by Ruskin Bond
To the hills, to the hills, like Kim and his Lama. I sought not the River of the Arrow, but a visible sky and a cushion of ferns beside a mountain stream.
And yes, there was a stream some way below the cottage. It emerged from a spring below Landour and went tumbling down the steep valley to join the little Song River near Rajpur. I would visit it often, to collect ferns or wild flowers, which I would press and preserve inside my larger books.
I read a lot during those early years at Maplewood. You might say I was looking for spiritual or religious or philosophical guidance. I read the Koran and the Bible, the Gita and the Dhammapada. They spoke to me of hope and love and charity and the goodness of the Almighty. I read the Tao Te Ching, which told me to try everything! I read the Greek philosophers—Epicurus and Epictetus and the rest of them. I looked up Christian Science and thought it was just fine, except that I did not have the discipline to pursue it wholeheartedly. I read Thoreau’s Walden, but thought my own Walden was better; a flowing stream is better than a stagnant pond. I read Gurdjieff; there was some sense in his madness. I read Emerson’s essay on Compensation and liked what he propounded: rewards and punishments come to us in this life (not the next) in proportion to our deeds, misdeeds, effort or lack of effort.
I made an effort!
I wrote. Banged away on the old typewriter until the letter ‘b’ broke off. Then I had to go through all my typescripts filling in the ‘b’ by hand. Finally, I bought a second-hand Olympia from Hamer’s Department Store. I still have it, fifty years later, and it works perfectly. But now I do most of my writing with a ballpoint pen; it’s more comfortable. I go backwards instead of forward. This writing pad is friendlier than a computer screen.
* * *
Above the stream was a grassy knoll on which grew a lone pine tree. I would go there sometimes with my notebook and jot down a poem or a few stray thoughts or ideas for stories. It was my place of power.
I am not a powerful man, just a frail human full of faults and foibles; but sitting on that knoll, in the fragrance of the pine, and looking out over the receding hills and the valley beyond, I was filled with a sense of well-being, of belief in myself—rather like that occasion in Jersey when, fed up with everything, I had gone out in a gale, leaning against the wind as I struggled along the seafront, the incoming tide dashing off the sea wall. And I had experienced a great sense of uplift, an ascending of spirit, the certainty that I would go where I wanted and do what I wanted . . .
I must have been a conceited young man to feel that I was special in some way. But aren’t we all special in our different ways? And sometimes it’s that ego, that arrogant self-belief, that keeps us going when others falter in the pursuit of a dream.
Is it luck, or effort, or providence, or the goodwill of that Great Librarian in the sky that has helped me to survive into a flabby old age, making a living by the written word and nothing else? The written word! So much magic in it, as young people are discovering today, as they light up their screens or pages with words expressive of their hopes, thoughts, desires.
And so, over the nine or ten years I spent at Maplewood, the words kept tumbling out, as stories, poems, novels, tales for children, and vignettes on birds, beetles and the ever-changing seasons.
But I am not one to burn the midnight oil. Lazy by nature, I work for two or three hours a day at the most, and then give in to my sensual nature—read, sleep, lie on the grass, make myself a sandwich, share my beer with that friendly crow.
Yes, more than once I caught him in the act of dipping into my tumbler of beer (aptly named Golden Eagle) and then staggering off to quarrel with his friends and relatives.
Tons of Money—a farce in three acts—was the school play put on by the staff and senior boys. I’m on the right of a pretty and trim Mrs Murray. My false beard kept coming off during the performance, and my clumsy efforts to keep it from falling off brought us the most laughs from the audience. As a result I was given the Best Actor award. The others accused me of doing it deliberately!
An alcoholic crow . . . I don’t suppose there are many of them. But a little company is always welcome.
