by Ruskin Bond
It’s dark at six and by then, Ranbir likes to be out of the deodar forest and on the open road to the village. The moon and the stars and the village lights are sufficient, but not in the forest, where it is dark even during the day. And the silent flitting of bats and flying foxes, and the eerie hoot of an owl, can be a little disconcerting for the hardiest of children. Once Ranbir and the other boys were chased by a bear.
When he told me about it, I said, ‘Well, now we know you can run faster then a bear!’
‘Yes, but you have to run downhill when chased by a bear.’ He spoke as one having long experience of escaping from bears. ‘They run much faster uphill!’
‘I’ll remember that,’ I said, ‘thanks for the advice.’ And I don’t suppose calling a bear ‘uncle’ would help.
Usually Ranbir has the company of other boys, and they sing most of the way, for loud singing by small boys will silence owls and frighten away the forest demons. One of them plays a flute, and flute music in the mountains is always enchanting.
Not only in the hills, but all over India, children are constantly making their way to and from school, in conditions that range from dust storms in the Rajasthan desert to blizzards in Ladakh and Kashmir. In the larger towns and cities, there are school buses, but in remote rural areas, getting to school can pose a problem.
Most children are more than equal to any obstacles that may arise. Like those youngsters in the Ganjam district of Orissa. In the absence of a bridge, they swim or wade across the Dhanei river everyday in order to reach their school. I have a picture of them in my scrapbook. Holding books or satchels aloft in one hand, they do the breast stroke or dog paddle with the other; or form a chain and help each other across.
Wherever you go in India, you will find children helping out with the family’s source of livelihood, whether it be drying fish on the Malabar coast, or gathering saffron buds in Kashmir, or grazing camels or cattle in a village in Rajasthan or Gujarat.
Only the more fortunate can afford to send their children to English medium private or ‘public’ schools, and those children really are fortunate, for some of these institutions are excellent schools, as good, and often better, than their counterparts in Britain or USA. Whether it’s in Ajmer or Bangalore, New Delhi or Chandigarh, Kanpur or Kolkata, the best schools set very high standards. The growth of a prosperous middle-class has led to an ever-increasing demand for quality education. But as private schools proliferate, standards suffer, too, and many parents must settle for the second-rate.
The great majority of our children still attend schools run by the state or municipality. These vary from the good to the bad to the ugly, depending on how they are run and where they are situated. A classroom without windows, or with a roof that lets in the monsoon rain, is not uncommon. Even so, children from different communities learn to live and grow together. Hardship makes brothers of us all.
The census tells us that two in every five of the population is in the age group of five to fifteen. Almost half our population is on the way to school!
And here I stand at my window, watching some of them pass by—boys and girls, big and small, some scruffy, some smart, some mischievous, some serious, but all going somewhere—hopefully towards a better future.
EOPLE OFTEN ask me why I’ve chosen to live in Mussoorie for so long—almost forty years without any significant breaks.
‘I forgot to go away,’ I tell them, but of course, that isn’t the real reason.
The people here are friendly, but then people are friendly in a great many other places. The hills, the valleys are beautiful; but they are just as beautiful in Kulu or Kumaon.
‘This is where the family has grown up and where we all live,’ I say, and those who don’t know me are puzzled because the general impression of the writer is of a reclusive old bachelor.
Unmarried I may be, but single I am not. Not since Prem came to live and work with me in 1970. A year later, he was married. Then his children came along and stole my heart; and when they grew up, their children came along and stole my wits. So now I’m an enchanted bachelor, head of a family of twelve. Sometimes I go out to bat, sometimes to bowl, but generally I prefer to be twelfth man, carrying out the drinks!
In the old days, when I was a solitary writer living on baked beans, the prospect of my suffering from obesity was very remote. Now there is a little more of author than there used to be, and the other day, five-year-old Gautam patted me on my tummy (or balcony, as I prefer to call it) and remarked, ‘Dada, you should join the WWF.’
