Our Trees Still Grow In Dehra

by Ruskin Bond

  So I walked on home, and presently I heard another song, but this time it was the whistling thrush rendering a broken melody, singing of dark, sweet secrets in the depths of the forest.

  I had little to sing about myself, as the electricity bill hadn’t been paid, and there was nothing in the bank, and my second novel had just been turned down by another publisher. Still, it was summer, and men and animals were drowsy, and so too were my creditors. The distant mountains loomed purple in the shimmering dust-haze.

  I walked through the pines again, but I did not hear the singing. And then for a week I did not leave the cottage, as the novel had to be rewritten, and I worked hard at it, pausing only to eat and sleep and take note of the leaves turning a darker green.

  The window opened on to the forest. Trees reached up to the window. Oak, maple, walnut. Higher up the hill, the pines started, and further on, armies of deodars marched over the mountains. And the mountains rose higher, and the trees grew stunted until they finally disappeared and only the black spirit-haunted rocks rose up to meet the everlasting snows. Those peaks cradled the sky. I could not see them from my windows. But on clear mornings they could be seen from the pass on the Tehri road.

  There was a stream at the bottom of the hill. One morning, quite early, I went down to the stream, and using the boulders as stepping-stones, moved downstream for about half a mile. Then I lay down to rest on a flat rock, in the shade of a wild cherry tree, and watched the sun shifting through the branches as it rose over the hill called Pari Tibba (Fairy Hill) and slid down the steep slope into the valley. The air was very still and already the birds were silent. The only sound came from the water running over the stony bed of the stream. I had lain there ten, perhaps fifteen minutes, when I began to feel that someone was watching me.

  Someone in the trees, in the shadows, still and watchful. Nothing moved; not a stone shifted, not a twig broke; but someone was watching me. I felt terribly exposed; not to danger, but to the scrutiny of unknown eyes. So I left the rock and, finding a path through the trees, began climbing the hill again.

  It was warm work. The sun was up, and there was no breeze. I was perspiring profusely by the time I got to the top of the hill. There was no sign of my unseen watcher. Two lean cows grazed on the short grass; the tinkling of their bells was the only sound in the sultry summer air.

  That song again! The same song, the same singer. I heard her from my window. And putting aside the book I was reading, I leant out of the window and started down through the trees. But the foliage was too heavy, and the singer too far away for me to be able to make her out. ‘Should I go and look for her?’ I wondered. Or is it better this way—heard but not seen? For having fallen in love with a song, must it follow that I will fall in love with the singer? No. But surely it is the voice, and not the song that has touched me ….’ Presently the singing ended, and I turned away from the window.

  A girl was gathering bilberries on the hillside. She was fresh-faced, honey-coloured; her lips were stained with purple juice. She smiled at me. ‘Are they good to eat?’ I asked.

  She opened her fist and thrust out her hand, which was full of berries, bruised and crushed. I took one and put it in my mouth. It had a sharp, sour taste. ‘It is good,’ I said. Finding that I could speak haltingly in her language, she came nearer, said ‘Take more then,’ and filled my hand with bilberries. Her fingers touched mine. The sensation was almost unique; for it was nine or ten years since my hand had touched a girl’s.

  ‘Where do you live?’ I asked. She pointed across the valley to where a small village straddled the slopes of a terraced hill.

  ‘It’s quite far,’ I said. ‘Do you always come so far from home?’

  ‘I go further than this,’ she said. ‘The cows must find fresh grass. And there is wood to gather and grass to cut.’ She showed me the sickle held by the cloth tied firmly about her waist. ‘Sometimes I go to the top of Pari Tibba, sometimes to the valley beyond. Have you been there?’

  ‘No. But I will go some day.’

  ‘It is always windy on Pari Tibba.’

  ‘Is it true that there are fairies there?’

  She laughed. ‘That is what people say. But those are people who have never been there. I do not see fairies on Pari Tibba. It is said that there are ghosts in the ruins on the hill. But I do not see any ghosts.’

