The Beauty of All My Days

by Ruskin Bond

  Well, he did go all the way on his roller skates (this was verified by companions who accompanied him on bicycles), and he certainly deserved mention in the Guinness Book of World Records, but he never achieved that distinction—worse luck. If ever I compile a book of records, I shall put him in it.

  Looking back on those early days in Dehra and Mussoorie, it strikes me that a number of my young friends did unusual things or went in for unlikely careers.

  Take the boys from Dehra’s Dilaram Bazaar, in the late 1950s a small market leading into Old Survey Road. There were three or four Sikh families living in the area. When I met one, I met all. They were studying in a local college—Narinder, Gurbachan, Sahib Singh. They were in and out of my Astley Hall rooms whenever they wished, and I was always welcome in their homes. They were just average students, with the possible exception of Gurbachan, who was quite brilliant, and who ended up as a superintendent of income tax—in Hong Kong, of all places. I think he is still there.

  I had come back to India after two years in London, but my young friends were determined to go West and make good in a land where, perhaps, there were more opportunities for a Dick Whittington out to make his fortune.

  Well, Narinder set off while still in his twenties, and within a few years he owned the largest wine store in the UK. He does visit me on his occasional trips to India, but being a teetotaller, it never occurs to him to bring me a bottle of wine. Still, I forgive him. In those Dilaram days, his mother and sisters Dolly and Pummy were extremely kind to me. I could never go hungry when they were around.

  Sahib Singh was a quiet boy who had come out of East Africa with his parents—fleeing from the anti-Indian tyranny of the dictator Idi Amin. His father had been a clerk in a government office. Sahib also left for England when he was in his twenties. He was not a business-minded person and did not prosper in the same way as Narinder, and it was only in his middle age that he grew tired of his mundane office job and tried his hand at something else. To his surprise, he discovered that he could make a good samosa. Soon he was making samosas for all and sundry, and getting orders from local restaurants. Today, I’m told, he’s the Samosa King of Clapham or Tooting, or some fortunate suburb of south London.

  But of course, I remember them best from their Dehra days, when they would turn up at my place on their bicycles, urging me to join them for a picnic at the Robber’s Cave or Sulphur Springs or some idyllic spot in the surrounding jungles; for Dehra was just a small town then (population 50,000) and your bicycle could take you into the countryside within ten or fifteen minutes.

  I was always falling off bicycles, but I would hire one from the cycle-hire shop across the road and accompany them on these picnics in the wilderness.

  These places were then still wilderness—no shops or dhabas or dwellings—just streams of clear mountain water and sal forests stretching away across the foothills, and the Doon Valley a pattern of mustard, rice and wheat fields interspersed with lychee and mango groves. Today these same destinations are littered with plastic and heaps of rubbish, and across the valley the fields and forests are shrinking as the builders take over.

  And as for the little Dilaram Bazaar, it has been swallowed up by shopping malls and car parks, while motorcycles thunder down the road all day. All this is progress, I suppose. And if people are happy with it, who am I to complain?

  Take heart, Bond. They haven’t got to Pari Tibba as yet.

  But they have got to Rajpur . . .

  When I was eight I was taken on a picnic to Rajpur by a strange gentleman, Mr Hari, who put my mother, my Aunt Enid (my mother’s older half-sister), my little sister, Ellen, and me into a Ford convertible (the one in which the hood came down) and drove us into the foothills near Dehra. I did not know it then, but Mr Hari was to be my future stepfather. He was already a married man with small children; he owned a photographic saloon, but he preferred cars to cameras and was often taking us on these outings. My Aunt Enid had her eye on him, but he ended up with my mother.

  My sister, Ellen, and baby brother, William, circa 1942. As a young man my brother took off for Canada, never revisited India. Last seen in Hudson’s Bay!

  My father was then at his RAF posting in New Delhi, and it was through Aunt Enid (the jealous sister!) that he heard about the parties and picnics. A year later he and my mother would be separated.

  My stepsister, Premela, who, in later years, was to look after my physically disadvantaged sister. Her mother, ‘Bibiji’, let me use her Dehradun flat for a couple of years, after my return from England. On her right is Mrs Singh, who often told me hair-raising stories about the prets and churails in her village near Agra!

  I don’t remember much about the picnic except that I was provided with a pony to ride about on. My sister, Ellen, could not ride on it as she had just started having epileptic fits. The hills and forests seemed to go on forever, and the Flame of the Forest was in bloom, so it must have been late March or early April. You couldn’t have a picnic there today except on top of a high-rise building.

  * * *

  The following year I was in New Delhi, now living with my father. He didn’t get time for picnics, although on his off days he would take me to the Qutub Minar or the Red Fort or, better still, Wenger’s restaurant and confectionery shop.

  No school that year, so for me it was all one long picnic. Then, in June of 1943, he took me up to Simla and put me in Bishop Cotton School. But the day before I joined my new school he took me for a picnic to the top of Jakko Hill, crowned by a famous temple. No sooner did we get to the top than we were besieged by scores of rhesus monkeys, who took away our hamper, spread its contents across the grass and indulged in a bacchanalian picnic of their own. Welcome to Simla!

  Down the hill we came, hungry now, and headed straight for Davico’s, where I feasted on curry puffs and meringues.

  Some picnics are better held indoors.*

  * * *

  Move on twenty years.

  Maplewood. I take Sushila and her cousin down to the stream. We’ll picnic near running water, I tell them. Down comes the rain! It comes rushing down the hill—running water everywhere! We run for it, run for home.

