by Ruskin Bond
The valley has always been a seat of learning, as it is home to the finest educational institutions in the country. The Indian Military Academy trains young cadets, the Forest Research Institute is at the helm of research in ecological issues in India, the Wildlife Institute of India is internationally acclaimed for its efforts in protecting the flora and fauna of the subcontinent. One of the oldest institutions in the country, the Trignometrical Survey of India (TSI) has its headquarters here. Well-known and highly respected travel writer, Peter Hopkirk, came looking for information at TSI when he was working on his book, Quest for Kim. With a little help from this writer, he was able to go around the museum to pay his tributes to the great Indian cartographers and surveyors. His hook praises his visit to the valley. He writes of his memorable experience at TSI and the help he received in making this possible. Henrich Harrer too, in his book, Seven Years in Tibet tells of his understanding of life in the valley where he interned during the Second World War.
Apart from the intensely special symbiotic and symbolic relationship the valley has shared with local, national and international authors, there is also a complimentary culture of reading. Our family-run bookstore in Dehra Dun has grown, matured and developed, just like the readers of our town and the town itself. 'Thirty-five years ago, ours was a little bookstore on the first floor of the two-floor building we are in today. Gradually, we began recording more orders, needed more space, so we moved downstairs, to a room quarter the size of the current bookstore. A few years down, we had an increasing clientele, more books being published, more books being read, more books being ordered. We needed more shelf space, so we bought the shop next to ours, which belonged to a photographer who ran his studio from there. So many hooks after and to this day, we still need more shelf space, for the wide array of subjects we are required to stock, for the various readers who visit our store. While many like the standard page-turners in the bestsellers lists each month, we have an equal number of readers, asking for travel and religion, self-help and muscle building, patriarchy and anarchy. It's all a good sign. As long as people like to read, my grandfather often said to us, there is hope for a better tomorrow.
Our bookstore is a small seed my grandfather planted in Dehra Dun, which my father and his brothers began to run in the years shortly after Independence. The family tree of the bookstore traces back to Ferozpur Cantt in Punjab, where my grandfather ran a very large bookstore and trained us all. Today, my grandfather, Lala Narain Das is considered the founder of the book trade in India. Once he was confident of the training imparted, he sent each boy of the family out to a town in the country, to sow the seed of learning, to nurture it with the values he engrained, and to give back to the society around him.
For my father, just like it was for his father, a book is always like a friend. And, book-lovers thus are all friends. Our bookstore has always been a meeting place for thinking minds, a watering hole for the intellectually thirsty. Over the years, sitting behind the counter at the bookstore, I have had the privilege of meeting most of Dehra Dun's reading (and hence, thinking) public, its new and growing population, its ambitious adolescents and its nostalgic elders. Through these daily interactions, I have felt the pulse of a valley slowly spread its wings and grow into a town, a town that has learnt to adjust to the needs of its citizens and found itself on the national map as a city that has groomed itself, to become the capital of the hill state of Uttarakhand.
The days that I was at college, helping my father run the store after my lectures, there was a film theatre adjacent to our bookstore. It was called the Odeon Cinema and in those days, it ran English films. That was something the residents looked forward to, and before the show, the regulars would drop in at the bookstore to chat, browse and buy their books. We would get the odd phone call from a customer, requesting us to buy tickets for him for the next show because he was running late, or sometimes much before time for the matinee because he didn't want to miss a chance to watch the screening. For a particular customer, we had standing orders to buy two tickets for the first day first show, irrespective of the screening! There were an equal number of people, who initially did not necessary enjoy reading, but because there was time before the film, they would have no option but to wander in and browse and who over time, began visiting the bookstore as a matter of routine, long after the Cinema was broken down and made into the hotel that it is today.
We still have people dropping in, every other day, asking what happened to the Cinema or reminiscing of those simple and enjoyable evenings. These are either people who moved out then to find greener pastures and returned in remembrance of things past or those that have now retired and settled around the valley and visit the bookstore to refresh the memories of their youth spent here. Books about the area that tell the tales of the times that were are very popular. India's well-known author and someone the writer and our bookstore are fortunate to have as a friend, and a well-wisher, Ruskin Bond, first lived in Dehra Dun. His books talk of the verdant valley and of Mussoorie as it once used to be. He has the rare gift of being able to weave stories that appeal to all ages—young children, teenagers, and adults—and thus, his writing has immortalized the valley and the hill station of Mussoorie in the imagination of readers, forever. He is a master storyteller and commands a readership from ages seven to seventy, which is quite rare for contemporary writing in the world today. The valley now shares a very deep association with him, and his hooks not only have a huge readership in Dehra Dun and among visitors to the valley, but also across the country and other parts of the world.
Khushwant Singh, in his famous column, once wrote most judiciously, that the bookshops of a town are the barometer with which we can justly measure the intellectual strength of a city. And, after a book signing function at our bookstore, he carried a mention about it in the preceding week praising our collection of books. He thought, we were better stocked than most other cities he had been to. What better reflection of the valley's citizens than that!
