by Ruskin Bond
28 January
Muki completes five, and as usually happens on his birthday, there is a blizzard. The storm raged for two days—howling winds, hail, sleet, snow. In the middle of it Prem had to go out for coal and kerosene oil. Worst weather that I can recall in the hill-station. Sick of it. This is no place for a winter residence. Why do I stay here?
10 March
Gentle weather at last. Peach, plum and apricot trees in blossom. So this is why I stay here.
24 April
What I would really like to write is a children’s classic.
Have I written anything approaching one? Some good stories, but they are so easily lost in the flood of literature that spews forth from the presses of the world.
28 April
The feeling of space—of limitless space—can only be experienced by living in the mountains. Or at sea, in the days of the sailing-ships. I think that’s why I love sea literature— Masefield, Conrad, Stevenson, Melville . . . . Oddly enough, the mountains haven’t inspired many great books. And I don’t mean books on mountaineering.
17 May
Depressed all day. Kept thinking of this day, seven years ago, when little Suresh (Raki’s younger brother) was taken away so cruelly.
10 June
Monsoon sets in early, but welcome all the same. Perhaps the money drought will break too.
20 June
A name—a lovely face—turn back the years! Forty-five years, to be exact, when I was a small boy in Jamnagar and my father taught English to some of the younger princes and princesses— among them this girl, whose pictures (taken by my father) are still in my old album. She wrote to me after reading an article of mine in a Bombay paper, wanting to know if I was the same boy, ‘Mr Bond’s son.’ I responded, of course. A link with my childhood is so very rare. And besides, I had a crush on her (my first). She’d be about fifty-six now. So long ago—and yet it seems only yesterday.
11 July
Wrote Getting Granny’s Glasses (3,000 words) in two days; I wrote it with love and tenderness and, I think, with some skill. (It was to be short-listed for the Carnegie Medal the following year; unusual for so short a book.)
20 July
Among the monsoon insects who fly in at the open window after dark, is a very persistent bamboo beetle who must be the incarnation of a kamikaze pilot. Wrote a song for him:
A beetle fell into the goldfish bowl,
Hey-ho!
The beetle began to struggle and roll,
Ho-hum!
The window was open, the moon shone bright,
The crickets were singing with all their might,
But a blundering beetle had muddled his flight
And here he was now, in a watery plight,
Having given the goldfish a terrible fright,
Ho-hum, hey-ho!
The beetle swam left, the beetle swam right,
Hum-ho!
Along came myself—I said, ‘Lord, what a sight!
That poor old beetle will drown tonight.
Ho-hum.
A beetle is just an insect, I hear,
But what if I fell in a vat full of beer?
I’d be brewed to light lager if no one came near—
(It happened, I’m told, to a man in Ajmer)—
Ho-hum, ho-hum.
With my fingers and thumb
The beetle I seized;
The goldfish were pleased!
The window was open, the moon shone bright,
I flung that beetle far out in the night,
And he bumbled away in a staggering flight,
Ho-hum, hey-ho,
Good night!
8 October
Everyone at JM Books liked Granny, and an advance against royalties broke the drought.
Paid rent in advance for a year. But Ivy Cottage looks shaky. Will it come down next monsoon?
Mountains are kind To Writers
But the Wind is Cruel
In Search of a Winter Garden
IF SOMEONE WERE to ask me to choose between writing an essay on the Taj Mahal or on the last rose of summer, I’d take the rose—even if it was down to its last petal. Beautiful, cold, white marble leaves me—well, just a little cold.
Roses are warm and fragrant, and almost every flower I know, wild or cultivated, has its own unique quality, whether it be subtle fragrance or arresting colour or loveliness of design. Unfortunately, winter has come to the Himalayas, and the hillsides are now brown and dry, the only colour being that of the red sorrel growing from the limestone rocks. Even my small garden looks rather forlorn, with the year’s last dark- eyed nasturtium looking every bit like the Lone Ranger surveying the surrounding wilderness from his saddle. The marigolds have dried in the sun, and tomorrow I will gather the seed. The beanstalk that grew rampant during the monsoon is now down to a few yellow leaves and empty bean pods.
‘This won’t do,’ I told myself the other day. ‘I must have flowers!’
Prem, who had been down to the valley town of Dehra the previous week, had made me even more restless, because he had spoken of masses of sweet peas in full bloom in the garden of one of the town’s public schools. Down in the plains, winter is the best time for gardens, and I remembered my grandmother’s house in Dehra, with its long rows of hollyhocks, neatly staked sweet peas, and beds ablaze with red salvia and antirrhinum. Neither Grandmother nor the house are there anymore, but surely there are other beautiful gardens, I mused, and maybe I could visit the school where Prem had seen the sweet peas. It was a long time since I had enjoyed their delicate fragrance.
So I took the bus down the hill, and throughout the two- hour journey I dozed and dreamt of gardens—cottage gardens in the English countryside, tropical gardens in Florida, Mughal gardens in Kashmir, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon!—What had they really been like, I wondered.
And then we were in Dehra, and I got down from the bus and walked down the dusty, busy road to the school Prem had told me about.
