by Ruskin Bond
This was typical of those early days at Maplewood, the cottage I’d rented on the outskirts of Mussoorie. It was tucked away in a shelf of the hill, a little below the Wynberg-Allen playing field, and its windows, several of them, opened on to a mixed forest of oak, maple, walnut and horse chestnut. The forest has long since gone, cut down to make way for a highway, but fifty years ago it was fairly dense—and inhabited!
My jungle crow wasn’t my only avian visitor, although he was the boldest and noisiest of them. If I was late for breakfast, he would set up a tremendous cawing; and if the window happened to be closed, he would bang on it with his bill. If I was running short of eggs, I would have to save one for him and go without one. This wasn’t nobility on my part; simply a plea for peace and brotherly coexistence.
This is my Uncle Arthur, my father’s younger brother. I think I saw him just once. He worked in the Ishapore Rifle Factory, near Calcutta, for many years. He died in London during the Second World War, when a German bomb fell on his home.
A pair of whistling thrushes lived in the rocky gully below the cottage, and their sweet melodies were a pleasant contrast to the raucous commands of my crow. I call him my crow, but it was really the other way round. I was his human.
The thrushes did not enter the room, but they would sometimes perch on the windowsill and treat me to a sweet duet. They were especially vocal at dawn, and then again at dusk; the half-light of daybreak or twilight seemed to suit them.
A red-bottomed bulbul was another visitor, and so were several wagtails and finches who made merry in the cherry tree when it was in bloom. They loved knocking the petals off the flowers. I am no ornithologist—and there were some birds that I did not recognize—but I could not mistake the long-tailed blue magpies who were frequent visitors to the oak forest.
Up here at Ivy Cottage, where I now live, I have to keep the windows closed most of the time, lest the monkeys get in and raid the kitchen. But at Maplewood there were no monkeys—at least, not the intrusive rhesus monkey—and this may have been due to the presence of a leopard (possibly two) who roamed the vicinity and sometimes carried off a dog, a goat, a small cow or a careless monkey. Monkeys are terrified of leopards. A neighbour, Colonel Powell, used to keep a stuffed leopard in his garden to protect his beans and cucumbers. The monkeys stayed away. But the porcupines came at night and dug up his potatoes.
I tried growing dahlias, but the porcupines made off with dahlia bulbs; perhaps they mistook them for potatoes.
I couldn’t grow much on the stony hillside above the cottage, but in the shady gully below the house there were ferns, creepers and wild ginger. Why struggle to make a garden when nature had already provided me with one?
During the rainy season, the front room was taken over by beetles—all kinds of magnificent beetles: stag, rhino, bamboo and, sometimes, smaller beetles in bright glowing colours, velvety green, ruby red, deep sea blue, each one a living gem. They lived in the forest but when the lights were on and the windows open, they would come buzzing into the room like fighter planes, and sometimes plop—they would land in the goldfish tank, frightening the poor goldfish.
With my friend Kamal (from Rajouri Garden) on a visit to Narendra Nagar (above Rishikesh) in 1959. Kamal’s family is described in my story ‘Bhabiji’s House’ (The Lamp Is Lit, Penguin Books, 1998). Bell-bottom trousers were the fashion then.
That goldfish tank and its occupants had been given to me by Kamal, a friend from Delhi. Perhaps he felt I needed some sort of company during those days and nights of endless rain. I wasn’t particularly fond of goldfish, but they were no trouble to keep; they lived silent, aimless lives, gliding about in their glass container. And they didn’t bark. I had kept a dog for a short time, but his constant nocturnal barking had prevented me from writing, reading or sleeping. So one night I opened the front door and let him out. Barking furiously, he had dashed into the garden. Out of the shadows a silent predator had pounced. There was a squeal, and a commotion in the bushes, as the lurking leopard made off with the helpless dog.
It was a two-storey cottage, and the front door opened on to a landing, a small bridge connecting the first floor with the approach road. As long as the door was locked, no beast or man could get into the house. The windows of the main room were too high for a large animal, and I could safely leave them open for birds and beetles.
