Tales of the Open Road

by Ruskin Bond

  I was, I think, the only one walking the streets from choice. Shopkeepers nodded drowsily beneath whirring ceiling fans. The pavement barber had taken his customer into the shelter of an awning. A fortune-teller had decided that there was nothing to predict and had fallen asleep under the same awning. A vegetable-seller sprinkled water on his vegetables in a dispirited fashion. Those cauliflowers were fresh an hour ago, they looked old already. Even the flies were drowsy. Instead of buzzing feverishly from place to place, they staggered about on tired legs.

  It was the pigeons who had found all the coolest places. These birds had made the old city their own. New Delhi is for the crows who like to have a tree to sleep in, even if they take their meals from out of kitchens and verandas. But the pigeons prefer buildings, and the older the buildings the better. They are familiar with every cool alcove or shady recess in the crumbling walls of neglected mosques and mansions.

  A fat, supercilious pigeon watched me now from the window ledge above a jeweller’s shop. The pigeon’s forebears settled here long before the British thought of taking Delhi. Conquerors had come and gone. Nadir Shah the Persian, Madhav Rao the Maratha, Chulam Kadir the Rohilla, and generations of goldsmiths and silversmiths. Hindus and Muslims had made and lost fortunes in the city, but nothing had disturbed the tranquil life of these pigeons. Their gentle cooing can always be heard when there is a lull in the jagged symphony of traffic noise. How do they manage to sound so cool?

  But here was welcome relief for the human: a shady corner in Lal Kuan Bazaar (Street of the Red Well), where an old man provided drinking water to thirsty wayfarers such as myself. His water was stored in a surahi, an earthenware jug which keeps the water sweet and cool. I bent down, cupped my hands, and received the sparkling liquid as my benefactor tilted the surahi towards me.

  Lal Kuan. The Red Well. Of course it was no longer here. But the street still bore its name. And I liked to think that here, in the middle of the street, where a bullock had gone to sleep, forcing the cyclists to make a detour, there was once a well made of dark red brick, where the water bubbled forth all day.

  Imprisoned beneath the soil, held down by the crowded commercial houses of this old quarter, the water must still be there; it gave nourishment to an old peepul tree that grew beside a temple.

  It was the only tree in the street. It jutted out from the temple wall growing straight and tall, dwarfing the two-storey houses. One of its roots, breaking through the ground, had curled up to provide a smooth, well-worn seat.

  And it was cool here, beneath the peepul. Even when there was no breeze, the slender heart-shaped leaves revolved prettily, creating their own currents of air. No wonder the sages of old found it a good tree to sit beneath. No wonder they called it sacred.

  On the other side of the road, a tall iron doorway was set in a high wall. Doors like this were only built in the nineteenth century, when a wealthy merchant’s house had to be a miniature fortress as well as a residence. I could not see over the wall and I would have liked to know what lay behind the door. Perhaps a side-street, perhaps a market, perhaps a garden, perhaps …

  The door opened, not easily, because it had been left closed for a long time, but slowly and with much complaint. And beyond the door there was only an empty courtyard, covered with rubble, the ruins of an old house. I was about to turn away when I hear a deep, tremendous murmur.

  It was the cooing of many pigeons.

  But where were they?

  I advanced further into the ruin, and there, opening out in front of me, ready to receive me as the rabbit hole was ready to receive Alice, was an old, disused well.

  I peered down into its murky depths. It was dark, very dark, down there; but that was where the pigeons lived, in the walls of this lost, long-forgotten well shut away from the rest of the city.

  I could not see any water. So I dropped a pebble over the side. It struck the wall, and then, with a soft plop, touched water. At that instant there was a rush of air and a tremendous beating of wings, and a flock of pigeons, thirty or forty of them, flew out of the well, streaked upwards, circled the building, and then fell into formation, wheeled overhead, the sun gleaming white on their underwings.

  I had discovered their secret. Now I knew why they always looked so cool, so refreshed, while we who walked the streets of Old Delhi did so with parched mouths and drooping limbs.

  The pigeons are the only ones who still know about the Red Well.

