by Ruskin Bond
‘Let me help you,’ said the boy and gave me his hand.
I slithered down into a flower bed, shattering the stem of a hollyhock.
As we walked across the grass I noticed a stone bench under a mango tree. It was the bench on which my grandmother used to sit when she tired of pruning rose bushes and bougainvillaea.
‘Let’s sit here,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go inside.’
He sat beside me on the bench. It was March and the mango tree was in bloom. A sweet, heavy fragrance drenched the garden.
We were silent for some time. I closed my eyes and remembered other times—the music of a piano, the chiming of a grandfather clock, the constant twitter of budgerigars on the veranda, my grandfather cranking up the old car . . .
‘I used to climb the jackfruit tree,’ I said, opening my eyes. ‘I didn’t like the jackfruit, though. Do you?’
‘It’s all right in pickles.’
‘I suppose so . . . The tree was easy to climb. I spent a lot of time in it.’
‘Do you want to climb it again? My parents won’t mind.’
‘No, I don’t think so. Not after climbing the wall! Let’s just sit here for a few minutes and talk. I mention the jackfruit tree because it was my favourite place. Do you see that thick branch stretching out over the roof? Halfway along it there’s a small hollow in which I used to keep some of my treasures.’
‘What kind of treasures?’
‘Oh, nothing very valuable. Marbles I’d won. A book I wasn’t supposed to read. A few old coins I’d collected. Things came and went. There was my grandfather’s medal, well not his exactly, because he was British and the Iron Cross was a German decoration, awarded for bravery during the War—that’s the First World War—when Grandfather fought in France. He got it from a German soldier.’
‘Dead or alive?’
‘Pardon? Oh, you mean the German. I never asked. Dead I suppose. Or perhaps he was a prisoner. I never asked Grandfather. Isn’t that strange?’
‘And the Iron Cross? Do you still have it?’
‘No,’ I said, looking him in the eye. ‘I left it in the jackfruit tree.’
‘You left it in the tree!’
‘Yes, I was so busy at the time—packing, and saying goodbye to friends, and thinking about the ship I was going to sail on—that I just forgot all about it.’
He was silent, considering, his finger on his lips, his gaze fixed on the jackfruit tree.
Then, quietly, he said, ‘It may still be there. In the hollow of the branch.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘After forty years, it may still be there. Unless someone else found it.’
‘Would you like to take a look?’
‘I can’t climb trees any more.’
‘I can! I’ll go and see. You just sit here and wait for me.’
He sprang up and ran across the grass, swift and sweet of limb. Soon he was in the jackfruit tree, crawling along the projecting branch. A warm wind brought little eddies of dust along the road. Summer was in the air. Ah, if only I could climb trees again!
‘I’ve found something!’ he cried.
And now, barefoot, he ran breathlessly towards me, in his outstretched hand a rusty old medal.
I took it from him and turned it over on my palm.
‘Is it the Iron Cross?’ he asked eagerly.
‘Yes, this is it.’
‘Now I know why you came. You wanted to see if it was still in the tree.’
‘I don’t know. I’m not really sure why I came. But you can keep the Cross. You found it, after all.’
‘No, you keep it. It’s yours.’
‘But it might have remained in the tree for a hundred years if you hadn’t gone to look for it.’
‘Only because you came back—’
‘On the right day, at the right time, and with the right person.’ Getting up, I squeezed the hard rusty medal into my little friend’s left palm. ‘No, it wasn’t the Cross I came for. It was my lost youth.’
Somehow, he understood this, even though his own youth still lay ahead of him; he understood it, not as an adult, but with the wisdom of the child that was still part of him. He walked with me to the gate and stood there gazing after me as I walked away. Where the road turned, I glanced back and waved to him. Then I quickened my step and moved briskly towards the bus stop. There was a spring in my step and happiness in my heart. I felt at peace with the world and now wanted to go back to my own home in Mussoorie.
As Time Goes By
PREM’S BOYS ARE growing tall and healthy, on the verge of manhood. How can I think of growing old, when faced with the full vigour and confidence of youth? They remind me of Somi and Ranbir, who were the same age when I knew them in Dehra during my teenage years. But remembering Somi and Ranbir reminds me of death—for Ranbir had died a young man—and I look at Prem’s boys again, haunted by the thought of suddenly leaving this world, and pray that I can be with them a little longer.
Somi and Ranbir . . . I remember: it was going to rain. I could see the rain moving across the hills, and I could smell it on the breeze. But instead of turning back, I walked on through the leaves and brambles that grew over the disused path, and wandered into the forest. I had heard the sound of rushing water at the bottom of the hill, and there was no question of returning until I had found the water.
I had to slide down some smooth rocks into a small ravine, and there I found the stream running across a bed of shingle. I removed my shoes and socks and started walking up the stream. Water trickled down from the hillside, from amongst ferns and grass and wild flowers, and the hills, rising steeply on either side, kept the ravine in shadow. The rocks were smooth, almost soft, and some of them were grey and some yellow. The pool was fed by a small waterfall, and it was deep beneath the waterfall. I did not stay long, because now the rain was swishing over the sal trees, and I was impatient to tell the others about the pool.
