by Ruskin Bond
But Grandmother shook her head and carried on with the knitting; and I held the photograph in my hand looking from it to my grandmother and back again, trying to find points in common between the old lady and the little girl. A lemoncoloured butterfly settled on the end of Grandmother’s knitting needle, and stayed there while the needles clicked away. I made a grab at the butterfly, and it flew off in a dipping flight and settled on a sunflower.
‘I wonder whose hands they were,’ whispered Grandmother to herself, with her head bowed, and her needles clicking away in the soft warm silence of that summer afternoon.
A Vagrant in the Doon Valley
On the Road to Dehra
The light spring rain rode on the wind, into the trees, down the road; it brought an exhilarating freshness to the air, a smell of earth, a scent of flowers; it brought a smile to the eyes of the boy on the road.
The long road wound round the hills, rose and fell and twisted down to Dehra; the road came from the mountains and passed through the jungle and valley and, after passing through Dehra, ended somewhere in the bazaar. But just where it ended no one knew, for the bazaar was a baffling place, where roads were easily lost.
The boy was three miles out of Dehra. The further he could get from Dehra, the happier he was likely to be. Just now he was only three miles out of Dehra, so he was not very happy; and, what was worse, he was walking homewards.
He was a pale boy, with blue-grey eyes and fair hair; his face was rough and marked, and the lower lip hung loose and heavy. He had his hands in his pockets and his head down, which was the way he always walked, and which gave him a deceptively tired appearance. He was a lazy but not a tired person.
He liked the rain as it flecked his face, he liked the smell and the freshness; he did not look at his surroundings or notice them—his mind, as usual, was very far away—but he felt their atmosphere, and he smiled.
His mind was so very far away that it was a few minutes before he noticed the swish of bicycle wheels beside him. The cyclist did not pass the boy, but rode beside him, studying him, taking in every visible detail, the bare head, the open-necked shirt, the flannel trousers, the sandals, the thick hide belt round his waist. A European boy was no longer a common sight in Dehra, and Somi, the cyclist, was interested.
‘Hallo,’ said Somi, ‘would you like me to ride you into town? If you are going to town?’
‘No, I’m all right,’ said the boy, without slackening his pace, ‘I like to walk.’
‘So do I, but it’s raining.’
And to support Somi’s argument, the rain fell harder.
‘I like to walk in the rain,’ said the boy. ‘And I don’t live in the town, I live outside it.’
Nice people didn’t live in the town ...
‘Well, I can pass your way,’ persisted Somi, determined to help the stranger.
The boy looked again at Somi, who was dressed like him except for short pants and turban. Somi’s legs were long and athletic, his colour was an unusually rich gold, his features were fine, his mouth broke easily into friendliness. It was impossible to resist the warmth of his nature.
The boy pulled himself up on the cross-bar, in front of Somi, and they moved off.
They rode slowly, gliding round the low hills, and soon the jungle on either side of the road began to give way to open fields and tea gardens and then to orchards and one or two houses.
‘Tell me when you reach your place,’ said Somi. ‘You stay with your parents?’
The boy considered the question too familiar for a stranger to ask, and made no reply.
‘Do you like Dehra?’ asked Somi.
‘Not much,’ said the boy with pleasure.
‘Well, after England it must seem dull . . .’
There was a pause and then the boy said, ‘I haven’t been to England. I was born here. I’ve never been anywhere else except Delhi.’
‘Do you like Delhi?’
‘Not much.’
They rode on in silence. The rain still fell, but the cycle moved smoothly over the wet road, making a soft, swishing sound.
Presently a man came in sight—no, it was not a man, it was a youth, but he had the appearance, the build of a man—walking towards town.
‘Hey, Ranbir,’ shouted Somi, as they neared the burly figure, ‘want a lift?’
Ranbir ran into the road and slipped on to the carrier, behind Somi. The cycle wobbled a bit, but soon controlled itself and moved on, a little faster now.
Somi spoke into the boy’s ear, ‘Meet my friend Ranbir. He is the best wrestler in the bazaar.’
