by Ruskin Bond
All has gone smoothly. Vinod is waiting for me outside. So is Devilal.
‘Did you vote for me?’ asks Devilal.
It is my eyes that he is looking at, not my lips, when, I reply in the affirmative. He is a shrewd man, with many years’ experience in seeing through bluff. He is pleased with my reply, beams at me, and directs me to the waiting taxi.
Vinod and I get in together, and soon we are on the road again, being driven swiftly homewards up the winding hill road.
Vinod is looking pleased with himself; rather smug, in fact.
‘You did vote for Devilal?’ I ask him. ‘The symbol of the cock-bird?’
He shakes his head, keeping his eyes on the road. ‘No, the cow,’ he says.
‘You ass!’ I exclaim. ‘Devilal’s symbol was the cock, not the cow!’
‘I know,’ he says, ‘but I like the cow better.’
I subside into silence. It is a good thing no one else in the taxi has been paying any attention to our conversation. It would be a pity to see Vinod turned out of Devilal’s taxi and made to walk the remaining mile to the top of the hill. After all, it will be another five years before he gets another free taxi-ride.
(In spite of Vinod’s defection, Devilal won.)
The Night the Roof Blew Off
Looking back at the experience, I suppose it was the sort of thing that should have happened in a James Thurber story, like the dam that burst or the ghost who got in. But I wasn’t thinking of Thurber at the time, although a few of his books were among the many I was trying to save from the icy rain and sleet pouring into my bedroom and study.
We have grown accustomed to sudden storms up here at 7,000 feet in the Himalayan foothills, and the old building in which I live has, for over a hundred years, received the brunt of the wind and the rain as they sweep across the hills from the east.
We’d lived in the building for over ten years without any untoward happening. It had even taken the shock of an earthquake without sustaining any major damage: it is difficult to tell the new cracks from the old.
It’s a three-storey building, and I live on the top floor with my adopted family—three children and their parents. The roof consists of corrugated tin sheets, the ceiling, of wooden boards. That’s the traditional hill station roof.
Ours had held fast in many a storm, but the wind that night was stronger than we’d ever known it. It was cyclonic in it intensity, and it came rushing at us with a high-pitched eerie wail. The old roof groaned and protested at the unrelieved pressure. It took this battering for several hours while the rain lashed against the windows, and the lights kept coming and going.
There was no question of sleeping, but we remained in bed for warmth and comfort. The fire had long since gone out, the chimney stack having collapsed, bringing down a shower of sooty rainwater.
After about four hours of buffeting, the roof could take it no longer. My bedroom faces east, so my portion of the roof was the first to go.
The wind got under it and kept pushing, until, with a ripping, groaning sound, the metal sheets shifted from their moorings, some of them dropping with claps like thunder onto the road below.
So that’s it, I thought, nothing worse can happen. As long as the ceiling stays on, I’m not getting out of my bed. We’ll pick up the roof in the morning.
Icy water cascading down on my face made me change my mind in a hurry. Leaping from my bed, I found that much of the ceiling had gone too. Water was pouring onto my open typewriter—the typewriter that had been my trusty companion for almost thirty years!—and onto the bedside radio, bed covers, and clothes’ cupboard. The only object that wasn’t receiving any rain was the potted philodendron, which could have done with a little watering.
Picking up my precious typewriter and abandoning the rest, I stumbled into the front sitting-room (cum library), only to find that a similar situation had developed there. Water was pouring through the wooden slats, raining down on the bookshelves.
By now I had been joined by the children, who had come to rescue me. Their section of the roof hadn’t gone as yet. Their parents were struggling to close a window that had burst open, letting in lashings of wind and rain.
‘Save the books!’ shouted Dolly, the youngest, and that became our rallying cry for the next hour or two.
I have open shelves, vulnerable to borrowers as well as to floods. Dolly and her brother picked up armfuls of books and carried them into their room. But the floor was now awash all over the apartment, so the books had to be piled on the beds. Dolly was helping me gather up some of my manuscripts when a large field rat leapt onto the desk in front of her. Dolly squealed and ran for the door.
