by Ruskin Bond
There are snakes on Pari Tibba, and though they are probably harmless, I have never tried taking one of them in my arms. Once, near a spring, I came upon a checkered water snake. Its body was a series of bulges. I used a stick to exert pressure along the snake’s length, and it disgorged five frogs. They came out one after the other, and, to my astonishment, hopped off, little the worse for their harrowing experience. Perhaps they, too, were enchanted. Perhaps shepherd-boys, when they kiss. the snake-princess, are turned into frogs and remain inside the snake’s belly until a writer comes along with a magic stick and releases them from bondage.
Biologists probably have their own explanation for the frogs, but I’m all for perpetuating the fairy legends of Pari Tibba.
The Open Road
AS THE YEARS go by, I do not walk as far or as fast as I used to; but speed and distance were never my forte. Like J. Krishnamurti, I believe that the journey is more important than the destination. But, then, I have never really had a destination. The glory that comes from conquering the Himalayan peaks is not for me. My greatest pleasure lies in taking a path—any old path will do—and following it until it leads me to a forest-glade or village or stream or windy hilltop.
This sort of tramping (it does not even qualify as trekking) is a compulsive thing with me. You could call it my vice, since it is stronger than the desire for wine, women or song. To get on to the open road fills me with joie de vivre, gives me an exhilaration not found in other, possibly more worthy, pursuits.
Only this afternoon I had one of my more enjoyable tramps. I had been cooped up in my room for several days, while outside it rained and hailed and snowed and the wind blew icily from all directions. It seemed ages since I’d taken a long walk. Fed up with it all, I pulled on my overcoat, banged the door shut and set off up the hillside.
I kept to the main road, but because of the heavy snow there were no vehicles on it. Even as I walked, flurries of snow struck my face, and collected on my coat and head. Up at the top of the hill, the deodars were clothed in a mantle of white. It was fairyland: everything still and silent. The only movement was the circling of an eagle over the trees. I walked for an hour, and passed only one person, the milkman on his way back to his village. His cans were crowned with snow. He looked a little tipsy. He asked me the time, but before I could tell him he shook me by the hand and said I was a good fellow because I never complained about the water in the milk. I told him that as long as he used clean water, I’d contain my wrath.
On my way back, I passed a small group. It consisted of a person in some sort of uniform (because of the snow I couldn’t really make it out), who was hurling epithets at several small children who were busy throwing snowballs at him. He kept shouting: ‘Do you know who I am?’ Do you know who I am?’ The children did not want to know. They were only interested in hitting their target, and succeeded once in every five or six attempts.
I came home exhilarated and immediately sat down beside the stove to write this piece. I found some lines of Stevenson’s which seemed appropriate:
And this shall be for music when no one else is near,
The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!
That only I remember, that only you admire,
Of the broad road that stretches, and the roadside fire.
He speaks directly to me, across the mists of time: R. L. Stevenson, prince of essayists. There is none like him today. We hurry, hurry in a heat of hope—and who has time for roadside fires, except, perhaps, those who must work on the roads in all weathers?
Whenever I walk into the hills, I come across gangs of road- workers breaking stones, cutting into the rocky hillsides, building retaining walls. I am not against more roads—especially in the hills, where the people have remained impoverished largely because of the inaccessibility of their villages. Besides, a new road is one more road for me to explore, and in the interests of progress I am prepared to put up with the dust raised by the occasional bus. And if it becomes too dusty, one can always leave the main road. There is no dearth of paths leading off into the valleys.
On one such diversionary walk, I reached a village where I was given a drink of curds and a meal of rice and beans. That is another of the attractions of tramping to nowhere in particular—the finding of somewhere in particular; the striking up of friendships; the discovery of new springs and waterfalls, unusual plants, rare flowers, strange birds. In the hills, a new vista opens up at every bend in the road.
That is what makes me a compulsive walker—new vistas, and the charm of the unexpected.
A Quiet Mind
Lord, give me a quiet mind,
That I might listen;
A gentle tone of voice,
That I might comfort others;
A sound and healthy body,
That I might share
In the joy of walking
And leaping and running;
And a good sense of direction
So I might know just where I’m going!
These I Have Loved
SEA SHELLS. THEY are among my earliest memories. I was five years old, walking barefoot along the golden sands of a Kathiawar beach, collecting shells and cowries and taking them home to fill up an old trunk. Some of those shells remained with me through the years, and I still have one. Whenever I put it to my ear, I can listen to the distant music of the Arabian Sea.
A jack-fruit tree. It stood outside my grandfather’s house in Dehradun: it was easy to climb and was generous with its shade; and in its trunk was a large hole where I kept my marbles, sweets, prohibited books and other treasures.
I have always liked the smell of certain leaves, perhaps even more than the scent of flowers. Crushed geranium and chrysanthemum leaves, mint and myrtle, lime and neem trees after rain, and the leaves of ginger, marigolds and nasturtiums.