It was encircled by a high wall, and, tiptoeing, I could see playing fields and extensive school buildings and, in the far distance, a dollop of colour that may have been a garden. Prem’s eyesight was obviously better than mine!
I made my way to a wrought-iron gate that would have done justice to a medieval fortress, and found it chained and locked. On the other side stood a tough-looking guard, with a rifle.
‘May I enter?’ I asked.
‘Sorry, sir. Today is holiday. No school today.’
‘I don’t want to attend classes. I want to see sweet peas.’
‘Kitchen is on the other side of the ground.’
‘Not green peas. Sweet peas. I’m looking for the garden.’
‘I am guard here.’
‘Garden.’
‘No garden, only guard.’
I tried telling him that I was an old boy of the school and that I was visiting the town after a long interval. This was true up to a point, because I had once been admitted to this very school, and after one day’s attendance had insisted on going back to my old school. The guard was unimpressed. And perhaps it was poetic justice that the gates were barred to me now.
Disconsolate, I strolled down the main road, past a garage, a cinema, and a row of eating houses and tea shops. Behind the shops there seemed to be a park of sorts, but you couldn’t see much of it from the road because of the buildings, the press of people, and the passing trucks and buses. But I found the entrance, unbarred this time, and struggled through patches of overgrown shrubbery until, like Alice after finding the golden key to the little door in the wall, I looked upon a lovely little garden.
There were no sweet peas, and the small fountain was dry. But around it, filling a large circular bed, were masses of bright yellow California poppies.
They stood out like sunshine after rain, and my heart leapt as Wordsworth’s must have, when he saw his daffodils. I found myself oblivious to the sounds of the bazaar and the road, just as the people outside seemed oblivious
to this little garden. It was as though it had been waiting here all this time, waiting for me to come by and discover it.
I am fortunate. Something like this is always happening to me. As Grandmother often said, ‘When one door closes, another door opens.’ And while one gate had been closed upon the sweet peas, another had opened on California poppies.
The Words
Observing Ananda weeping, Gautama said,
‘O Ananda do not weep. This body of ours
contains within itself the powers which renew
its strength for a time, but also the causes which
lead to its destruction. Is there anything put
together which shall not dissolve?’
Then, turning to his disciples, he said, ‘When
I am passed away and am no longer with you,
do not think the Buddha has left you, and is not
still in your midst. You have my words, my
explanations, my laws . . . .’ And again, ‘Beloved
disciples, if you love my memory, love one another.’
And after another pause he said, ‘Beloved,
that which causes life causes also decay
and death. Never forget this. I called you to tell you this.’
These were the last words of Gautama
Buddha, as he stretched himself out and died
under the great sal tree, at Kasinagara.
The Old Lama
I MEET HIM on the road every morning, on my walk up to the Landour post office. He’s a lean, old man in a long maroon robe, a Tibetan monk of uncertain age. I’m told he’s about eighty-five. But age is really immaterial in the mountains. Some grow old at their mother’s breasts, and there are others who do not age at all.
If you are like this old lama, you go on forever. For he is a walking man, and there is no way you can stop him from walking.
The lama in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, rejuvenated by the mountain air, strode along with ‘steady, driving strokes’, leaving his disciple far behind. My lama, older and feebler than Kim’s, walks very slowly, with the aid of an old walnut walking-stick. The ferrule keeps coming off the end of the stick, but he puts it back with coal tar, left behind by the road repairers.
He plods and shuffles along. In fact, he’s very like the tortoise in the story of the hare and the tortoise. I see him walking past my window, and five minutes later when I start out on the same road, I feel sure of overtaking him halfway up the hill. But invariably I find him standing near the post office when I get there.
He smiles when he sees me. We are always smiling at each other. His English is limited, and I speak absolutely no Tibetan. He knows a few words of Hindi, enough to make his needs known, but that’s about all. He is quite happy to converse silently with all the creatures and people who take notice of him on the road.
It’s the same walk he takes every morning. At 9 o’clock, if I look out of my window, I can see a line of Tibetan prayer flags fluttering over an old building in the cantonment. He emerges from beneath the flags and starts up the steep road. Ten minutes later he is below my window, and sometimes he stops to sit and rest on my steps, or on a parapet farther along the road. Sooner or later, coming or going, I shall pass him on the road or up near the post office. His eyes will twinkle behind thick-lensed glasses, and he will raise his walking stick slightly in salutation. If I say something to him, he just smiles and nods vigorously in agreement.
An agreeable man.
He was one of those who came to India in 1959, fleeing the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The Dalai Lama found sanctuary in India, and lived here in Mussoorie for a couple of years; many of his followers settled here. A new generation of Tibetans has grown up in the hill-station, and those under thirty years have never seen their homeland.
But for almost all of them, and there are several thousand in this district alone, Tibet is their country, their real home, and they are quick to express their determination to go back when their land is free again.
