The Rupa Book of Heartwarming & The Rupa Book of Wicked Stories

by Ruskin Bond

  One night, like a bolt from the blue, Diru came to visit us. His hand grip was still firm, his eyes were still honest but he looked rather thin and worn out. The bright look in his face was absent and his crisp, curly hair, which covered his head in dark wavelets, had become a trifle scanty. No comments were made and though he chatted to us for some time I could see that he was rather crumpled up. And then, of course, he told us the story. He commenced by saying that after his recent experiences he was trying to find his feet once more by meeting his old friends.

  Hesitantly, he told us what had happened. It was just an ordinary tale of a love affair which had misfired, but Diru felt that his world had crumbled. He had met the girl quite accidentally at a club. Now Diru is no club vallah but often these incidents pan out like that. He happened to go to the India Club, one night, for a drink with some friends. And the girl was there. She had come down from Bangalore for a holiday in the company of an Indian film star. The girl was small, demure, a pure vegetarian and according to Diru's biased judgment, kittenishly attractive.

  Poor Diru. What with building bridges, educating his brothers, making matches for his younger sisters and planting coconut trees in the jungle, his experiences with women, up till that point, could have been written down in one line. He fell head over heels. For three months he poured at the girl's dainty feet his time, his money and his utter devotion. The girl led him on and Diru soaked her in. He learnt to worship the way she walked, talked, dressed, cooked her vegetarian foods and the subtle manner in which she made him dance to her every mood. She even made him a vegetarian. I always credited Diru with sober, steady judgment and I also thought he had a fine, mature mind. But the girl knocked him off his feet and who worries about a fine, mature mind in such a situation! Diru was far too honourable to play around with any woman. He proposed marriage. She made excuses but did not refuse. On a day of gloom for Diru the girl flew back to India. She left only a brief note for Diru thanking him for his wonderful attention and company. She added that she had quite recovered from the fit of blues she had developed after a dispute with her husband and told him not to worry because she would live happily ever after.

  Diru brooded for days and days. I took him fishing. I gave him books to read. I did everything I could to put his mind off the one track groove into which it had fallen. It was a pretty deep groove. Diru was determined to go and spend a holiday in India when his depleted finances permitted him to do so. No, he was not going there to look for the girl. She had let him down. He would go to India and find another Brahmin girl. Only a Brahmin girl would suit his tastes after his recent experiences.

  Now, I am no match-maker but I hated seeing Diru going to pieces. I knew there was one girl who could make Diru forget. That girl was Mithra. She was a real beauty, and she fitted in with the theory I expounded to Diru. Marry your own kind. Mithra was Diru's kind. She was a marvellous girl. She had received an excellent education, she was an efficient housekeeper, a good cook and most of all she was a dream to look at. Nothing old fashioned about Mithra. She used lipstick and nail polish, tied her hair in a lovely bun on the top of her shapely head and when she wore a red saree draped round her luscious figure she looked like a real film star in flesh and blood. And she was not sophisticated. That is what made her most attractive. She enjoyed the simple things in life.

  But of course there was a snag. There are always snags for nice girls like Mithra. She was twenty-two. All the girls in Mithra's home town marry before they are twenty. But no one wanted to marry Mithra. Her old man had been to jail for some lark. Her old man was fond of playing larks with the tax department. Where Mithra comes from it is a terrible crime for a man to go to jail. It's not a crime to have larks with the tax department but it was a crime for Mithra's old man to have allowed himself to be caught and put in jail. The people way up North think like that and when the people up North think in a certain way, nobody from the East, West or the South can get them to change their ways of thought.