Of course there were other smells which, as a boy, I especially liked—the smell of pillau and kofta curry, hot jalebis, roast chicken and fried prawns. But these are smells loved by most gourmets (and most boys), and are not as personal as the smell of leaves and grass.
I have always liked trains and railway-stations. I like eating at railway-stations—hot gram, peanuts, puris, oranges . . . .
As a boy, I travelled to Simla in the little train that crawls round and through the mountains. In March the flowers on the rhododendron trees provided splashes of red against the dark green of the hills. Sometimes there would be snow on the ground to add to the contrast.
What else do I love and remember of the hills? Smells, again . . . . The smells of fallen pine-needles, cowdung smoke, spring rain, bruised grass, the pure cold water of mountain streams, the depth and blueness of the sky.
In the hills, I have loved forests. In the plains, I have loved single trees. A lone tree on wide flat plain—even if it is a thin, crooked, nondescript tree—gains beauty and nobility from its isolation, from the precarious nature of its existence.
Of course, I have had my favourites among trees. The banyan, with its great branches spreading to form roots and intricate passageways. The peepul, with its beautiful heart-shaped leaf catching the breeze and fluttering even on the stillest of days. It is always cool under the peepul. The jacaranda and the gulmohur bursting into blossom with the coming of summer. The cherries, peaches and apricots flowering in the hills; the tall handsome chestnuts and the whispering deodars.
Deodars have often inspired me to poetry. One day I wrote:
Trees of God, we call them;
Planted here when the world was young,
The first trees
Their fingers pointing to the stars,
Older than the cedars of Lebanon.
Several of these trees were cut down recently, and I was furious:
They cut them down last spring
With swift efficient tools,
The sap was rising still.
The trees bled,
Slaughtered
To make furniture for fools.
And which
flower is most redolent of India, of the heat and light and colour of India? Not for me the lotus or the water-lily, but the single marigold, fresh, golden, dew-drenched, kissed by the morning sun.
The smell of the sea . . . . I lived with it for over a year in the Channel Islands. I liked the sea-mist and I liked the fierce gales that swept across the islands in the winter.
Later, there were the fogs of London; I did not like them, but they made me think of Dickens, and I walked to Wapping and the East India Dock Road, and watched the barges on the Thames. It had my favourite pub, and my favourite fish-and- chips shop.
There were always children flying kites from Primrose Hill or sailing boats in the ponds of Hampstead Heath.
Once we visited the gardens at Kew, and in a hothouse, moist and smelling of the tropics, I remembered the East and some of the simple things I had known—a field of wheat, a stack of sugarcane, a cow at rest and a boy sleeping in the shade of a long, red fingered poinsettia . . . . And I knew I would go home to India.
A Dream of Gardens
AS WITH MANY who love gardens, I have never really had enough space in which to create a garden of my own. A few square feet of rocky hillside has been the largest patch at my disposal. 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 the past few years, here in Mussoorie, I have had to live in two small rooms on the third floor of a tumbledown building which has no garden space at all. All the same, it has a number of ever-widening cracks in which wild sorrel, dandelions, thorn- apples and nettles all take root and thrive. You could, I suppose, call it a wild wall-garden. Not that I am deprived of flowers. I am better off than most city-dwellers because I have only to walk a short way out of the hill-station to see (or discover) a variety of flowers in their wild state; and wild flowers are rewarding, because the best ones are often the most difficult to find.
But I have always had this dream of possessing a garden of my own. Not a very formal garden—certainly not the ‘stately home’ type, with its pools and fountains and neat hedges as described in such detail by Bacon in his essay ‘Of Gardens’. Bacon had a methodical mind, and he wanted a methodical garden. I like a garden to be a little untidy, unplanned, full of surprises—rather like my own muddled mind, which gives even me a few surprises at times.
My grandmother’s garden in Dehra, in north India, for example; Grandmother liked flowers, and she didn’t waste space on lawns and hedges. There was plenty of space at the back of the house for shrubs and fruit trees, but the front garden was a maze of flower-beds of all shapes and sizes, and everything that could grow in Dehra (a fertile valley) was grown in them—masses of sweet peas, petunias, antirrhinum, poppies, phlox, and larkspur, scarlet poinsettia leaves draped the garden walls, while purple and red bougainvillaea climbed the porch; geraniums of many hues mounted the veranda steps; and, indoors, vases full of cut flowers gave the rooms a heady fragrance. I suppose it was this garden of my childhood that implanted in my mind the permanent vision of a perfect garden so that, whenever I am worried or down in the dumps, I close my eyes and conjure up a picture of this lovely place, where I am wandering through forests of cosmos and banks of rambling roses. It does help to soothe an agitated mind. I wouldn’t call it meditation. Contemplation, rather.
I remember an aunt who sometimes came to stay with my grandmother, and who had an obsession about watering the flowers. She would be at it morning and evening, an old and rather lopsided watering-can in her frail hands. To everyone’s amazement, she would water the garden in all weathers, even during the rains.
‘But it’s just been raining, aunt,’ I would remonstrate. ‘Why are you watering the garden?’
