by Ruskin Bond
The lights, which had been behaving all evening, now failed us, and we had a real black-out. In the midst of this confusion, someone—it must have been a girl, judging from the overpowering scent of jasmine that clung to her—put her arms around me and kissed me.
When the light came on again, she had vanished.
Who had kissed me in the dark?
As no one came forward to admit to the deed, I could only make wild guesses. But it had been a very sweet kiss, and I would have been only too happy to return it had I known its ownership. I could hardly go up to each of the girls and kiss them in the hope of reciprocation. After all, it might even have been someone from the audience.
Anyway, our concert did raise a few hundred rupees for the war effort. By the time we sent the money to the right authorities, the war was over. Hopefully they saw to it that the money was put to good use.
We went our various ways and although the kiss lingered in my mind, it gradually became a distant, fading memory and as the years passed it went out of my head altogether. Until the other day, almost forty years later…
‘Phone for you,’ announced Gautam, my seven-year-old secretary.
‘Boy or girl? Man or woman?’
‘Don’t know. Deep voice like my teacher but it says you know her.’
‘Ask her name.’
Gautam asked.
‘She’s Nellie, and she’s speaking from Bareilly.’
‘Nellie from Bareilly?’ I was intrigued. I took the phone. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m Bonda from Golconda.’
‘Then you must be wealthy now.’ Her voice was certainly husky. ‘But don’t you remember me? Nellie? I acted in that play of yours, up in Mussoorie a long time ago.’
‘Of course, I remember now,’ I was remembering. ‘You had a small part, the maidservant I think. You were very pretty. You had dark, sultry eyes. But what made you ring me after all these years?’
‘Well, I was thinking of you. I’ve often thought about you. You were much older than me, but I liked you. After that show, when the lights went out, I came up to you and kissed you. And then I ran away.’
‘So it was you! I’ve often wondered. But why did you run away? I would have returned the kiss. More than once.’
‘I was very nervous. I thought you’d be angry.’
‘Well, I suppose it’s too late now. You must be happily married with lots of children.’
‘Husband left me. Children grew up, went away.’
‘It must be lonely for you.’
‘I have lots of dogs.’
‘How many?’
‘About thirty.’
‘Thirty dogs! Do you run a kennel club?’
‘No, they are all strays. I run a dog shelter.’
‘Well, that’s very good of you. Very humane.’
‘You must come and see it sometime. Come to Bareilly. Stay with me. You like dogs, don’t you?’
‘Er-yes, of course. Man’s best friend, the dog. But thirty is a lot of dogs to have about the house.’
‘I have lots of space.’
‘I’m sure… well, Nellie, if ever I’m in Bareilly, I’ll come to see you. And I’m glad you phoned and cleared up the mystery. It was a lovely kiss and I’ll always remember it.’
We said our goodbyes and I promised to visit her some day. A trip to Bareilly to return a kiss might seem a bit far-fetched, but I’ve done sillier things in my life. It’s those dogs that worry me. I can imagine them snapping at my heels as I attempt to approach their mistress. Dogs can be very possessive.
‘Who was that on the phone?’ asked Gautam, breaking in on my reverie.
‘Just an old friend!’
‘Dada’s old girlfriend. Are you going to see her?’
‘I’ll think about it.’
And I’m still thinking about it and about those dogs. But bliss it was to be in Mussoorie forty years ago, when Nellie kissed me in the dark.
Some memories are best left untouched.
From Small Beginnings
And the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, that man will at the last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die.
—Rudyard Kipling
On the first clear September day, towards the end of the rains, I visited the pine knoll, my place of peace and power.
It was months since I’d last been there. Trips to the plains, a crisis in my affairs, involvements with other people and their troubles, and an entire monsoon had come between me and the grassy, pine-topped slope facing the Hill of Fairies (Pari Tibba to the locals). Now I tramped through late monsoon foliage—tall ferns, bushes festooned with flowering convolvulus—and crossed the stream by way of its little bridge of stones before climbing the steep hill to the pine slope.
