Uncles, Aunts and Elephants

by Ruskin Bond

  The beat had closed in, and the exit along the bank downstream was completely blocked, so the tiger turned into a belt of reeds, and Kundan Singh expected that the head would soon peer out of the cover a few yards away. The beaters were now making a great noise, shouting and beating their drums, but nothing moved, and Ramu, watching from a distance, wondered, ‘Has he slipped through the beaters?’ And he half hoped so.

  Tins clashed, drums beat, and some of the men poked into the reeds with their spears or long bamboos. Perhaps one of these thrusts found a mark, because at last the tiger was roused, and with an angry, desperate snarl he charged out of the reeds, splashing his way through an inlet of mud and water.

  Kundan Singh fired, and his bullet struck the tiger on the thigh.

  The mighty animal stumbled; but he was up in a minute, and rushing through a gap in the narrowing line of beaters, he made straight for the only way across the river — the suspension bridge that passed over the Ganga here, providing a route into the high hills beyond.

  ‘We’ll get him now,’ said Kundan, priming his gun again. ‘He’s right in the open!’

  The suspension bridge swayed and trembled as the wounded tiger lurched across it. Kundan fired, and this time the bullet grazed the tiger’s shoulder. The animal bounded forward, lost his footing on the unfamiliar, slippery planks of the swaying bridge, and went over the side, falling headlong into the strong, swirling waters of the river.

  He rose to the surface once, but the current took him under and away, and only a thin streak of blood remained on the river’s surface.

  Kundan and others hurried downstream to see if the dead tiger had been washed up on the river’s banks; but though they searched the riverside several miles, they could not find the king of the forest.

  He had not provided anyone with a trophy. His skin would not be spread on a couch, nor would his head be hung up on a wall. No claw of his would be hung as a charm around the neck of a child. No villager would use his fat as a cure for rheumatism.

  At first the villagers were glad because they felt their buffaloes were safe. Then the men began to feel that something had gone out of their lives, out of the life of the forest; they began to feel that the forest was no longer a forest. It had been shrinking year by year, but, as long as the tiger had been there and the villagers had heard it roar at night, they had known that they were still secure from the intruders and newcomers who came to fell the trees and eat up the land and let the flood waters into the village. But, now that the tiger had gone, it was as though a protector had gone, leaving the forest open and vulnerable, easily destroyable. And, once the forest was destroyed, they too would be in danger.

  There was another thing that had gone with the tiger, another thing that had been lost, a thing that was being lost everywhere — something called ‘nobility’.

  Ramu remembered something that his grandfather had once said, ‘The tiger is the very soul of India, and when the last tiger has gone, so will the soul of the country.’

  The boys lay flat on their stomachs on the little mud island and watched the monsoon clouds gathering overhead.

  ‘The king of our forest is dead,’ said Shyam. ‘There are no more tigers.’

  ‘There must be tigers,’ said Ramu. ‘How can there be an India without tigers?’

  The river had carried the tiger many miles away from its home, from the forest it had always known, and brought it ashore on a strip of warm yellow sand, where it lay in the sun, quite still, but breathing.

  Vultures gathered and waited at a distance, some of them perching on the branches of nearby trees.

  But the tiger was more drowned than hurt, and as the river water oozed out of his mouth, and the warm sun made new life throb through his body, he stirred and stretched, and his glazed eyes came into focus. Raising his head, he saw trees and tall grass.

  Slowly he heaved himself off the ground and moved at a crouch to where the grass waved in the afternoon breeze. Would he be harried again, and shot at? There was no smell of Man. The tiger moved forward with greater confidence.

  There was, however, another smell in the air — a smell that reached back to the time when he was young and fresh and full of vigour — a smell that he had almost forgotten but could never quite forget — the smell of a tigress!

  He raised his head high, and new life surged through his tired limbs. He gave a full-throated roar and moved purposefully through the tall grass. And the roar came back to him, calling him, calling him forward — a roar that meant there would be more tigers in this land!

  The Good Earth

  As with many who love gardens, I have never really had enough space in which to create a proper garden of my own. A few square feet of rocky hillside has been the largest patch at my disposal. All that I managed to grow on it were daisies — and they’d probably have grown there anyway. Still, they made for a charmingly dappled hillside throughout the summer, especially on full moon nights when the flowers were at their most radiant.

  For the past few years, here in Mussoorie, I have had to live in two small rooms on the second floor of a tumbledown building which has no garden space at all. All the same, it has a number of ever-widening cracks in which wild sorrels, dandelions, thornapples and nettles all take root and thrive. You could, I suppose, call it a wild wall-garden. Not that I am deprived of flowers. I am better off than most city dwellers because I have only to walk a short way out of the hill station to see (or discover) a variety of flowers in their wild state; and wild flowers are rewarding, because the best ones are often the most difficult to find.

  But I have always had this dream of possessing a garden of my own. Not a very formal garden — certainly not the ‘stately home’ type, with its pools and fountains and neat hedges as described in such detail by Bacon in his essay ‘Of Gardens’. Bacon had a methodical mind, and he wanted a methodical garden. I like a garden to be a little untidy, unplanned, full of surprises — rather like my own muddled mind, which gives even me a few surprises at times.