  Well, I put on my thinking cap and consulted my old lady. We are both sentimental and all that and we tried to plan it so that Diru and Mithra could meet. But the North, where Mithra lives, is a long way off. There was little excuse for us to take Diru that far without telling him the why and the wherefore. But Diru knows I am nuts on fishing and that five hundred miles is not too far for me. So one fine day we set off for the North. I wrote to Mithra and told her that I was coming to the North on business and could she kindly pose for me in her red saree. I had taken a colour picture of Mithra before and it was difficult to explain why I wanted another. But I took a chance on that and offered no explanation. Besides, Mithra knows that I am not too good in the head sometimes and maybe she just overlooked the fact that I had a picture of her in her red saree.

  When Diru and Mithra met I knew that everything was all right. They had nothing to say to each other. Neither attempted to be polite and make small talk. Diru gazed his fill. I watched him with a quick side glance the moment he saw Mithra. I could scarcely suppress a smile. There was a swift, startled look in his eyes. His mental reflexes were registering some new lines of thought.

  We had a superb meal with Mithra and we teased her about her concern for her figure when she ate sparingly. She gave us curried chicken, fried fish and prawn salad with tasty country rice. We left Diru alone and were surprised to find that he too enjoyed the meal, forgetting, if you please, that he was a vegetarian by persuasion and not by conviction. We secretly hoped he would also forget his coy charmer from India.

  On leaving, we asked Mithra when she would be in Colombo again. She told us that she might come down for a short holiday during Easter.

  We went to see Mithra during the holidays. She stayed with her old man who had a house in the city. Diru went with us and soon he was going without us. Diru started cheering up. The brightness came back to his face and he no longer behaved like he had slipped a disc in his mind. He stopped moping and went back to building good bridges and planting coconut in the jungle. But just when my old lady and I thought everything was going right the dragons entered the arena. These, according to my old lady, are underground dragons. They work in the background. From the day Diru proposed marriage to Mithra the dragons set to work. They compared horoscope, family trees, caste and creed. In the end both sides were against the marriage. That is not unusual in the Northern land of the Palmyrah.

  There was one way out of the tangle. I suggested that they should elope. My old lady bristled, all her hackles out. They must have a proper wedding, she insisted. It was no use my pointing out to her that this orange blossom mentality was the mythical basis of the feminine belief that women rule the world. She went to see Mithra's mother, who told her that a scholarship to go abroad had been arranged for Mithra and that the girl would be leaving in two months to complete her studies.

  That made matters easy. At this end we fixed a scholarship for Diru in an engineering institution in the same country. We also fixed the same ship and the same date of departure, unknown, of course, to the dragons. Diru went on board with his dragons fairly early, on our advice and we saw to it that his dragons and Mithra's dragons did not meet. We saw both parties off with the usual farewells. But going back was not our responsibility. Both parties of dragons waited till the last moment to come off the ship. They had to return on the same launch. That must have been the first time a humble harbour boat became a battlefield for civilians. My old lady and I hopped a lift on the Customs launch.

  Diru and Mithra were married on board. They have been away for three years. The Americans like them and they like the Americans. So they are in no hurry to come back to the dragons. They have a little boy and a little girl. The boy is like Mithra and the girl like her father. But women are perverse and my old lady says it should have been the other way round. The boy should have been like Diru and the girl like Mithra. And she says it like I am to blame. I never argue with my old lady about such complicated issues but I still don't see how I could have arranged that
to her satisfaction. And besides, what does it matter? They are both bound to be handsome children with such good-looking parents.

  THE TREE LOVER

  RUSKIN BOND

  I was never able to get over the feeling that plants and trees loved Grandfather with as much tenderness as he loved them. I was sitting beside him on the verandah steps one morning, when I noticed the tendril of a creeping vine that was trailing near my feet. As we sat there, in the soft sunshine of a north Indian winter, I saw that the tendril was moving very slowly away from me and towards Grandfather. Twenty minutes later it had crossed the verandah step and was touching Grandfather's feet.

  There is probably a scientific explanation for the plant's behaviour—something to do with light and warmth—but I like to think that it moved that way simply because it was fond of Grandfather. One felt like drawing close to him. Sometimes when I sat alone beneath a tree I would feel a little lonely or lost; but as soon as Grandfather joined me, the garden would become a happy place, the tree itself more friendly.

