The Best of Ruskin Bond

by Bond, Ruskin

  What dreams were lost, I’ll never know.

  It seemed the world’s last night had come

  And there would never be a dawn.

  Your touch soon swept the panting dark away—

  Some suns are brighter by night than day!

  4

  Your eyes, glad and wondering,

  Dwelt in mine,

  And all that stood between us

  Was a blade of grass

  Shivering slightly

  In the breath from our lips.

  But grass will bend.

  We turn and kiss,

  And the world swings round,

  The sky spins, the trees go hush

  Hush, the mountain sings—

  Though we must leave this place,

  We’ve trapped forever

  In the trembling air

  The last sweet phantom kiss.

  5

  I know you’ll come when the cherries

  Are ripe;

  But it is still November

  And I must wait

  For the green fruit to blush

  At your approach.

  And meanwhile the tree is visited

  By robber bands, masked mynas

  And yellow birds with beaks like daggers,

  Determined not to leave one cherry

  Whole for lovers.

  But still I wait, hoping one day

  You’ll come to stain your lips

  With cherry-juice, and climb my tree;

  Bright goddess in dark green temple,

  Thrusting your tongue at me.

  6

  Slender waisted, bright as a song,

  Dark as the whistling-thrush at dawn,

  Swift as the running days of November,

  Lost like a dream too sweet to remember.

  It Isn’t Time That’s Passing

  Remember the long ago when we lay together

  In a pain of tenderness and counted

  Our dreams: long summer afternoons

  When the whistling-thrush released

  A deep sweet secret on the trembling air;

  Blackbird on the wing, bird of the forest shadows,

  Black rose in the long ago summer,

  This was your song:

  It isn’t time that’s passing by,

  It is you and I.

  Kites

  Are you listening to me, boy?

  I am only your kitemaker,

  My poems are flimsy things

  Torn by the wind, caught in mango trees,

  Gay sport for boys and dreamers.

  My silent songs. But once I fashioned

  A kite like a violin,

  She sang most mournfully, like the wind

  In tall deodars.

  Are you listening? Remember

  The Dragon Kite I made one summer?

  No, you are too young. A great

  Kite, with small mirrors to catch the sun

  And eyes and a tongue, and gold

  Trappings and a trailing silver tail.

  A kite for the gods to ride!

  And it rose most sweetly, but the wind

  Came up from nowhere,

  A wind in waiting for us,

  My twine snapped and the wind took the kite,

  Took it over the flat roofs

  And the waving trees and the river

  And the blue hills for ever.

  No one knew where it fell. Boy, are you

  Listening? All my kites

  Are torn, but for you I’ll make a bright

  New poem to fly.

  Cherry Tree

  Eight years have passed

  Since I placed my cherry seed in the grass.

  ‘Must have a tree of my own,’ I said—

  And watered it once and went to bed

  And forgot; but cherries have a way of growing

  Though no one’s caring very much or knowing,

  And suddenly that summer, near the end of May,

  I found a tree had come to stay.

  It was very small, a five months’ child,

  Lost in the tall grass running wild.

  Goats ate the leaves, grasscutter’s scythe

  Split it apart, and a monsoon blight

  Shrivelled the slender stem . . . Even so,

  Next spring I watched three new shoots grow,

  The young tree struggle, upwards thrust

  Its arms in a fresh fierce lust

  For light and air and sun.

  I could only wait, as one

  Who watches, wondering, while Time and the rain

  Made a miracle from green growing pain . . .

  I went away next year—

  Spent a season in Kashmir—

  Came back thinner, rather poor,

  But richer by a cherry tree at my door.

  Six feet high, my own dark cherry,

  And—I could scarcely believe it—a berry,

  Ripened and jewelled in the sun,

  Hung from a branch—just one!

  And next year there were blossoms, small

  Pink, fragile, quick to fall

  At the merest breath, the sleepiest breeze . . .

  I lay on the grass, at ease,

  Looked up through leaves, at the blue

  Blind sky, at the finches as they flew

  And flitted through the dappled green,

  While bees in an ecstasy drank

  Of nectar from each bloom, and the sun sank

  Swiftly, and the stars turned in the sky,

  And moon-moths and singing crickets and I—

  Yes, I!—praised night and stars and trees:

  A small, tall cherry grown by me.

  Lovers Observed

  Lovers lie drowsy in the grass,

  Sunk in bracken, swimming in pools

  Of late afternoon sunshine;

  All agitation past, they stay totally

  Absorbed in grass.

  Green grass, and growing from that place

  A sweep of languid arm still bare

  But for a lost ladybird.

  Anonymous lover brushes a dragon

  Fly from his face.

