The Very Best of Ruskin Bond, the Writer on the Hill: Selected Fiction and Non-Fiction

by Ruskin Bond

  ‘Great, grey, formless India,’ as Kipling had called it, was, until I was eight or nine, unknown territory for me, and I had heard only vaguely of the freedom movement and Nehru and Gandhi; but then, a child of today’s India is just as vague about them. Most domiciled Europeans and Anglo-Indians were apolitical. That the rule of the sahib was not exactly popular in the land was made plain to me on the few occasions I ventured far from the house. Shouts of ‘Red Monkey!’ or ‘White Pig!’ were hurled at me with some enthusiasm but without any physical follow-up. I had the sense, even then, to follow the old adage, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.’

  It was a couple of years later, when I was eleven, just a year or two before independence, that two passing cyclists, young men, swept past and struck me over the head. I was stunned but not hurt. They rode away with cries of triumph—I suppose it was a rare achievement to have successfully assaulted someone whom they associated with the ruling race—but although I could hardly (at that age) be expected to view them with Gandhian love and tolerance, I did not allow the resentment to rankle. I know I did not mention the incident to anyone—not to my mother or grandmother, or even to Mr Ballantyne, the superintendent of police, a family friend who dropped in at the house quite frequently. Perhaps it was personal pride that prevented me from doing so; or perhaps I had already learnt to accept the paradox that India could be as cruel as it could be kind. With my habit, already formed, of taking long walks into unfamiliar areas, I exposed myself more than did most Anglo-Indian boys of my age. Boys bigger than me rode bicycles; boys smaller than me stayed at home!

  My parents’ marriage had been on the verge of breaking up, and I was eight or nine when they finally separated. My mother was soon married again, to a Punjabi businessman, while I went to join my father in his air force hutment in Delhi. I would return to Dehra, not once but many times in the course of my life, for the town, even when it ceased to enchant, continued to exert a considerable influence on me, both as a writer and as a person; not a literary influence (for that came almost entirely from books) but as an area whose atmosphere was to become a part of my mind and sensuous nature.

  I had a very close relationship with my father and was more than happy with him in Delhi, although he would be away almost every day, and sometimes, when he was hospitalized with malaria, he would be away almost every night too. When he was free he took me for long walks to the old tombs and monuments that dotted the wilderness that then surrounded New Delhi; or to the bookshops and cinemas of Connaught Place, the capital’s smart shopping complex, then spacious and uncluttered. I shared his fondness for musicals, and wartime Delhi had a number of cinemas offering all the glitter of Hollywood.

  I wasn’t doing much reading then—I did not, in fact, become a great reader until after my father’s death—but played gramophone records when I was alone in the house, or strolled about the quiet avenues of New Delhi, waiting for my father to return from his office. There was very little traffic in those days, and the roads were comparatively safe.

  I was lonely, shy and aloof, and when other children came my way I found it difficult to relate to them. Not that they came my way very often. My father hadn’t the time or the inclination to socialize and in the evenings he would sit down to his stamp collection, while I helped to sort, categorize and mount his treasures.

  I was quite happy with this life. During the day, when there was nothing else to do, I would make long lists of films or books or records; and although I have long since shed this hobby, it had the effect of turning me into an efficient cataloguer. When I became a writer, the world lost a librarian or archivist.

  My father felt that this wasn’t the right sort of life for a growing boy, and arranged for me to go to a boarding school in Simla. As often happens, when the time approached for me to leave, I did make friends with some other boys who lived down the road.

  Trenches had been dug all over New Delhi, in anticipation of Japanese air raids, and there were several along the length of the road on which we lived. These were ideal places for games of cops and robbers, and I was gradually drawn into them. The heat of midsummer, with temperatures well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, did not keep us indoors for long, and in any case the trenches were cooler than the open road. I discovered that I was quite strong too, in comparison with most boys of my age, and in the wrestling bouts that were often held in the trenches I invariably came out, quite literally, on top. At eight or nine I was a chubby boy; I hadn’t learnt to use my fists (and never did), but I knew how to use my weight, and when I sat upon an opponent he usually remained sat upon until I decided to move.

