by Ruskin Bond
That probably explains why friends with twisted fenders, bubbling radiators and inexplicable flat tyres request him not to sing anymore, at least not while taking a ride in their cars: by that hangs another unkind tale.
Still in his early twenties, Ruskin returned to India, a celebrity. In Dehra Dun he found the old jackfruit tree in whose crevice he had put away his little treasures. His catapult, a few marbles and some silver and gold chocolate wrappers. Far from the maddening fog, he lay back on the grass composing lyrics, courting penury, and rejecting the advances of a mustachioed wench who eventually put him off marriage forever. It also did not help that the Garhwali girl he swooned over, never purred back. However, in early spring, when the tree blossomed, he came down with a severe attack of hay fever. Then, fortune struck.
An oily sanitary engineer barged into his apartment unannounced, and grinning like a slaughterable goat, stood by his bed with one filthy foot on "Tintern Abbey" and another on the Manchester United Football scarf that Ruskin prized above everything he possessed. Ruskin turned purple. "So you are the great Ruskin Bond, like James Bond eh?" the flatula guffawed, "I've come to make you an offer. A hundred rupees for a slogan, a simple line, extolling the virtues of the automatic flush I've invented to go with my custom made thunder-box.
El Crudo guffawed again, and were it not for a bout of sneezing that suddenly gripped our young lyricist, the inventor would have been flushed down the stairs quicker than he had mounted them. "May I sit?" he said, pointing to a three-legged stool, "is it safe?". Ruskin could do no more than nod involuntarily as he glared over the drenched handkerchief he held clasped to his nostrils. Then it hit him. That was it. "SIT SAFE!"
He paid the rent, picked up a clean shirt from the dhobi, delivered United's scarf to the dry cleaners, took an exclusive tonga drawn by a white horse to the Odeon, and bought a dress circle sent to the matinee of "Brigadoon". Fortune, like the Cheshire cat, smiled thereafter.
And that brings me to Ping and Pong, my two trusted roosters who fearlessly crow on my side every time my little Turandot hoists a rolling pin. Only when caught stepping on her pansies, or nibbling on the celery, are they filled with the dread that I live with. It was they who drew out the repressed talents of Bond, the baritone.
Outside my window is a peach tree on whose branches my chickens roost every afternoon. I am not too sure about metempsychosis, but I am hard pressed to explain how and why my chickens begin to sing every time they hear opera. The phenomenon has been observed by many a curious visitor, including Ruskin, who has marvelled at how the red Pong prefers Pavarotti and the speckled Ping, Domingo. The hens only chirp in when the sopranos and contraltos come in.
Early last December, I was at my desk daydreaming, and admiring the crackling patterns of frost on my window pane. My diary had said Mozart died, two hundred years ago. Nature seemed to be paying silent tribute, for all was quiet; and then I heard a voice in the orchard.
"Diess irae, dies illa … the day of wrath shall dissolve the world in ashes". Mozart's requiem, rendered immaculately. I peered through gnarled vines and saw Ruskin. He was seated on a wrecked settee, with Ping and Pong clutched under his arms. They listened silently to the soul of a silenced lover of song. The apple tree overheard overhead, and blossomed.
The old Parsee had not lied. A great voice.
*Victor Banerjee, a well known actor, photographer and director in the world of cinema, enjoys writing in his free time.
The Music Man
BY VIJAY N. SHANKAR
The first thing I heard the night I moved into the room under a false name—the landlord only wanted a South Indian tenant—was the saxophone. Now that was a change from my old room neighbour who spent most of his time beating his wife and then making up to her. I couldn't sleep of course because the saxophone went on like a cat somebody had stepped upon. So I smoked the last of my cigarettes and then went next door to borrow one.
Joseph Samuel was a small man with a big repertoire of swear words and an abrupt manner. "Christ in heaven," he said at the door, "I'm trying to create music, man." Then his face swung into formal lines. "Yes?" He was almost a dwarf but he squeezed my hand so hard that I stopped feeling sorry about his height.
"I'm your neighbour. Ran out of cigarettes."
"Have you got a girlfriend in your room?" he asked.
"No."
"Right. Because the guy before you said my saxophone distracted him from his girlfriend. I play in a band and my name is Mister Samuel." He stepped aside for me and smiled the first time.
He had this pompous way about him which I found later was no pose at all. It was his way of putting on a few extra inches.
"Meet my wife," he said and I looked around the empty room.
"Sally," he said and laughed. Then walked over to his bed and patted the gleaming saxophone. "The best wife a man ever had, eh?"
"I'm a writer," I said. I had practised that line so many times.
"That's why you're here in this dump, man. God bless us artist types." He threw me his packet of cigarettes. That, as the man said, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Actually a ribald, drunken, cry-on-your-shoulder kind of friendship with an impossible man. You just couldn't believe that he was there. He was broke most of the time of course, but had worked out a foolproof system of redistributing loans. So if he borrowed two hundred at a certain time, he took it from four people and kept on paying back three of them while he used the money taken from only one of them.
What was most surprising was that he actually had political views of his own. "I believe in socialism, man," he said to me one day after reading the newspaper he borrowed every morning from me. "It makes you feel good to know that things are going to change … that one day I'll have a house of my own."