‘Hallo, mister,’ said Ranbir, before the boy could open his mouth.
‘Hallo, mister,’ said the boy.
Then Ranbir and Somi began a swift conversation in Punjabi, and the boy felt very lost; even, for some strange reason, jealous of the newcomer.
Now someone was standing in the middle of the road, frantically waving his arms and shouting incomprehensibly.
‘It is Suri,’ said Somi.
It was Suri.
Bespectacled and owlish to behold, Suri possessed an almost criminal cunning, and was both respected and despised by all who knew him. It was strange to find him out of town, for his interests were confined to people and their privacies; which privacies, when known to Suri, were soon made public.
He was a pale, bony, sickly boy, but he would probably live longer than Ranbir.
‘Hey, give me a lift!’ he shouted.
‘Too many already,’ said Somi.
‘Oh, come on Somi, I’m nearly drowned.’
‘It’s stopped raining.’
‘Oh, come on ...’
So Suri climbed on to the handlebar, which rather obscured Somi’s view of the road and caused the cycle to wobble all over the place. Ranbir kept slipping on and off the carrier, and the boy found the cross-bar exceedingly uncomfortable. The cycle had barely been controlled when Suri started to complain.
‘It hurts,’ he whimpered.
‘I haven’t got a cushion,’ said Somi.
‘It is a cycle,’ said Ranbir bitingly, ‘not a Rolls Royce.’
Suddenly the road fell steeply, and the cycle gathered speed.
‘Take it easy, now,’ said Suri, ‘or I’ll fly off!’
‘Hold tight,’ warned Somi.
‘It’s downhill nearly all the way. We will have to go fast because the brakes aren’t very good.’
‘Oh, Mummy!’ wailed Suri.
‘Shut up!’ said Ranbir.
The wind hit them with a sudden force, and their clothes blew up like balloons, almost tearing them from the machine. The boy forgot his discomfort and clung desperately to the crossbar, too nervous to say a word. Suri howled and Ranbir kept telling him to shut up, but Somi was enjoying the ride. He laughed merrily, a clear, ringing laugh, a laugh that bore no malice and no derision but only enjoyment, fun . . .
‘It’s all right for you to laugh,’ said Suri, ‘if anything happens, I’ll get hurt!’
‘If anything happens,’ said Somi, ‘we all get hurt!’
‘That’s right,’ shouted Ranbir from behind.
The boy closed his eyes and put his trust in God and Somi—but mainly Somi . . .
‘Oh, Mummy!’ wailed Suri.
‘Shut up!’ said Ranbir.
The road twisted and turned as much as it could, and rose a little only to fall more steeply on the other side. But eventually it began to even out, for they were nearing the town and were almost in the residential area.
‘The run is over,’ said Somi, a little regretfully.
‘Oh, Mummy!’
‘Shut up.’
The boy said: ‘I must get off now, I live very near.’ Somi skidded the cycle to a standstill, and Suri shot off the handlebar into a muddy sidetrack. The boy slipped off, but Somi and Ranbir remained on their seats, Ranbir steadying the cycle with his feet on the ground.
‘Well, thank you,’ said the boy.
Somi said, ‘Why don’t y
ou come and have your meal with us, there is not much further to go.’
The boy’s shyness would not fall away.
‘I’ve got to go home,’ he said. ‘I’m expected. Thanks very much.’
‘Well, come and see us some time,’ said Somi. ‘If you come to the chaat shop in the bazaar, you are sure to find one of us. You know the bazaar?’
‘Well, I have passed through it—in a car.’
‘Oh.’
The boy began walking away, his hands once more in his pockets.
‘Hey!’ shouted Somi. ‘You didn’t tell us your name!’
The boy turned and hesitated and then said, ‘Rusty . . .’
‘See you soon, Rusty,’ said Somi, and the cycle pushed off.
The boy watched the cycle receding down the road, and Suri’s shrill voice came to him on the wind. It had stopped raining, but the boy was unaware of this; he was almost home, and that was a miserable thought. To his surprise and disgust, he found himself wishing he had gone into Dehra with Somi.