  ‘I have heard of the ghosts,’ I said. ‘Two lovers who ran away and took shelter in a ruined cottage. At night there was a storm, and they were killed by lightning. Is it true, this story?’

  ‘It happened many years ago, before I was born. I have heard the story. But there are no ghosts on Pari Tibba.’

  ‘How old are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Fifteen, sixteen, I do not know for sure.’

  ‘Doesn’t your mother know?’

  ‘She is dead. And my grandmother has forgotten. And my brother, he is younger than me and he’s forgotten his own age. Is it important to remember?’

  ‘No, it is not important. Not here, anyway. Not in the hills. To a mountain, a hundred years are but as a day.’

  ‘Are you very old?’ she asked.

  ‘I hope not. Do I look very old?’

  ‘Only a hundred,’ she said, and laughed, and the silver bangles on her wrists tinkled as she put her hand up to her laughing face.

  ‘Why do you laugh?’ I asked.

  ‘Because you looked as though you believed me. How old are you?’

  ‘Thirty-five, thirty-six, I do not remember.’

  ‘Ah, it is better to forget!’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said, ‘but sometimes one has to fill in forms and things like that, and then one has to state one’s age.’

  ‘I have never filled a form. I have never seen one.’

  ‘And I hope you never will. It is a piece of paper covered with useless information. It is all a part of human progress.’

  ‘Progress?’

  ‘Yes. Are you unhappy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you go hungry?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you don’t need progress. Wild bilberries are better.’

  She went away without saying goodbye. The cows had strayed and she ran after them, calling them by name: ‘Neelu, Neelu!’ (Blue) and ‘Bhuri!’ (Old One). Her bare feet moved swiftly over the rocks and dry grass.

  Early May. The cicadas were singing in the forest; or rather, orchestrating, since they make the sound with their legs. The whistling thrushes pursued each other over the tree-tops, in acrobatic love-flights. Sometimes the langurs visited the oak trees, to feed on the leaves. As I moved down the path to the stream, I heard the same singing, and coming suddenly upon the clearing near the water’s edge, I saw the girl sitting on a rock, her feet in the rushing water—the same girl who had given me bilberries. Strangely enough, I had not guessed that she was the singer. Unseen voices conjure up fanciful images. I had imagined a woodland nymph, a graceful, delicate, beautiful, goddess-like creature; not a mischievous-eyed, round-faced, juice-stained, slightly ragged pixie. Her dhoti—a rough, homespun sari—was faded and torn; an impractical garment, I thought, for running about on the hillside, but the village folk put their girls into dhotis before they are twelve. She’d compromised by hitching it up, and by strengthening the waist with a length of cloth bound tightly about her, but she’d have been more at ease in the long, flounced skirt worn in the further hills.

  But I was not disillusioned. I had clearly taken a fancy to her cherubic, open countenance; and the sweetness of her voice added to her charms.

  I watched her from the banks of the stream, and presently she looked up, grinned, and stuck her tongue out at me.

  ‘That’s a nice way to greet me,’ I said. ‘Have I offended you?’

  ‘You surprised me. Why did you not call out?’

  ‘Because I was listening to your singing. I did not wish to speak until you had finished.’

  ‘It was only a song.’

  ‘But you sang it s
weetly.’

  She smiled. ‘Have you brought anything to eat?’

  ‘No. Are you hungry?’

  ‘At this time I get hungry. When you come to meet me you must always bring something to eat.’

  ‘But I didn’t come to meet you. I didn’t know you would be here.’

  ‘You do not wish to meet me?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. It is nice to meet you.’

  ‘You will meet me if you keep coming into the forest. So always bring something to eat.’

  ‘I will do so next time. Shall I pick you some berries?’

  ‘You will have to go to the top of the hill again to find the kingora bushes.’

  ‘I don’t mind. If you are hungry, I will bring some.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, and looked down at her feet, which were still in the water.

  Like some knight-errant of old, I toiled up the hill again until I found the bilberry bushes; and stuffing my pockets with berries, I returned to the stream. But when I got there I found she’d slipped away. The cowbells tinkled on the far hill.

