by Ruskin Bond
‘What is it you want?’ I asked. ‘Are you staying here?’
He did not reply but looked past me, possibly through me, and then walked silently into the room. I stood there, bewildered and awestruck, as he strode across to my bed, smoothed out the sheets and patted down my pillow. He then walked over to the next room and came back with a glass and a jug of water, which he placed on the bedside table. As if that were not enough, he picked up my day clothes, folded them neatly and placed them on a vacant chair. Then, just as unobtrusively and without so much as a glance in my direction, he left the room and walked out into the night.
Early next morning, as the sun came up like thunder over the Bay of Bengal, I went down to the sea again, picking my way over the puddles of human excreta that decorated parts of the beach. Well, you can’t have everything. The world might be more beautiful without the human presence; but then, who would appreciate it?
Back at the rest house for breakfast, I was reminded of my visitor of the previous night.
‘Who was the tall gentleman who came to my room last night?’ I asked. ‘He looked like a butler. Smartly dressed, very dignified.’
The caretaker and the gardener exchanged meaningful glances.
‘You tell him,’ said the caretaker to his companion.
‘It must have been Hazoor Ali,’ said the gardener, nodding. ‘He was the orderly, the personal servant of Mr Robbins, the port commissioner – the Englishman who lived here.’
‘But that was over sixty years ago,’ I said. ‘They must all be dead.’
‘Yes, all are dead, sir. But sometimes the ghost of Hazoor Ali appears, especially if one of our guests reminds him of his old master. He was quite devoted to him, sir. In fact, he received this bungalow as a parting gift when Mr Robbins left the country. But unable to maintain it, he sold it to the government and returned to his home in Cuttack. He died many years ago, but revisits this place sometimes. Do not feel alarmed, sir. He means no harm. And he does not appear to everyone – you are the lucky one this year! I have but seen him twice. Once, when I took service here twenty years ago, and then, last year, the night before the cyclone. He came to warn us, I think. Went to every door and window and made sure they were secured. Never said a word. Just vanished into the night.’
‘And it’s time for me to vanish by day,’ I said, getting my things ready. I had to be in Bhubaneswar by late afternoon, to board the plane for Delhi. I was sorry it had been such a short stay. I would have liked to spend a few days in Gopalpur, wandering about its backwaters, old roads, mango groves, fishing villages, sandy inlets… Another time perhaps. In this life, if I am so lucky. Or the next, if I am luckier still.
At the airport in Bhubaneswar, the security asked me for my photo-identity. ‘Driving licence, pan card, passport? Anything with your picture on it will do, since you have an e-ticket,’ he explained.
I do not have a driving licence and have never felt the need to carry my pan card with me. Luckily, I always carry my passport on my travels. I looked for it in my little travel-bag and then in my suitcase, but couldn’t find it. I was feeling awkward fumbling in all my pockets, when another senior officer came to my rescue. ‘It’s all right. Let him in. I know Mr Ruskin Bond,’ he called out, and beckoned me inside. I thanked him and hurried into the check-in area.
All the time in the flight, I was trying to recollect where I might have kept my passport. Possibly tucked away somewhere inside the suitcase, I thought. Now that my baggage was sealed at the airport, I decided to look for it when I reached home.
A day later I was back in my home in the hills, tired after a long road journey from Delhi. I like travelling by road, there is so much to see, but the ever-increasing volume of traffic turns it into an obstacle race most of the time. To add to my woes, my passport was still missing. I looked for it everywhere – my suitcase, travel-bag, in all my pockets.
I gave up the search. Either I had dropped it somewhere, or I had left it at Gopalpur. I decided to ring up and check with the rest house staff the next day.
It was a frosty night, bitingly cold, so I went to bed early, well-covered with razai and blanket. Only two nights previously I had been sleeping under a fan!
It was a windy night, the windows were rattling; and the old tin roof was groaning, a loose sheet flapping about and making a frightful din.
I slept only fitfully.
When the wind abated, I heard someone knocking on my front door.
‘Who’s there?’ I called, but there was no answer.