Somi usually chose the adventures we were to have, and I would just grumble and get involved in them; but this pool was my own discovery, and both Somi and Ranbir gave me credit for it. We decided to call it ‘Rusty’s Pool’.
I think it was the pool that brought us together more than anything else. We made it a secret, private pool, and invited no others except for Kishen—the boy I tutored to earn my living when I was forced to leave my guardian, Mr Harrison’s house. Ranbir was the best swimmer. He dived off rocks and went gliding about under the water, like a long, golden fish. Somi threshed about with much vigour but little skill. I could dive off a rock too, but I usually landed on my belly.
There were slim silverfish in the waters of the stream. At first we tried catching them with a line, but they usually took the bait and left the hook. Then we brought a bedsheet and stretched it across one end of the stream, but the fish wouldn’t come near it. Eventually Ranbir, without telling us, brought along a stick of dynamite, and Somi, Kishen and I were startled out of a siesta by a flash across the water and a deafening explosion. Half the hillside had tumbled into the pool, and Ranbir along with it; but we got him out, as well as a good supply of stunned fish which were too small for eating.
The effects of the explosion gave Somi another idea, and that was to enlarge our pool by building a dam across one end. This we accomplished with our joint labour. But one afternoon, when it rained heavily, a torrent of water came rushing down the stream, bursting the dam and flooding the ravine. Our clothes were all carried away by the current, and we had to wait for night to fall before creeping home through the darkest alleyways, for we used to bathe quite naked; it would have been unmanly to do otherwise.
Our activities at the pool included wrestling and buffalo-riding. We wrestled on a strip of sand that ran beside the stream, and rode on a couple of buffaloes that sometimes came to drink and wallow in the more muddy parts of the stream. We would sit astride the buffaloes, and kick and yell and urge them forward, but on no occasion did we ever get them to move. At the most, they would roll over on their backs, t
aking us with them into a pool of slush.
But the buffaloes were always comfortable to watch. Solid, earthbound creatures, they liked warm days and cool, soft mud. There is nothing so satisfying to watch as buffaloes wallowing in mud, or ruminating over a mouthful of grass, absolutely oblivious to everything else. They watched us with sleepy, indifferent eyes, and tolerated the pecking of crows. Did they think all that time, or did they just enjoy the sensuousness of soft, wet mud, while we perspired under a summer sun . . .? No, thinking would have been too strenuous for those supine creatures; to get neck-deep in water was their only aim in life.
It didn’t matter how muddy we got ourselves, because we had only to dive into the pool to get rid of the muck. In fact, mud-fighting was one of our favourite pastimes. It was like playing with snowballs, only, we used mud balls.
If it was possible for Somi, Ranbir and Kishen and me to get out of our houses undetected at night, we would come to the pool and bathe by moonlight, and at these times we would bathe silently and seriously, because there was something subduing about the stillness of the jungle at night.
I don’t exactly remember how we broke up, but we hardly noticed it at the time. That was because we never really believed we were finally parting, or that we would not be seeing the pool again. After about three years, Somi finished his schooling, and he and his family left for Calcutta. The last time I heard from him, many years ago, he was working in a pharmacy in Calcutta; he remembered the pool in a sentimental way, but not as I remembered it.
Before Somi Ranbir had left town, and I did not see him again, until after I returned from England. Then he was in Air Force uniform, tall, slim, very handsome, completely unrecognizable as the chubby boy who had played with me in the pool. Three weeks after this meeting I heard that he had been killed in an air crash. Sweet Ranbir . . . I feel you are close to me now . . .
And what of the pool?
I looked for it, after an interval of more than thirty years, but couldn’t find it. I found the ravine, and the bed of shingle, but there was no water. The stream had changed its course, just as we had changed ours.
I turned away in disappointment, and with a dull ache in my heart. It was cruel of the pool to disappear; it was the cruelty of time. But I hadn’t gone far when I heard the sound of rushing water, and the shouting of children; and pushing my way through the jungle, I found another stream and another pool and about half-a-dozen children splashing about in the water.
They did not see me, and I kept in the shadow of the trees and watched them play. But I didn’t really see them. I was seeing Somi and Ranbir and the lazy old buffaloes, and I stood there for almost an hour, a disembodied spirit, romping again in the shallows of our secret pool. Nothing had really changed. Time is like that.
Upon an Old Wall Dreaming
IT IS TIME to confess that at least half my life has been spent in idleness. My old school would not be proud of me. Nor would my Aunt Mabel.
‘You spend most of your time sitting on that wall, doing nothing,’ scolded Aunt Mabel, when I was seven or eight. ‘Are you thinking about something?’
‘No, Aunt Mabel.’