  Grandfather had served many years in the Indian Forest Service, and so it was natural that he should know and understand and like trees. On his retirement from the Service, he had built a bungalow on the outskirts of Dehra, planting trees all round it: limes, mangoes, oranges and guavas; also eucalyptus, jacaranda and the Persian lilac. In the fertile Doon valley, plants and trees grew tall and strong.

  There were other trees in the compound before the house was built, including an old peepul which had forced its way through the walls of an abandoned outhouse, knocking the bricks down with its vigorous growth. Peepul trees are great show-offs. Even when there is no breeze, their broad-chested, slim-waisted leaves will spin like tops, determined to attract your attention and invite you into the shade.

  Grandmother had wanted the peepul tree cut down, but Grandfather had said, 'Let it be. We can always build another outhouse.'

  The gardener, Dhuki, who was a Hindu, was pleased that we had allowed the tree to live. Peepul trees are sacred to Hindus, and some people believe that ghosts live in the branches.

  'If we cut the tree down, wouldn't the ghosts go away?' I asked.

  'I don't know,' said Grandfather. 'Perhaps they'd come into the house.'

  Dhuki wouldn't walk under the tree at night. He said that once, when he was a youth, he had wandered beneath a peepul tree late at night, and that something heavy had fallen with a thud on his shoulders. Since then he had always walked with a slight stoop, he explained.

  'Nonsense,' said Grandmother, who didn't believe in ghosts. 'He got his stoop from squatting on his haunches year after year, weeding with that tiny spade of his!'

  I never saw any ghosts in our peepul tree. There are peepul trees all over India, and people sometimes leave offerings of milk and flowers beneath them to keep the spirits happy. But since no one left any offerings under our tree, I expect the ghosts left in disgust, to look for peepul trees where there was both board and lodging.

  Grandfather was about sixty, a lean active man who still rode his bicycle at great speed. He had stopped climbing trees a year previously, when he had got to the top of the jack-fruit tree and had been unable to come down again. We'd had to fetch a ladder for him.

  Grandfather bathed quite often but got back into his gardening clothes immediately after the bath. During meals, ladybirds or caterpillars would sometimes walk off his shirt-sleeves and wander about on the tablecloth, and this always annoyed Grandmother.

  She grumbled at Grandfather a lot, but he didn't mind, because he knew she loved him.

  My favourite tree was the banyan which grew behind the house. Its spreading branches, which hung to the ground and took root again, formed a number of twisting passageways. The tree was older than the house, older than my grandparents; I could hide in its branches, behind a screen of thick green leaves, and spy on the world below.

  The banyan tree was a world in itself, populated with small animals and large insects. While the leaves were still pink and tender, they would be visited by the delicate map butterfly, who left her eggs in their care. The 'honey' on the leaves—a sweet, sticky smear—also attracted the little striped squirrels, who soon grew used to having me in the tree and became quite bold, accepting gram from my hand.

  At night the tree was visited by the hawk cuckoo. Its shrill nagging cry kept us awake on hot summer nights. Indians called the bird 'Paos-ala', which means 'Rain is coming!' But according to Grandfather, when the bird was in full cry it seemed to be shouting: 'Oh dear, oh dear! How very hot it's getting! We feel it… we feel it… WE FEEL IT!'

  Grandfather wasn't content with planting trees in our garden. During the rains we would walk into the jungle beyond the river-bed, armed with cuttings and saplings, and these we would plant in the forest, beside the tall Sal and Shisham trees.

  'But no one ever comes here,' I protested, the first time we did this. 'Who is going to see them?'

  'We're not planting for people only,' said Grandfather. 'We're planting for the forest—and for the birds and animals who live here and need more food and shelter.'

  He told me how men, and not only birds and animals, needed trees—for keeping the desert away, for attracting rain, for preventing the banks of rivers from being washed away, and for wild plants and grasses to grow beneath.