"You're just dreaming, Joseph."
"That's why I voted for Mrs. Gandhi's party, man. They had the best dreams to give." I laughed at that but he was dead serious. "You may be an angry young man, but there are millions like me who want this kind of dream. We're quite happy. And look at the music I play. A lot of dream stuff from a shining, golden world.
"Who knows that I go back with my saxophone to this dump of a room where there's no water and the stairs stink. And the people who hear me … they go back too, to places like this … even worse. That's life and life is a bitch, as Mr. Hallsworth used to say."
"Who's that?"
"God rest his soul. He was the undertaker in whose house I lived before coming to Delhi. That was in Bombay. A great man who quoted your friend Shakespeare."
As they say of course, behind every great and not so great man there is a woman. In Joseph's case, the woman was about ten years behind him. "Used to sing like an angel, she did," he said to me one cold night just before Christmas. "Would have married her too and everything was fixed up."
"You didn't?"
"No. She married a good-for-nothing pianist in Bombay. I don't blame her. I never was much to look at. But what I got is soul, man. That's God's own truth. Do you think I have a soul?"
For a moment I thought Joseph was going metaphysical on me and I didn't like any of it. I would have much rather heard him talk about his bacchanalias in Colombo where he had lived for some years. So to cut short any prospective argument, I agreed that he had a soul.
"Anyhow, I'm happy with Sally. I live to play this," he fondled the keys of his saxophone.
But try as I might, I never could get him to take me along when he lumbered out with his saxophone to play it, God knows where. He left in the afternoons and came back close to midnight about ready to fall apart. "You can hear me all you want right here," he said when I suggested that I might go along with him. He went fishing almost every Sunday. He always left too early for me but I saw him come back wearing his faded T-shirt and trying to get his outsize fishing rod in past the door and the corner just before the stairs. It was a sight as he strutted about when he caught a fish or two and showed it off to everyone in the building. Finally the fish
went as a goodwill bribe to the landlord and Joseph made a great production of it as he made the formal presentation, bending over double and patting the landlord's pretty daughter as he forced them to accept the fish. "It makes him feel very special," he said to me when I suggested that we could eat the fish ourselves. "A fish or two every Sunday and I don't have to pay the rent. When he's so terribly grateful to me, how can he ask for the rent? That's why it's worth buying the fish and giving it to him."
"You mean, you don't catch them?" I asked with some surprise. "Me catch fish," he laughed. "Never caught one in my life."
Excepting for the day when Joseph really dropped a brick. He had been drinking more than usual and I thought it was just because it was Christmas eve. He went out as usual with his saxophone and large briefcase, staggering as he walked unsteadily. "Want me to come?" I asked him and he shook his head vigorously. "Don't be silly, man … who says I'm drunk, eh?" he said. I went back to an article I was doing. Maybe I should have taken away his quart bottle of rum before he left. That thought came later.
He came back, or rather was brought back at night by some men wearing the multi-coloured costume of a marriage band. The people who march along before the bridegroom's horse.
Joseph was in the same costume too and it took a long minute to register that he played in that kind of band. And he was far out drunk, falling on all sides as he clutched Sally and mumbled incoherently. "He just wouldn't stop playing some silly western tune," one of the men said. "We were playing the latest film hits and Joseph just played this silly music."
He had a splitting hangover next morning and was painfully contrite because we had all found out about his band. "I had to join up with them. Everyone faces hard times," he said. "And I don't know why but the only thing I could play last evening was the funeral march. It came out from the soul, you know." I handed him some coffee. "You were playing what?"
He doubled up laughing as the irony struck him too. "Christ, the funeral march." The coffee fell all over him as we laughed.
But Joseph moved out the next day because everyone started calling him bandwalla. That was something he never could live down.
In Praise of the Sausage
BY RUSKIN BOND
I like a good sausage, I do;
It's a dish for the chosen and few.
Oh, for sausage and mash,
And of mustard a dash
And an egg nicely fried—maybe two?
At breakfast or lunch, or at dinner,
The sausage in always a winner;
If you want a good spread
Go for sausage on bread,
And forget all your vows to be slimmer.
Epitaph for an Escape Artiste
Here lies a famous escapologist
Who was buried on the 19th, 20th,
And then again on the 21st June.
First Kiss
I remember—I remember
The first girl that I kissed.
She closed her eyes and I closed mine,
And then—worse luck—we missed!
Last Tango in the Far Pavilions
BY BILL AITKEN
I've never read M M Kaye but I ran into one of her unguided tours the other weekend, a party of middle-aged English ladies on a "Ramble of Hill Stations". I'd been house-painting for weeks, grimly saving on the cost of labour to pay for the paint and decided I could do with a day off. I decided to walk to Everest's old bungalow beyond Mussoorie and overlooking the Yamuna as it straggles across the Doon valley. (The English ramble while we paharis prefer to straggle).
On the way I was surprised to see at a distance several ladies wearing red gym skirts with matching sunhats and knapsacks for all the world like one of those tremendously tough teams of Japanese lady climbers who give a cheery wave before they abseil off the top of Everest into the gathering gloom … to be followed shortly after by the sound of six short sharp blasts on a girl-guide whistle—the Alpine distress signal.