‘The rain comes from above,’ she would reply. ‘This is from me. They expect me at this time, you know.’
Grandmother died when I was still a boy, and the garden soon passed into other hands. I’ve never done well enough to be able to acquire something like it. And there’s no point in getting sentimental about the past.
Yes, I’d love to have a garden of my own—spacious and gracious, and full of everything that’s fragrant and flowering. But if I don’t succeed, never mind—I’ve still got the dream.
There are in my Garden
There are in my garden
the burnt bronze petals
of shattered marigolds
spears of goldenrod
bending to the load
of pillaging bees
two armoured lizards
a map butterfly
and a division of ants . . . .
A small yellow bird
attacks the last wild cherry blossom
and a laughing boy
stands over new grown clover
where, last year September,
I buried my revolver
in the dark . . . .
A Sweet Savour
I WOULD BE the last person to belittle a flower because of its colour or appearance, but it does happen that my own favourites are those with their own distinctive fragrance.
The rose, of course, is a joy to all—even to my baby granddaughter, who enjoys taking one apart, petal by petal— but there are other, less spectacular blooms, which have a lovely and sometimes elusive fragrance all their own.
I have a special fondness for antirrhinums, or snapdragons, as they are more commonly known. If I sniff hard at them, I don’t catch any scent at all. They seem to hold it back from me. But if I walk past a bed of these flowers, or even a single plant, the gentlest of fragrances is wafted to me, zephyr-like. And if I stop to try and take it all in, it has gone again! I find this quite tantalizing, but it has given me a special regard for this modest flower.
Carnations, with their strong scent of cloves, are great show- offs. And here, in India, the jasmine can be rather heady and overpowering. The honeysuckle, too, insists on making its presence known. There is a honeysuckle creeper outside the study window of my cottage in the hills, and all through the summer its sweet, rather cloying fragrance drifts in through the open window. It is delightful at times; but at other times I have to close the window just so that I can give my attention to other, less intrusive, smells—like the soft scent of petunias (another of my favourites) near the doorstep, and pine needles on the hillside, and great bunches of sweet peas placed on my table.
Some flowers can be quite tricky. One would think that the calendula had no scent at all. Certainly the flower gives nothing away. But run your fingers gently over the leaves and then bring them to your face, and you will be touched—just briefly— by the most delicate of aromas.
Sometimes leaves outdo their blooms. The lemon geranium, for instance, is valued more for its fragrant leaves than for its rather indeterminate flowers. It is the same with verbena. And I cannot truthfully say what ordinary mint looks like in flower. The refreshing aroma of its leaves, when crushed, makes up for any absence of floral display.
Not all plants are fragrant. Some, like the asafoetida, will keep strong men at bay. Of course, one man’s fragrance might well turn out to be another creature’s bad smell. Geraniums, my grandmother insisted, kept snakes away because they couldn’t stand the smell of these flowers. She surrounded her north Indian bungalow with pots of geraniums. It’s true we never found a snake in the house, so she may have been right!
But snakes must like some smells, close to the gound, or by now they’d have taken to living in more elevated places; but I am told their sense of smell is rather dull. When I lie on summer grass in the Himalayas, I am conscious of the many good smells around me—the grass itself, redolent of the morning’s dew; bruised clover; wild violets; tiny buttercups and golden stars and strawberry flowers and many I shall never know the names of . . . .
And the earth itself. It smells differently in different places. But its loveliest fragrance is known only when it
receives a shower of rain. And then the scent of wet earth rises as though it were giving something beautiful back to the clouds—a blend of all the fragrant things that grow in it.
Walnut Tree
The walnut tree is the first to lose its leaves,
But at the same time the fruit ripens,
The skin splits, the hard shell of the nut
Stands revealed. Yesterday (the last of August)
You climbed among the last few crumpled leaves,
Slim boy in a walnut tree, your toes
Gripping the tender bark, your fingers
Fondling walnuts, while I waited and counted,
And there were twenty-three walnuts on the grass.
We cracked them open with our teeth.
They were still raw but we could not wait:
The walnuts would age and I might grow younger!
Great Trees I Have Known
LIVING FOR MANY years in a cottage at 7,000 feet in the Garhwal Himalayas, I was fortunate in having a big window that opened out on the forest, so that the trees were almost within my reach. Had I jumped, I should have landed quite safely in the arms of an oak or chestnut.
The incline of the hill was such that my first-floor window opened on what must, I suppose, have been the second-floor. I never made the jump, but the big langurs, silver-red monkeys with long swishing tails, often leapt from the trees onto the corrugated tin roof and made enough noise to disturb the bats sleeping in the space between the roof and ceiling.
Standing on its own was a walnut tree, and truly, this was a tree for all seasons. In winter the branches were bare but they were smooth and straight and round like the arms of a woman in a painting by Jamini Roy. In the spring each branch produced a hard bright spear of new leaf. By midsummer the entire tree was in leaf, and towards the end of the monsoon the walnuts, encased in their green jackets, had reached maturity.