The valley is famous for its educational institutions for the young—public schools like The Doon School and Welhams rank amongst the best and are deeply steeped in history. Their students have gone on to make a name for themselves in various spheres of life. Indira Gandhi used to visit Dehra Dun with her father. Her love for books brought her to our bookstore regularly. Later, she enrolled her sons at The Doon School and would visit our bookstore when she came down to see them. Even when she became Prime Minister and much after that, she chose to order her books from our bookstore. One of the main attributes of our old and cherished relationship with Indira Gandhi was her love for the environment. Since we publish and stock books on ecological issues, she was always keen to encourage and support us to help the larger cause of conservation. She passed her enthusiasm for reading and protection of the environment down to her son Rajiv, who carried on the legacy. He continued to patronize the bookstore much after.
Since teaching and education carry a great emphasis, the valley has always enjoyed an intellectual air. Schools use written literature as a source of study; children are encouraged to learn more through hooks. They are taught to develop the reading habit to widen their knowledge of the world. Since we have educational institutions, we naturally have educationists, and they too, are driven by a quest for learning. Literature, politics, art, defence and military affairs, ecology and environment, anthropology and history are all subjects that have readers.
Dehra Dun has always been home to citizens who perceive the world through the pages of the books they read. It is a place where most people dream of spending their old age, by a cosy fire in winter, huddled on a rocking chair, curled around a book. This is one reason the city has blossomed—retired educationists, environmentalists, government employees and army officials choose Dehra Dun over other cities to settle down in their old age. They bring with them the knowledge and wisdom that experience unfolds-making the city a 'thinking' one, one that is conscientious and mindful. They are aware of it
s rich natural, architectural and intellectual heritage and work towards preserving it.
Such social activism is not possible without a constant sense of awareness and understanding of the changing times. This is what books and literature provide—and we can proudly boast that in this supersonic age of cyber-rule, our quaint valley of grey hair and green hedges, has three general bookstores and several others that stock other specialized subjects. Most evenings, these bookstores are buzzing with browsers, steaming with debate and discussion.
'That is one of the myriad reasons for the increasing number of tourists to the valley. Since our bookstore is listed in the Lonely Planet Guide for India, we often find ourselves providing necessary tourist information about transport, accommodation and food to customers, and quite happily so! The nature of a good bookstore reflects the internal countenance of a city—just like Cambridge and Oxford are both centres of learning that can boast of their bookstores—Cambridge for Heffers' and Oxford for its Blackwells, we find solace in the pride our citizens display in our bookstore.
Dehra Dun has always been a sophisticated town of thinkers and thinking. It continues to he a town that cherishes a reputation, for its emphasis on education and learning. It is a shiningly optimistic sign for future generations, on this otherwise rather bumpy road of the not-so-distant future of altering forms of information.
THE LITTLE GHOST
Hugh Walpole
I
Ghosts? I looked across the table at Truscott and had a sudden desire to impress him. Truscott has, before now, invited confidences in just that same way, with his flat impassivity, his air of not caring whether you say anything to him or no, his determined indifference to your drama and your pathos. On this particular evening he had been less impassive. He had himself turned the conversation towards spiritualism, seances, and all that world of humbug, as he believed it to be, and suddenly I saw, or fancied that I saw, an real invitation in his eyes, something that made me say to myself: 'Well, hang it all, I've known Truscott for nearly twenty years; I've never shown him the least little bit of my real self; he thinks me a writing money-machine, with no thought in the world besides my brazen serial stories and the yacht that I purchased out of them.'
So I told him this story, and I will do him the justice to say that he listened to every word of it most attentively, although it was far into the evening before I had finished. He didn't seem impatient with all the little details that I gave. Of course, in a ghost story, details are more important than anything else. But was it a ghost story? Was it a story at all? Was it true even in its material background? Now, as I try to tell it again, I can't be sure. Truscott is the only other person who has ever heard it, and at the end of it he made no comment whatever.
It happened long ago, long before the war, when I had been married for about five years, and was an exceedingly prosperous journalist, with a nice little house and two children, in Wimbledon.
I lost suddenly my greatest friend. That may mean little or much as friendship is commonly held, but I believe that most Britishers, most Americans, most Scandinavians, know before they die one friendship at least that changes their whole life experience by its depth and colour. Very few Frenchmen, Italians or Spaniards, very few Southern people at all, understand these things.
The curious part of it in my particular case was that I had known this friend only four or five years before his death, that I had made many friendships both before and since that have endure over much longer periods, and yet this particular friendship had a quality of intensity and happiness that I have never found elsewhere.
Another curious thing was that I met Bond only a few months before my marriage, when I was deeply in love with my wife, and so intensely preoccupied with my engagement that I could think of nothing else. I met Bond quite casually at someone's house. He was a large-boned, broad-shouldered, slow-smiling man with close-cropped hair turning slightly grey, and our meeting was casual; the ripening of our friendship was casual; indeed, the whole affair may be said to have been casual to the very last. It was, in fact, my wife who said to me one day, when we had been married about a year or so; 'Why, I believe you care more for Charlie Bond than for anyone else in the world.' She said it in that sudden, disconcerting, perceptive way that some women have. I was entirely astonished. Of course I laughed at the idea. I saw Bond frequently. He came often to the house. My wife, wiser than many wives, encouraged all my friendships, and she herself liked Charlie immensely. I don't suppose that anyone disliked him. Some men were jealous of him; some men, the merest acquaintances, called him conceited; women were sometimes irritated by him because so clearly he could get on very easily without them; but he had, I think, no real enemy.