  Footloose in Agra

  (I went to Agra in 1965, to see the Taj. But what interested me about the city had little to do with Emperor Shah Jahan’s grand monument to his love.)

  The cycle rickshaw is the best way of getting about Agra. Its smooth gliding motion and leisurely rate of progress are in keeping with the pace of life in this old-world city. The rickshaw boy makes his way through the crowded bazaars, exchanging insults with tonga drivers, pedestrians and other cyclists; but once on the broad Mall or Taj Road, his curses change to carefree song and he freewheels along the tree-lined avenues. Old colonial-style bungalows still stand in large compounds shaded by peepul, banyan, neem and jamun trees.

  Looking up, I notice a number of bright paper kites that flutter, dip and swerve in the cloudless sky. I cannot recall seeing so many kites before.

  ‘Is it a festival today?’ I ask.

  ‘No, sahib,’ says the rickshaw boy. ‘Not even a holiday.’

  ‘Then why so many kites?’

  He does not even bother to look up. ‘You can see kites every day, sahib.’

  ‘I don’t see them in Delhi.’

  ‘Ah, but Delhi is a busy place. In Agra, people still fly kites. There are kite-flying competitions every Sunday, and heavy bets are sometimes placed on the outcome.’

  As we near the city, I notice kites stuck in trees or dangling from electric wires; but there are always others soaring up to take their place. I ask the rickshaw boy to tell me something about the kite-fliers and the kitemakers, but the subject bores him.

  ‘You had better see the Taj today, sahib.’

  ‘All right take me to it. I can lunch afterwards.’

  It is difficult to view the Taj at noon. The sun strikes the white marble, and there is a great dazzle of reflected light. I stand there with averted eyes, looking at everything—the formal gardens, the surrounding walls of red sandstone, the winding river—everything except the monument I have come to see.

  It is there, of course, very solid and real, perfectly preserved, with every jade, jasper or lapis lazuli playing its part in the overall design; and after a while, I can shade my eyes and take in a vision of shimmering white marble. The light rises in waves from the paving-stones, and the squares of black and white marble create an effect of running water. Inside the chamber it is cool and dark but rather musty, and I waste no time in hurrying out again into the sunlight.

  I walk the length of a gallery and turn with some relief to the river scene. The sluggish Yamuna winds past Agra on its way to its union with the Ganga. I know the Yamuna well. I know it where it emerges from the foothills near Kalsi, cold and blue from the melting snows; I know it as it winds through fields of wheat and sugarcane and mustard, across the flat plains of Uttar Pradesh, sometimes placid, sometimes in flood. I know the river at Delhi, where its muddy banks are a patchwork of clothes spread out by the hundreds of washermen who serve the city and I know it at Mathura, where it is alive with huge turtles; Mathura, sacred city, whose beginnings are lost in antiquity.

  And then the river winds its way to Agra, to this spot by the Taj, where parrots flash in the sunshine, kingfishers swoop low over the water and a proud peacock struts across the lawns surrounding the monument.

  I follow the peacock into a shady grove. It is quite tame and does not fly away. It leads me to a small boy who is sitting in the shade of a tree, feasting on a handful of small green fruit.

  I have not seen the fruit before, and I ask the boy to tell me what it is. He offers me what looks like a hard green plum.
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br />   ‘It is the fruit from the Ashok tree,’ says the boy. ‘There are many such trees in the garden.’

  ‘Are you allowed to take the fruit?’

  ‘I am allowed,’ he says, grinning. ‘My father is the head gardener.’ I bite into the fruit. It is hard and sour but not unpleasant.

  ‘Do you live here?’ I ask.

  ‘Over the wall,’ he says. ‘But I come here everyday, to help my father and to eat the fruit.’

  ‘So you see the Taj Mahal every day?’

  ‘I have seen it every day for as long as I can remember.’

  ‘And I am seeing it for the first time … you’re very lucky.’

  He shrugs. ‘If you see it once, or a hundred times, it is the same. It doesn’t change.’

  ‘Don’t you like looking at it, then?’

  ‘I like looking at the people who come here. They are always different. In the evening there will be many people.’

  ‘You must have seen people from almost every country in the world.’