The knocking continued, insistent, growing louder all the time.
‘Who’s there? Kaun hai?’ I call again.
Only that knocking.
Someone in distress, I thought. I’d better see who it is. I got up shivering, and walked barefoot to the front door. Opened it slowly, opened it wider, someone stepped out of the shadows.
Hazoor Ali salaamed, entered the room, and as in Gopalpur, he walked silently into the room. It was lying in disarray because of my frantic search for my passport. He arranged the room, removed my garments from my travel-bag, folded them and placed them neatly upon the cupboard shelves. Then, he did a salaam again and waited at the door.
Strange, I thought. If he did the entire room why did he not set the travel-bag in its right place? Why did he leave it lying on the floor? Possibly he didn't know where to keep it; he left the last bit of work for me. I picked up the bag to place it on the top shelf. And there, from its front pocket my passport fell out, on to the floor.
I turned to look at Hazoor Ali, but he had already walked out into the cold darkness.
And Now We are Twelve
eople often ask me why I’ve chosen to live in Mussoorie for so long – almost forty years, without any significant breaks.
‘I forgot to go away,’ I tell them, but of course, that isn’t the real reason.
The people here are friendly, but then people are friendly in a great many other places. The hills, the valleys are beautiful; but they are just as beautiful in Kulu or Kumaon.
‘This is where the family has grown up and where we all live,’ I say, and those who don’t know me are puzzled because the general impression of the writer is of a reclusive old bachelor.
Unmarried I may be, but single I am not. Not since Prem came to live and work with me in 1970. A year later, he was married. Then his children came along and stole my heart; and when they grew up, their children came along and stole my wits. So now I’m an enchanted bachelor, head of a family of twelve. Sometimes I go out to bat, sometimes to bowl, but generally I prefer to be twelfth man, carrying out the drinks.
In the old days, when I was a solitary writer living on baked beans, the prospect of my suffering from obesity was very remote. Now there is a little more of author than there used to be, and the other day five-year-old Gautam patted me on my tummy (or balcony, as I prefer to call it) and remarked; ‘Dada, you should join the WWF.’
‘I’m already a member,’ I said, ‘I joined the World Wildlife Fund years ago.’
‘Not that,’ he said. ‘I mean the World Wrestling Federation.’
If I have a tummy today, it’s thanks to Gautam’s grandfather and now his mother who, over the years, have made sure that I am well-fed and well-proportioned.
Forty years ago, when I was a lean young man, people would look at me and say, ‘Poor chap, he’s definitely undernourished. What on earth made him take up writing as a profession?’ Now they look at me and say, ‘You wouldn’t think he was a writer, would you? Too well nourished!’
It was a cold, wet and windy March evening when Prem came back from the village with his wife and first-born child, then just four months old. In those days, they had to walk to the house from the bus stand; it was a half-hour walk in the cold rain, and the baby was all wrapped up when they entered the front room. Finally, I got a glimpse of him. And he of me, and it was friendship at first sight. Little Rakesh (as he was to be called) grabbed me by the nose and held on. He did not have muc
h of a nose to grab, but he had a dimpled chin and I played with it until he smiled.
The little chap spent a good deal of his time with me during those first two years in Maplewood – learning to crawl, to toddle, and then to walk unsteadily about the little sitting-room. I would carry him into the garden, and later, up the steep gravel path to the main road. Rakesh enjoyed these little excursions, and so did I, because in pointing out trees, flowers, birds, butterflies, beetles, grasshoppers, et al, I was giving myself a chance to observe them better instead of just taking them for granted.
In particular, there was a pair of squirrels that lived in the big oak tree outside the cottage. Squirrels are rare in Mussoorie though common enough down in the valley. This couple must have come up for the summer. They became quite friendly, and although they never got around to taking food from our hands, they were soon entering the house quite freely. The sitting room window opened directly on to the oak tree whose various denizens – ranging from stag-beetles to small birds and even an acrobatic bat – took to darting in and out of the cottage at various times of the day or night.