Not that I was without human company. Friends often came to stay, and stayed on. Kamal with his poster paints, Anil attending the local school, Kuldip with his cricket gear, Sushila in the summer. I would take her down to the stream to show her a cleft in the overhanging rocks, where the sun’s rays met a spray of falling water and created a miniature rainbow. I had found this place quite by accident, and I had sworn to keep it to myself. But I couldn’t keep any secrets from Sushila; I wanted to share everything with her. But she was half my age and her destiny lay elsewhere.
* * *
A time came when I needed some help, and Prem and Chandra came to live with me, soon followed by the infant Rakesh, who took over our lives, as children are wont to do.
Over the years the family grew. We had to leave Maplewood; a road was built through the property. I said goodbye to my drinking buddy, the crow, and various other visitors from the forest. They, too, were looking for fresh new residences, as most of the trees were being cut down and cleared away. The house, too, was haunted—haunted by the cries of little Suresh, Rakesh’s little brother, who had died of tetanus. It was time to move on.
Aside from atomic scientists, mad dictators, psychotic despots and robots embedded with artificial intelligence, we are all imperfect beings, capable of being wiped out of existence without a moment’s warning. No wonder humans are superstitious, clinging to old beliefs, mantras and magical signs to keep away the demons out to harm and destroy us.
As the family grew—in spite of infant deaths—I became more protective of the children. Although I had read so widely, and studied so many faiths, I was distrustful of a Supreme Being, the Great Umpire who could raise his finger if he thought one of us should be on his or her way back to the pavilion of oblivion.
As Rakesh grew older, and Mukesh and Dolly came along, I became as superstitious as any tribal or primitive being. In some old book I’d read about a magic circle, an imaginary protective circle that one could throw around oneself as protection against threats of a physical or psychological nature. It was an invisible shield. I began flinging circles around myself, around the family, whenever I felt that we needed protection!
Absurd, no doubt. Surely a prayer would be more effective. And I, as a writer, should be able to compose a prayer.* But we are all primitives at heart. We need a little magic sometimes. A magical word to make our wishes come true, or to ward off evil spirits. Wishing wells and lucky horseshoes and four-leaf clovers are all potent in their own ways for these folk beliefs to have survived.
I have never succeeded in finding a four-leaf clover, although I have tried hard enough. The hillside is thick with clover at this time of the year. But only three leaves! Some day I’ll find a four-leaf clover . . .
As for wishing wells, there’s one out near Hathi Paon, but it’s a long way to go to make a wish. Rakesh and Beena drove me there last winter. You could see the bottom of the well; the water had drained away, gone somewhere else. Water doesn’t abide by our rules; it comes and goes as it wishes.
But the trip wasn’t wasted. On the damp, shady hillside nearby I found a cluster of maidenhair fern—the prettiest and most delicate of ferns, reminding me of the little canal that ran past my grandmother’s house in Dehra, the maidenhair growing in profusion wherever it went underground or emerged into the sunlight. It’s hard to grow maidenhair in a house or in a garden; like water, it finds its own special, sometimes secret, place.
We keep some things out of superstition, like the heavy horseshoe on the shelf above my bed. It’s the shoe of an English carthorse. It was given to me by Miss Bean, my neighbour at Maplewood. It had been handed down to her by her father, who’d brought it out from England. Fancy bringing a horseshoe all the way to India! But then, I’d taken a peacock’s feather to England—just for luck!
The peacock, Lord Krishna’s favourite
bird. And the peepul leaf, shaped like the perfect torso of this beautiful god; broad shoulders tapering down to a slender waist. Pressed between the pages of my notebook is a peepul leaf, a maidenhair fern and a blade of grass. As long as grass grows on the face of the earth there is hope for our planet.
* * *
It’s late April, and as I sit here, gazing out of my window and pondering about the past, the sky becomes overcast, and the light changes to a pearlescent glow. It’s the calm before the approaching storm. Presently thunder blossoms in the sky, rolls overhead in a succession of threatening thunderclaps. Lightning sizzles over Pari Tibba. There’s a clatter on the roof. Someone throwing stones? Hailstones, in fact, and they come down with a rush, bang-bang-bang, blotting out all other noise. I stand at my window, watching the road and hillside transformed into a glistening white meadow as the hail piles up.