  I don’t remember all their names, but there was a dark boy called Joseph, Goan I think, who was particularly nice to me, no matter how often I sat upon him. Our burgeoning friendship was cut short when my father and I set out for Simla. My father had two weeks’ leave, and we would spend that time together before I was shut up in school. Ten years in a boarding school was to convince me that such places bring about an unnatural separation between children and parents that is good for neither body nor soul.

  That fortnight with my father was the only happy spell in my life for some time to come. We walked up to the Hanuman temple on Jakke Hill; took a rickshaw ride to Sanjauli, while my father told me the story of Kipling’s phantom rickshaw, set on that very road; ate ice creams at Davice’s restaurant (and as I write this, I learn that this famous restaurant has just been destroyed in a fire); browsed in bookshops and saw more films; made plans for the future. ‘We will go to England after the war.’

  He was, in fact, the only friend I had as a child, and after his death I was to be a lonely boy until I reached my late teens.

  School seemed a stupid and heartless place after my father had gone away. The traditions even in prep school—such as ragging and caning, compulsory games and daily chapel attendance, prefects larger than life, and Honours Boards for everything from School Captaincy to choir membership—had apparently been borrowed from Tom Brown’s Schooldays. It was all part of the process of turning us into ‘leaders of men’. Well, my leadership qualities remained exactly at zero, and in time I was to discover the sad fact that the world at large judges you according to who you are, rather than what you have done.

  My father had been transferred to Calcutta and wasn’t keeping well. Malaria again. And the jaundice. But his last letter sounded quite cheerful. He’d been selling his valuable stamp collection, so as to have enough money for us to settle in England.

  One day my class teacher sent for me.

  ‘I want to talk to you, Bond,’ he said. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

  I knew it wasn’t going to be a walk I would enjoy; I knew instinctively that something was wrong.

  As soon as my unfortunate teacher (no doubt cursing the Headmaster for giving him such an unpleasant task) started on the theme of ‘God wanting your father in a higher and better place’—as though there could be any better place than Jakke Hill in midsummer!—I knew my father was dead, and burst into tears.

  Later, the Headmaster sent for me and made me give him the pile of letters from my father that I had been keeping in my locker. He probably felt it was unmanly of me to cling to them.

  ‘You might lose them,’ he said. ‘Why not keep them with me? At the end of term, before you go home, you can come and collect them.’

  Reluctantly I gave him the letters. He told me he had heard from my mother and stepfather and that I would be going to them when school closed.

  At the end of the year, the day before school closed, I went to the headmaster’s office and asked him for my letters.

  ‘What letters?’ he said. His desk was piled with papers and correspondence, and he was irritated by the interruption.

  ‘My father’s letters,’ I explained. ‘You said you would keep them for me, sir.’

  ‘Letters, letters. Are you sure you gave them to me?’ He was growing more irritated. ‘You must be mistaken, Bond. What w
ould I want from your father’s letters?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. You said I could collect them before going home.’

  ‘Look, I don’t remember your letters and I’m very busy just now. So run along. I’m sure you’re mistaken, but if I find any personal letters of yours, I’ll send them on to you.’

  I don’t suppose his forgetfulness was anything more than the muddled indifference that grows in many of those who have charge of countless small boys, but for the first time in my life, I knew what it was like to hate someone.

  And I had discovered that words could hurt too.

  Upon an Old Wall Dreaming

  IT IS TIME to confess that at least half my life has been spent in idleness. My old school would not be proud of me. Nor would my Aunt Muriel.

  ‘You spend most of your time sitting on that wall, doing nothing,’ scolded Aunt Muriel, when I was seven or eight. ‘Are you thinking about something?’

  ‘No, Aunt Muriel.’

  ‘Are you dreaming?’

  ‘I’m awake!’

  ‘Then what on earth are you doing there?’

  ‘Nothing, Aunt Muriel.’