He stood in the side-track and stared down the empty road; and, to his surprise and disgust, he felt immeasurably lonely.
When a large white butterfly settled on the missionary’s wife’s palatial bosom, she felt flattered, and allowed it to remain there. Her garden was beginning to burst into flower, giving her great pleasure—her husband gave her none—and such fellow-feeling as to make her tread gingerly among the caterpillars.
Mr John Harrison, the boy’s guardian, felt only contempt for the good lady’s buoyancy of spirit, but nevertheless gave her an ingratiating smile.
‘I hope you’ll put the boy to work while I’m away,’ he said. ‘Make some use of him. He dreams too much. Most unfortunate that he’s finished with school, I don’t know what to do with him.’
‘He doesn’t know what to do with himself,’ said the missionary’s wife. ‘But I’ll keep him occupied. He can do some weeding, or read to me in the afternoon. I’ll keep an eye on him.’
‘Good,’ said the guardian. And, having cleared his conscience, he made quick his escape.
Over lunch he told the boy: ‘I’m going to Delhi tomorrow. Business.’
It was the only thing he said during the meal. When he had finished eating, he lit a cigarette and erected a curtain of smoke between himself and the boy. He was a heavy smoker, his fingers were stained a deep yellow.
‘How long will you be gone, sir?’ asked Rusty, trying to sound casual.
Mr Harrison did not reply. He seldom answered the boy’s questions, and his own were stated, not asked; he probed and suggested, sharply, quickly, without ever encouraging loose conversation. He never talked about himself; he never argued: he would tolerate no argument.
He was a tall man, neat in appearance; and, though over forty, looked younger because he kept his hair short, shaving above the ears. He had a small ginger toothbrush moustache.
Rusty was afraid of his guardian.
Mr Harrison, who was really a cousin of the boy’s father, had done a lot for Rusty, and that was why the boy was afraid of him. Since his parents had died, Rusty had been kept, fed and paid for, and sent to an expensive school in the hills that was run on ‘exclusively European lines’. He had, in a way, been bought by Mr Harrison. And now he was owned by him. And he must do as his guardian wished.
Rusty was ready to do as his guardian wished: he had always obeyed him. But he was afraid of the man, afraid of his silence and of the ginger moustache and of the supple malacca cane that lay in the glass cupboard in the drawing-room.
Lunch over, the boy left his guardian giving the cook orders, and went to his room.
The window looked out on the garden path, and a sweeper boy moved up and down the path, a bucket clanging against his naked thighs. He wore only a loincloth, his body was bare and burnt a deep brown, and his head was shaved clean. He went to and from the water-tank, and every time he returned to it he bathed, so that his body continually glistened with moisture.
Apart from Rusty, the only boy in the European community of Dehra was this sweeper boy, the low-caste untouchable, the cleaner of pots. But the two seldom spoke to each other, one was a servant and the other a sahib and anyway, muttered Rusty to himself, playing with the sweeper boy would be unhygienic . . .
The missionary’s wife had said: ‘Even if you were an Indian, my child, you would not be allowed to play with the sweeper boy.’ So that Rusty often wondered: with whom, then, could the sweeper boy play?
The untouchable passed by the window and smiled, but Rusty looked away.
Over the tops of the cherry trees were mountains. Dehra lay in a valley in the foothills, and the small, diminishing European community had its abode on the outskirts of the town.
Mr John Harrison’s house, and the other houses, were all built in an English style, with neat front gardens and name-plates on the gates. The surroundings on the whole were so English that the people often found it difficult to believe that they did live at the foot of the Himalayas, surrounded by India’s thickest jungles. India started a mile away, where the bazaar began.
To Rusty, the bazaar sounded a fascinating place, and what he had seen of it from the window of his guardian’s car had been enough to make his heart pound excitedly and his imagination soar; but it was a forbidden place—‘full of thieves and germs’, said the missionary’s wife—and the boy never entered it save in his dreams.
