by Ruskin Bond
‘Otherwise, there is nothing wrong with you,’ said Dr Khazan Singh. ‘You are just anaemic. You need vitamins—lots of them.’ And he gave me a painful vitamin B12 injection.
Well, I took the vitamins and I gave up eggs for some time, and the clouds cleared up; but there was no way I was going to give up pickles. To this day, even sixty years later, my dining table is taken up with at least six assortments of pickles—mango, sweet lime, garlic, hing (asafoetida), green chillies, jackfruit, shalgam. That’s seven! Seven pickles from heaven! And being something of a mixed pickle myself, I am probably well-adjusted to these combinations of fruits and spices pickled in the sun—for the sun itself is one of the chief ingredients. And sunshine is good for you!
After two years of freelancing from Dehradun’s Astley Hall I moved to Delhi. Nobody missed me, except possibly the neighbour’s cat, who probably wondered: ‘Whatever happened to that young fellow who used to feed me with those little fish that came out of a tin?’
TRAVELS WITH A MORA
I shall continue this brief excursion into the past with an account of my voyage from Bombay to London when I was seventeen, and conclude it by recalling my voyage back to India when I was twenty-one.
I am now well into my eighties, and people no longer make long sea voyages unless they have time on their hands. You can board a plane in New Delhi and be in London in eight hours. Those ocean liners took about three weeks’ steaming through the Arabian Sea, the Mediterranean and the English Channel, before docking at Tilbury or Southampton.
The Strathnaver, the Strathaird and the Stratheden were the top P&O (Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company) liners then plying between Sydney, Bombay and ports en route to London. They sailed to the Far East as well, and apart from the P&O, there were the Ellerman Lines (City of Poona, City of Cairo), and the Anchor Line to Mombasa and Zanzibar. The British may have been parting with their empire, but their ships still dominated the maritime routes. Sea power had created and maintained the empire, and now sea power was on the decline. Those who ruled the air would rule the world.
What happened to all those lovely ocean liners, I wonder. A few might still exist in naval museums, anchored in Plymouth or other old ports; most of them went to the scrapyards.
After I’d finished schooling in Simla it was decided that I should be sent to England, to ‘better my prospects’, which meant getting a job of sorts and earning a living . . . There was no money for a higher education, and besides, I wasn’t the academic type, just a bookish boy and something of a dreamer. I had already written a few stories, and although most of them had been rejected by magazine publishers, I was convinced that I had it in me to be a successful writer. And you had to go to London to be one!
All dressed up as a bishop and ready to face the cameras for my small role in 7 Khoon Maaf, Vishal Bhardwaj’s film based on my story ‘Susanna’s Seven Husbands’. I felt quite at home in those beautiful robes!
My mother scraped together enough money for my passage—about five hundred rupees—and put me on the Doon Express, a slow passenger train which took two days and two nights to get to Bombay.
For company I had Mrs Shukla and her daughter.
Mrs Shukla was a Scotswoman in her early forties. At some point in her history she had married Dr Shukla, a young Indian doctor who had been studying in the UK. Childless for several years, they had finally adopted an abandoned baby, given the child everything she could possibly want and sent her to an expensive private school. This little girl was now about fifteen or sixteen. She did not talk much, possibly because Mrs Shukla liked to do all the talking. She was unattractive, pockmarked (having survived smallpox when she was ten or eleven) and rather sullen. I don’t recall that she ever smiled, although she might well have been smiling to herself for all I know. She liked having her way, and she usually got it. In other words, she was well spoilt.
Mrs Shukla had brought along a hamper of food, but she wasn’t particularly generous with it. She professed to be a good friend of my mother’s but this friendship did not extend to feeding her friend’s hungry brat. The odd sandwich came my way, but for the most part I lived off the food that was available at the various stations along the route. At the larger stations the train would halt for anything up to an hour, and the station vendors would come round with their exciting and mouth-watering snacks. You could, of course, play safe and order the dull meals provided by the railway restaurants, but inevitably I would give way to temptation and stuff myself with puris and chole, or a banana-leaf plate brimming with chaat, or mutton kebabs accompanied by hot pudina chutney.
Signing books for Priyanka Chopra on the sets of 7 Khoon Maaf. Priyanka carried the film on her shoulders, playing the role of Susanna, in Vishal Bhardwaj’s film adaptation of my short story.
Mrs Shukla’s daughter, Lily, looked on in envy as I tucked into these forbidden morsels, for she was not allowed to eat anything that had not been made at home; so she was limited to bread and butter, slices of cold meat and boiled potatoes. I started feeling sorry for her.
Mrs Shukla was married to a prosperous doctor and lived in a spacious house with servants to do all the housework; but she was one of those people who complained about everything in India—everything from stray dogs to beggars to naked children to ranting politicians to corrupt babus to the climate to everything being late and to engine soot coming in through the windows. For two days I had to listen to her litany of complaints. At night she slept, but she snored, so there was really no relief from her presence.