  ‘He’ll come to no good,’ she warned the world at large. ‘He’ll spend all his life sitting on walls, doing nothing.’

  And how right she proved to be! Sometimes I bestir myself, and bang out a few sentences on my old typewriter, but most of the time I’m still sitting on that wall, preferably in the winter sunshine. Thinking? Not very deeply. Dreaming? But I’ve grown too old to dream. Meditation, perhaps. That’s been fashionable for some time. But it isn’t that either. Contemplation might come closer to the mark.

  Was I born with a silver spoon in my mouth that I could afford to sit in the sun for hours, doing nothing? Far from it; I was born poor and remained poor, as far as worldly riches went. But one has to eat and pay the rent. And there have been others to feed too. So I have to admit that between long bouts of idleness there have been short bursts of creativity. My typewriter after more than thirty years of loyal service, has finally collapsed, proof enough that it has not lain idle all this time.

  Sitting on walls, apparently doing nothing, has always been my favourite form of inactivity. But for these walls, and the many idle hours I have spent upon them, I would not have written even a fraction of the hundreds of stories, essays and other diversions that have been banged out on the typewriter over the years. It is not the walls themselves that set me off or give me ideas, but a personal view of the world that I receive from sitting there.

  Creative idleness, you could call it. A receptivity to the world around me—the breeze, the warmth of the old stone, the lizard on the rock, a raindrop on a blade of grass—these and other impressions impinge upon me as I sit in that passive, benign condition that makes people smile tolerantly at me as they pass. ‘Eccentric writer,’ they remark to each other, as they drive on, hurrying in a heat of hope, towards the pot of gold at the end of their personal rainbows.

  It’s true that I am eccentric in many ways, and old walls bring out the essence of my eccentricity.

  I do not have a garden wall. This shaky tumbledown house in the hills is perched directly above a motorable road, making me both accessible and vulnerable to casual callers of all kinds—inquisitive tourists, local busybodies, schoolgirls with their poems, hawkers selling candyfloss, itinerant sadhus, scrap merchants, potential Nobel Prize winners…

  To escape them, and to set my thoughts in order, I walk a little way up the road, cross it, and sit down on a parapet wall overlooking the Woodstock spur. Here, partially shaded by an overhanging oak, I am usually left alone. I look suitably down and out, shabbily dressed, a complete nonentity—not the sort of person you would want to be seen talking to!

  Stray dogs sometimes join me here. Having been a stray dog myself at various periods of my life, I can empathize with these friendly vagabonds of the road. Far more intelligent than your inbred Pom or Peke, they let me know by their silent companionship that they are on the same wavelength. They sport about on the road, but they do not yap at all and sundry.

  Left to myself on the wall, I am soon in the throes of composing a story or poem. I do not write it down—that can be done later—I just work it out in my mind, memorize my words, so to speak, and keep them stored up for my next writing session.

  Occasionally a car will stop, and someone I know will stick his head out and say, ‘No work today, Mr Bond? How I envy you! Not a care in the world!’

  I travel back in time some fifty years to Aunt Muriel asking me the same question. The years melt away, and I am a child again, sitting on the garden wall, doing nothing.

  ‘Don’t you get bored sitting there?’ asks the latest passing motorist, who has one of those half-beards which are in vogue with TV news readers. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing, Aunty,’ I reply.

  He gives me a long hard stare.

  ‘You must be dreaming. Don’t you recognize me?’

  ‘Yes, Aunt Muriel.’

  He shakes his head sadly, steps on the gas, and goes roaring up the hill in a cloud of dust.

  ‘Poor old Bond,’ he tells his friends over evening cocktails. ‘Must be going round the bend. This morning he called me Aunty.’

  Nina

  THE BIG CIRCUS tent looms up out of the monsoon mist, standing forlorn in a quagmire of mud and slush. It has rained ceaselessly for two days and nights. The chairs stand about in deep pools of water. One or two of them float around with their legs in the air. There will be no show for the third night running, and tomorrow there will be problems, with the ringhands to be fed and the ground rent to be paid: a hundred odd bills to be settled, and no money at the gate.

