The Ruskin Bond Mini Bus

by Ruskin Bond

  "The original bent of the soul..." I accept that man has a soul, or he would be incapable of compassion.

  February

  We move from mind to matter:

  Tried a pizza — seemed to take an hour to travel down my gullet.

  Two days later: Swiss cheese pie with Mrs Goel who's Swiss — and more adventures of the digestive tract.

  Next day: Supper with the Deutschmanns from Australia. Australian pie.

  Following day: Rest and recovery. Then reverted to good old dal-bhaat.

  Accompanied N — to Dehra Dun and ended up paying for our lunch. The trouble with rich people is that they never seem to have any money on them. That's how they stay rich, I suppose.

  March

  Sold A Crow for All Seasons to the Children's Film Society for a small sum. They think it will make a good animated film. And so it will. But I'm pretty sure they won't make it. They have forgotten about the story they bought from me five years ago! (Neither film was ever made.)

  April

  The wind in the pines and deodars hums and moans, but in the chestnut it rustles and chatters and makes cheerful conversation. The horse-chestnut in full leaf is a magnificent sight.

  Children down with mumps. I go down with a viral fever for two days. Recover and write three articles. Hope for the best. It is not in mortals to command success.

  Men get their sensual natures from their mothers, their intellectual make-up from their fathers; women, the other way round, (or so I'm told!)

  June

  Not many years ago you had to walk for weeks to reach the pilgrim destinations — Badrinath, Gangotri, Kedarnath, Tungnath... Last week, within a few days, I covered them all, as most of them are now accessible by motorable road. I liked some of the smaller places, such as Nandprayag, which are still unspoilt. Otherwise, I'm afraid the dhaba-culture of urban India has followed the cars and buses into the mountains and up to the shrines.

  July

  The deodar (unlike the pine) is a hospitable tree. It allows other things to grow beneath it, and it tolerates growth upon its trunk and branches — moss, ferns, small plants. The tiny young cones are like blossoms on the dark green foliage at this time of the year.

  Slipped and cracked my head against the grid of a truck. Blood gushed forth, so I dashed across to Dr. Joshi's little clinic and had three stitches and an anti-tetanus shot. Now you know why I don't travel well.

  M.C. Beautiful, seductive. "She walks in beauty like the night..."

  August

  Endless rain. No sun for a week. But M.C. playful, loving. In good spirits, I wrote a funny story about cricket. I'd find it hard to write a serious story about cricket. The farcical element appeals to me more then the 'nobler' aspects of the game. Uncle Ken made more runs with his pads than with his bat. And out of every ten catches that came his way, he took one!

  October

  Paid rent in advance for next year; paid school fees to end of this year. Broke, but don't owe a paisa to a soul. Ice cream in town with Raki. Came home to find a couple of cheques waiting for me!

  M. C. Quick as a vixen, but makes the chase worthwhile.

  We walk in the wind and the rain. Exhilarating.

  Frantic kisses.

  Time to say goodbye!

  When love is swiftly stolen,

  It hasn't time to die.

  When in love, I'm inspired to write bad verse.

  Teilhard de Chardin said it better:

  "Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."

  February 1986

  Destiny is really the strength of our desires.

  Raki back from the village. I'm happy he has made himself popular there, adapted to both worlds, the comparative sophistication of Mussoorie and the simple earthiness of village Bachhanshu in the remoteness of Garhwal. Being able to get on with everyone, rich or poor, old or young, makes life so much easier. Or so I've found! My parents' broken marriage, father's early death, and the difficulties of adapting to my stepfather's home, resulted in my being something of a loner until I was thirty. Now I've become a family person without marrying. Selfish?

  Returned to two great comic novels — H. G. Wells's History of Mr. Polly and George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody. Polly has some marvellous set-pieces, while Nobody never fails to make me laugh.

  M. C. returns with a spring in the Springtime. The same good nature and sense of humour.

  'Three things in love the foolish will desire:

  Faith, constancy, and passion; but the wise

  Only an hour's happiness require

  And not to look into uncaring eyes.'

  (Kenneth Hopkins)

  March

  Getting Granny's Glasses received a nomination for the Carnegie Medal. Cricket for the Crocodile makes friends.

  After a cold wet spell, Holi brings warmer days, ladybirds, new friends.

  May

  So now I'm 52. Time to pare life down to the basics of doing.

  a) what I have to do

  b) what I want to do

  Much prefer the latter.

  June

  Blood pressure up and down.

  Writing for a living: it's a battlefield!

  People do ask funny questions. Accosted on the road by a stranger, who proceeds to cross-examine me, starting with: "Excuse me, are you a good writer?" For once, I'm stumped for an answer.

  Muki no better. Bangs my study door, sees me give a start, and says: "This door makes a lot of noise, doesn't it?"

  August

  Thousands converge on the town from outlying villages, for local festival. By late evening, scores of drunks staggering about on the road. A few fights, but largely good-natured.