For Mr Harrison, the missionaries, and their neighbours, this country district of blossoming cherry trees was India. They knew there was a bazaar and a real India not far away, but they did not speak of such places, they chose not to think about them.
The community consisted mostly of elderly people, the others had left soon after independence. These few stayed because they were too old to start life again in another country, where there would be no servants and very little sunlight; and, though they complained of their lot and criticized the government, they knew their money could buy them their comforts: servants, good food, whisky, almost anything—except the dignity they cherished most . . .
But the boy’s guardian, though he enjoyed the same comforts, remained in the country for different reasons. He did not care who were the rulers so long as they didn’t take away his business; he had shares in a number of small tea estates and owned some land—forested land—where, for instance, he hunted deer and wild pig.
Rusty, being the only young person in the community, was the centre of everyone’s attention, particularly the ladies’.
He was also very lonely.
Every day he walked aimlessly along the road, over the hillside; brooding on the future, or dreaming of sudden and perfect companionship, romance and heroics; hardly ever conscious of the present. When an opportunity for friendship did present itself, as it had the previous day, he shied away, preferring his own company.
His idle hours were crowded with memories, snatches of childhood. He could not remember what his parents were like, but in his mind there were pictures of sandy beaches covered with seashells of every description. They had lived on the west coast, in the Gulf of Kutch; there had been a gramophone that played records of Gracie Fields and Harry Lauder, and a captain of a cargo ship who gave the child bars of chocolate and piles of comics—The Dandy, Beano, Tiger Tim—and spoke of the wonderful countries he had visited. But the boy’s guardian seldom spoke of Rusty’s childhood, or his parents, and this secrecy lent mystery to the vague, undefined memories that hovered in the boy’s mind like hesitant ghosts.
Rusty spent much of his time studying himself in the dressing-table mirror; he was able to ignore his pimples and see a grown man, worldly and attractive. Though only sixteen, he felt much older.
He was white. His guardian was pink, and the missionary’s wife a bright red, but Rusty was white. With his thick lower lip and prominent cheek-bones, he looked slightly Mongolian, specially in a half-light. He often wondered why no one else in the community had the same features.
Mr John Harrison was go
ing to Delhi.
Rusty intended making the most of his guardian’s absence: he would squeeze all the freedom he could out of the next few days; explore, get lost, wander afar; even if it were only to find new places to dream in. So he threw himself on the bed and visualized the morrow . . . where should he go—into the hills again, into the forest? Or should he listen to the devil in his heart and go into the bazaar? Tomorrow he would know, tomorrow . . .
(An excerpt from Ruskin Bond’s first novel Room on the Roof)
The Window
I came in the spring, and took the room on the roof. It was a long low building which housed several families; the roof was flat, except for my room and a chimney. I don’t know whose room owned the chimney, but my room owned the roof. And from the window of my room I owned the world.
But only from the window.
The banyan tree, just opposite, was mine, and its inhabitants my subjects. They were two squirrels, a few mynas, a crow, and at night, a pair of flying-foxes. The squirrels were busy in the afternoon, the birds in the morning and evening, the foxes at night. I wasn’t very busy that year; not as busy as the inhabitants of the banyan tree.
There was also a mango tree but that came later, in the summer, when I met Koki and the mangoes were ripe.
At first, I was lonely in my room. But then I discovered the power of my window. It looked out on the banyan tree, on the garden, on the broad path that ran beside the building, and out over the roofs of other houses, over roads and fields, as far as the horizon. The path was not a very busy one, but it held variety: an ayah, with a baby in a pram; the postman, an event in himself; the fruit-seller, the toy-seller, calling their wares in high-pitched familiar cries; the rent-collector; a posse of cyclists, a long chain of schoolgirls; a lame beggar . . . all passed my way, the way of my window ...
1948: Ruskin with broken arm after riding his bicycle into a bullock cart. ‘Stick to writing,’ urged a kindly neighbour.
In the early summer, a tonga came rattling and jingling down the path and stopped in front of the house. A girl and an elderly lady climbed down, and a servant unloaded their baggage. They went into the house and the tonga moved off, the horse snorting a little.