‘I’m already a member,’ I said. ‘I joined the World Wildlife Fund years ago.’
‘Not that,’ he said. ‘I mean the World Wrestling Federation.’
If I have a tummy today, it’s thanks to Gautam’s grandfather and now his mother who, over the years, have made sure that I am well-fed and well-proportioned.
Forty years ago, when I was a lean young man, people would look at me and say, ‘Poor chap, he’s definitely undernourished. What on earth made him take up writing as a profession?’ Now they look at me and say, ‘You wouldn’t think he was a writer, would you? Too well nourished!’
It was a cold, wet and windy March evening when Prem came back from the village with his wife and first-born child, then just four months old. In those days, they had to walk to the house from the bus stand; it was a half-hour walk in the cold rain, and the baby was all wrapped up when they entered the front room. Finally, I got a glimpse of him, and he of me, and it was friendship at first sight. Little Rakesh (as he was to be called) grabbed me by the nose and held on. He did not have much of a nose to grab, but he had a dimpled chin and I played with it until he smiled.
The little chap spent a good deal of his time with me during those first two years of his in Maplewood—learning to crawl, to toddle, and then to walk unsteadily about the little sitting room. I would carry him into the garden, and later, up the steep gravel path to the main road. Rakesh enjoyed these little excursions, and so did I, because in pointing out trees, flowers, birds, butterflies, beetles, grasshoppers, et al, I was giving myself a chance to observe them better instead of just taking them for granted.
In particular, there was a pair of squirrels that lived in the big oak tree outside the cottage. Squirrels are rare in Mussoorie, though common enough down in the valley. This couple must have come up for the summer. They became quite friendly, and although they never got around to taking food from our hands, they were soon entering the house quite freely. The sitting room window opened directly on to the oak tree whose various denizens—ranging from stag beetles to small birds and even an acrobatic bat—took to darting in and out of the cottage at various times of the day or night.
Life at Maplewood was quite idyllic, and when Rakesh’s baby brother, Suresh, came into the world, it seemed we were all set for a long period of domestic bliss; but at such times, tragedy is often lurking just around the corner. Suresh was just over a year old when he contracted tetanus. Doctors and hospitals were of no avail. He suffered—as any child would from this terrible affliction—and left this world before he had a chance of getting to know it. His parents were broken-hearted. And I feared for Rakesh, for he wasn’t a very healthy boy, and two of his cousins in the village had already succumbed to tuberculosis.
It was to be a difficult year for me. A criminal charge was brought against me for a slightly risque story I’d written for a Bombay magazine. I had to face trial in Bombay and this involved three journeys there over a period of a year and a half, before an irate but perceptive judge found the charges baseless and gave me an honourable acquittal.
It’s the only time I’ve been involved with the law and I sincerely hope it is the last. Most cases drag on interminably, and the main beneficiaries are the lawyers. My trial would have been much longer had not the prosecutor died of a heart attack in the middle of the proceedings. His successor did not pursue it with the same vigour. His heart was not in it. The whole issue had started with a complaint by a l
ocal politician, and when he lost interest, so did the prosecution. Nevertheless, the trial, once begun, had to be seen through. The defence (organized by the concerned magazine) marshalled its witnesses (which included Nissim Ezekiel and the Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar). I made a short speech which couldn’t have been very memorable as I have forgotten it! And everyone, including the judge, was bored with the whole business. After that, I steered clear of controversial publications. I have never set out to shock the world. Telling a meaningful story was all that really mattered. And that is still the case.
I was looking forward to continuing our idyllic existence in Maplewood, but it was not to be. The powers-that-be, in the shape of the Public Works Department (PWD), had decided to build a ‘strategic’ road just below the cottage and without any warning to us, all the trees in the vicinity were felled (including the friendly old oak) and the hillside was rocked by explosives and bludgeoned by bulldozers. I decided it was time to move. Prem and Chandra (Rakesh’s mother) wanted to move too; not because of the road, but because they associated the house with the death of little Suresh, whose presence seemed to haunt every room, every corner of the cottage. His little cries of pain and suffering still echoed through the still hours of the night.