  The women dress very attractively and colourfully. But for most of the menfolk, the height of fashion appears to be a new pyjama-suit. But I'm a pyjama person myself. Pyjamas are comfortable, I write better wearing pyjamas!

  September

  Month began with a cheque that bounced. Refrained from checking my blood pressure.

  Monsoon growth at its peak. The ladies' slipper orchids are tailing off, but I noticed all the following wild flowers: balsam (two kinds), commelina, agrimony, wild geranium (very pretty), sprays of white flowers emanating from the wild ginger, the scarlet fruit of the cobra lily just forming tiny mushrooms set like pearls in a retaining wall; ferns still green, which means more rain to come; escaped dahlias everywhere; wild begonias and much else. The best time of year for wild flowers.

  February 1987

  Home again, after five days in hospital with bleeding ulcers. Loving care from Prem. Support from Ganesh and others. Nurse Nirmala very caring. I prefer nurses to doctors.

  Milk, hateful milk!

  After a week, back in hospital. Must have been all that milk. Or maybe Nurse Nirmala!

  March

  To Delhi for a check-up. Public gardens ablaze with flowers. Felt much better.

  "A merry heart does good like a medicine, but a broken spirit dries the bones."

  "He who tenderly brings up his servant from a child, shall have him become his son at the end."

  (Book of Proverbs)

  May

  Lines for future use:

  Lunch (at my convent school) was boiled mutton and overcooked pumpkin, which made death lose some of its sting.

  Pictures on the wall are not just something to look at. After a time, they become company.

  Another bus accident, and a curious crowd gathered with disaster-inspired speed.

  He (Upendra) has a bonfire of a laugh.

  (Forgot to use these lines, so here they are!)

  May

  Ordered a birthday cake, but it failed to arrive. Sometimes I think inertia is the greatest force in the world.

  Wrote a ghost story, something I enjoy doing from time to time, although I must admit that,
try as I might, I have yet to encounter a supernatural being. Unless you can count dreams as being supernatural experiences.

  August

  After the drought, the deluge.

  Landslide near the house. It rumbled away all night and I kept getting up to see how close it was getting to us. About twenty feet away. The house is none too stable, badly in need of repairs. In fact, it looks a bit like the Lucknow Residency after the rebels had finished shelling it.

  (It did, however, survive the landslide, although the retaining wall above our flat collapsed, filling the sitting-room with rubble.)

  November

  To Delhi, to receive a generous award from Indian Council for Child Education. Presented to me by the Vice-President of India. Got back to my host's home to discover that the envelope contained another awardee's cheque. He was due to leave for Ahmedabad by train. Rushed to railway station, to find him on the platform studying my cheque which he had just discovered in his pocket. Exchanged cheques. All's well that ends well.

  A Delhi Visit

  A long day's taxi journey to Delhi. It gets tiring towards the end, but I have always found the road journey interesting and at times quite enchanting — especially the rural scene from outside Dehra Dun, through Roorkee and various small wayside towns, up to Muzzafarnagar and the outskirts of Meerut: the sugar-cane being harvested and taken to the sugar factories (by cart or truck); the fruit on sale everywhere (right now, its the season for bananas and 'chakotra' lemons); children bathing in small canals; the serenity of mango groves...

  Of course there's the other side to all this — the litter that accumulates wherever there are large centres of population; the blaring of horns; loudspeakers here and there. It's all part of the picture. But the picture as a whole is a fascinating one, and the colours can't be matched anywhere else.

  Marigolds blaze in the sun. Yes, whole fields of them, for they are much in demand on all sorts of ceremonial occasions: marriages, temple pujas, and garlands for dignitaries — making the humble marigold a good cash crop.

  And not so humble after all. For although the rose may still be the queen of flowers, and the jasmine the princess of fragrance, the marigold holds its own through sheer sturdiness, colour and cheerfulness. It is a cheerful flower, no doubt about that — brightening up winter days, often when there is little else in bloom. It doesn't really have a fragrance — simply an acid odour, not to everyone's liking — but it has a wonderful range of colour, from lower yellow to deep orange to golden bronze, especially among the giant varieties in the hills.

  Otherwise this is not a great month for flowers, although at the India International Centre (IIC) in Delhi, where I am staying, there is a pretty tree with fragile pink flowers — the Chorisnia speciosa, each bloom having five large pink petals, with long pistula.

  Eight

  Garhwal Himalaya

  Deep in the crouching mist lie the mountains.

  Climbing the mountains are forests

  Of rhododendron, spruce and deodar —

  Trees of God, we call them — sighing

  In the wind from the passes of Garhwal;

  And the snow-leopard moans softly

  Where the herdsmen pass, their lean sheep cropping

  Short winter grass.

  And clinging to the sides of the mountains,

  The small stone houses of Garhwal;

  Then thin fields of calcinated soil torn

  From the old spirit-haunted rocks;

  Pale women plough, they laugh at the thunder,

  And their men go down to the plains:

  Little grows on the beautiful mountains

  In the north wind.