Even a twenty-year-old girl like Tseten, who has grown up knowing English and Hindi, speaks of the day when she will return to Tibet with her parents. She has given me a painting of Milarepa, the Buddhist monk-philosopher, meditating beneath a fruit-laden peace tree, the eternal snows in the background. This is, perhaps, her vision of the Tibet which she would like to see, some day. Meanwhile, she works as a typist in the office of the Tibetan Homes Foundation.
My old lama will, I am sure, be among the first to return, even if he has to walk all the way over the mountain passes. Maybe that’s why he plods up and around this hill every day. He is practicing for the long walk back to Tibet.
Here he is again, pausing at the foot of my steps. It’s a cool, breezy morning, and he does not feel the need to sit down.
‘Tashi-tilay! Good day!’ I greet him, in the only Tibetan I know.
‘Tashi-tilay!’ he responds, beaming with delight.
‘Will you go back to Tibet one day?’ I ask him for the first time.
In spite of his limited Hindi, he understands me immediately, and nods vigorously.
‘Soon, soon!’ he exclaims, and raises his walking-stick to emphasize his words.
Yes, if the Tibetans are able to return to their country, he will be among the first to go back. His heart is still on that high plateau. And like the tortoise, he’ll be there waiting for the young hares to catch up with him.
If he goes, I shall certainly miss him on my walks.
Walk Tall
You stride through the long grass,
Pressing on over fallen pine-needles,
Up the winding road to the mountain-pass:
Small red ant, now crossing a sea
Of raindrops; your destiny
To carry home that single, slender
Cosmos seed,
Waving it like a banner in the sun.
The Night the Roof Blew Off
LOOKING BACK AT the experience, I suppose it was the sort of thing that should have happened in a James Thurber story, like the dam that burst or the ghost who got in. But I wasn’t thinking of Thurber at the time, although a few of his books were among the many I was trying to save from the icy rain and sleet pouring into my bedroom and study.
We have grown accustomed to sudden storms up here at 7,000 feet in the Himalayan foothills, and the old building in which I live has, for over a hundred years, received the brunt of the wind and the rain as they sweep across the hills from the east.
We’d lived in the building for over ten years without any untoward happening. It had even taken the shock of an earthquake without sustaining any major damage: it is difficult to tell the new cracks from the old.
It’s a three-storey building, and I live on the top floor with my adopted family—three children and their parents. The roof consists of corrugated tin sheets, the ceiling, of wooden boards. That’s the traditional hill-station roof.
Ours had held fast in many a storm, but the wind that night was stronger than we’d ever known it. It was cyclonic in its intensity, and it came rushing at us with a high-pitched eerie wail. The old roof groaned and protested at the unrelieved pressure. It took this battering for several hours while the rain lashed against the windows, and the lights kept coming and going.
There was no question of sleeping, but we remained in bed for warmth and comfort. The fire had long since gone out, the chimney stack having collapsed, bringing down a shower of sooty rain water.
After about four hours of buffeting, the roof could take it no longer. My bedroom faces east, so my portion of the roof was the first to go.
The wind got under it and kept pushing, until, with a ripping, groaning sound, the metal sheets shifted from their moorings, some of them dropping with claps like thunder onto the road below.
So that’s it, I thought, nothing worse can happen. As long as the ceiling stays on, I’m not getting out of my bed. We’ll pick up the roof in the morning.
Icy water cascading down on my face made me change my
mind in a hurry. Leaping from my bed, I found that much of the ceiling had gone too. Water was pouring onto my open typewriter—the typewriter that had been my trusty companion for almost thirty years!—and onto the bedside radio, bed covers, and clothes’ cupboard. The only object that wasn’t receiving any rain was the potted philodendron, which could have done with a little watering.
Picking up my precious typewriter and abandoning the rest, I stumbled into the front sitting-room (cum library), only to find that a similar situation had developed there. Water was pouring through the wooden slats, raining down on the bookshelves.
By now I had been joined by the children, who had come to rescue me. Their section of the roof hadn’t gone as yet. Their parents were struggling to close a window that had burst open, letting in lashings of wind and rain.
‘Save the books!’ shouted Dolly, the youngest, and that became our rallying cry for the next hour or two.
I have open shelves, vulnerable to borrowers as well as to floods. Dolly and her brother picked up armfuls of books and carried them into their room. But the floor was now awash all over the apartment, so the books had to be piled on the beds. Dolly was helping me gather up some of my manuscripts when a large field rat leapt onto the desk in front of her. Dolly squealed and ran for the door.
‘It’s all right,’ said Mukesh, whose love of animals extends even to field rats. ‘He’s only sheltering from the storm.’
Big brother Rakesh whistled for our mongrel, Toby, but Toby wasn’t interested in rats just then. He had taken shelter in the kitchen, the only dry spot in the house.
At this point, two rooms were practically roofless, and the sky was frequently lighted up for us by flashes of lightning. There were fireworks inside too, as water sputtered and crackled along a damaged electric wire. Then the lights went out altogether, which in some ways made the house a safer place.
Prem, the children’s father, is at his best in an emergency, and he had already located and lit two kerosene lamps; so we continued to transfer books, papers, and clothes to the children’s room.