  My grandmother’s garden in Dehra, in north India, for example: Grandmother liked flowers, and she didn’t waste space on lawns and hedges. There was plenty of space at the back of the house for shrubs and fruit trees, but the front garden was a maze of flower beds of all shapes and sizes, and everything that could grow in Dehra (a fertile valley) was grown in them — masses of sweet peas, petunias, antirrhinum, poppies, phlox and larkspur; scarlet poinsettia leaves draped the garden walls, while purple and red bougainvillea climbed the porch; geraniums of many hues mounted the veranda steps; and, indoors, vases full of cut flowers gave the rooms a heady fragrance. I suppose it was this garden of my childhood that implanted in my mind the permanent vision of a perfect garden so that, whenever I am worried or down in the dumps, I close my eyes and conjure up a picture of this lovely place, where I am wandering through forests of cosmos and banks of rambling roses. It soothes the agitated mind.

  I remember an aunt who sometimes came to stay with my grandmother, and who had an obsession about watering the flowers. She would be at it morning and evening, an old and rather lopsided watering can in her frail hands. To everyone’s amazement, she would water the garden in all weathers, even during the rains.

  ‘But it’s just been raining, aunt,’ I would argue. Why are you watering the garden?’

  ‘The rain comes from above,’ she would reply. ‘This is from me. They expect me at this time, you know.’

  Grandmother died when I was still a boy, and the garden soon passed into other hands. I’ve never done well enough to be able to acquire something like it. And there’s no point in getting sentimental about the past.

  Yes, I’d love to have a garden of my own — spacious and gracious, and full of everything that’s fragrant and flowering. But if I don’t succeed, never mind — I’ve still got the dream.

  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a garden is the answer to all problems, but it’s amazing how a little digging and friendly dialogue with the good ear
th can help reactivate us when we grow sluggish.

  Before I moved into my present home which has no space for a garden, I had, as I’ve said, a tiny patch on a hillside, where I grew some daisies. Whenever I was stuck in the middle of a story or an essay, I would go into my tiny hillside garden and get down to the serious business of transplanting or weeding or pruning or just plucking off dead blooms, and in no time at all I was struck with a notion of how to proceed with the stalled story, reluctant essay, or unresolved poem.

  Not all gardeners are writers, but you don’t have to be a writer to benefit from the goodness of your garden. Baldev, who heads a large business corporation in Delhi, tells me that he wouldn’t dream of going to his office unless he’d spent at least half an hour in his garden that morning. If you can start the day by looking at the dew on your antirrhinums, he tells me, you can face the stormiest of board meetings.

  Or take Cyril, an old friend.

  When I met him, he was living in a small apartment on the first floor of a building that looked over a steep, stony precipice. The house itself appeared to be built on stilts, although these turned out to be concrete pillars. Altogether an ugly edifice. ‘Poor Cyril,’ I thought. ‘There’s no way he can have a garden.’

  I couldn’t have been more wrong. Cyril’s rooms were surrounded by a long veranda that allowed in so much sunlight and air, resulting in such a profusion of leaf and flower, that at first I thought I was back in one of the greenhouses at Kew Gardens, where I used to wander during a lonely sojourn in London.

  Cyril found a chair for me among the tendrils of a climbing ivy, while a coffee table materialized from behind a plant. By the time I had recovered enough from taking in my arboreal surroundings, I discovered that there were at least two other guests — one concealed behind a tree-sized philodendron, the other apparently embedded in a pot of begonias.

  Cyril, of course, was an exception. We cannot all have sunny verandas; nor would I show the same tolerance as he does towards the occasional caterpillar on my counterpane. But he was a happy man until his landlord, who lived below, complained that water was cascading down through the ceiling.

  ‘Fix the ceiling,’ said Cyril, and went back to watering his plants. It was the end of a beautiful tenant-landlord relationship.

  So let us move on to the washerwoman who lives down the road, a little distance from my own abode. She and her family live at the subsistence level. They have one square meal at midday, and they keep the leftovers for the evening. But the steps to their humble quarters are brightened by geraniums potted in large tin cans, all ablaze with several shades of flower.

  Hard as I try, I cannot grow geraniums to match hers. Does she scold her plants the way she scolds her children? Maybe I’m not firm enough with my geraniums. Or has it something to do with the washing? Anyway, her abode certainly looks more attractive than some of the official residences here in Mussoorie.

  Some gardeners like to specialize in particular flowers, but specialization has its dangers. My friend, Professor Saili, an ardent admirer of the nature poetry of William Wordsworth, decided he would have his own field of nodding daffodils, and planted daffodil bulbs all over his front yard. The following spring, after much waiting, he was rewarded by the appearance of a solitary daffodil that looked like a railway passenger who had gotten off at the wrong station. This year he is specializing in ‘easy-to-grow’ French marigolds. They grow easily enough in France, I’m sure; but the professor is discovering that they are stubborn growers on our stony Himalayan soil.

  Not everyone in this hill station has a lovely garden. Some palatial homes and spacious hotels are approached through forests of weeds, clumps of nettle, and dead or dying rose bushes. The owners are often plagued by personal problems that prevent them from noticing the state of their gardens. Loveless lives, unloved gardens.