Rescuing beetles from drowning in the goldfish bowl became a regular occupation. They could swim a little but not for long. I would pick up a beetle and free it into the night, only to have another blunder in and make straight for that goldfish bowl! The little red bulb above the bowl was probably what attracted them.
And other insects too.
I rescued a praying mantis, several crickets and grasshoppers and a beautiful moon moth. I call it a ‘moon’ moth because a new moon was outlined in pale yellow on its deep-brown wings. Whenever I am stumped for the name of an insect or flower, I make up my own. Why struggle with those long Latin names? A buttercup looks like a buttercup, and sounds much nicer than Ranunculus asiaticus.
I must not give the reader the impression that I was emulating Thoreau by living alone in the woods. Friends frequently stayed with me. Some cut short their visits when they heard the leopard on its nocturnal rounds; but I was never short of human company when I needed it.
I sought solitude, but I did not seek loneliness. You can be lonely in a crowd, in a big city, if you have no friends. And you can live alone in a cottage in the hills and be far from lonely, because for a great part of the time you will be busy keeping that old cottage from falling down.
There were cracks in the walls, the roof leaked, and the landing was on the verge of collapse. The building was, after all, over a hundred years old. The owner was an elderly Anglo-Indian lady of limited means, and I was a writer of extremely limited means, so repairs and renovations were few, if any. The wild cat in the attic did not complain, nor did the shrew in my bedroom. So who was I to complain?
Beena and Rakesh accompany me on all my journeys to literature festivals and other distant events, to give me company and to make sure I don’t get lost. I’m good at getting lost.
The milkman told me that the shrew (or chuchundar) in the house was supposed to be lucky, and that it would bring me wealth; so I let it roam freely. It was half blind and frequently bumped into the furniture, so I had to help it along from time to time. A harmless little creature. Why is a bad-tempered woman called a shrew, I wonder. There was nothing bad-tempered about my little companion. He (or she) did not bring me any material wealth, but I was certainly richer from the experience of living close to nature.
As a boy, and as a young man in London and then in New Delhi, I had taken the natural world for granted. Now that I was living closer to nature, I realized that this was the real world, very different from the man-made world of automobiles, computers and skyscrapers. Man was a god of sorts in his own sphere, but on a lovely mountainside he is no more important than an ant—and not half as industrious!
The ants were getting to my sugar bowl and growing fat on my lumps of Daurala sugar. I did not really mind, not being a sugar fanatic, but every now and then a dead or comatose ant would get mixed up with the sugar, and this irritated me.
Anyway, I thought I’d be clever and outwit them, so I filled a larger bowl with water and placed my sugar bowl in the centre. It stood there like an island surrounded by a sea; and ants, like beetles, are not great swimmers!
The next morning I found my sugar bowl brimming with ants. A twig from my potted asparagus fern lay across the large bowl, forming a bridge across these forbidden waters, and the ants were merrily moving to and fro across this makeshift bridge. Whether it had fallen there accidentally, or was carried there by a platoon of ants, I have no idea. But they had made full use of the floating fern, and in my admiration for their tenacity I made them a gift of the sugar bowl and its contents—to the winner, the spoils!
Lest my reader should think I was spending all my
time in beetle watching and anti-ant activities, I should mention that I did a certain amount of writing. After all, that was why I had come to the hills, Delhi having failed to inspire me to any creative heights.
So there was a method to my working day.
At first light, Usha, the goddess of dawn, would raise her brow over the next mountain, and seeing that I was awake, would glide swiftly over the intervening valley and touch my brow with beams of incandescent light. Then Suraj, the sun god, would take over. An arrow of gold would strike the window, landing on my razai. Slowly, it would spread across the bed, its warmth creeping into my yielding flesh and bones. To be seduced by the sun—what could be more sensuous, more thrilling than that first contact with the earth’s life force?
And then it was gone—gone as swiftly as an escaping thought—and I would have to follow it outside, to where the sunbeams advanced across the hillside.