  There is hunger of children at noon; yet

  There are those who sing of sunsets

  And the gods and glories of Himachal,

  Forgetting no one eats sunsets.

  Wonder, then, at the absence of old men;

  For some grow old at their mother's breasts,

  In cold Garhwal.

  Nine

  The India I Carried with Me

  I AM NOW GOING BACK IN TIME, TO A PERIOD WHEN I WAS CAUGHT between East and West, and had to make up my mind just where I belonged. I had been away from India for barely a month before I was longing to return. The insularity of the place where I found myself (Jersey, in the Channel Islands) had something to do with it, I suppose. There was little there to remind me of India or the East, not one brown face to be seen in the streets or on the beaches. I'm sure it's a different sort of place now; but fifty years ago it had nothing to offer by way of companionship or good cheer to a lonely, sensitive boy who had left home and friends in search of a 'better future'.

  I had come to England with a dream of sorts, and I was to return to India with another kind of dream; but in between there were to be four years of dreary office work, lonely bed-sitting rooms, shabby lodging houses, cheap snack bars, hospital wards, and the struggle to write my first book and find a publisher for it.

  I started work in a large departmental store called Le Riche. At eight in the morning, when I walked to the store, it was dark. At six in the evening, when I walked home, it was dark again. Where were all those sunny beaches Jersey was famous for? I would have to wait for summer to see them, and a Saturday afternoon to take a dip in the sea.

  Occasionally, after an early supper, I would walk along the deserted seafront. If the tide was in and the wind approaching gale-force, the waves would climb the sea wall and drench me with their cold salt spray. My aunt, with whom I was staying, thought I was quite mad to take this solitary walk; but I have always been at one with nature, even in its wilder moments, and the wind and the crashing waves gave me a sense of freedom, strengthened my determination to escape from the island and go my own way.

  When I wasn't walking along the seafront, I would sit at the portable typewriter in my small attic room, and hammer out the rough chapters of the book that was to become my first novel. These were characters and incidents based on the journal I had kept during my last year in India. It was 1951, recalled in late 1952. An eighteen-year old looking back on incidents in the life of a seventeen-year old! Nostalgia and longing suffused those pages. How I longed to be back with my friends in the small town of Dehra Dun — a leafy place, sunny, fruit-laden, easy-going every familiar corner etched clearly in my memory. Somehow, it had been that last year in Dehra that had brought me closer to the India that I had so far only taken for granted. An India of close and sometimes sentimental friendships. Of striking contrasts: a small cinema showing English pictures (a George Formby comedy or an American musical) and only a couple of hours away thousands taking a dip in the sacred water of the Ganga. Or outside the station, hundreds of pony-drawn tongas waiting to pick up passengers, while the more affluent climbed into their Ford Convertibles, Morris Minors, Baby Austins or flashy Packards and Daimlers.

  But of course Dehra in the 'fifties' was a town of bicycles. Students, shopkeepers, Army cadets, office workers, all used them. The scooter (or Lambretta) had only just been invented, and it would be several years before it took over from the bicycle. It was still unaffordable for the great majority.

  I was awkward on a bicycle and frequently fell off, breaking my arm on one occasion. But this did not prevent me from joining my friends on cycle rides to the Sulphur springs, or to Premnagar (where the Military Academy was situated) or along the Hardwar road and down to the riverbed at Lachiwala.

  In Jersey, I found an old cycle belonging to my cousin, and I rode from St. Helier where we lived, to St Brelade's Bay, at the other end of the island. But returning after dark, I was hauled up for riding without lights. I had no idea that cycles had also to be equipped with lights. Back in Dehra, we never used them!

  The attic room had no view, so one of my favourite occupations, gazing out of windows, came to a stop. But perhaps this was helpful in that it made me concentrate on the sheet of paper in my typewriter. After about six months, I had a book of sorts ready for submission to an
y publisher who was prepared to look at it. Meanwhile, I had been through at least three jobs and had even been offered a post in the Jersey Civil Service, having successfully taken the local civil service exam — something I had done out of sheer boredom, as I had no intention of settling permanently on the island.

  I had been keeping a diary of sorts and in some of the entries I had expressed my desire to get back to India, and my discontent at having to stay with relatives who were unsympathetic, not only to my feelings for India but also to my ambitions to become a writer. The diary fell into my uncle's hands. He read it, and was naturally upset. We had a row. I was contrite; but a few days later I packed my suitcases (all two of them) and stepped on to the ferry that was to take me to Southampton and then to London. Lesson One: don't leave your personal diaries lying around!

  But perhaps it was all for the best, otherwise I might have hung around in Jersey for another year or two, to the detriment of my personal happiness and my writing ambitions.

  I arrived in London in the middle of a thick yellow November fog — those were the days of the killer London fogs — and after a search found the Students' Hostel where I was given a cubicle to myself. But I did not stay there very long; the available food was awful. As soon as I got an office job — not too difficult in the 1950s — I rented an attic room in Belsize Park, the first of many bed-sitters that I was to live in during my three-year sojourn in London.