It lasts for a few minutes and then it’s all over. But all traffic has come to a standstill and it will be an hour or two before the road is clear. The clouds begin to part, and a lemon-yellow shaft of diffused sunlight slips through the window. It wanders over to my desk, caresses the red geranium and settles on my reading glasses.
It’s time to do a little writing.
Rakesh brings me a cup of tea. Absent-mindedly I dip my pen into the teacup. I’m getting careless. Yesterday I put shaving cream on my toothbrush; and in the evening, instead of adding water to my rum, I poured in a generous amount of vodka. It was most refreshing.
These things happen as one grows older. It confirms my view that life is just a ridiculous caper. You come in at one door, and before you’ve had a chance to get your bearings, you are out at the other door. So you might as well enjoy the flowers along the way.
These thirty years in Landour have been enlivened by two generations of the children growing up in my presence. First Rakesh and Mukesh and Dolly. Then their children, Siddharth, Shrishti, Gautam, now all at college or doing their own thing. And Mukesh’s children too, still at school. It is important to have children in the house. When there is laughter bouncing off the walls, I catch some of it too. A house is truly blessed only when it resounds with the innocent laughter of children.
The cottage in Munnar (Travancore–Cochin, now Kerala), where my father lived in the late 1920s, during his tenure as an assistant manager on a tea estate. Later, he took up tutoring (he was a trained schoolteacher), and took on teaching jobs in Jamnagar and other Kathiawar States.
We come into this world pure and innocent, but it doesn’t take long for us to be tainted and corrupted by the warped civilization that prevails around us—a world controlled by megalomaniacs, fanatics, power-hungry individuals and self-appointed guardians of our morals. Whenever you go you will find your freedoms curtailed—in the Americas, in Asia, in the Middle East, in Africa—and even if you don’t move from your home, Big Brother will be watching you, courtesy all the super technology that imprisons us so effectively, making us the slaves of our phones, cameras, every sort of digital surveillance at the disposal of governments and those who want to control us.
With Gautam, my youngest grandson; he is now at college. Like Mr Dick in David Copperfield, he has a ready solution for all my problems. ‘Just have a beer, dada, everything will be fine!’
With Shrishti, when she was eight or nine. After school she played an important role in the television series Ek Tha Rusty. Now studying biotechnology at KIIT University in Bhubaneswar. Sends me warm socks every month.
We are the true robots, not those sad mechanical creatures created in our own image.
I need a little help on steps, and Rakesh, my grandson, is always there to help me ascend or descend so that I don’t go bouncing down on my tummy. Rakesh came to Maplewood when he was three months old, and he is now forty-three with a lovely wife and three talented children.
It is said that God created Man in his own image, and then lost control of him. So now we create new men, artificial humans, in our own image, and it is only a matter of time before we lose control of them.
But all this is futile in the face of the natural forces that control the universe. When the earth shakes, the tallest buildings come tumbling down. And the world’s richest and most powerful men have yet to achieve the immortality they crave.
In his novel The Island of Sheep, John Buchan quotes Herodotus: ‘I know that the Gods are jealous, for I cannot remember that I ever heard of any man who, having been constantly successful, did not at last utterly perish.’
Perhaps the Gods will have the last word.
POSTSCRIPT
I am sometimes asked why I never write about politics. Well, since everybody else does, I thought I might be the exception and concentrate instead on birth and death and the interval between.
The trouble with political issues is that they come and go very quickly, and if you make them a part of your story it is apt to date the writing. A short story I wrote sixty years ago, about meeting a blind girl on a train,* is still read with pleasure by young people today; but if the story had been about meeting a politician who was about to open an eye camp in his constituency, would it have the same impact today? The topical is for the day’s news media. The loves of Neela and Damayanthi, or Romeo and Juliet, or Laila and Majnu, are timeless storytelling.
