Uncles, Aunts and Elephants

by Ruskin Bond

  Kamal and I attended the siege for about an hour, before retiring to the Gardens with our ham sandwiches. A couple of friendly squirrels came up to investigate, and were soon taking bread from our hands. We could hear the chanting of the students in the distance. I lay back on the grass and opened my copy of Barchester Towers. Whenever life in Delhi, or in Bhabiji’s house (or anywhere, for that matter), becomes too tumultuous, I turn to Trollope. Nothing could be further removed from the turmoil of our times than an English cathedral town in the nineteenth century. But I think Jane Austen would have appreciated life in Bhabiji’s house.

  By ten o’clock, everyone is back from the marriage. (They had gone for the feast, and not for the ceremonies, which continue into the early hours of the morning.) Shobha is full of praise for the bridegroom’s good looks and fair complexion. She describes him as being ‘gora-chitta’ — very white! She does not have a high opinion of the bride.

  Shiv, in a happy and reflective mood, extols the qualities of his own wife, referring to her as The Barrel. He tells us how, shortly after their marriage, she had threatened to throw a brick at the next-door girl. This little incident remains fresh in Shiv’s mind, after eighteen years of marriage.

  He says: ‘When the neighbours came and complained, I told them, “It is quite possible that my wife will throw a brick at your daughter. She is in the habit of throwing bricks.” The neighbours held their peace.’

  I think Shiv is rather proud of his wife’s militancy when it comes to taking on neighbours; recently she vanquished the woman next door (a formidable Sikh lady) after a verbal battle that lasted three hours. But in arguments or quarrels with Bhabiji, Shiv’s wife always loses, because Shiv takes his mother’s side.

  Arun, on the other hand, is afraid of both wife and mother, and simply makes himself scarce when a quarrel brews. Or he tells his mother she is right, and then, to placate Shobha, takes her to the pictures.

  Kishore turns up just as everyone is about to go to bed. Bhabiji is annoyed at first, because he has been drinking too much; but when he produces a bunch of cinema tickets, she is mollified and asks him to stay the night. Not even Bhabiji likes missing a new picture.

  Kishore is urging me to write his life story.

  ‘Your life would make a most interesting story,’ I tell him. ‘But it will be interesting only if I put in everything — your successes and your failures.’

  ‘No, no, only successes,’ exhorts Kishore. ‘I want you to describe me as a popular music director.’

  ‘But you have yet to become popular.’

  ‘I will be popular if you write about me.’

  Fortunately we are interrupted by the cots being brought in. Then Bhabiji and Shiv go into a huddle, discussing plans for building an extra room. After all, Kamal may be married soon.

  One by one, the children get under their quilts. Popat starts massaging Bhabiji’s back. She gives him her favourite blessing: ‘God protect you and give you lots of children.’ If God listens to all of Bhabiji’s prayers and blessings, there will never be a fall in the population.

  The lights are off and Bhabiji settles down for the night. She is almost asleep when a small voice pipes up: ‘Bhabiji, tell us a story.

  At first Bhabiji pretends not to hear; then, when the request is repeated, she says: ‘You’ll keep Aunty Shobha awake, and then she’ll have an excuse for getting up late in the morning.’ But the children know Bhabiji’s one great weakness, and they renew their demand.

  ‘Your grandmother is tired,’ says Arun. ‘Let her sleep.’

  But Bhabiji’s eyes are open. Her mind is going back over the crowded years, and she remembers something very interesting that happened when her younger brother’s wife’s sister married the eldest son of her third cousin . . .

  Before long, the children are asleep, and I am wondering if I will ever sleep, for Bhabiji’s voice drones on, into the darker reaches of the night.

  Fragrance to the Air

  I would be the last person to belittle a flower for its lack of fragrance, because there are many spectacular blooms such as the dahlia and the gladioli which have hardly any scent and yet make up for it with their colour and appearance. But it does happen that my own favourite flowers are those with a distinctive fragrance and these are the flowers I would have around me.