Lily hardly spoke at all. I don’t suppose she ever had the chance. Most of the time she had her head stuck in a book. Occasionally she would look up at me, but without any expression—no hostility, but no friendship either. The eyes can say a lot; but Lily’s eyes were as reticent as her tongue.
‘What are you reading?’ I asked her.
Instead of answering, she showed me the cover of her book. Forever Amber. She was certainly up to date, this historical saga being a bestseller at the time. She did not ask me what I was reading, and I felt reluctant to tell her, as I was reading a detective story, something by Agatha Christie, and this made me feel intellectually inferior. And yet, even sixty years later, people are still enamoured with Hercule Poirot’s little grey cells, and no one remembers Amber. Forever Amber. It was also a film, wasn’t it?
Mrs Shukla wasn’t reading a book. She had a pile of women’s magazines with her, and she flipped through them from time to time. She was always ready to talk.
‘I’m sending Lily to a finishing school in Switzerland,’ she told me, mentioning the name of a school that was unfamiliar to me. ‘Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, went there.’
‘Did she?’ I said, trying to sound impressed.
‘One day she’ll take over from her father, you know.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. I wasn’t interested in politics.
‘And what are you going to do in England? Oxford or Cambridge?’
‘I’ll be looking for a job,’ I said.
‘What—without any qualifications?’
‘I might become a sailor,’ I said mischievously. ‘When I was a Boy Scout I learnt to tie all the right knots.’ This was a lie. I was hopeless at tying knots.
She gave me a baleful look. ‘You should go to a university.’
‘Well, I have an uncle in Oxford,’ I said.
‘What is he, a professor?’
‘No, he keeps a pub in the town.’
That shut her up for some time. I had, of course, made up the uncle with the pub; but I did have an uncle and an aunt in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, and I’d be staying with them until I found a job. No one was going to send me to a university. Nor was I in the least interested in going to one.
* * *
The train rumbled and rocked through the desert of Rajasthan, the forests of central India, the fertile plains of Gujarat. We stopped at Baroda in the middle of the night. Mrs Shukla and Lily were fast asleep. It was
hot in the carriage, and Lily had kept her window partly open. The station platform was dimly lit, but hardly anyone was about at that late hour. A shadow fell against Lily’s window, a hand slipped in, groped beneath her pillow and emerged with her purse tight within its grasp. I gave a shout and leapt for the window; but the hand had disappeared, and bare feet took the thief—a skinny little fellow—speeding down the platform until he had disappeared into the darkness.
‘What happened?’ asked Mrs Shukla, sitting up in her bunk.
‘Someone stole my purse,’ said Lily.
Mrs Shukla looked at me suspiciously, as though I were the thief.
‘There wasn’t much in it,’ added Lily. ‘I left my window open—it was so hot.’
She received a scolding from her mother, and we spent the rest of the journey with the windows shut and the little fan turning fitfully.
‘What’s the use of travelling first class if you can’t be safe,’ grumbled Mrs Shukla.
And she was still grumbling when we got down at Bombay’s Victoria Terminus; but I wouldn’t be seeing them for a couple of days.
* * *
A recent photo of some of the papers on my desk. The brown notebook contains a record of my dreams. Sometimes dreams help me with my stories. But I’m no Freud—I don’t try to analyse them!
We had two days in Bombay before the ship sailed. Mrs Shukla and Lily sped off in a taxi, heading for the Grand Hotel. I could not afford such a posh destination. I got into a tonga, a pony cart, with my two suitcases and a mora—a mora being a small wicker-cane stool, very light and easy to carry about.
What was I doing with a mora, as I awaited my passage to England?
Well, my aunt in Jersey wanted one. Her back was giving trouble, and she longed for the good old days in India when there were servants to do the cooking and cleaning and dish washing. You didn’t get moras in England. You performed all your kitchen duties standing up. She remembered the mora in her girlhood home. Sometimes she would sit on it while shelling peas or peeling potatoes or skinning onions—that is, whenever she felt like helping in the kitchen. Or just sitting in the sun on a winter’s day. You could carry the mora about with you as you dodged the shadows, moving around on the veranda or over the lawn without having to lug a heavy chair around. Yes, the mora was the ideal thing for her Jersey kitchen. And Ruskin could easily carry one with him.
That, and a packet of haldi.
Aunt Emily was longing to make a real curry, and for that she needed haldi. You couldn’t get it in the Channel Islands, not in those days. So a packet of haldi went into one of Ruskin’s suitcases.
So there I was, a lonely figure outside Victoria Station, with two suitcases and a mora.
‘Protect that mora with your life,’ my mother had warned me. ‘That is, if you want to feel welcome in your aunt’s home.’
A tonga came along, and the driver asked me where I wanted to go.
‘The cheapest hotel,’ I said. ‘But not too far from the docks.’
‘Get in,’ said the tonga driver. ‘For two rupees I take you to Bombay’s top hotel.’
We travelled along for half an hour, past the Taj, the Grand, Green’s, the Ritz, all the posh places, then plunged into the depths of commercial Bombay, a hive of teeming crowds and feverish activity, until I was finally deposited outside a seedy little hotel on Lamington Road.