I have no idea what I am doing here. But as there is a frustrated look on my face, I am probably doing my tax returns.
But I have never ignored politics or political issues. After all, I have lived with them for over eighty years. I have lived through more governments and prime ministers than I care to count. In 1948, as a schoolboy, I received my literary and other academic prizes from the hands of Lord Mountbatten, still India’s governor general. Fifty-one years later I was receiving my first Padma Shri award from President K.R. Narayanan, and just four years ago I was honoured with the Padma Bhushan by President Pranab Mukherjee.
Different governments, different parties in power, different eras. I am fortunate to have witnessed a little history; political history, at that.
My first prime minister was Jawaharlal Nehru. I grew up during the Nehru years. He had no rivals. Although a tolerant, widely read man, I don’t think he would have liked the idea of a rival. Although very English in some of his ways (and this accounted for his friendship with the Mountbattens) he was popular with the masses; he had the gift of being able to communicate readily with people from all walks of life. Children responded to him. He had received most of his education in England, and he thought and wrote in English. I had the privilege, many years ago, of reading his jail diaries (written during his imprisonment during the freedom movement), and in them he writes about the pleasures of reading poets such as Wordsworth and Walter de la Mare.
Nehru took his own writing seriously but without pretension. I wish some of our contemporary writers could be as humble. In 1959 I attended a talk he gave to a small audience in the Publications Division auditorium just off Janpath. He was in great good humour and spoke entertainingly about his London publishers. And like any professional writer, he talked about his royalties, about literary influences, about the pleasures of writing. Nehru understood the literary mind, the English mind. Unfortunately he did not understand the Chinese mind—who did?—and that led to the one disaster in an otherwise long and fruitful era of leadership.
It is not for me to go into the merits or demerits of subsequent leaders. Others are more qualified to do so.
I mention the Nehru years because I lived through them as a boy and as a struggling young writer, and those who did so are now dwindling in numbers.
People are surprised when I say that I saw (and heard) Nehru in his prime. That I met Morarji Desai (while I was working with CARE) and that he told me I should drink orange juice instead of alcohol (I’m afraid I did not take his advice). That I once shared a railway compartment with Acharya Kripalani and that he kept me awake all night with his criticisms of the Five-Year Plan.
Whatever happened to those Five-Year Plans? Whatever h
appened to Madhubala? Whatever happened to Krishan Chander, that fine writer? Whatever happened to my Headmaster? Whatever happened to my best friend, Azhar? Whatever happened to Dhuki, who tended my grandmother’s garden?
History only tells us about the great ones who left their footprints on the sands of time. Dhuki spent most of his life growing sweet peas and petunias for an old lady.
That’s the kind of life I try to celebrate!
* * *
Another question that is sometimes put to me: ‘Haven’t you ever thought of living in another country—of settling down somewhere else?’
I think I saw enough of London when I was just out of my teens. The Thames, though a lovely river, is not as exciting as the Ganga.
China? Somehow I don’t see myself sitting on the Great Wall, writing Taoist fables. Someone might take me away.
As a boy I had romantic visions of Burma and the road to Mandalay. But it’s a harsh, intolerant land today. And I don’t see myself penning poems in a poppy field in Afghanistan; my intentions would be misunderstood. Further west, into Arabia and the Middle East, there is only death and disaster: Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya . . . When does the suffering end?
America? I’m no Hemingway, I’m afraid of guns. And he shot himself, didn’t he?
South America, up the Amazon? But they’ve cut all the forests away. W.H. Hudson’s ‘Green Mansions’ are now just a book.
Where else could I live and write? The choice in today’s world is rather limited.
Destiny, or the Great Librarian, brought me to this hilltop; Mother Hill near Mother Ganga, and here I have spent my best days and done my best work. And here I stay, until I have written my last word.