by Ruskin Bond
On the spur of the hill stood the ruins of an old brewery. The roof had long since disappeared and the rain had beaten the stone floors smooth and yellow. Some enterprising Englishman had spent a lifetime here making beer for his thirsty compatriots down in the plains. Now, moss and ferns grew from the walls. In a hollow beneath a flight of worn steps, a wildcat had made its home. It was a beautiful grey creature, black-striped, with pale green eyes. Sometimes it watched me from the steps or the wall, but it never came near.
No one lived on the hill, except occasionally a coal burner in a temporary grass-thatched hut. But villagers used the path, grazing their sheep and cattle on the grassy slopes. Each cow or sheep had a bell suspended from its neck, to let the shepherd boy know of its whereabouts. The boy could then lie in the sun and eat wild strawberries without fear of losing his animals.
I remembered some of the shepherd boys and girls.
There was a boy who played a flute. Its rough, sweet, straightforward notes travelled clearly across the mountain air. He would greet me with a nod of his head, without taking the flute from his lips. There was a girl who was nearly always cutting grass for fodder. She wore heavy bangles on her feet, and long silver earrings. She did not speak much either, but she always had a wide grin on her face when she met me on the path. She used to sing to herself, or to the sheep, or to the grass, or to the sickle in her hand.
And there was a boy who carried milk into town (a distance of about five miles), who would often fall into step with me. He had never been away from the hills. He had never been in a train. I told him about the cities (and why my hair wasn’t black), and he told me about his village; how they made rotis from maize, how fish were to be caught in the mountain streams, how bears came to steal his father’s pumpkins.
These things I remembered, crossing the street to a busy London tube station—these, and the smell of pine needles, the silver of oak leaves, the call of the Himalayan cuckoo, and the mist, like a wet facecloth. And as I stood in a crowded tube train between Goodge Street and Tottenham Court, my nose tucked into the back page of someone else’s newspaper, I had a vision of a bear making off with a ripe pumpkin, and I had crossed a thousand miles of ocean, plain and desert and reached home.
Reading a book of Bhutanese wisdom, I came upon this little gem: ‘Cold weather doesn’t care if your coat is old or new.’
Given my sensual nature, I count myself lucky for having been spared the affliction of acquisitiveness. It is a matter of temperament; I was born this way, I can take no credit for it.
I began living on my own at seventeen. It was a tiny barsati in Dehradun. A bed, a table and a chair (by the window) were all that the room contained. It was all I needed—all that any writer needs. Even today, over sixty years later, my room contains the same basic furnishings—only the table is larger, to accommodate more in the way of paper and manuscripts; the bed is slightly more comfortable; and there is a rug on the floor. There’s a separate room for my books—a luxury.
Yes, the rest of the house has grown, as my adopted family has grown. There is a television set in the dining room, a refrigerator in the kitchen. A few years ago we found we had saved enough to buy a car.
To be unconcerned about a desired good is probably the only way to possess it. To paraphrase Lao Tzu—one sure way to lose the world and everything in it, is to try grasping it.
Money often costs too much.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you owe nothing, you are rich. Money doesn’t make people happy.
But neither does poverty.
The secret, then, is to have as much as you need—or maybe a little more, and then share what you have.
‘I enjoy life,’ said Seneca, ‘because I am ready to leave it.’ If we can disencumber ourselves of nine-tenths of our worldly goods, it should not be difficult to leave the rest behind.
One of life’s greatest pleasures is free. It lies in watching a plant grow—from seed to seedling, to green branch to bough, to flower to fruit.
As with many who love gardens, I have never really had enough space in which to create a proper garden of my own. The only time I had a patch of free earth at my disposal was back in the 1960s, when I was living in an old cottage on the outskirts of Mussoorie. Even then it was a few square feet of rocky hillside. 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 many years now, I have had to live in modest dwellings, sometimes on the upper floors of tumbledown buildings, which have no garden space at all. All the same, there are always a number of ever-widening cracks in which wild sorrels, dandelions, thorn apples and nettles—and sometimes a miniature peepul tree—all take root and thrive. You could call it a wild wall-garden, as pleasing a sight as any.
Let us cultivate our garden.
—Voltaire
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a garden is the answer to all our problems, but it’s amazing how a little digging and friendly dialogue with the good earth 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 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 gaindas and raat ki ranis. Baldev, who heads a large business corporation in Delhi, tells me that he wouldn’t dream of going to his office unless he’s spent at least half an hour in his garden. 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 Annie Powell, at one time my neighbour in Mussoorie, who at the age of ninety was up early every morning to water her little 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.
Gardens remind me of one of the few friends I had as a child. His name was Dukhi and he took care of the garden in my grandmother’s house in Dehradun. Time had no meaning in a large garden, and Dukhi never hurried. Life, for him, was not a matter of one year succeeding another, but of five seasons—winter, spring, hot weather, monsoon and autumn—arriving and departing. His seed beds had always to be in readiness for the coming season, and he did not look any further than the next monsoon. It was impossible to tell his age. He was either very young for his years or very old for them.