When the trees saw me, they made as if to turn in my direction. A puff of wind came across the valley from the distant snows. A long-tailed blue magpie took alarm and flew noisily out of an oak tree. The cicadas were suddenly silent. But the trees remembered me. They bowed gently in the breeze and beckoned me nearer, welcoming me home. Three pines, a straggling oak and a wild cherry. I went among them and acknowledged their welcome with a touch of my hand against their trunks—the cherry’s smooth and polished; the pine’s patterned and whorled; the oak’s rough, gnarled, full of experience. He’d been there longest, and the wind had bent his upper branches and twisted a few, so that he looked shaggy and undistinguished. But like the philosopher who is careless about his dress and appearance, the oak has secrets, a hidden wisdom. He has learnt the art of survival!
While the oak and the pines are older than me and have been here many years, the cherry tree is exactly seven years old. I know, because I planted it.
One day I had this cherry seed in my hand, and on an impulse I thrust it into the soft earth, and then went away and forgot all about it. A few months later I found a tiny cherry tree in the long grass. I did not expect it to survive. But the following year it was two feet tall. And then some goats ate its leaves and a grass cutter’s scythe injured the stem, and I was sure it would wither away. But it renewed itself, sprang up even faster, and within three years it was a healthy, growing tree, about five feet tall.
I left the hills for two years—forced by circumstances to make a living in Delhi—but this time I did not forget the cherry tree. I thought about it fairly often, sent telepathic messages of encouragement in its direction. And when, a couple of years ago, I returned in the autumn, my heart did a somersault when I found my tree sprinkled with pale pink blossom (the Himalayan cherry flowers in November). And later, when the fruit was ripe, the tree was visited by finches, tits, bulbuls and other small birds, all come to feast on the sour, red cherries.
Last summer I spent a night on the pine knoll, sleeping on the grass beneath the cherry tree. I lay awake for hours, listening to the chatter of the stream and the occasional tonk-tonk of nightjars, and watching through the branches overhead, the stars turning in the sky. And I felt the power of the sky and the earth, and the power of a small cherry seed…
And so when the rains are over, this is where I come, that I might feel the peace and power of this place.
This is where I will write my stories. I can see everything from here—my cottage across the valley; behind and above me, the town and the bazaar, straddling the ridge; to the left, the high mountains and the twisting road to the source of the great river; below me, the little stream and the path to the village; ahead, the Hill of Fairies and the fields beyond; the wide valley below, and another range of hills and then the distant plains. I can even see Prem Singh in the garden, putting the mattresses out in the sun.
From here he is just a speck on the far hill, but I know it is Prem by the way he stands. A man may have a hundred disguises, but in the end it is his posture that gives him away. Like my grandfather, who was a
master of disguise and successfully roamed the bazaars as fruit vendor or basket maker. But we could always recognize him because of his pronounced slouch.
Prem Singh doesn’t slouch, but he has this habit of looking up at the sky (regardless of whether it’s cloudy or clear), and at the moment he’s looking at the sky.
Eight years with Prem. He was just a sixteen-year-old boy when I first saw him, and now he has a wife and child.
I had been in the cottage for just over a year… He stood on the landing outside the kitchen door. A tall boy, dark, with good teeth and brown, deep-set eyes, dressed smartly in white drill—his only change of clothes. Looking for a job. I liked the look of him, but—
‘I already have someone working for me,’ I said.
‘Yes, sir. He is my uncle.’
In the hills, everyone is a brother or an uncle.
‘You don’t want me to dismiss your uncle?’
‘No, sir. But he says you can find a job for me.’
‘I’ll try. I’ll make inquiries. Have you just come from your village?’
‘Yes. Yesterday I walked ten miles to Pauri. There I got a bus.’
‘Sit down. Your uncle will make some tea.’
He sat down on the steps, removed his white keds, wriggled his toes. His feet were both long and broad, large feet but not ugly. He was unusually clean for a hill boy. And taller than most.
‘Do you smoke?’ I asked.
‘No, sir.’