If it was a fine morning, I would carry a small table, chair and typewriter into my small patch of garden, and sit there for some time, hoping that the words would come.
Sometimes they came, and sometimes, like the bluebird, they stayed away.
Sometimes a cloud came across the sun, and then I would move indoors and try writing at the dining table, surrounded by pickles and sauce bottles. Mystical when I wanted, but down to earth when I had to be!
What did I write during those early years at Maplewood? If the cheques were to keep coming in, I had to keep peppering the editors of magazines and newspapers with my stories and articles, and fortunately, there were still openings for the kind of things I wrote. An occasional sale to a British or American magazine also brought in a few welcome pounds or dollars.
The postman came every day, and every other day I would walk into ‘town’ (Mussoorie’s Mall and commercial centre), my first destination being the post office, in order to send off my manuscripts; then the bank, to deposit a cheque or withdraw some money; then the bookshop, to pick up a newspaper or, occasionally, a book; then the Kwality cafe, for a coffee or a snack. The walk into town took about half an hour. In those days everyone walked. There were only a couple of taxis in Mussoorie, and these were used only in emergencies. There were three or four private cars. There were still a few hand-pulled rickshaws, but these were dying out, along with their short-lived rickshaw pullers. Visitors to Mussoorie usually came by bus. The bus journey from Delhi took about eight hours. You could also take the night train, which got into Dehradun in the early hours.
Looking through an old photo album. Back in the 1950s and 1960s I used to carry a camera around. Then I decided it was too intrusive—too intrusive for a writer. Now everyone carries a camera of sorts, and no one bothers about being intrusive!
A few people had telephones. Those were pre-television days, and one kept in touch with events elsewhere in India and in the greater world by means of the radio, which provided news, music and the coverage of sporting events. All India Radio gave you the news, impartially, and so did the BBC and Radio Ceylon; they left you to make your own judgements. There were none of the noisy, partisan ‘debates’ that are a feature of our television news channels today. Scandals, political or otherwise, would be confined to the pages of a few papers such as Blitz, which could be quite nasty.
Swimming in the Ganga at Rishikesh, 1959. Just showing off, really. I did not venture very far into the current! Rishikesh was then first a small hamlet, with a few scattered ashrams. The river was pure and unpolluted.
Radio enlivened the home; the cinema enlivened the town.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, before the advent of television, Mussoorie had no fewer than six cinemas, all operating throughout the summer months. (They were shut down in the winter, along with most of the shops and hotels.) English films would be shown in the afternoon, Hindi films later in the evening.
The most popular cinema halls were the Picture Palace, which had opened in 1912, when electricity had come to Mussoorie—its original name was the Electric Picture Palace; the Rialto, very central and usually well maintained; the Capital, located in the basement of Hakman’s Hotel; the Jubilee, a poor sister of the Picture Palace, showing reruns mostly; the Majestic, its seats bug-infested; and one more near the skating rink, which underwent a name change almost every year.
As a small boy, I had been taken by my father to see a film at the Capital. It was one of those Hope–Crosby–Lamour ‘road’ comedies—The Road to Zanzibar, if I remember correctly—and it marked the beginning of several decades of movie-going. Through the 1940s and 1950s there wasn’t much that I missed; the cinemas of New Delhi, Dehradun, Simla, and even London became my stamping ground in my teens and twenties.
Sadly, by the 1960s, the projector in the Capital was showing signs of old age and rattling so loudly that it was impossible to hear the dialogue in the picture. It was like watching a silent movie, but without the exaggerated animation. Some of the other cinemas were in bad shape too. Inevitably the reels would get mixed up and shown in the wrong order. The Vikings would be wiped out in one reel, and then up and fighting in the next. Picture-going was no longer much fun, and I wasn’t surprised when the cinema halls began to shut down, one after another.
By now the reader will realize that I was not the complete recluse, the companion only of birds, ladybirds and wild creatures. Friends from Delhi would often come to stay with me. I went on picnics; I went to the pictures; I watched football games at the nearby school; I strolled along the Mall with the tourists; I talked to the rickshaw boys; I sat in Kwality’s and drank beer and put on weight.