Dukhi loved bright colours, especially reds and yellows. He liked strongly scented flowers, like jasmine and honeysuckle. He couldn’t understand my Granny’s preference for the more delicately perfumed petunias and sweetpeas. But I shared Dukhi’s fondness for the common bright orange marigold. When the garden was bare of all colour, the marigold would still be there, gay and flashy, challenging the sun.
Dukhi was very fond of making nosegays, and I liked to watch him at work. A sunflower formed the centre-piece. It was surrounded by roses, marigolds and oleander, fringed with green leaves, and bound together with silver thread. Was Dukhi really dukhi—sad? If he was, the garden kept him going.
There’s a suitcase under my bed where I store old manuscripts and photographs, magazines and greeting cards from years ago that I couldn’t throw away. It is a treasure I go to when I’m in need of diversion or comfort—the comfort of old friends, for memories can be friends. As, indeed, is the suitcase—still with me, sixty years after I bought it cheap as a homesick teenager in Jersey. It travelled back to India with me, and it h
as served me well. Like me, it’s a bit battered but still functioning.
It isn’t by throwing things away—and, invariably, replacing them—that we avoid cluttering up our life. It is by holding on to things that have been good and faithful to us. A trusted familiar knows how to live with us, finding its own space, giving us ours, and saves us from the need to hoard and possess that comes from feeling incomplete.
‘Always tell the truth,’ wrote Mark Twain, ‘then you don’t have to remember anything.’
I haven’t always done that. So there’s a truth. Most of us fail, and we always pay the price—with every lie we surrender a little of our peace of mind, because we never lie only once; a single lie births ten others. The trick, I suppose, is to make the effort to be truthful, for nothing liberates us like the truth. A life of simplicity is impossible without it.
And it is the same with forgiveness and letting go. We clutter up our life with grievances, hurts and regrets when we cannot forgive.
A local racketeer, who has been in jail a couple of times, meets me on the road and compliments me because I’m ‘always smiling’. I think better of him for the observation.
Later that day I get a phone call from a lady who has sent me a slim volume of her poems, self-published. I tell her the poems are lovely.
If, by telling a lie, one can make someone happy, why not tell the damn lie?
A quiet sort of evening. I fix myself a rum and soda and settle down with one of my favourite books, The Pocket Trivet: An Anthology for Optimists, published by The Morning Post newspaper in 1932.
But what is a trivet, the unenlightened may ask. Well, it’s a stand for a small pot or kettle, fixed securely over a grate. To be ‘right as a trivet’ is to be perfectly right—just right, like the short sayings in this book, which are further enlivened by a number of charming woodcuts based on seventeenth-century originals; such as the illustration of a moth hovering over a candle flame and below it the legend: ‘I seeke mine owne hurt.’ But the sayings are mostly of a cheering nature, such as Emerson’s ‘Hitch your wagon to a star!’ Or the West Indian proverb: ‘Every day no Christmas, an’ every day no rainy day.’
My book of trivets is a happy example of much concentrated wisdom being collected in a small space—the beauty separated from the dross. It helps me to forget the dilapidated building in which I live and to look instead at the ever-changing cloud patterns from my bedroom window. There is no end to the shapes made by the clouds, or to the stories they set off in my head. We don’t have to circle the world in order to find beauty and fulfilment.
After all, most of living has to happen in the mind. To quote one anonymous sage from my trivet: ‘The world is only the size of each man’s head.’
A thunderstorm, followed by strong winds, brought down the temperature. That was yesterday. And today it is cloudy, cool, drizzling a little, almost monsoon weather; but it is still too early for the real monsoon.
The birds are enjoying the cool weather. The green-backed tits cool their bottoms in the rainwater pool. A king-crow flashes past, winging through the air like an arrow. On the wing, it snaps up a hovering dragonfly. The mynahs fetch crow feathers to line their nests in the eaves of the house. I am lying so still on the window seat that a tit alights on the sill, within a few inches of my head. It snaps up a small dead moth before flying away.
At dusk I sit at the window and watch the trees and listen to the wind as it makes light conversation in the leafy tops of the maples. There is a whirr of wings as the king-crows fly into the trees to roost for the night. But for one large bat it is time to get busy, and he flits in and out of the trees. The sky is just light enough to enable me to see the bat and the outlines of the taller trees. Someone walks up the road below, whistling an old song.
There was something I had to do, but I think I will sit here a little longer.