‘It is true,’ said his uncle. ‘He does not smoke. All my nephews smoke, but this one. He is a little peculiar, he does not smoke—neither beedi nor hookah.’
‘Do you drink?’
‘It makes me vomit.’
‘Do you take bhang?’
‘No, sahib.’
‘You have no vices. It’s unnatural.’
‘He is unnatural, sahib,’ said his uncle.
‘Does he chase girls?’
‘They chase him, sahib.’
‘So he left the village and came looking for a job.’ I looked at him. He grinned, then looked away and began rubbing his feet.
‘Your name is…?’
‘Prem Singh.’
‘All right, Prem, I will try to do something for you.’
I did not see him for a couple of weeks. I forgot about finding him a job. But when I met him again, on the road to the bazaar, he told me that he had got a temporary job in the Survey, looking after the surveyor’s tents.
‘Next week we will be going to Rajasthan,’ he said.
‘It will be very hot. Have you been in the desert before?’
‘No, sir.’
‘It is not like the hills. And it is far from home.’
‘I know. But I have no choice in the matter. I have to collect some money in order to get married.’
In his region there was a bride price, usually of 2,000 rupees.
‘Do you have to get married so soon?’
‘I have only one brother and he is still very young. My mother is not well. She needs a daughter-in-law to help her in the fields and with the cows and in the house. We are a small family, so the work is greater.’
Every family has its few terraced fields, narrow and stony, usually perched on a hillside above a stream or river. They grow rice, barley, maize, potatoes—just enough to live on. Even if their produce is sufficient for marketing, the absence of roads makes it difficult to get the produce to the market towns. There is no money to be earned in the villages, and money is needed for clothes, soap, medicines, and for recovering the family jewellery from the moneylenders. So the young men leave their villages to find work, and to find work they must go to the plains. The lucky ones get into the army. Others enter domestic service or take jobs in garages, hotels, wayside tea shops, schools…
In Mussoorie, the main attraction is the large number of schools which employ cooks and bearers. But the schools were full when Prem arrived. He’d been to the recruiting centre at Roorkee, hoping to get into the army; but they found a deformity in his right foot, the result of a bone broken when a landslip carried him away one dark monsoon night. He was lucky, he said, that it was only his foot and not his head that had been broken.
He came to the house to inform his uncle about the job and to say goodbye. I thought, another nice person I probably won’t see again; another ship passing in the night, the friendly twinkle of its lights soon vanishing in the darkness. I said ‘come again,’ held his smile with mine so that I could remember him better, and returned to my study and my typewriter. The typewriter is the repository of a writer’s loneliness. It stares unsympathetically back at him every day, doing its best to be discouraging. Maybe I’ll go back to the old-fashioned quill pen and marble inkstand; then I can feel like a real writer—Balzac or Dickens—scratching away into the endless reaches of the night… Of course, the days and nights are seemingly shorter than they need to be! They must be, otherwise why do we hurry so much and achieve so little, by the standards of the past…
Prem goes, disappears into the vast faceless cities of the plains, and a year slips by, or rather I do, and then here he is again, thinner and darker, and still smiling and looking for a job. I should have known that hillmen don’t disappear altogether. The spirit-haunted rocks don’t let their people wander too far, lest they lose them forever.
I was able to get him a job in the school. The headmaster’s wife needed a cook. I wasn’t sure if Prem could cook very well but I sent him along and they said they’d give him a trial. Three days later the headmaster’s wife met me on the road and started gushing all over me. She was the type who gushed.
‘We’re so grateful to you! Thank you for sending me that lovely boy. He’s so polite. And he cooks very well. A little too hot for my husband, but otherwise delicious—just delicious! He’s a real treasure—a lovely boy.’ And she gave me an arch look—the famous look which she used to captivate all the good looking young prefects who became prefects, it was said, only if she approved of them.
I wasn’t sure that she didn’t want something more than a cook, and I only hoped that Prem would give every satisfaction.
He looked cheerful enough when he came to see me on his off day.
‘How are you getting on?’ I asked.