  The rose, of course, is the world’s favourite, a joy to all — even to babies, who enjoy taking them apart, petal by petal. But there are other, less spectacular, less celebrated blooms which have a lovely, sometimes elusive fragrance all their own.

  I have a special fondness for antirrhinums — or snapdragons, as they are more commonly known. If I sniff hard at them, I don’t catch any scent at all. They seem to hold it back from me. But if I walk past a bed of snapdragons, or even a single plant, the gentlest of fragrance is wafted towards me. If I stop and try to take it all in, it has gone again! I find this quite tantalizing, but it has given me a special regard for this modest flower.

  Another humble, even old-fashioned flower, is the wallflower which obviously takes its name from the fact that it thrives on walls. I have seen wallflowers adorn a garden wall in an extravagant and delightful manner, making it a mountain of perfume. They are best grown so as to form dense masses which become literally solid with fiery flowers — blood-red, purple, yellow, orange or bronze, all sending a heady fragrance into the surrounding air.

  Carnations, with their strong scent of cloves, are great showoffs. In India, the jasmine and the magnolia are both rather heady and overpowering. The honeysuckle too insists on making its presence known. A honeysuckle creeper flourished outside the window of my room in Mussoorie, and all through the summer its sweet, rather cloying fragrance drifted in through the open window. It was delightful at times, but at other times I had to close the window just so that I could give my attention to other, less intrusive smells — like the soft, sweet scent of petunias (another of my favourites) growing near the doorstep, and great bunches of sweet peas stacked in a bowl on my desk.

  It is much the same with chrysanthemums and geraniums. The lemon geranium, for instance, is valued more for its fragrant leaves than for its rather indeterminate blue flowers. And I cannot truthfully say what ordinary mint looks like in flower. The refreshing fragrance of the leaves, when crushed, makes up for any absence of floral display. On the other hand, the multicoloured loveliness of dahlias is unaccompanied by any scent. Its greenery, when cut or broken, does have a faintly acrid smell, but that’s about all.

  Not all plants are good to smell. Some leaves, when crushed, will keep strong men at bay! During the monsoon in the plains, neem pods fall and are crushed underfoot, giving out a distinctive odour. Most people dislike the smell, but I find it quite refreshing.

  Of course, one man’s fragrance might well turn out to be another creature’s bad smell. Geraniums, my grandmother insisted, kept snakes away because they couldn’t stand the smell of the leaves. She surrounded her bungalow with pots of geraniums. As we never found a snake in the house, she may well have been right. But the evidence is purely circumstantial.

  I suppose snakes like some smells, close to the ground, or by now they’d have taken to living in more elevated places. But, turning to a book on reptiles, I learnt from it that in the snake the sense of smell is rather dull. Perhaps it has an aversion to anything that it can smell — such as those aromatic geranium leaves!

  Close to Mother Earth, there are many delightful smells, provided you avoid roadsides and freshly-manured fields. When I lie on summer grass in some Himalayan meadow, I am conscious of the many good smells around me — the grass itself, redolent of the morning’s dew, bruised clover, wild violets, tiny buttercups and golden stars and strawberry flowers and many others I shall never know the names of.

  And the earth itself. It smells different in different places. But its loveliest fragrance is known only when it receives a shower of rain. And then the scent of the wet earth rises as though it would give something beautiful back to the
clouds. A blend of all the fragrant things that grow upon it.

  Garden of a Thousand Trees

  No one in his right mind would want to chop down a mango tree. Every mango tree, even if it grows wild, is generous with its juicy fruit, known sometimes as ‘the nectar of the gods’, and sometimes as the ‘king of fruits’. You can eat ripe mangoes fresh from the tree; you can eat them in pickles or chutneys or jams; you can eat them flattened out and dried, as in aam papad; you can drink the juice with milk as in ‘mango-fool’; you can even pound the kernel into flour and use it as a substitute for wheat. And there are over a hundred different varieties of the mango, each with its own distinctive flavour.