‘Are you dreaming?’
‘I’m awake!’
‘Then what on earth are you doing there?’ ‘Nothing, Aunt Mabel.’
‘He’ll come to no good,’ she warned the world at large. ‘He’ll spend all his life sitting on walls, doing nothing.’
And how right she proved to be! Sometimes I bestir myself, and bang out a few sentences on my old typewriter, but most of the time I’m still sitting on that wall, preferably in the winter sunshine. Thinking? Not very deeply. Dreaming? But I’ve grown too old to dream. Meditation, perhaps. That’s been fashionable for some time. But it isn’t that either. Contemplation might come closer to the mark.
Was I born with a silver spoon in my mouth that I could afford to sit in the sun for hours, doing nothing? Far from it; I was born into a family with decent means but I hadn’t made much for myself as far as worldly riches went. But one has to eat and pay the rent. And there have been others to feed too. So I have to admit that between long bouts of idleness, there have been short bursts of creativity. My typewriter, after more than thirty years of loyal service, has finally collapsed, proof enough that it has not lain idle all this time.
Sitting on walls, apparently doing nothing, has always been my favourite form of inactivity. But for these walls, and the many idle hours I have spent upon them, I would not have written even a fraction of the hundreds of stories, essays and other diversions that have been banged out on the typewriter over the years. It is not the walls themselves that set me off or give me ideas, but a personal view of the world that I receive from sitting there.
Creative idleness, you could call it. A receptivity to the world around me—the breeze, the warmth of the old stone, the lizard on the rock, a raindrop on a blade of grass—these and other impressions impinge upon me as I sit in that passive, benign condition that makes people smile tolerantly at me as they pass. ‘Eccentric writer,’ they remark to each other as they drive on, hurrying in a heat of hope, towards the pot of gold at the end of their personal rainbows.
It’s true that I am eccentric in many ways, and old walls bring out the essence of my eccentricity.
I do not have a garden wall. This shaky tumbledown house in the hills is perched directly above a motorable road, making me both accessible and vulnerable to casual callers of all kinds—inquisitive tourists, local busybodies, schoolgirls with their poems, hawkers selling candyfloss, itinerant sadhus, scrap merchants, potential Nobel Prize winners . . .
To escape them, and, to set my thoughts in order, I walk a little way up the road, cross it, and sit down on a parapet wall overlooking the Woodstock spur. Here, partially shaded by an overhanging oak, I am usually left alone. I look suitably down and out, shabbily dressed, a complete nonentity—not the sort of person you would want to be seen talking to!
Stray dogs sometimes join me here. Having been a stray dog myself at various periods of my life, I can empathize with these friendly vagabonds of the road. Far more intelligent than your inbred Pom or Peke, they let me know by their silent companionship that they are on the same wavelength. They sport about on the road, but they do not yap at all and sundry.
Left to myself on the wall, I am soon in the throes of composing a story or a poem. I do not write it down—that can be done later—I just work it out in my mind, memorize my words, so to speak, and keep them stored up for my next writing session.
Occasionally, a car will stop, and someone I know will stick his head out and say, ‘No work today, Mr Bond? How I envy you! Not a care in the world!’
I travel back in time some fifty years to Aunt Mabel asking me the same question. The years melt away, and I am a child again sitting on the garden wall, doing nothing.
‘Don’t you get bored sitting there?’ asks the latest passing motorist, who has one of those half-beards which are in vogue with TV newsreaders. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing, Aunty,’ I reply.
He gives me a long, hard stare.
‘You must be dreaming. Don’t you recognize me?’
‘Yes, Aunt Mabel.’
He shakes his head sadly, steps on the gas, and goes roaring up the hill in a cloud of dust.
‘Poor old Bond,’ he tells his friends over evening cocktails. ‘Must be going round the bend. This morning he called me Aunty.’
Author’s Note
THIS IS THE fifth and final volume in the series of Rusty stories. We will allow Rusty to go riding into the sunset—not on a horse, chariot, rocket or broomstick, but wobbling about on his old bicycle.
After returning from London, Rusty freelanced from Dehra Dun, explored New and Old Delhi, lived for a while in Shahganj, and finally settled in the hills around Mussoorie. Stories flowed from his pen and from his battered old typewriter. He found new friends and companions, and discovered that if you are interested in people and live close to
nature, you will never run short of ideas or stories. And if you like people, you will never feel bored or lonely.
Udayan Mitra and Anjana Ramakrishnan have once again conspired to bring together more Rusty stories, following him from the plains to the mountains. My thanks to them and to all those who have worked on this series. And may they and my readers prosper and be happy.
Landour,
Mussoorie
Ruskin Bond
October 2014
THE BEGINNING
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
This collection published 2003
Copyright © Ruskin Bond, 2003
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket images © Aparajita Ninan
ISBN: 978-0-143-33340-1
This digital edition published in 2014.
e-ISBN: 978-8-184-75060-7
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