‘Lovely,’ he said, using his mistress’s favourite expression.
‘What do you mean—lovely? Do they like your work?’
‘The memsahib likes it. She strokes me on the cheek whenever she enters the kitchen. The sahib says nothing. He takes medicine after every meal.’
‘Did he always take medicine—or only now that you’re doing the cooking?’
‘I am not sure. I think he has always been sick.’
He was sleeping in the headmaster’s verandah and getting sixty rupees a month. A cook in Delhi got a hundred and sixty. And a cook in Paris or New York got ten times as much. I did not say as much to Prem. He might ask me to get him a job in New York. And that would be the last I saw of him! He, as a cook, might well get a job making curries off-Broadway; I, as a writer, wouldn’t get to first base. And only my Uncle Ken knew the secret of how to make a living without actually doing any work. But then, of course, he had four sisters. And each of them was married to a fairly prosperous husband. So Uncle Ken divided his year among them. Three months with Aunt Ruby in Nainital. Three months with Aunt Susie in Kashmir. Three months with my mother (not quite so affluent) in Jamnagar. And three months in the Vet Hospital in Bareilly, where Aunt Mabel ran the hospital for her veterinary husband. In this way, he never overstayed his welcome. A sister can look after a brother for just three months at a time and no more. Uncle K had it worked out to perfection.
But I had no sisters and I couldn’t live forever on the royalties of a single novel. So I had to write others. So I came to the hills.
The hillmen go to the plains to make a living. I had to come to the hills to try and make mine.
‘Prem,’ I said, ‘why don’t you work for me?’
‘And what about my unc
le?’
‘He seems ready to desert me any day. His grandfather is ill, he says, and he wants to go home.’
‘His grandfather died last year.’
‘That’s what I mean—he’s getting restless. And I don’t mind if he goes. These days he seems to be suffering from a form of sleeping sickness. I have to get up first and make his tea…’
Sitting here under the cherry tree, whose leaves are just beginning to turn yellow, I rest my chin on my knees and gaze across the valley to where Prem moves about in the garden. Looking back over the seven years he has been with me, I recall some of the nicest things about him. They come to me in no particular order—just pieces of cinema—coloured slides slipping across the screen of memory…
Prem rocking his infant son to sleep—crooning to him, passing his large hand gently over the child’s curly head—Prem following me down to the police station when I was arrested (on a warrant from Bombay, charging me with writing an allegedly obscene short story!), and waiting outside until I reappeared—his smile, when I found him in Delhi, his large, irrepressible laughter, most in evidence when he was seeing an old Laurel and Hardy movie.
Of course, there were times when he could be infuriating, stubborn, deliberately pig-headed, sending me little notes of resignation—but I never found it difficult to overlook these little acts of self-indulgence. He had brought much love and laughter into my life, and what more could a lonely man ask for?
It was his stubborn streak that limited the length of his stay in the headmaster’s household. Mr Good was tolerant enough. But Mrs Good was one of those women who, when they are pleased with you, go out of their way to help, pamper and flatter, but when displeased, become vindictive, going out of their way to harm or destroy. Mrs Good sought power—over her husband, her dog, her favourite pupils, her servant… She had absolute power over the husband and the dog, partial power over her slightly bewildered pupils, and none at all over Prem, who missed the subtleties of her designs upon his soul. He did not respond to her mothering, or to the way in which she tweaked him on the cheeks, brushed against him in the kitchen and made admiring remarks about his looks and physique. Memsahibs, he knew, were not for him. So he kept a stony face and went diligently about his duties. And she felt slighted, put in her place. Her liking turned to dislike. Instead of admiring remarks, she began making disparaging remarks about his looks, his clothes, his manners. She found fault with his cooking. No longer was it ‘lovely’. She even accused him of taking away the dog’s meat and giving it to a poor family living on the hillside—no more heinous crime could be imagined! Mr Good threatened him with dismissal. So Prem became stubborn. The following day he withheld the dog’s food altogether, threw it down the khud where it was seized upon by innumerable strays, and went off to the pictures.