  Glow-worms shone fitfully in the dark. The night was full of sounds—the tonk-tonk of a nightjar, the cry of a barking deer, the shuffling of porcupines, the soft flip-flop of moths beating against the window-panes. On the hill across the valley, lights flickered in the small village—the dim lights of kerosene lamps swinging in the dark.

  ‘What is your name?’ I asked, when we met again on the path through the pine forest.

  ‘Binya,’ she said. ‘What is yours?’

  ‘I’ve no name.’

  ‘All right, Mr No-name.’

  ‘I mean I haven’t made a name for myself. We must make our own names, don’t you think?’

  ‘Binya is my name. I do not wish to have any other. Where are you going?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘No-name goes nowhere! Then you cannot come with me, because I am going home and my grandmother will set the village dogs on you if you follow me.’ And laughing, she ran down the path to the stream; she knew I could not catch up with her.

  Her face streamed summer rain as she climbed the steep hill, calling the white cow home. She seemed very tiny on the windswept mountainside; a twist of hair lay flat against her forehead, and her torn blue dhoti clung to her firm round thighs. I went to her with an umbrella to give her shelter. She stood with me beneath the umbrella and let me put my arm around her. Then she turned her face up to mine, wonderingly, and I kissed her quickly, softly on the lips. Her lips tasted of raindrops and mint. And then she left me there, so gallant in the blistering rain. She ran home laughing. But it was worth the drenching.

  Another day I heard her calling to me—‘No-name, Mister No-name!’—but I couldn’t see her, and it was some time before I found her, halfway up a cherry tree, her feet pressed firmly against the bark, her dhoti tucked up between her thighs—fair, rounded thighs, and legs that were strong and vigorous.

  ‘The cherries are not ripe,’ I said.

  ‘They are never ripe. But I like them green and sour. Will you come into the tree?’

  ‘If I can still climb a tree,’ I said.

  ‘My grandmother is over sixty, and she can climb trees.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t mind being more adventurous at sixty. There’s not so much to lose then.’ I climbed into the tree without much difficulty, but I did not think the higher branches would take my weight, so I remained standing in the fork of the tree, my face on a level with Binya’s breasts. I put my hand against her waist, and kissed her on the soft inside of her arm. She did not say anything. But she took me by the hand and helped me to climb a little higher, and I put my arm around her, as much to support myself as to be close to her.

  The full moon rides high, shining through the tall oak trees near the window. The night is full of sounds, crickets, the tonk-tonk of a nightjar, and floating across the valley from your village, the sound of drums beating, and people singing. It is a festival day, and there will be feasting in your home. Are you singing too, tonight? And are you thinking of me, as you sing, as you laugh, as you dance with your friends? I am sitting here alone, and so I have no one to think of but you.

  Binya … I take your name again and again—as though by taking it, I can make you hear me, come to me, walking over the moonlit mountain ….

  There are spirits abroad tonight. They move silently in the trees; they hover about the window at which I sit; they take up with the wind and rush about the house. Spirits of the trees, spirits of the old house. An old lady died here last year. She’d lived in the house for over thirty years; something of her personality surely dwells here still. When I look into the tall, old mirror which was hers, I sometimes catch a glimpse of her pale face and long, golden hair. She likes me, I think, and the house is kind to me. Would she be jealous of you, Binya?

  The music and singing grows louder. I can imagine your face glowing in the firelight. Your eyes shine with laughter. You have all those people near you and I have only the stars, and the nightjar, and the ghost in the mirror.

  I woke early, while the dew was still fresh on the grass, and walked down the hill to the stream, and then up to a little knoll where a pine tree grew in solitary splendour, the wind going hoo-hoo in its slender branches. This was my favourite place, my place of power, where I came to renew myself from time to time. I lay on the grass, dreaming. The sky in its blueness swung round above me. An eagle soared in the distance. I heard her voice down among the trees; or I thought I heard it. But when I went to look, I could not find her.