I rented rooms at the top of Landour, a good thousand feet higher up the mountain. Rakesh was now old enough to go to school, and every morning I would walk with him down to the little convent school near the clock tower. Prem would go to fetch him in the afternoon. The walk took us about half an hour, and on the way Rakesh would ask for a story and I would have to rack my brains in order to invent one. I am not the most inventive of writers, and fantastical plots are beyond me. My forte is observation, recollection and reflection. Small boys prefer action. So I invented a leopard who suffered from acute indigestion because he’d eaten one human too many and a belt buckle was causing an obstruction.
This went down quite well until Rakesh asked me how the leopard got around the problem of the victim’s clothes.
‘The secret,’ I said, ‘is to pounce on them when their trousers are off!’
Not the stuff of which great picture books are made, but then, I’ve never attempted to write stories for beginners. Red Riding Hood’s granny-eating wolf always scared me as a small boy, and yet parents have always found it acceptable for toddlers. Possibly they feel grannies are expendable.
Mukesh was born around this time and Savitri (Dolly) a couple of years later. When Dolly grew older, she was annoyed at having been named Savitri (my choice), which is now considered very old fashioned; so we settled for Dolly. I can understand a child’s dissatisfaction with given names.
My first name was Owen, which in Welsh means ‘brave’. As I am not in the least brave, I have preferred not to use it. One given name and one surname should be enough.
When my granny said, ‘But you should try to be brave, otherwise how will you survive in this cruel world?’ I replied, ‘Don’t worry, I can run very fast.’
Not that I’ve ever had to do much running, except when I was pursued by a lissome Australian lady who thought I’d make a good obedient husband. It wasn’t so much the lady I was running from, but the prospect of spending the rest of my life in some remote cattle station in the Australian outback.
Anyone who has tried to drag me away from India has always met with stout resistance.
Up on the heights of Landour lived a motley crowd. My immediate neighbours included a Frenchwoman who played the sitar (very badly) all through the night; a Spanish lady with two husbands, one of whom practised acupuncture—rather ineffectively as far as he was concerned, for he seemed to be dying of some mysterious debilitating disease. The other came and went rather mysteriously, and finally ended up in Tihar Jail, having been apprehended at Delhi airport carrying a large amount of contraband hashish.
Apart from these and a few other colourful characters, the area was inhabitated by some very respectable people—retired brigadiers, air marshals and rear admirals, almost all of whom were busy writing their memoirs. I had to read or listen to extracts from their literary efforts. This was slow torture. A few years before, I had done a stint of editing for a magazine called Imprint. It had involved going through hundreds of badly written manuscripts, and in some cases (friends of the owner!) re-writing some of them for publication. One of life’s joys had been to throw up that particular job, and now here I was, besieged by all the top brass of the Army, Navy and Air Force, each one determined that I should read, inwardly digest, improve, and if possible find a publisher for their outpourings.
Thank goodness they were all retired. I could not be shot or court-martialled. But at least two of them set their wives upon me, and these intrepid ladies would turn up around noon with my ‘homework’—typescripts to read and edit! There was no escape. My own writing was of no consequence to them. I told them that I was taking sitar lessons, but they disapproved, saying I was more suited to the tabla.
When Prem discovered a set of vacant rooms further down the Landour slope, close to school and bazaar, I rented them without hesitation. This was Ivy Cottage. Come up and see me sometimes, but leave your manuscripts behind.
When we came to Ivy Cottage in 1980, we were six, Dolly having just been born. Now, twenty-four years later, we are twelve. I think that’s a reasonable expansion. The increase has been brought about by Rakesh’s marriage twelve years ago, and Mukesh’s marriage two years ago. Both precipitated themselves into marriage when they were barely twenty, and both were lucky. Beena and Binita, who happen to be real sisters, have brightened and enlivened our lives with their happy, positive natures and the wonderful children they have brought into the world. More about them later.