  Brief thunder blossoms in the air,

  A leaf between the thighs is caught

  And crushed. Love comes like a thief,

  Crouching among the bruised and broken clover.

  All flesh in grass.

  Lone Fox Dancing

  As I walked home last night

  I saw a lone fox dancing

  In the cold moonlight.

  I stood and watched. Then

  Took the low road, knowing

  The night was his by right.

  Sometimes, when words ring true,

  I’m like a lone fox dancing

  In the morning dew.

  Secondhand Shop In Hill Station

  The smell of secondhand goods

  Is everywhere. Lost causes,

  Lonely lives, and deaths in small cottages

  Among the pines, meet here in the mildewed dark

  Of his shop—Abdul Salaam, Proprietor.

  Tales of a hundred failures

  And ten hundred broken dreams.

  A hat-pin and an Iron Cross

  Lie down with a blackened pistol,

  While a bronze Buddha smiles across

  At a plastic doll from Bristol.

  Old clothes, old books (perhaps a first edition?),

  A dressing-gown, a dagger marked with rust.

  A card for some lost Christmas,

  And inside, a letter:

  ‘Dear Jane, I am getting better.’

  A Chinese vase and a china-dog.

  The shop is cold and thick with dust,

  The Mall is far from Grand;

  But Abdul Salaam grows prosperous,

  In a suit that’s secondhand.

  A Frog Screams

  Standing near a mountain stream

  I heard a sound like the creaking

  Of a branch in the wind
.

  It was a frog screaming

  In the jaws of a long green snake.

  I couldn’t bear that hideous cry.

  And taking two sharp sticks,

  I made the twisting snake disgorge the frog,

  Who hopped quite spry out of the snake’s mouth

  And sailed away on a floating log.

  Pleased with the outcome,

  I released the green grass-snake,

  Stood back and spoke aloud:

  ‘Is this what it feels like to be God?’

  ‘Only what it’s like to be English,’

  Said God (speaking for a change in French);

  ‘I would have let the snake finish his lunch!’

  A Song For Lost Friends

  The past is always with us, for it feeds the present . . .

  1

  As a boy I stood on the edge of the railway-cutting,

  Outside the dark tunnel, my hands touching

  The hot rails, waiting for them to tremble

  At the coming of the noonday train.

  The whistle of the engine hung on the forest’s silence.

  Then out of the tunnel, a green-gold dragon

  Came plunging, thundering past—

  Out of the tunnel, out of the grinning dark.

  And the train rolled on, every day

  Hundreds of people coming or going or running away—

  Goodbye, goodbye!

  I haven’t seen you again, bright boy at the carriage window,

  Waving to me, calling,

  But I’ve loved you all these years and looked for you everywhere,

  In cities and villages, beside the sea,

  In the mountains, in crowds at distant places;

  Returning always to the forest’s silence,

  To watch the windows of some passing train . . .

  2

  My father took me by the hand and led me

  Among the ruins of old forts and palaces.

  We lived in a tent near the tomb of Humayun

  Among old trees. Now multi-storeyed blocks

  Rise from the plain—tomorrow’s ruins. . . .

  You can explore them, my son, when the trees

  Take over again and the thorn-apple grows

  In empty windows. There were seven cities before. . . .

  Nothing my father said could bring my mother home;

  She had gone with another. He took me to the hills

  In a small train, the engine having palpitations

  As it toiled up the steep slopes peopled

  With pines and rhododendrons. Through tunnels

  To Simla. Boarding-school. He came to see me

  In the holidays. We caught butterflies together.

  ‘Next year,’ he said, ‘when the War is over,

  We’ll go to England.’ But wars are never over

  And I have yet to go to England with my father.

  He died that year

  And I was dispatched to my mother and stepfather—

  A long journey through a dark tunnel.

  No one met me at the station. So I wandered

  Round Dehra in a tonga, looking for a house

  With lichi trees. She’d written to say there were lichis

  In the garden.

  But in Dehra all the houses had lichi trees,

  The tonga-driver charged five rupees

  for taking me back to the station.

  They were looking for me on the platform:

  ‘We thought the train would be late as usual.’

  It had arrived on time, upsetting everyone’s schedule.

  In my new home I found a new baby in a new pram.

  Your little brother, they said; which made me a hundred.

  But he too was left behind with the servants

  When my mother and Mr H went hunting

  Or danced late at the casino, our only wartime night-club.

  Tommies and Yanks scuffled drunk and disorderly

  In a private war for the favours of stale women.

  Lonely in the house with the servants and the child

  And books I’d read twice and my father’s letters

  Treasured secretly in the small trunk beneath my bed:

  I wrote to him once but did not post the letter

  For fear it might come back ‘Return to sender . . .’