‘It’s all right,’ said Mukesh, whose love of animals extends even to field rats. ‘He’s only sheltering from the storm.’
Big brother Rakesh whistled for our mongrel, Toby, but Toby wasn’t interested in rats just then. He had taken shelter in the kitchen, the only dry spot in the house.
At this point, two rooms were practically roofless, and the sky was frequently lighted up for us by flashes of lightning. There were fireworks inside too, as water sputtered and crackled along a damaged electric wire. Then the lights went out altogether, which in some ways made the house a safer place.
Prem, the children’s father, is at his best in an emergency, and he had already located and lit two kerosene lamps; so we continued to transfer books, papers, and clothes to the children’s room.
We noticed that the water on the floor was beginning to subside a little.
‘Where is it going?’ asked Dolly, for we could see no outlet.
‘Through the floor,’ said Mukesh. ‘Down to the rooms below.’ He was right, too. Cries of consternation from our neighbours told us that they were now having their share of the flood.
Our feet were freezing because there hadn’t been time to put on enough protective footwear, and in any case, shoes and slippers were awash. Tables and chairs were also piled high with books. I hadn’t realized the considerable size of my library until that night!
The available beds were pushed into the driest corner of the children’s room and there, huddled in blankets and quilts, we spent the remaining hours of the night, while the storm continued to threaten further mayhem.
But then the wind fell, and it began to snow. Through the door to the sitting-room I could see snowflakes drifting through the gaps in the ceiling, settling on picture frames, statuettes and miscellaneous ornaments. Mundane things like a glue bottle and a plastic doll took on a certain beauty when covered with soft snow. The clock on the wall had stopped and with its covering of snow reminded me of a painting by Salvador Dali. And my shaving brush looked ready for use!
Most of us dozed off.
I sensed that the direction of the wind had changed, and that it was now blowing from the west; it was making a rushing sound in the trees rather than in what remained of our roof. The clouds were scurrying away.
When the dawn broke, we found the windowpanes encrusted with snow and icicles. Then the rising sun struck through the gaps in the ceiling and turned everything to gold. Snow crystals glinted like diamonds on the empty bookshelves. I crept into my abandoned bedroom to find the philodendron looking like a Christmas tree.
Prem went out to find a carpenter and a tinsmith, while the rest of us started putting things in the sun to dry out. And by evening, we’d put much of the roof on again. Vacant houses are impossible to find in Mussoorie, so there was no question of moving.
But it’s a much-improved roof now, and I look forward to approaching storms with some confidence!
Up at Sisters Bazaar
A few years ago I spent a couple of summers up at Sisters Bazaar, at the farthest extremity of Mussoorie’s Landour cantonment—an area as yet untouched by the tentacles of a bulging, disoriented octopus of a hill-station.
There were a number of residences up at Sisters, most of them old houses, but they were at some distance from each other, separated by clumps of oak o
r stands of deodar. After sundown, flying-foxes swooped across the roads, and the nightjar set up its nocturnal chant. Here, I thought, I would live like Thoreau at Walden Pond—alone, aloof, far from the strife and cacophony of the vast amusement park that was now Mussoorie. How wrong I was proved to be!
To begin with, I found that almost everyone on the hillside was busily engaged in writing a book. Was the atmosphere really so conducive to creative activity, or was it just a conspiracy to put me out of business? The discovery certainly put me out of my stride completely, and it was several weeks before I could write a word.
There was a retired Brigadier who was writing a novel about World War II, and a retired Vice-Admiral who was writing a book about a Rear Admiral. Mrs S, who had been an actress in the early days of the talkies, was writing poems in the manner of Wordsworth; and an ageing (or rather, resurrected) ex-Maharani was penning her memoirs. There was also an elderly American who wrote salacious bestselling novels about India. It was said of him that he looked like Hemingway and wrote like Charles Bronson.
With all this frenzied literary activity going on around me, it wasn’t surprising that I went into shock for some time.
I was saved (or so I thought) by a ‘far-out’ ex-hippie and ex-Hollywood scriptwriter who decided he would produce a children’s film based on one of my stories. It was a pleasant little story, and all would have gone well if our producer friend hadn’t returned from some high-altitude poppy fields in a bit of a trance and failed to notice that his leading lady was in the family way. Although the events of the story all took place in a single day, the film itself took about four months to complete, with the result that her figure altered considerably from scene to scene until, by late evening of the same day, she was displaying all the glories of imminent motherhood.