  ‘That is so. They all come here to look at the Taj. Kings and Queens and Presidents and Prime Ministers and film stars and poor people too. And I look at them. In that way it isn’t boring.’

  ‘Well, you have the Taj to thank for that.’

  He gazes thoughtfully at the shimmering monument. His eyes are accustomed to the sharp sunlight. He sees the Taj every day, but at this moment he is really looking at it, thinking about it, wondering what magic it must possess to attract people from all corners of the earth, to bring them here walking through his father’s well-kept garden so that he can have something new and fresh to look at each day.

  A cloud—a very small cloud—passes across the face of the sun; and in the softened light I too am able to look at the Taj without screwing up my eyes.

  As the boy said, it does not change. Therein lies beauty. For the effect on the traveller is the same today as it was three hundred years ago when Bernier wrote: ‘Nothing offends the eye … No part can be found that is not skilfully wrought, or that has not its peculiar beauty.’

  And so, for a few moments, this poem in marble is on view to two unimportant people—the itinerant writer and the gardener’s boy.

  We say nothing; there is really nothing to be said. (But now, a few months later, when I try to recapture the essence of that day, it is not the monument that I remember most vividly. The Taj is there of course; I still see it as a mirror for the sun. But what remain with me, more than anything else, are the passage of the river and the sharp flavour of the Ashok fruit.)

  In the afternoon I walk through the old bazaars which lie to the west of Akbar’s great red sandstone fort, and I am not surprised to find a small street which is almost entirely taken up by kite-shops. Most of them sell the smaller, cheaper kites, but one small dark shop has in it a variety of odd and fantastic creations. Stepping inside, I find myself face to face with the doyen of Agra’s kite-makers, Hosain Ali, a feeble old man whose long beard is dyed red with the juice of mehendi leaves. He has just finished making a new kite from bamboo, paper and thin silk, and it lies outside in the sun, firming up. It is a pale pink kite, with a small green tail.

  The old man is soon talking to me, for he likes to talk and is not very busy. He complains that few people buy kites these days (I find this hard to believe), and tells me that I should have visited Agra twenty-five years ago, when kite-flying was the sport of kings and even grown men found time to spend an hour or two every day with these dancing strips of paper. Now, he says, everyone hurries, hurries in a heat of hope, and delicate things like kites and daydreams are trampled underfoot. ‘Once I made a wonderful kite,’ says Hosain Ali nostalgically. ‘It was unlike any kite seen in Agra. It had a number of small, very light paper discs trailing on a thin bamboo frame. At the end of each disc I fixed a sprig of grass, forming a balance on both sides. On the first and largest disc I painted a face and gave it eyes made of two small mirrors. The discs, which grew smaller from head to tail, gave the kite the appearance of a crawling serpent. It was very difficult to get this great kite off the ground. Only I could manage it.

  ‘Of course, everyone heard of the Dragon Kite I had made, and word went about that there was some magic in its making. A large crowd arrived on the maidan to watch me fly the kite.

  ‘At first the kite would not leave the ground. The discs made a sharp wailing sound, the sun was trapped in the little mirrors. My kite had eyes and tongue and a trailing silver tail. I felt it come alive in my hands. It rose from the ground, rose steeply into the sky, moving farther and farther away, with the sun still glinting in its dragon eyes. And when it went very high, it pulled fiercely on the twine, and my son had to help me with the reel.

  ‘But still the kite pulled, determined to be free—yes, it had become a living thing—and at last the twine snapped, and the wind took the kite, took it over the rooftops and the waving trees and the river and the far hills for ever. No one ever saw where it fell. Sahib, are you listening? The Dragon Kite is lost, but for you I’ll make a bright new poem to fly.’

  ‘Make me one,’ I say, moved by his tale, or rather by the manner of its telling. ‘I will collect it tomorrow, before I leave Agra. Let it be a beautiful kite. I won’t fly it. I’ll hang it on my wall, and will not give it a chance to get away.’

  It is evening, and the winter sun comes slanting through the intricate branches of a banyan tree, as a cycle rickshaw—a different one this time—brings me to a forgotten corner of Agra that I have always wanted to visit. This is the old Roman Catholic cemetery where so many early European travellers and adventurers lie buried.