How could he have had? His good-nature, his freedom from all jealousy, his naturalness, his sense of fun, the absence of all pettiness, his common sense, his manliness, and at the same time his broad-minded intelligence, all these things made him a most charming personality. I don't know that he shone very much in ordinary society. He was very quiet and his wit and humour came out best with his intimates.
I was the showy one, and he always played up to me, and I think I patronized him a little and thought deep down in my subconscious self that it was lucky for him to have such a brilliant friend, but he never gave a sign of resentment. I believe now that he knew me, with all my faults and vanities and absurdities, far better than anyone else, even my wife, did, and that is one of the reasons, to the day of my death, why I shall always miss him so desperately.
However, it was not until his death that I realized how close we had been. One November day he came back to his flat, wet and chilled, didn't change his clothes, caught a cold, which developed into pneumonia, and after three days was dead. It happened that week I was in Paris, and I returned to be told on my doorstep by my wife of what had occurred. At first I refused to believe it. When I had seen him a week before he had been in splendid health; with his tanned, rather rough and clumsy face, his clear eyes, no fat about him anywhere, he had looked as though he would live to a thousand, and then when I realized that it was indeed true I did not during the first week or two grasp my loss.
I missed him, of course; was vaguely unhappy and discontented; railed against life, wondering why it was always the best people who were taken and the others left; but I was not actually aware that for the rest of my days things would be different, and that that day of my return from Paris was a crisis in my human experience. Suddenly one morning, walking down Fleet Street, I had a flashing, almost blinding, need of Bond that was like a revelation. From that moment I knew no peace. Everyone seemed to me dull, profitless and empty. Even my wife was a long way away from me, and my children, whom I dearly loved, counted nothing to me at all. I didn't, after that, know what was the matter with me. I lost my appetite, I couldn't sleep, I was grumpy and nervous. I didn't myself connect it with Bond at all. I thought that I was overworked, and when my wife suggested a holiday, I agreed, got a fortnight's leave from my newspaper, and went down to Glebeshire.
Early December is not a bad time for Glebeshire. It is just then the best spot in the British Isles. I knew a little village beyond St Mary's Moor, that I had not seen for ten years, but always remembered with romantic gratitude, and I felt that that was the place for me now.
I changed trains at Polchester and found myself at last in a little jingle driving out to the sea. The air, the wide open moor, the smell of the sea delighted me, and when I reached my village, with its sandy cover and the boats drawn up in two rows in front of a high rocky cave, and when I ate my eggs and bacon in the parlour of the inn overlooking the sea, I felt happier than I had done for weeks past; but my happiness did not last long. Night after night I could not sleep. I began to feel acute loneliness and knew at last in full truth that it was my friend who I was missing, and that it was not solitude I needed, but his company. Easy enough to talk about having his company, but I only truly knew, down here in this little village, sitting on the edge of the g
reen cliff, looking over into limitless sea, that I was indeed never to have his company again. There followed after that a wild, impatient regret that I had not made more of my time with him. I saw myself, in a sudden vision, as I had really been with him, patronizing, indulgent, a little contemptuous of his good-natured ideas. Had I only a week with him now, how eagerly I would show him that I was the fool and not he, that I was the lucky one every time!
One connects with one's own grief the place where one feels it, and before many days had passed I had grown to loathe the little village, to dread, beyond words, the long, soughing groan of the sea as it drew back down the slanting beach, the melancholy wail of the seagulls, the chattering women under my little window. I couldn't stand it. I ought to go back to London, and yet from that, too, I shrank. Memories of Bond lingered there as they did in no other place, and it was hardly fair to my wife and family to give them the company of the dreary, discontented man that I just then was.
And then, just in the way that such things always happen, I found on my breakfast-table one fine morning a forwarded letter. It was from a certain Mrs Baldwin, and, to my surprise, I saw that it came from Glebeshire, but from the top of the county and not its southern end.
John Baldwin was a Stock Exchange friend of my brother's, a rough diamond, but kindly and generous, and not, I believed, very well off. Mrs Baldwin I had always liked, and I think she always like me. We had not met for some little time and I had no idea what had happened to them. Now in her letter she told me that they had taken an old eighteenth-century house on the north coast of Glebeshire, not very far from Drymouth, that they were enjoying it very much indeed, that Jack was fitter than he had been for years, and that they would be delighted, were I ever in that part of the country, to have me as their guest. This suddenly seemed to me the very thing. The Baldwins had never known Charlie Bond, and they would have, therefore, for me no association with his memory. They were jolly, noisy people, with a jolly, noisy family, and Jack Baldwin's personality was so robust that it would surely shake me out of my gloomy mood. I sent a telegram at once to Mrs Baldwin, asking her whether she could have me for a week, and before the day was over I received the warmest of invitations.