Naturally, the film was never released. I believe our producer friend now runs a health-food restaurant in Sydney.
I shared a large building (it had paper-thin walls), with several other tenants, one of whom, a French girl in her thirties, was learning to play the sitar. She and her tabla-playing companion would sleep by day, but practise all through the night, making sleep impossible for me or anyone else in my household. I would try singing operatic arias to drown her out, but you can’t sing all night and she always outlasted me. Even a raging forest fire, which forced everyone else to evacuate the building for a night, did not keep her from her sitar any more than Rome burning kept Nero from his fiddle. Finally I got one of the chowkidar’s children to pour sand into her instrument, and that silenced her for some time.
Another tenant who was there for a short while was a Dutchman, (yes, we were a cosmopolitan lot in the 1980s, before visa regulations were tightened) who claimed to be an acupuncturist. He showed me his box of needles and promised to cure me of the headaches that bothered me from time to time. But before he could start the treatment, he took a tumble while coming home from a late night party and fell down the khud into a clump of cacti, the sharppointed kind, which punctured the more tender parts of his anatomy. He had to spend a couple of weeks in the local mission hospital, receiving more conventional treatment, and he never did return to cure my headaches.
How did Sisters Bazaar come by its name?
Well, in the bad old, good old days, when Landour was a convalescent station for sick and weary British soldiers, the nursing sisters had their barracks in the long, low building that lines the road opposite Prakash’s Store. On the old maps this building is called ‘The Sisters’. For a time it belonged to Dev Anand’s family, but I believe it has since changed hands.
Of a ‘bazaar’ there is little evidence, although Prakash’s Store must be at least a hundred years old. It is famous for its home-made cheese, and tradition has it that several generations of the Nehru family have patronized the store, from Motilal Nehru in the 1920s, to Rahul and his mother in more recent times.
I am more of a jam-fancier myself, and although I no longer live in the area, I do sometimes drop into the store for a can of raspberry or apricot or plum jam, made from the fruit brought here from the surrounding villages.
Further down the road is Dahlia Bank, where dahlias once covered the precipitous slope (known as the ‘Eyebrow’), behind the house. The old military hospital, (which was opened in 1827) has been altered and expanded to house the present Defence Institute of Work Study. Beyond it lies Mount Hermon, with the lonely grave of a lady who perished here one wild and windy winter, 150 years ago. And close by lies the lovely Oakville Estate, where at least three generations of the multi-talented Alter family have lived. They do everything from acting in Hindi films to climbing greasy poles, Malkhumb-style. From wise old Bob to Steve and Andy, those Alter boys are mighty handy.
It is cold up there in winter, and I now live about 500 feet lower down, where it is only slightly warmer. But my walks take me up the hill from time to time. Most of the unusual eccentric people I have written about have gone away, but others, equally interesting, have taken their place. But for news of them you’ll have to wait for my autobiography. The Mussoorie gossips will then get a dose of their own medicine. Let them start having sleepless nights.
Bhabiji’s House
(My neighbours in Rajouri Garden back in the 1960s were the Kamal family. This entry from my journal, which I wrote on one of my later visits, describes a typical day in that household.)
At first light there is a tremendous burst of birdsong from the guava tree in the little garden. Over a hundred sparrows wake up all at once and give tongue to whatever it is that sparrows have to say to each other at five o’clock on a foggy winter’s morning in Delhi.
In the small house, people sleep on; that is, everyone except Bhabiji—Granny—the head of the lively Punjabi middle-class family with whom I nearly always stay when I am in Delhi.
She coughs, stirs, groans, grumbles and gets out of bed. The fire has to be lit, and food prepared for two of her sons to take to work. There is a daughterin-law, Shobha, to help her; but the girl is not very bright at getting up in the morning. Actually, it is this way: Bhabiji wants to show up her daughter-in-law; so, no matter how hard Shobha tries to be up first, Bhabiji forestalls her. The old lady does not sleep well, anyway; her eyes are open long before the first sparrow chirps, and as soon as she sees her daughter-in-law stirring, she scrambles out of bed and hurries to the kitchen. This gives her the opportunity to say: ‘What good is a daughter-in-law when I have to get up to prepare her husband’s food?’