  Although it is quite probably the oldest Christian cemetery in northern India, it has none of that overgrown, crumbling look that is common to old cemeteries in monsoon lands. It is a bright, even cheerful place, and the jingle of tonga-bells and other street noises can be heard from any part of the grounds. The grass is cut, the gravestones are kept clean, and most of the inscriptions are still readable.

  The caretaker takes me straight to the oldest grave—this is the oldest known European grave in northern India—and it happens to be that of an Englishman, John Mildenhall. The lettering stands out clearly:

  Here lies John Mildenhall, Englishman, who left London in 1599 and travelling to India through Persia, reached Agra in 1605 and spoke with the Emperor Akbar. On a second visit in 1614 he fell ill at Lahore, died at Ajmere, and was buried here through the good offices of Thomas Kerridge, Merchant.

  During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Agra cemetery was considered blessed ground by Christians, and the dead were brought here from distant places. Thomas Kerridge must have put himself to considerable expense to bury his friend in Agra. Mildenhall was a romantic, who styled himself an envoy of Queen Elizabeth. Unfortunately he left no account of his travels, although a couple of his letters are quoted in the writings of Purchas, another English merchant, who lies buried in the Protestant cemetery a couple of furlongs away.

  Nearby is the grave of the Venetian, Jerome Veronio, who died at Lahore. According to some old records, he had a hand in designing the Taj, modelling it on Humayun’s tomb in Delhi. There had for long been a belief that this ‘architect’ of the Taj lay buried in the cemetery but no one knew where. Then in 1945, Father Hyacinth, Superior Regular of Agra, scraped the moss off a tombstone, revealing the simple epitaph: ‘Here lies Jerome Veronio, who died at Lahore.’

  Actually, there is no evidence that Veronio designed the Taj, and even if he had something to do with it, he was only one of a number of artists and architects who worked on its construction. The chief architect was Muhammed Sharif of Samarkand. Each drew a salary of one thousand rupees per month. Ismail Khan of Turkey was the dome-maker. A number of inlay workers, sculptors and masons were Hindus, including Manohar Singh of Lahore and Mohan Lal of Kanauj, both famous inlay workers.

  A man of more authentic accomplishments was the Italian lapidary, Horten Bronzoni, whose grave lies at a short distance from
Veronio’s. He died on 11 August 1677. According to Tavernier, it was Bronzoni who cut the Koh-i-noor diamond; and, says Tavernier, he cut the stone very badly.

  Bronzoni is again mentioned as having manufactured a model ship of war for Aurangzeb, who had been annoyed by the depredations of Portuguese pirates and was anxious to create a navy. The ship was floated in a huge tank and manoeuvred by a number of European artillerymen. It made a ridiculous sight and convinced the Emperor that a navy was out of the question.

  There are over eighty old Armenian graves in the cemetery, but the only one that interests me is the tomb of Shah Azar Khan, an expert in the art of moulding a heavy cannon. One of these, ‘Zamzamah’, earned a measure of immortality in Kipling’s Kim—who holds Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-breathing dragon’, holds the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot. The gun was 14.6 feet long, and is still at Lahore.

  Other historic tombs lie scattered about the cemetery, but the most striking and curious of them is the grave of Colonel Jon Hessing, who died in 1803. It is a miniature Taj Mahal, built of red sandstone. Although small compared to a Mughal tomb, it is large for a Christian grave, and could easily accommodate a living family of moderate proportions. Hessing came to India from Holland, and was one of a colourful band of freelance soldiers (most of them deserters) who served in Sindhia’s Maratha army. Hessing, we are told, was a good, benevolent man and a great soldier. The tomb was built by his wife Alice, who it must be supposed, felt as tenderly towards the Colonel as Shah Jahan felt towards his queen. She could not afford marble. Even so, her ‘Taj’ cost a lakh of rupees.

  Outside, in the street, people move about with casual unconcern.

  Street-vendors occupy the pavement, unwilling that their rivals should take advantage of a brief absence. In the banyan tree, the sparrows and bulbuls are settling down for the night. A kite lies entangled in the upper branches.