ground. With their razor sharp eyes and powerful beaks, they were excellent pest-destroyers.

  Looking back on those childhood days, I carry in my mind a picture of Grandmother in her rocking chair with a contented owlet sprawled across her aproned lap. Once, on entering a room while she was taking an afternoon nap, I saw one of the owlets had crawled up her pillow till its head was snuggled under her ear.

  Both Grandmother and the owlet were snoring.

  Adventures In A Banyan Tree

  Though the house and grounds of our home in India were Grandfather’s domain, the magnificent old banyan tree was mine—chiefly because Grandfather, at the age of sixty-five, could no longer climb it. Grandmother used to tease him about this, and would speak of a certain Countess of Desmond, an Englishwoman who lived to the age of 117, and would have lived longer if she hadn’t fallen while climbing an apple tree. The spreading branches of the banyan tree, which curved to the ground and took root again, forming a maze of arches, gave me endless pleasure. The tree was older than the house, older than Grandfather, as old as the town of Dehra, nestling in a valley at the foot of the Himalayas.

  My first friend and familiar was a small grey squirrel. Arching his back and sniffing into the air, he seemed at first to resent my invasion of his privacy. But, when he found that I did not arm myself with a catapult or air-gun, he became friendlier. And, when I started leaving him pieces of cake and biscuit, he grew bolder, and finally became familiar enough to take food from my hands.

  Before long he was delving into my pockets and helping himself to whatever he could find. He was a very young squirrel, and his friends and relatives probably thought him headstrong and foolish for trusting a human.

  In the spring, when the banyan tree was full of small red figs, birds of all kinds would flock into its branches, the red-bottomed bulbul, cheerful and greedy; gossiping rosy-pastors; and parrots and crows, squabbling with each other all the time. During the fig season, the banyan tree was the noisiest place on the road.

  Halfway up the tree I had built a small platform on which I would often spend the afternoons when it wasn’t too hot. I could read there, propping myself up against the bole of the tree with cushions taken from the drawing room. Treasure Island, Huck Finn, the Mowgli Stories, and the novels of Edgar Wallace, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Louisa May Alcott made up my bag of very mixed reading.

  When I didn’t want to read, I could look down through the banyan leaves at the world below, at Grandmother hanging up or taking down the washing, at the cook quarrelling with a fruit vendor or at Grandfather grumbling at the hardy Indian marigolds which insisted on springing up all over his very English garden. Usually nothing very exciting happened while I was in the banyan tree, but on one particular afternoon I had enough excitement to last me through the summer.

  That was the time I saw a mongoose and a cobra fight to death in the garden, while I sat directly above them in the banyan tree.

  It was an April afternoon. And the warm breezes of approaching summer had sent everyone, including Grandfather, indoors. I was feeling drowsy myself and was wondering if I should go to the pond behind the house for a swim, when I saw a huge black cobra gliding out of a clump of cactus and making for some cooler part of the garden. At the same time a mongoose (whom I had often seen) emer
ged from the bushes and went straight for the cobra.

  In a clearing beneath the tree, in bright sunshine, they came face to face.

  The cobra knew only too well that the grey mongoose, three feet long, was a superb fighter, clever and aggressive. But the cobra was a skilful and experienced fighter too. He could move swiftly and strike with the speed of light, and the sacs behind his long, sharp fangs were full of deadly venom.

  It was to be a battle of champions.

  Hissing defiance, his forked tongue darting in and out, the cobra raised three of his six feet off the ground, and spread his broad, spectacled hood. The mongoose bushed his tail. The long hair on his spine stood up (in the past, the very thickness of his hair had saved him from bites that would have been fatal to others).

  Though the combatants were unaware of my presence in the banyan tree, they soon became aware of the arrival of two other spectators. One was a myna, and the other a jungle crow (not the wily urban crow). They had seen these preparations for battle, and had settled on the cactus to watch the outcome. Had they been content only to watch, all would have been well with both of them.

  The cobra stood on the defensive, swaying slowly from side to side, trying to mesmerize the mongoose into marking a false move. But the mongoose knew the power of his opponent’s glassy, unwinking eyes, and refused to meet them. Instead he fixed his gaze at a point just below the cobra’s hood, and opened the attack.

  Moving forward quickly until he was just within the cobra’s reach, he made a feint to one side. Immediately the cobra struck. His great hood came down so swiftly that I thought nothing could save the mongoose. But the little fellow jumped neatly to one side, and darted in as swiftly as the cobra, biting the snake on the back and darting away again out of reach.

  The moment the cobra struck, the crow and the myna hurled themselves at him, only to collide heavily in mid-air. Shrieking at each other, they returned to the cactus plant.