The truth is that Bhabiji does not like anyone else preparing her sons’ food.
She looks no older than when I first saw her ten years ago. She still has complete control over a large family and, with tremendous confidence and enthusiasm, presides over the lives of three sons, a daughter, two daughters-in-law and fourteen grandchildren. This is a joint family (there are not many left in a big city like Delhi), in which the sons and their families all live together as one unit under their mother’s benevolent (and sometimes slightly malevolent) autocracy. Even when her husband was alive, Bhabiji dominated the household.
The eldest son, Shiv, has a separate kitchen, but his wife and children participate in all the family celebrations and quarrels. It is a small miracle how everyone (including myself when I visit) manages to fit into the house; and a stranger might be forgiven for wondering where everyone sleeps, for no beds are visible during the day. That is because the beds—light wooden frames with rough string across—are brought in only at night, and are taken out first thing in the morning and kept in the garden shed.
As Bhabiji lights the kitchen fire, the household begins to stir, and Shobha joins her mother-in-law in the kitchen. As a guest I am privileged and may get up last. But my bed soon becomes an island battered by waves of scurrying, shouting children, eager to bathe, dress, eat and find their school books. Before I can get up, someone brings me a tumbler of hot sweet tea. It is a brass tumbler and burns my fingers; I have yet to learn how to hold one properly. Punjabis like their tea with lots of
milk and sugar—so much so that I often wonder why they bother to add any tea.
Ten years ago, ‘bed tea’ was unheard of in Bhabiji’s house. Then, the first time I came to stay, Kamal, the youngest son, told Bhabiji: ‘My friend is angrez. He must have tea in bed.’ He forgot to mention that I usually took my morning cup at seven; they gave it to me at five. I gulped it down and went to sleep again. Then, slowly, others in the household began indulging in morning cups of tea. Now everyone, including the older children, has ‘bed tea’. They bless my English forebears for instituting the custom; I bless the Punjabis for perpetuating it.
Breakfast is by rota, in the kitchen. It is a tiny room and accommodates only four adults at a time. The children have eaten first; but the smallest children, Shobha’s toddlers, keep coming in and climbing over us. Says Bhabiji of the youngest and most mischievous: ‘He lives only because God keeps a special eye on him.’
Kamal, his elder brother Arun and I sit crossiegged and barefooted on the floor while Bhabiji serves us hot parathas stuffed with potatoes and onions, along with omelettes, an excellent dish. Arun then goes to work on his scooter, while Kamal catches a bus for the city, where he attends an art college. After they have gone, Bhabiji and Shobha have their breakfast.
By nine o’clock everyone who is still in the house is busy doing something. Shobha is washing clothes. Bhabiji has settled down on a cot with a huge pile of spinach, which she methodically cleans and chops up. Madhu, her fourteen-year-old granddaughter, who attends school only in the afternoons, is washing down the sitting room floor. Madhu’s mother is a teacher in a primary school in Delhi, and earns a pittance of Rs 150 a month. Her husband went to England ten years ago, and never returned; he does not send any money home.
Madhu is made attractive by the gravity of her countenance. She is always thoughtful, reflective; seldom speaks, smiles rarely (but looks very pretty when she does). I wonder what she thinks about as she scrubs floors, prepares meals with Bhabiji, washes dishes and even finds a few hard-pressed moments for her school work. She is the Cinderella of the house. Not that she has to put up with anything like a cruel stepmother. Madhu is Bhabiji’s favourite. She has made herself so useful that she is above all reproach. Apart from that, there is a certain measure of aloofness about her—she does not get involved in domestic squabbles—and this is foreign to a household in which everyone has something to say for himself or herself. Her two young brothers are constantly being reprimanded; but no one says anything to Madhu. Only yesterday morning, when clothes were being washed and Madhu was scrubbing the floor, the following dialogue took place.