Life at Maplewood was quite idyllic, and when Rakesh’s baby brother, Suresh, came into the world, it seemed we were all set for a long period of domestic bliss; but at such times tragedy is often lurking just around the corner. Suresh was just over a year old when he contracted tetanus. Doctors and hospitals were of no avail. He suffered – as any child would from this terrible affliction – and left this world before he had a chance of getting to know it. His parents were broken-hearted. And I feared for Rakesh, for he wasn’t a very healthy boy, and two of his cousins in the village had already succumbed to tuberculosis.
It was to be a difficult year for me. A criminal charge was brought against me for a slightly risqué story I’d written for a Bombay magazine. I had to face trial in Bombay and this involved three journeys there over a period of a year and a half, before an irate but perceptive judge found the charges baseless and gave me an honourable acquittal.
It’s the only time I’ve been involved with the law and I sincerely hope it is the last. Most cases drag on interminably, and the main beneficiaries are the lawyers. My trial would have been much longer had not the prosecutor died of a heart attack in the middle of the proceedings. His successor did not pursue it with the same vigour. His heart was not in it. The whole issue had started with a complaint by a local politician, and when he lost interest so did the prosecution. Nevertheless the trial, once begun, had to be seen through. The defence (organised by the concerned magazine) marshalled its witnesses (which included Nissim Ezekiel and the Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar). I made a short speech which couldn’t have been very memorable as I have forgotten it! And everyone, including the judge, was bored with the whole business. After that, I steered clear of controversial publications. I have never set out to shock the world. Telling a meaningful story was all that really mattered. And that is still the case.
I was looking forward to continuing our idyllic existence in Maplewood, but it was not to be. The powers-that-be, in the shape of the Public Works Department (PWD), had decided to build a ‘strategic’ road just below the cottage and without any warning to us, all the trees in the vicinity were felled (including the friendly old oak) and the hillside was rocked by explosives and bludgeoned by bulldozers. I decided it was time to move. Prem and Chandra (Rakesh’s mother) wanted to move too; not because of the road, but because they associated the house with the death of little Suresh, whose presence seemed to haunt every room, every corner of the cottage. His little cries of pain and suffering still echoed through the still hours of the night.
I rented rooms at the top of Landour, a good thousand feet higher up the mountain. Rakesh was now old enough to go to school, and every morning I would walk with him down to the little convent school near the clock tower. Prem would go to fetch him in the afternoon. The walk took us about half-an-hour, and on the way Rakesh would ask for a story and I would have to rack my brains in order to invent one. I am not the most inventive of writers, and fantastical plots are beyond me. My forte is observation, recollection, and reflection. Small boys prefer action. So I invented a leopard who suffered from acute indigestion because he’d eaten one human too many and a belt buckle was causing an obstruction.
This went down quite well until Rakesh asked me how the leopard got around the problem of the victim’s clothes.
‘The secret,’ I said, ‘is to pounce on them when their trousers are off!’
Not the stuff of which great picture books are made, but then, I’ve never attempted to write stories for beginners. Red Riding Hood’s granny-eating wolf always scared me as a small boy, and yet parents have always found it acceptable for toddlers. Possibly they feel grannies are expendable.
Mukesh was born around this time and Savitri (Dolly) a couple of years later. When Dolly grew older, she was annoyed at having been named Savitri (my choice), which is now considered very old-fashioned; so we settled for Dolly. I can understand a child’s dissatisfaction with given names.
My first name was Owen, which in Welsh means ‘brave’. As I am not in the least brave, I have preferred not to use it. One given name and one surname should be enough.
When my granny said, ‘But you should try to be brave, otherwise how will you survive in this cruel world?’ I replied: ‘Don’t worry, I can run very fast.’
Not that I’ve ever had to do much running, except when I was pursued by a lissome Australian lady who thought I’d make a good obedient husband. It wasn’t so much the lady I was running from, but the prospect of spending the rest of my life in some remote cattle station in the Australian outback. Anyone who has tried to drag me away from India has always met with stout resistance.