  I’d always prided myself on my rationality; had taught myself to be wary of emotional states, like ‘falling in love’, which turned out to be ephemeral and illusory. And although I told myself again and again that the attraction was purely physical, on my part as well as hers, I had to admit to myself that my feelings towards Binya differed from the feelings I’d had for others; and that while sex had often been for me a celebration, it had, like any other feast, resulted in satiety, a need for change, a desire to forget ….

  Binya represented something else—something wild, dreamlike, fairy-like. She moved close to the spirit-haunted rocks, the old trees, the young grass; she had absorbed something from them—a primeval innocence, an unconcern with the passing of time and events, an affinity with the forest and the mountains; this made her special and magical.

  And so, when three, four, five days went by, and I did not find her on the hillside, I went through all the pangs of frustrated love: had she forgotten me and gone elsewhere? Had we been seen together, and was she being kept at home? Was she ill? Or had she been spirited away?

  I could hardly go and ask for her. I would probably be driven from the village. It straddled the opposite hill, a cluster of slate-roof houses, a pattern of little terraced fields. I could see figures in the fields, but they were too far away, too tiny, for me to be able to recognize anyone. She had gone to her mother’s village a hundred miles away, or so, a small boy told me.

  And so I brooded; walked disconsolately through the oak forest hardly listening to the birds—the sweet-throated whistling thrush; the shrill barbet; the mellow-voiced doves. Happiness had always made me more responsive to nature. Feeling miserable, my thoughts turned inward. I brooded upon the trickery of time and circumstance; I felt the years were passing by, had passed by, like waves on a receding tide, leaving me washed up like a bit of flotsam on a lonely beach. But at the same time, the whistling thrush seemed to mock at me, calling tantalizingly from the shadows of the ravine: ‘It isn’t time that’s passing by, it is you and I, it is you and I ….’

  Then I forced myself to snap out of my melancholy. I kept away from the hillside and the forest. I did not look towards the village. I buried myself in my work, tried to think objectively, and wrote an article on ‘The inscriptions on the iron pillar at Kalsi’; very learned, very dry, very sensible.

  But at night I was assailed by thoughts of Binya. I could not sleep. I switched on the light, and there s
he was, smiling at me from the looking glass, replacing the image of the old lady who had watched over me for so long.

  As Time Goes By

  Prem’s boys are growing tall and healthy, on the verge of manhood. How can I think of death, when faced with the full vigour and confidence of youth? They remind me of Somi and Daljit, who were the same age when I knew them in Dehra during our schooldays. But remembering Somi and Dal reminded me of death again—for Dal had died a young man—and I looked at Prem’s boys again, haunted by the thought of suddenly leaving this world, and prayed that I could be with them a little longer.

  Somi and Dal …. I remember: it was going to rain. I could see the rain moving across the hills, and I could smell it on the breeze. But instead of turning back, I walked on through the leaves and brambles that grew over the disused path, and wandered into the forest. I had heard the sound of rushing water at the bottom of the hill, and there was no question of returning until I had found the water.

  I had to slide down some smooth rocks into a small ravine, and there I found the stream running across a bed of shingle. I removed my shoes and socks and started walking up the stream. Water trickled down from the hillside, from amongst ferns and grass and wild flowers; and the hills, rising steeply on either side, kept the ravine in shadow. The rocks were smooth, almost soft, and some of them were grey and some yellow. The pool was fed by a small waterfall, and it was deep beneath the waterfall. I did not stay long, because now the rain was swishing over the sal trees, and I was impatient to tell the others about the pool.

  Somi usually chose the adventures we were to have, and I would just grumble and get involved in them; but the pool was my own discovery, and both Somi and Daljeet gave me credit for it.

  I think it was the pool that brought us together more than anything else. We made it a secret, private pool, and invited no others. Somi was the best swimmer. He dived off rocks and went gliding about under the water, like a long, golden fish. Dal threshed about with much vigour but little skill. I could dive off a rock too, but I usually landed on my belly.