And I wrote lots of stories and poems and essays and novels and books for children. And then Prem came to work for me, and his children grew up under my umbrella. Sometimes I enjoyed being alone, and sometimes I enjoyed being part of a family.
And it is much the same today, except that I no longer have that crow sharing my breakfast. But sometimes I miss the old fellow.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO PICNICS?
An old photo slips out of a book and on to my desk. 1964. It shows a little group about to set out on a picnic—Dick and Hetty Prim and their little girl Sunita (on the pony), Kamal, myself and Surekha (who was to become an actress)—and we must have had a couple of tiffin carriers with us too, because we carried our own food, there being no dhabas to greet us when we arrived at our destination.
And where was our destination that day? The Kempty waterfall, or Cloud’s End, would have been too far for little Sunita and her mother, who was in poor health, and you had to walk to these and most other picnic spots. We were probably headed for the municipal garden (still called ‘Company Bagh’), which would have been a 3-mile walk.
Dick Prim. A dear, gentle person, but extremely absent-minded. He would walk all the way to the Landour Bazaar, do the family shopping—vegetables, eggs, bread, meat—and trudge home again, only to discover that he’d left the shopping bag in one of the shops.
On another occasion he caught the night train for Delhi, only to wake up in Amritsar. He’d taken the wrong train.
He was an artist, and perhaps this explained his tendency to be easily distracted. He would forget names and would sometimes address me as ‘Russell’ instead of Ruskin.
Hetty Prim was very patient with him. She taught English and wrote poetry on the side. Surekha was just out of college. She too wrote poetry on the side. So did I. Everyone seemed to write poetry on the side. They still do. Some things haven’t changed.
I don’t remember much about this particular picnic, except that there were others too—Kamal’s nephew Anil and Surekha’s two sisters, and her mother, not forgetting the boy who hired out his pony. Naturally, there had to be a lot of food, and everyone brought something for the feast. Kamal made parathas. I brought various pickles. Hetty made a great mutton biryani, Bangalore-style (she hailed from Bangalore, now Bengaluru). Mrs Verma and her brood brought lots of boiled eggs and sandwiches. We did not go hungry. But Dick had left the two thermos flasks behind, so we had to do without tea.
Fade in, fade out . . .
Another day, another picnic.
Rakesh is about nine months old, just beginning to toddle around Maplewood Lodge. Spring of 1974. The wild irises are flowering on the hillside. I insist on a picnic.
We put Rakesh in a pram (along with two bottles of beer for yours truly), his father (Prem) prepares a substantial meal, and we set off down the Tehri road, accompanied by two local schoolboys, the Painuli brothers, who had become regular visitors.
What had been a bridle path for mules was now being dug up and converted into a motorable road; but it was at the halfway stage, just dust and rubble and road gangs digging into the hillside to widen the path. Our progress was slow and painful, with me pushing the pram most of the way. At Suakholi, about 5 miles from home, the mountain range opened up to provide a magnificent vista of the higher snow-covered ranges. Here we settled down under a whispering pine and enjoyed our repast. Prem had brought plenty of food for all, and as there were no takers but myself for the Golden Eagle beer, I drank both bottles and fell asleep.
After that I was in no condition to push the pram again, but fortunately the Painuli brothers took turns with it, and when we got home I slept again.
Vishnu, the youngest Painuli, was the quiet one; he grew up to become a schoolteacher and eventually a school principal. His brother, Shiv, was always trying out different things, and a couple of years later I was present at Badrinath, at 12,000 feet, when Shiv appeared on roller skates, ready to skate all the way down to Rishikesh in the foothills. This was a day’s journey by car.
Shiv’s ambition was to get into the Guinness Book of World Records, and he felt that this was one way of doing it. As Badrinath was a place of pilgrimage, there were some who did penance by prostrating themselves at intervals along the road, arriving at Rishikesh a week later; but Shiv wasn’t interested in doing penance, he wanted instant fame.