  But in praising the fruit, let us not forget the tree, for it is one of the stateliest trees in India, its tall, spreading branches a familiar sight throughout the country, from the lower slopes of the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.

  In Gujarat, on the night of the seventh of the month of Savan (July-August), a young mango tree is planted near the house and worshipped by the womenfolk to protect their children from disease. Sometimes a post of mango wood is set up when Ganesh is worshipped.

  If you live anywhere in the plains of northern India, you will often have seen a grove of giant mango trees, sometimes appearing like an oasis in the midst of the vast, flat countryside. Beneath the trees you may find a well and a small temple. It is here that the tired, dusty farmer sits down to rest and eat his midday chapati, following it with a draught of cold water from the well. If you join him and ask him who planted the mango grove, he will not be able to tell you; it was there when he was a boy, and probably when his father was a boy too. Some mango groves are very, very old.

  Have you heard of the Garden of a Thousand Trees? Probably not. But you must have heard of the town of Hazaribagh in Bihar. Well, a huge mango grove containing over a thousand trees — some of which are still there — was known as hazari, and around these trees a village grew, spreading in time into the modern town of Hazaribagh, ‘Garden of a Thousand Trees’. Anyway, that’s the story you will hear from the oldest inhabitants of the town. And even today, the town is almost hidden in a garden of trees: mango and neem, sal and tamarind.

  All are welcome in a mango grove. But during the mango season, when the trees are in fruit, you enter the grove at your own peril! At this time of the year it is watched over by a fierce chowkidar, whose business is to drive away any mischievous children who creep into the grove in the hope of catching him asleep and making off with a few juicy mangoes. The chowkidar is a busy man. Even before the mangoes ripen, he has to battle not only with the village urchins, but also with raiding parties of emerald-green parrots, who swarm all over the trees, biting deep into the green fruit. Sometimes he sits under a tree in the middle of the grove, pulling a rope which makes a large kerosene-tin rattle in the branches. He can try shouting too, but his voice can’t compete with the screams of the parrots. They wheel in circles round the grove and, spreading their tails, settle on the topmost branches.

  Even when there are no mangoes, you will find parrots in the grove, because during their breeding season, their favourite nesting places are the holes in the gnarled trunks of old mango trees.

  Other birds, including the blue jay and the little green coppersmith, favour the mango grove for the same reason. And sometimes you may spot a small owl peering at you from its hole halfway up the trunk of an old tree.

  Good Day to You, Uncle

  On the left bank of the Ganga, where it emerges from the Himalayan foothills, there is a long stretch of heavy forest. There are villages on the fringe of the forest, inhabited by bamboo cutters and farmers, but there are few signs of commerce or pilgrimage. Hunters, however, have found the area an ideal hunting ground during the last seventy years, and as a result, the animals are not as numerous as they used to be. The trees, too, have been disappearing slowly; and, as the forest recedes, the animals lose their food and shelter and move further on into the foothills. Slowly, they are being denied the right to live.

  Only the elephants can cross the river. And two years ago, when a large area of the forest was cleared to make way for a refugee resettlement camp, a herd of elephants — finding their favourite food, the green shoots of the bamboo, in short supply — waded across the river. They crashed through the suburbs of Hardwar, knocked down a factory wall, pulled down several tin roofs, held up a train and left a trail of devastation in their wake until they found a new home in a new forest which was still untouched. Here, they settled down to a new life — but an unsettled, wary life. They did not know when men would appear again with tractors, bulldozers and dynamite.

  There was a time when the forest on the banks of the Ganga had provided food and shelter for some thirty or forty tigers; but men in search of trophies had shot them all, and now there remained only one old tiger in the jungle. Many hunters had tried to get him, but he was a wise and crafty old tiger, who knew the ways of men, and he had so far survived all attempts on his life.

  Although the tiger had passed the prime of his life, he had lost none of his majesty. His muscles rippled beneath the golden yellow of his coat, and he walked through the long grass with the confidence of one who knew that he was still a king, even though his subjects were fewer. His great head pushed through the foliage, and it was only his tail, swinging high, that showed occasionally above the sea of grass.