Ivy Cottage has, on the whole, been kind to us, and particularly kind to me. Some houses like their occupants, others don’t. Maplewood, set in the shadow of the hill lacked a natural cheerfulness; there was a settled gloom about the place. The house at the top of Landour was too exposed to the elements to have any sort of character. The wind moaning in the deodars may have inspired the sitar player but it did nothing for my writing. I produced very little up there.
On the other hand, Ivy Cottage—especially my little room facing the sunrise—has been conducive to creative work. Novellas, poems, essays, children’s stories, anthologies, have all come tumbling on to whatever sheets of paper happen to be nearest me. As I write by hand, I have only to grab for the nearest pad, loose sheet, page proof or envelope whenever the muse takes hold of me; which is surprisingly often.
I came here when I was nearing fifty. Now I’m seventy, and instead of drying up, as some writers do in their later years, I find myself writing with as much ease and assurance as when I was twenty. And I enjoy writing. It’s not a burdensome task. I may not have anything of earth-shattering significance to convey to the world, but in conveying my sentiments to you, dear readers, and in telling you something about my relationship with people and the natural world, I hope to bring a little pleasure and sunshine into your life.
Life isn’t a bed of roses, not for any of us, and I have never had the comforts or luxuries that wealth can provide. But here I am, doing my own thing, in my own time and my own way. What more can I ask of life? Give me a big cash prize and I’d still be here. I happen to like the view from my window. And I like to have Gautam coming up to me, patting me on the tummy, and telling me that I’ll make a good goalkeeper one day.
It’s a Sunday morning, as I come to the conclusion of this chapter. There’s bedlam in the house. Siddharth’s football keeps smashing against the front door. Shrishti is practising her dance routine in the back verandah. Gautam has cut his finger and is trying his best to bandage it with cellotape. He is, of course, the youngest of Rakesh’s three musketeers, and probably the most independent-minded. Siddharth, now ten, is restless, never quite able to expend all his energy. ‘Does not pay enough attention,’ says his teacher. It must be hard for anyone to pay attention in a class of sixty! How does the poor teacher pa
y attention?
If you, dear reader, have any ambitions to be a writer, you must first rid yourself of any notion that perfect peace and quiet is the first requirement. There is no such thing as perfect peace and quiet, except perhaps in a monastery or a cave in the mountains. And what would you write about, living in a cave? One should be able to write in a train, a bus, a bullock cart, in good weather or bad, on a park bench or in the middle of a noisy classroom.
Of course, the best place is the sun-drenched desk right next to my bed. It isn’t always sunny here, but on a good day like this, it’s ideal. The children are getting ready for school, dogs are barking in the street, and down near the water tap there’s an altercation between two women with empty buckets, the tap having dried up. But these are all background noises and will subside in due course. They are not directed at me.
Hello! Here’s Atish, Mukesh’s little ten-month-old infant, crawling over the rug, curious to know why I’m sitting on the edge of my bed scribbling away, when I should be playing with him. So I shall play with him for five minutes and then come back to this page. Giving him my time is important. After all, I won’t be around when he grows up.
Half an hour later, Atish soon tired of playing with me, but meanwhile Gautam had absconded with my pen. When I asked him to return it, he asked, ‘Why don’t you get a computer? Then we can play games on it.’
‘My pen is faster than any computer,’ I tell him. ‘I wrote three pages this morning without getting out of bed. And yesterday I wrote two pages sitting under Billoo’s chestnut tree.’
‘Until a chestnut fell on your head,’ says Gautam. ‘Did it hurt?’
‘Only a little,’ I said, putting on a brave front.
He had saved the chestnut and now he showed it to me. The smooth brown horse-chestnut shone in the sunlight.