Later in the day on my way back I bumped into them again near a little tea-stall I always go to. They turned out to be British and disgruntled bird and wild-flower watchers. They had also wanted to visit Everest's estate (they referred to him as "Sir George" though when he lived in Mussoorie the locals called him "Compasswala,") but had lost the way.
Apparently my curiosity had been reciprocated for they admitted they had been trying to identify me through binoculars. It had to be the day I was wearing a pair of borrowed ladies ski pants with no flies. (No sex please. They're British). From the paint on my fingers, elbows and hair they deduced rightly if not accurately that I was a painter. Strange how respectable matrons perk up on meeting "artists". Plumbers don't have the same effect.
They were looking for a rare partridge that Dr Salim Ali had reported to be last sighted in the 1880's. I told them never mind the partridge having disappeared, the whole mountain was being systematically levelled by the limestone quarrying. To silence the environment lobby the government was "monitoring" the destruction.
They sat gingerly on the packing cases which furnished the tea-stall and intoned long, crucial instructions to my friend the Sardarji who owned the shack, on how their tea was to be prepared. Sardarji spoiled the life-and-death atmosphere by beaming to his wife—who was in control of operations—and summing it all up as "light tea". His wife smiled back in lieu of not comprehending.
The lady Gringos were suffering not just cultural shock but aesthetic battering. The picnic spot they had been directed to was a beautiful amphitheatre of lofty deodar trailing wild roses, with bursts of rhododendron and wisteria. The municipal authorities were not satisfied with the hand of God however and had used up their allocation of cement on providing an artificial lake with cemented bottom and sides. In place of water there were painted pink and blue stripes of fluorescent brilliance. The memsahibs had been stunned into silence, shaking their heads in disbelief. It was a sight not dreamed of on land of sea or even on colour television. I'm not a snob in these matters and the PWD engineer who hit on this colour scheme, had he been born in America, might have been hailed as a master of the "suburban primitive" school.
They had already suffered a financial trauma that Sunday morning when they learned that their hotel's licence to change traveller's cheques had expired on Saturday evening. The manager who was ignorant of the situation was grateful for them explaining their predicament and laughed uproariously at his own misfortune, not realising that the British never laugh when mentioning the church, the lavatory or the bank.
Never a man to sit idle, Sardarji was fiddling with his motorcycle chain when his wife announced tea was about to be served. Reverentially the assortment of chipped china mugs of light tea arrayed on a battered tin tray was placed on a wobbling plastic topped table. It was so light it looked white. To accommodate the novel idea of 'no sugar, no milk' Sardarji's wife had added some condensed milk which is strictly neither though very much both, just in case the ladies had been jesting. Their frozen horror showed they hadn't been joking and Sardarji tried to retrieve the situation by producing a shrivelled nimbu that had wintered in his loft and attempted to squeeze it with the beatific suggestion that he was providing "Russia tea". Unfortunately the citric acid loosened the axle-grease on his fingers and what they got was "Diesel cappuccino."
My mood had already been spoiled by the unspoken resentment that I could come here regularly and tuck into two stuffed parathas visibly enjoying myself despite the fact that the Viceroy would never return. Their resentment also extended to a small party of Tibetan monks picnicking nearby. Their leader was sitting apart, stout and smiling and although a complete stranger, he seemed to be a continuation of the happy landscape, his presence perhaps accounting for the magnolia's gorgeous bloom. But he had a Polaroid camera and holy-men had no business enjoying themselves in a public place.
It seemed useless to explain that Sardarji had named his shack "Premi Ristorent" for the ladies' quivering nostrils seemed to suspect the very air of being hosti
le. The whole trip appeared to have been a butter-side-down experience, even to complaining of fleas at the Mughal Agra. A very small party had come in a very big air-conditioned bus and had been put up in an empty, turreted hostelry that claimed to be the biggest of its kind in Asia. It had been chosen because inside things hadn't changed much since the British left. Tottering bearers still bore plates of cucumber sandwiches for tea, though the cucumber was actually ghia, masquerading. When I asked if they had seen the morning papers about the Falklands being invaded by a corn-beef republic all I got was a raised eyebrow and "Really" stretched out to three syllables. It was her way of letting me know she didn't really believe that India could rise to such pleasures as the morning newspapers. Surely all the good things of life had gone back in the tin trunks of the Raj?
Literacy Lapses
A young admirer came up to James Joyce and said, "May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?" To which Joyce replied: "No it did lots of other things too."
When Tennyson entered the Oxford Theatre to receive his honorary degree of Doctor of Literature, his locks hung in disorder on his shoulders, and he looked untidy and dishevelled. A voice from the gallery was heard calling out to him: "Did your mother get your up too early, dear?"
A dear old lady sitting next to P.G. Wodehouse at dinner kept raving about his work. She said she never missed reading each of his books, and that her shelves were filled with them. "And when I tell my family," she concluded, "that I have actually been sitting at dinner with Edger Wallace, I don't know what they will say!"
Verses: From the Sanskrit