  'And for timber?' I asked, pointing to the Sal and Shisham trees.

  'Yes, and for timber. But men are cutting down the trees without replacing them. For every tree that's felled, we must plant two. Otherwise, one day there'll be no forests at all, and the world will become one great desert.'

  The thought of a world without trees became a sort of nightmare for me—it's one reason why I shall never want to live on the treeless Moon—and I helped Grandfather in his tree-planting with even greater enthusiasm. He taught me a poem by George Morris, and we would recite it together:

  Woodman, spare that tree!

  Touch not a single bough!

  In youth it sheltered me,

  And I'll protect it now.

  'One day the trees will move again,' said Grandfather.

  'They've been standing still for thousands of years, but one day they'll move again. There was a time when trees could walk about like people, but along came the Devil and cast a spell over them, rooting them to one place. But they're always trying to move—see how they reach out with their arms!—and some of them, like the banyan tree with its travelling roots, manage to get quite far!'

  In the autumn, Grandfather took me to the hills. The deodars (Indian cedars), oaks, chestnuts and maples were very different from the trees I had grown up with in Dehra. The broad leaves of the horse chestnut had turned yellow, and smooth brown chestnuts lay scattered on the roads. Grandfather and I filled our pockets with them, then climbed the slope of a bare hill and started planting the chestnuts in the ground.

  I don't know if they ever came up, because I never went there again. Goats and cattle grazed freely on the hill, and, if the trees did come up in the spring, they may well have been eaten; but I like to think that somewhere in the foothills of the Himalayas there is a grove of chestnut trees, and that birds and flying foxes and cicadas have made their homes in them.

  Back in Dehra, we found an island, a small rocky island in the middle of a dry riverbed. It was one of those river-beds, so common in the Doon valley, which are completely dry in summer but flooded during the monsoon rains. A small mango tree was growing in the middle of the island, and Grandfather said, 'If a mango can grow here, so can other trees.'

  As soon as the rains set in—and while the river could still be crossed—we set out with a number of tamarind, laburnum and coral-tree saplings and cuttings, and spent the day planting them on the island.

  When the monsoon set in, the trees appeared to be flourishing.

  The monsoon season was the time for rambling about. At every turn there was something new to see. Out of earth and rock and leafless bough, the magic touch of the monsoon rains had brought life and g
reenness. You could almost see the broad-leaved vines grow. Plants sprang up in the most unlikely places. A peepul would take root in the ceiling, a mango would sprout on the windowsill. We did not like to remove them; but they had to go, if the house was to be kept from falling down.

  'If you want to live in a tree, it's all right by me,' said Grandmother. 'But I like having a roof over my head, and I'm not going to have it brought down by the jungle!'

  The common monsoon sights along the Indian roads were always picturesque—the wide plains, with great herds of smoke-coloured, delicate-limbed cattle being driven slowly home for the night, accompanied by several ungainly buffaloes, and flocks of goats and black long-tailed sheep. Then you came to a pond, where some buffaloes were enjoying themselves, with no part of them visible but the tips of their noses, while on their backs were a number of merry children, perfectly and happily naked.

  The banyan tree really came to life during the monsoon, when the branches were thick with scarlet figs. Humans couldn't eat the berries, but the many birds that gathered in the tree—gossipy rosy pastors, quarrelsome mynahs, cheerful bulbuls and coppersmiths, and sometimes a noisy, bullying crow—feasted on them. And when night fell and the birds were resting, the dark flying foxes flapped heavily about the tree, chewing and munching loudly as they clambered over the branches.

  The tree crickets were a band of willing artists who started their singing at almost any time of the day but preferably in the evenings. Delicate pale green creatures with transparent wings, they were hard to find amongst the lush monsoon foliage; but once found, a tap on the bush or leaf on which one of them sat would put an immediate end to its performance.