Up on the heights of Landour lived a motley crowd. My immediate neighbours included a Frenchwoman who played the sitar (very badly) all through the night; and a Spanish lady with two husbands, one of whom practised acupuncture – rather ineffectively as far as he was concerned, for he seemed to be dying of some mysterious debilitating disease. Another neighbour came and went rather mysteriously, and finally ended up in Tihar jail, having been apprehended at Delhi carrying a large amount of contraband hashish.
Apart from these and a few other colourful characters, the area was inhabitated by some very respectable people, retired brigadiers, air marshals and rear admirals, almost all of whom were busy writing their memoirs. I had to read or listen to extracts from their literary efforts. This was slow torture. A few years before, I had done a stint of editing for a magazine called Imprint. It had involved going through hundreds of badly written manuscripts, and in some cases (friends of the owner!) rewriting some of them for publication. One of life’s joys had been to throw up that particular job, and now here I was, besieged by all the top brass of the army, navy and air force, each one determined that I should read, inwardly digest, improve, and if possible find a publisher for their outpourings. Thank goodness they were all retired. I could not be shot or court-martialled. But at least two of them set their wives upon me, and these intrepid ladies would turn up around noon with my ‘homework’ – typescripts to read and edit! There was no escape. My own writing was of no consequence to them. I told them that I was taking sitar lessons, but they disapproved, saying I was more suited to the tabla.
When Prem discovered a set of vacant rooms further down the Landour slope, close to school and bazaar, I rented them without hesitation. This was Ivy Cottage. Come up and see me sometime, but leave your manuscripts behind.
When we came to Ivy Cottage in 1980, we were six, Dolly having just been born. Now, twenty-four years later, we are twelve. I think that’s a reasonable expansion. The increase has been brought about by Rakesh’s marriage twelve years ago, and Mukesh’s marriage two years ago. Both precipitated themselves into marriage when they were barely twenty, and both were lucky. Beena and Binita, who happen to be real sisters, have brightened and enlivened our lives with their happy, positive natures and the won
derful children they have brought into the world. More about them later.
Ivy Cottage has, on the whole, been kind to us, and particularly kind to me. Some houses like their occupants, others don’t. Maplewood, set in the shadow of the hill, lacked a natural cheerfulness; there was a settled gloom about the place. The house at the top of Landour was too exposed to the elements to have any sort of character. The wind moaning in the deodars may have inspired the sitar player but it did nothing for my writing. I produced very little up there.
On the other hand, Ivy Cottage – especially my little room facing the sunrise – has been conducive to creative work. Novellas, poems, essays, children’s stories, anthologies, have all come tumbling on to whatever sheets of paper happen to be nearest me. As I write by hand, I have only to grab for the nearest pad, loose sheet, page-proof or envelope whenever the muse take hold of me; which is surprisingly often.
I came here when I was nearing fifty. Now I’m approaching eighty, and instead of drying up, as some writers do in their later years, I find myself writing with as much ease and assurance as when I was twenty. And I enjoy writing, it’s not a burdensome task. I may not have anything of earth-shattering significance to convey to the world, but in conveying my sentiments to you, dear readers, and in telling you something about my relationship with people and the natural world, I hope to bring a little pleasure and sunshine into your life.
Life isn’t a bed of roses, not for any of us, and I have never had the comforts or luxuries that wealth can provide. But here I am, doing my own thing, in my own time and my own way. What more can I ask of life? Give me a big cash prize and I’d still be here. I happen to like the view from my window. And I like to have Gautam coming up to me, patting me on the tummy, and telling me that I’ll make a good goalkeeper one day.
It’s a Sunday morning, as I come to the conclusion of this chapter. There’s bedlam in the house. Siddharth’s football keeps smashing against the front door. Shrishti is practising her dance routine in the back verandah. Gautam has cut his finger and is trying his best to bandage it with cellotape. He is, of course, the youngest of Rakesh’s three musketeers, and probably the most independent-minded. Siddharth, now ten, is restless, never quite able to expend all his energy. ‘Does not pay enough attention,’ says his teacher. It must be hard for anyone to pay attention in a class of sixty! How does the poor teacher pay attention?