Opening a book exhibition in Mumbai with help from the late Tom Alter and Gulzar. Tom made a great contribution to Indian cinema and theatre. Gulzar Sahib’s great lyrics have brought him a huge following; and he’s the most courteous and gentle person I’ve met!
And there I was stranded for two days and two nights.
* * *
Ah! Lamington Road . . . Sometimes I see you again in my dreams, or rather my nightmares, for you and your seedy little hotel were indeed a nightmare for a pimply seventeen-year-old without friends or money.
They gave me a small bare room with a rickety chair and table and a bed made of wooden slats covered with a lumpy mattress. There was no window, not even a skylight. The toilet served several rooms. This wouldn’t have mattered, but within an hour of taking up residence I was making frequent trips to the lavatory.
This wasn’t the fault of the hotel. The virulent attack of diarrhoea was no doubt the result of all the puris and chole I’d been feasting on during the railway journey; I should have abstained from station food like Mrs Shukla and Lily; but I have always given way to temptation (and suffered for it) as far as street food is concerned.
Between visits to the loo, I lay on the bed or sat on my mora, the chair being too unsteady for comfort. A sixty-year-old ‘room boy’ brought me a jug of water from time to time; he refilled the jug from the bathroom tap. He asked me if I would like to order some food, but I felt too ill to eat and asked only for tea and a boiled egg. For those two and a half days I lived on tea and the occasional boiled egg.
My only companion was a lizard, a gecko, who spent all his time on the walls or ceiling, waiting patiently for a careless fly or mosquito to come his way, when his tongue would shoot out, snap up its prey and convey the juicy morsel to its gullet. The lizard was fat and greedy. Once it fell on the bed with a loud plop, and I had to sweep it away with a slipper. In parts of India it is said to be lucky if a wall lizard falls on you—the luck varying according to the part of your anatomy on which it lands. I had no such luck. The lizard fell occasionally on my bed or on the floor, and I was quite happy to be spared its reptilian blessings.
This adventure into the unknown was already beginning to pall on me. I was tempted to tear up my P&O ticket, take a ride to the railway station and buy a third-class ticket to Dehra on the Doon Express. But I would look pretty silly, coming home with my tail between my legs, my dream of becoming a writer in the land of Dickens and Stevenson thwarted by an attack of dysentery in a seedy Bombay hotel. I decided to stick it out with the lizard.
And the next morning I felt better and more optimistic about the future.
I arrived on time at Ballard Pier, just able to carry my suitcases and the precious mora.
‘What’s that you’ve brought with you?’ asked a smartly uniformed steward as I mounted the gangway. ‘Taking your waste-paper basket along with you?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I’m a writer.’
This was only partly true. I’d had a story, a poem and a couple of short articles published in Indian magazines, and had also collected a sizeable number of rejection slips.
The steward, who was British, looked at my passport.
‘So you’re Ruskin,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Not John Ruskin? Thought you’d popped off long ago. Well, you’re in Cabin 63, that’s the tourist-class deck. Good luck with the basket.’ And I was on my way, searching for my cabin.
There was no sign of Mrs Shukla and Lily. They were travelling first class, on the upper deck, and were probably in their cabin or relaxing in the lounge. I did not expect to see much of them during the voyage. Tourist-class passengers were treated very well—unlike those poor steerage passengers on the Titanic—but they were expected to confine themselves to their own deck. And Mrs Shukla was far too snooty to come down to the lower deck just to see me.
People were busy looking for their cabins and I found mine without much difficulty. It was tiny, but certainly more inviting than the room on Lamington Road.
I went straight to the porthole and looked out—or rather, through the glass, for it was well fastened.
I saw the docks, the pier, a throng of people seeing off their friends and relatives. There was no one to see me off, except for the land itself. The land itself—what did it care for a solitary boy leaving for another shore? But that boy cared about the lovely land and all that lived and grew upon it. There was an attachment that would not dissolve because of time or distance. I knew I would return one day. It was part of my destiny. And I believed in some sort of destiny.
With Beena and Siddharth, 2017. Always beaming, Sid doesn’t
stop growing. Shrishti and Gautam, his sister and young brother, are still at college as I write.
BREAKFAST AT MAPLEWOOD
There’s nothing I like better than a hot buttered toast, a freshly boiled egg and a dash of sweet mango chutney; this is usually my breakfast, and it sets me up nicely for the rest of the day.
Well, I had just peeled my egg and was busy buttering my toast, when I realized that I wasn’t alone at the dining table. A glossy black jungle crow was sitting near the salt cellar, watching me with beady eyes. And before I could say good morning he seized my peeled egg and flew off through the open window.
Now, I have known crows to steal eggs (usually the eggs of other birds) but this was the first time I’d seen one make off with a breakfast egg, already boiled and peeled. If he’d waited a moment longer he’d have had it with salt and pepper.
Being of a philosophical nature (having read everyone from Spinoza to Garfield the cat), I got up, closed the window, called the crow a crow, and boiled myself another egg.