When a small storeroom collapsed during the last heavy rains, I was forced to rescue a couple of old packing cases that had been left there for three or four years. The contents were well soaked and most of it had to be thrown away—old manuscripts that had been obliterated, negatives that had got stuck together, gramophone records that had taken on strange shapes (dear ‘Ink Spots’, how will I ever listen to you again?)… Unlike most writers, I have no compunction about throwing away work that hasn’t quite come off, and I am sure there are a few critics who would prefer that I throw away the lot! Sentimental rubbish, no doubt. Well, we can’t please everyone; and we can’t preserve everything either. Time and the elements will take their toll. It is not a bad thing to be forced to travel light.
A memory from long ago. Ulla.
She woke fresh and frolicsome. The sun streamed in through the window, and she stood naked in its warmth, performing calisthenics. I busied myself with the breakfast. Ulla ate three eggs and a lot of bacon, and drank two cups of coffee.
‘And what shall we do today?’ she asked, her blue eyes shining. They were the bright blue eyes of a Siamese kitten.
‘I’m supposed to visit the Employment Exchange,’ I said.
‘But that is bad. Can’t you go tomorrow—after I have left?’
‘If you like.’
‘I like.’
And she gave me a swift, unsettling kiss on the lips.
We climbed Primrose Hill and watched boys flying kites. We lay in the sun and chewed blades of grass, and then we visited the Zoo, where Ulla fed the monkeys. She consumed innumerable ices. We lunched at a small Greek restaurant, and in the evening we walked all the way home through scruffy Camden Town, drank beer, ate a fine, greasy dinner of fish and chips, and went to bed early—Ulla had to catch a boat-train next morning.
‘It has been a good day,’ she said.
‘I’d like to do it again tomorrow.’
‘But I must go tomorrow.’
‘But you must go.’
She turned her head on the pillow and looked wonderingly into my eyes, as though she were searching for something. I don’t know if she found what she was looking for; but she smiled, and kissed me softly on the lips.
‘Thanks for everything,’ she said.
She was fresh and clean, like the earth after spring rain.
I took her fingers and kissed them, one by one. I kissed her breasts, her throat, her forehead; and, making her close her eyes, I kissed her eyelids.
We lay in each other’s arms for a long time, savouring the warmth and texture of each other’s bodies. Though we were both very young and inexperienced, we found ourselves imbued with a tender patience, as though there lay before us not just this one passing night, but all the nights of a lifetime, all eternity.
There was a great joy in our loving, and afterwards we fell asleep like two children who have been playing in the open all day.
The sun woke me next morning. I opened my eyes to see Ulla’s slim, bare leg dangling over the side of the bed. I smiled at her painted toes. Her hair pressed against my face, and the sunshine fell on it, making each hair a strand of burnished gold.
The station and the train were crowded, and we held hands and grinned at each other, too shy to kiss.
‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘Give my love to Phuong.’
‘I will.’
We made no promises—of writing, or of meeting again. Somehow our relationship seemed complete and whole, as though it had been destined to blossom for just those two days. A courting and a marriage and a living together had been compressed, perfectly, into one summer night…
I passed the day in a glow of happiness; I thought Ulla was still with me; and it was only at night, when I put my hand out for hers, and did not find it, that I knew she had gone.
But I kept the window open all through the summer, and the scent of the honeysuckle was with me every night.
Love is as mysterious as happiness—no telling when it may visit us; when it will look in at the door and walk on, or come in and decide to stay. I won’t even hazard to say that love is always fleeting, a bird on the wing. I have known
couples who grew old together and seemed reasonably happy.
There are few comforts greater than the touch of a loving hand when your hopes have been dashed. Of course things don’t turn out that way for all of us. When I was young, I fell in love with someone, someone fell in love with me, and both loves were unrequited. But life carried on.
Nothing really ends happily ever after, but if you come to terms with your own isolation, then, paradoxically, it becomes immediately possible to find a friend. And friendship is also love.
A bat flies in through the open window. He flies very low, skimming the floor, zooming in and out under the single chair and table, seeming lost, as if his radar is wrong. I’ve grown quite used to him. And when sometimes he settles upside down at the foot of my bed, I let him be. On lonely nights, even a crazy bat is company.
It was March 1955 and I was returning to India, to everything I had missed keenly during my three years in the UK. Although I was twenty-one, and had been earning my own living for over three years, in many ways I was still a boy, with a boy’s thoughts and dreams—dreams of romance and high adventure and good companionship. And I was still a lonely boy, alone on that big ship—passengers and crew all strangers to me—still sailing to an uncertain future.
I had two books with me—Thoreau’s Walden and Richard Jefferies’s The Story of My Heart—both reflecting my burgeoning interest in the natural world—but during the day the cabin was hot and stuffy, and the decks too crowded, so I postponed most of my reading until the journey was over. But at night, when it was cool on deck, and most of the passengers were down below, watching a film or drinking Polish vodka (it was a Polish ship), I would sit out under the stars while the ship ploughed on through the Red Sea. There was no sound but the dull thunder of the ship’s screws and the faint tinkle of music from an open porthole.