  On the other hand, there was Annie Powell, who, at the age of ninety, was up early every morning to water her lovely garden. Watering can in hand, she would move methodically from one flower bed to the next, devotedly giving each plant a sprinkling. She said she loved to see leaves and flowers sparkling with fresh water, it gave her a new lease of life every day.

  And there were my maternal grandparents, whose home in Dehra in the valley was surrounded by a beautiful, well-kept garden. How I wish I had been old enough to prevent that lovely home from passing into other hands. But no one can take away our memories.

  Grandfather looked after the orchard, Grandmother looked after the flower garden. Like all people who have lived together for many years, they had the occasional disagreement.

  Grandfather would proceed to sulk on a bench beneath the jackfruit tree while, at the other end of the garden, Grandmother would start clipping a hedge with more than her usual vigour. Silently, imperceptibly, they would make their way toward the centre of the garden, where the flower beds gave way to a vegetable patch. This was neutral ground. My cousins and I looked on like UN observers. And there among the cauliflowers, conversation would begin again, and the quarrel would be forgotten. There’s nothing like home-grown vegetables for bringing two people together.

  Red roses for young lovers. French beans for long-standing relationships!

  The Garden of Memories

  Sitting in the sun on a winter’s afternoon, feeling my age just a little (I’m sixty-seven now), I began reminiscing about my boyhood in the Dehra of long ago, and I found myself missing the old times — friends of my youth, my grandmother, our neighbours, interesting characters in our small town, and, of course, my eccentric relative — the dashing young Uncle Ken!

  Yes, Dehra was a small town then — uncluttered, uncrowded, with quiet lanes and pretty gardens and shady orchards.

  The only time in my life that I was fortunate enough to live in a house with a real garden — as opposed to a backyard or balcony or windswept veranda — was during those three years when I spent my winter holidays (December to March) in Granny’s bungalow on the Old Survey Road.

  The best months were February and March, when the garden was heavy with the scent of sweet peas, the flower beds a many-coloured quilt of phlox, antirrhinum, larkspur, petunia and Californian poppy. I loved the bright yellows of the Californian poppies, the soft pinks of our own Indian poppies, the subtle perfume of petunias and snapdragons, and above all, the delicious, overpowering scent of the massed sweet peas which grew taller than me. Flowers made a sensualist of me. They taught me the delight of smell and colour and touch — yes, touch too, for to press a rose to one’s lips is very like a gentle, hesitant, exploratory kiss . . .

  Granny decided on what flowers should be sown, and where. Dhuki, the gardener, did the digging and weeding, sowing and transplanting. He was a skinny, taciturn old man, who had begun to resemble the weeds he flung away. He did not mind answering my questions, but never did he allow our brief conversations to interfere with his work. Most of the time he was to be found on his haunches, hoeing and weeding with a little spade called a ‘khurpi’. He would throw out the smaller marigolds because he said Granny did not care for them. I felt sorry for these colourful little discards, collected them, and transplanted them to a little garden patch of my own at the back of the house, near the garden wall.

  Another so-called weed that I liked was a little purple flower that grew in clusters all over Dehra, on any bit of wasteland, in ditches, on canal banks. It flowered from late winter into early summer, and it will be growing in the valley and beyond long after gardens have become obsolete, as indeed they must, considering the rapid spread of urban clutter. It brightens up fields and roads where you least expect a little colour. I have since learnt that it is called Ageratum, and that it is actually prized as a garden flower in Europe, where it is described as ‘Blue Mink’ in the seed catalogues. Here it isn’t blue but purple and it grows all the way from Rajpur (just above Dehra) to the outskirts of Meerut; then it disappears.

  Other garden outcasts include the lantana bush, an attractive wayside shrub, the thorn apple,
various thistles, daisies and dandelions. But both Granny and Dhuki had declared a war on weeds, and many of these commoners had to exist outside the confines of the garden. Like slum children, they survived rather well in ditches and on the roadside, while their more pampered fellow citizens were prone to leaf diseases and parasitic infections of various kinds.

  The veranda was a place where Granny herself could potter about, attending to various ferns, potted palms and colourful geraniums. She averred that geraniums kept snakes away, although she never said why. As far as I know, snakes don’t have a great sense of smell.

  One day I saw a snake curled up at the bottom of the veranda steps. When it saw me, or became aware of my footsteps, it uncoiled itself and slithered away. I told Granny about it, and observed that it did not seem to be bothered by the geraniums.

  ‘Ah,’ said Granny. ‘But for those geraniums, the snake would have entered the house!’ There was no arguing with Granny.

  Or with Uncle Ken, when he was at his most pontifical.

  One day, while walking near the canal bank, we came upon a green grass snake holding a frog in its mouth. The frog was half in, half out, and with the help of my hockey stick, I made the snake disgorge the unfortunate creature. It hopped away, none the worse for its adventure.

  I felt quite pleased with myself. ‘Is this what it feels like to be God?’ I mused aloud.

  ‘No,’ said Uncle Ken. ‘God would have let the snake finish its lunch.’