  Often he headed for water, the only water in the forest (if you don’t count the river, which was several miles away), the water of a large jheel, which was almost a lake during the rainy season, but just a muddy marsh at this time of the year, in the late spring.

  Here, at different times of the day and night, all the animals came to drink — the long-horned sambar, the delicate chital, the swamp deer, the hyenas and jackals, the wild boar, the panthers — and the lone tiger. Since the elephants had gone, the water was usually clear except when buffaloes from the nearby village came to wallow in it. These buffaloes, though not wild, were not afraid of the panther or even of the tiger. They knew the panther was afraid of their massive horns and that the tiger preferred the flesh of the deer.

  One day, there were several sambars at the water’s edge, but they did not stay long. The scent of the tiger came with the breeze, and there was no mistaking its strong feline odour. The deer held their heads high for a few moments, their nostrils twitching, and then scattered into the forest, disappearing behind a screen of leaf and bamboo.

  When the tiger arrived, there was no other animal near the water. But the birds were still there. The egrets continued to wade in the shallows, and a kingfisher darted low over the water, dived suddenly, a flash of blue and gold, and made off with a slim silver fish, which glistened in the sun like a polished gem. A long, brown snake glided in and out among the water lilies and disappeared beneath a fallen tree which lay rotting in the shallows.

  The tiger waited in the shelter of a rock, his ears pricked up for the least unfamiliar sound, for he knew that it was at that place that men sometimes sat up for him with guns for they coveted his beauty — his stripes and the gold of his body, his fine teeth, his whiskers, and his noble head. They would have liked to hang his skin on a wall, with his head stuffed and mounted, and pieces of glass replacing his fierce eyes; then they would have boasted of their triumph over the king of the jungle.

  The tiger had been hunted before, so he did not usually show himself in the open during the day. But of late he had heard no guns, and if there were hunters around, you would have heard their guns (for a man with a gun cannot resist letting it off, even if it is only at a rabbit — or at another man). And, besides, the tiger was thirsty.

  He was also feeling quite hot. It was March and the shimmering dust haze of summer had come early. Tigers — unlike other cats — are fond of water, and on a hot day will wallow in it for hours.

  He walked into the water, in amongst the water lilies, and drank slowly. He was seldom in a hurry when he ate or drank. Other animals might bolt down their food,
but they were only other animals. A tiger is a tiger; he has his dignity to preserve even though he isn’t aware of it!

  He raised his head and listened, one paw suspended in the air. A strange sound had come to him with the breeze, and he was wary of strange sounds. So he moved swiftly into the shelter of the tall grass that bordered the jheel, and climbed a hillock until he reached his favourite rock. This rock was big enough both to hide him and to give him shade. Anyone looking up from the jheel might think it strange that the rock had a round bump on the top. The bump was the tiger’s head. He kept it very still.

  The sound he heard was only the sound of a flute, rendered thin and reedy in the forest. It belonged to Ramu, a slim, brown boy who rode a buffalo. Ramu played vigorously on the flute. Shyam, a slightly smaller boy, riding another buffalo, brought up the rear of the herd.

  There were about eight buffaloes in the herd, and they belonged to the families of the two friends Ramu and Shyam. Their people were Gujjars, a nomadic community who earned a livelihood by keeping buffaloes and selling milk and butter. The boys were about twelve years old, but they could not have told you exactly because in their village nobody thought birthdays were important. They were almost the same age as the tiger, but he was old and experienced while they were still cubs.

  The tiger had often seen them at the tank, and he was not worried by their presence. He knew the village people would do him no harm as long as he left their buffaloes alone. Once when he was younger and full of bravado, he had killed a buffalo — not because he was hungry, but because he was young and wanted to try out his strength — and after that the villagers had hunted him for days, with spears, bows and an old muzzle loader. Now he left the buffaloes alone, even though the deer in the forest were not as numerous as before.