  Nina, a dark, good-looking girl—part Indian, part Romanian—who has been doing the high-wire act for several years, sits at the window of a shabby hotel room and gazes out at the heavy downpour.

  At one time, she tells me, she was with a very small circus, touring the remote areas of the Konkan on India’s west coast. The tent was so low that when she stood on her pedestal her head touched the ceiling cloth. She can still hear the hiss of the Petromax lamps. The band was a shrill affair: it made your hair stand on end!

  The manager of a big circus happened to be passing through, and he came in and saw Nina’s act, and that was the beginning of a life of constant travel.

  She remembers her first night with the new circus, and the terrible suspense she went through. Suddenly feeling like a country bumpkin, she looked about her in amazement. There were more than twenty elephants, countless horses, and a menacing array of lions and tigers. She looked at the immense proportions of the tent and wanted to turn and run. The lights were a blinding brilliance—she had never worked in a spotlight before.

  As the programme ran through, she stood at the rear curtains waiting for her entrance. She peeped through the curtains and felt sure she would be lost in that wide circus ring. Though her costume was new, she suddenly felt shabby. She had spangled her crimson velvet costume with scarlet sequins so that the whole thing was a red blaze. Her feet were sweating in white kid boots.

  She cannot recall how she entered the ring. But she remembers standing on her pedestal and looking over her shoulder to see if the supporting wires were pulled taut. Her attention was caught by the sea of faces behind her. All the artists, the ringhands and the stable boys were there, eager to look over the new act.

  Her most critical audience was the group of foreign artists who stood to one side in a tight, curious knot. There were two Italian brothers, a family of Belgians, and a half Russian, half English aerial ballet artist, a tiny woman who did a beautiful act on the single trapeze.

  Nina has no recollection of how she got through her act. She did get through it somehow and was almost in tears when she reached the exit gate. She hurried to the seclusion of her dressing-room tent, and there she laid her head upon her arms and sobbed. She did not hear the tent flaps open and was surprised at the sudden appearance of the t
iny woman at her side.

  ‘Ah, no!’ exclaimed the little trapeze artist, laying a hand on the girl’s head. ‘Never tears on your first night! It was a lovely act, my child. Why do you cry? You are sensitive and beautiful in the ring.’

  Nina sobbed all the more and would not be comforted by the kind woman’s words. Yet it was the beginning of a friendship that lasted for several years. The woman’s name was Isabella. She took the young girl under her wing with deep maternal care.

  She showed Nina how to use ring make-up and what colours I looked best at night. She was nimble-fingered and made costumes and coronets for the girl, and taught her grace in the ring. Once she made a blue-and-silver outfit. The first night Nina wore it, she performed solely for her friend, although the circus tent was crowded and appreciative.

  The Road to Badrinath

  IF YOU HAVE travelled up the Mandakini valley, and then cross over into the valley of the Alaknanda, you are immediately struck by the contrast. The Mandakini is gentler, richer in vegetation, almost pastoral in places; the Alaknanda is awesome, precipitous, threatening—and seemingly inhospitable to those who must live, and earn a livelihood, in its confines.

  Even as we left Chamoli and began the steady, winding climb to Badrinath, the nature of the terrain underwent a dramatic change. No longer did green fields slope gently down to the riverbed. Here they clung precariously to rocky slopes and ledges that grew steeper and narrower, while the river below, impatient to reach its confluence with the Bhagirathi at Deoprayag, thundered along the narrow gorge.

  Badrinath is one of the four dhams, or four most holy places in India. (The other three are Rameshwaram, Dwarka and Jagannath Puri.) For the pilgrim travelling to this holiest of holies, the journey is exciting, possibly even uplifting; but for those who live permanently on these crags and ridges, life is harsh, a struggle from one day to the next. No wonder so many young men from Garhwal find their way into the army. Little grows on these rocky promontories; and what does, is at the mercy of the weather. For most of the year the fields lie fallow. Rivers, unfortunately, run downhill and not uphill.