  One day I slipped into the guava orchard next door—

  It really belonged to Seth Hari Kishore

  Who’d gone to the Ganga on a pilgrimage—

  The guavas were ripe and ready for boys to steal

  (Always sweeter when stolen)

  And a bare leg thrust at me as I climbed:

  There’s only room for one,’ came a voice.

  I looked up at a boy who had blackberry eyes

  And guava juice on his chin, grabbed at him

  And we both tumbled out of the tree

  On to the ragged December grass. We rolled and fought

  But not for long. A gardener came shouting,

  And we broke and ran—over the gate and down the road

  And across the fields and a dry river bed,

  Into the shades of afternoon . . .

  ‘Why didn’t you run home?’ he said.

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘There’s no one there, my mother’s out.’

  ‘And mine’s at home.’

  3

  His mother was Burmese; his father

  An English soldier killed in the War.

  They were waiting for it to be over.

  Every day, beyond the gardens, we loafed:

  Time was suspended for a time.

  On heavy wings, ringed pheasants rose

  At our approach.

  The fields were yellow with mustard,

  Parrots wheeled in the sunshine, dipped and disappeared

  Into the morning mist on the foothills.

  We found a pool, fed by a freshet

  Of cold spring water. ‘One day when we are men,’

  He said, ‘We’ll meet here at the pool again.

  Promise?’ ‘Promise,’ I said. And we took a pledge

  In blood, nicking our fingers on a penknife

  And pressing them to each other’s lips. Sweet salty kiss.

  Late evening, past cowdust time, we trudged home:

  He to his mother, I to my dinner.

  One wining—dancing night I thought I’d stay out too.

  We went to the pictures—Gone with the Wind—

  A crashing bore for boys, and it finished late.

  So I had dinner with them, and his mother said:

  ‘It’s past ten. You’d better stay the night.

  But will they miss you?’

  I did not answer but climbed into my friend’s bed—

  I’d never slept with anyone before, except my father—

  And when it grew cold, after midnight,

  He put his arms around me and looped a leg

  Over mine and it was nice that way

  But I stayed awake with the niceness of it

  My sleep stolen by his own deep slumber . . .

  What dreams were lost, I’ll never know!

  But next morning, just as we’d started breakfast,

  A car drew up, and my parents, outraged,

  Chastised me for staying out and hustled me home.

  Breakfast unfinished. My friend unhappy. My pride wounded.

  We met sometimes, but a constraint had grown upon us,

  And the following month I heard he’d gone

  To an orphanage in Kalimpong.

  4

  I remember you well, old banyan tree,

  As you stood there spreading quietly

  Over the broken wall.

  While adults slept, I crept away

  Down the broad veranda steps, around

  The outhouse and the melon-ground. . . .

  In that winter of long ago, I roamed

  The faded garden of my mother’s hom
e.

  I must have known that giants have few friends

  (The great lurk shyly in their private dens),

  And found you hidden by a thick green wall

  Of aerial roots.

  Intruder in your pillared den, I stood

  And shyly touched your old and wizened wood,

  And as my heart explored you, giant tree,

  I heard you singing!

  The spirit of the tree became my friend,

  Took me to his silent throbbing heart

  And taught me the value of stillness.

  My first tutor; friend of the lonely.

  And the second was the tonga-man

  Whose pony-cart came rattling along the road

  Under the furthest arch of the banyan tree.

  Looking up, he waved his whip at me

  And laughing, called, ‘Who lives up there?’

  ‘I do,’ I said.

  And the next time he came along, he stopped the tonga

  And asked me if I felt lonely in the tree.

  ‘Only sometimes,’ I said. ‘When the tree is thinking.’

  ‘I never think,’ he said. ‘You won’t feel lonely with me.’

  And with a flick of the reins he rattled away,

  With a promise he’d give me a ride someday.

  And from him I learnt the value of promises kept.

  5

  From the tree to the tonga was an easy drop.

  I fell into life. Bansi, tonga-driver,

  Wore a yellow waistcoat and spat red

  Betel-juice the entire width of the road.

  ‘I can spit further than any man,’ he claimed.

  It is natural for a man to strive to excel

  At something; he spat with authority.

  When he took me for rides, he lost a fare.

  That was his way. He once said, ‘If a girl

  Wants five rupees for a fix, bargain like hell

  And then give six.’

  It was the secret of his failure, he claimed,

  To give away more than he owned.

  And to prove it, he borrowed my pocket-money

  In order to buy a present for his mistress.

  A man who fails well is better than one who succeeds badly.

  The rattletrap tonga and the winding road

  Through the valley, to the river-bed,

  With the wind in my hair and the dust

  Rising, and the dogs running and barking

  And Bansi singing and shouting in my ear,