  Get home drenched. Sushila, beautiful with her hair dripping and her blouse clinging to her slender figure. She falls into my embrace, laughing. She gives me a long, wet, salty kiss.

  Some picnics are much better held indoors.

  SO WELL-REMEMBERED:

  MISS KELLNER AND THE MAGIC BISCUIT TIN

  There are some people who, because of their personality or circumstances, stand out in this writer’s memory more vividly than those who seemed more important in many ways. Childhood influences are often the most lasting, and people who once seemed peripheral to my life now take on a deeper meaning. They did not know it, but they made a lasting impression on a growing boy.

  Miss Kellner must have been in her sixties when I first saw her. She was my grandmother’s tenant, and a valued tenant at that. I must have been seven or eight at the time, spending that winter in my grandmother’s house. She too was in her late sixties, a heavily built woman with Nordic features. She seldom smiled, and I never heard her laugh, and I don’t think she was particularly fond of small boys, but she put up with me more as a matter of family duty than anything else. I stayed out of her way as much as I could. But at lunchtime (or ‘tiffin’, as we called it), she would be present at the dining table, making sure that I did not overeat or use the wrong knife or drop gravy on the tablecloth. My table manners had to be perfect. This rather took my appetite away.

  ‘Don’t play with your food,’ Granny would say. ‘And if you don’t finish your vegetables, you won’t get any custard afterwards.’ As a result, I took a permanent dislike to vegetables, especially those that were supposed to be ‘good for a growing boy’—turnips, cabbage, spinach and lettuce. A famous children’s author called Beatrix Potter wrote little books about cute rabbits being kept out of the farmer’s lettuce patch. As far as I was concerned, th
e rabbits were welcome to all the lettuce in the world.

  All the same, I did not really miss out on all those vital green vitamins as there were several guava trees in the garden. These were easy to climb and I spent a fair amount of time in them, guzzling guavas until my stomach ached.

  It was while I was in one of these guava trees that I noticed the old lady in the armchair, sunning herself at the far end of the garden. She was there every morning, a small table beside her, and an ayah in attendance. I asked Dhuki, the gardener, about her.

  ‘She can’t walk,’ said Dhuki. ‘Can’t stand up. And her hands and arms are all crooked too. Poor lady, she had an accident when she was a child. But she can read and write, and maybe she’ll talk to you if you go and see her.’

  I approached the old lady with some caution. As I came closer, I noticed she had a beaky nose and bright-blue eyes. Her head was covered by a small straw hat. I was quite close before she noticed me. Without looking up she said, ‘You must be Edith’s son,’ (Edith being my mother’s name); so she was aware of my presence.

  ‘Yes, Miss—’ I began.

  ‘Kellner,’ she said. ‘I am Miss Kellner. You must be having your holidays.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Kellner.’

  ‘And getting bored?’

  ‘A bit. There’s not much to do.’

  ‘No books in the house?’

  ‘Only religious books.’

  ‘But you like guavas, I notice.’ (She noticed everything.)

  ‘Only when I’m hungry.’

  ‘And are you hungry now?’

  ‘Just a little.’

  ‘I see you’re a truthful boy. Ayah, fetch the biscuit tin!’

  Ayah, a stalwart lady with a paan-stained mouth, went indoors and came back with a very large tin, the size of a bucket, and placed it on the side table.

  ‘Have a biscuit’, said Miss Kellner. ‘Have two. They are all different.’

  It was a collection of all sorts of biscuits—ginger biscuits, cream crackers, biscuits with sugary tops, cream-filled biscuits, chocolate biscuits, cheese biscuits . . .

  I helped myself to a ginger biscuit, and followed this up with something soft and buttery. The magic biscuit tin was then taken indoors.

  ‘Sit down and talk to me,’ said Miss Kellner.

  I sat down on a cushioned mora and tried to think of something intelligent to say. But the old lady was full of questions, so I didn’t have to think much. She told me a little about herself, but not much—and I refrained from asking her how she became a cripple. Her hands and fingers were all twisted, but she could hold a pen and a pack of cards. When she wasn’t writing letters, she told me, she was playing cards with herself.

  ‘Do you know any card games?’ she asked, and when I shook my head, she said, ‘I’ll teach you some easy ones.’ And producing a pack of well-worn cards she taught me a simple but lively game called ‘Snap’. And another called ‘Beggar My Neighbour’. I was never going to become a card player—too much of sitting in one place—but I enjoyed playing with Miss Kellner, and the time passed quickly.

  ‘Tiffin time!’ called Granny’s khansama from the kitchen, and I had to say goodbye to Miss Kellner and hurry back to our side of the house. Granny did not like my being late for meals—or for anything.

  * * *

  I had the temerity to ask my grandmother how Miss Kellner got her injuries, but I was told not to pry into the affairs of older people. The cook told me she’d been in a carriage accident in Kolkata when she was a girl, but Dhuki the gardener gave me a different story. According to him, when Miss Kellner was a baby, a fond uncle had been playing with her by tossing her up in the air and catching her as she came down. Distracted by a loud noise behind her, he failed to catch the baby on her descent, and she fell on the floor, breaking her limbs and injuring her spine.

  My bathroom window, a few years ago. It gave me a good view of the Banj oaks on the road to upper Landour. Then the wall began to bulge outwards, and to strengthen it the windows had to be bricked up. But there are other windows . . .

  I did not talk to Miss Kellner about it. She would not have remembered such incidents from her early childhood. Her condition was something that she accepted, having known nothing better. And she was fortunate in that she had money of her own, her father having left her with ample means and investments. She could afford servants and a comfortable home. Once a week she was put into her rickshaw and taken off to play bridge with her friends.

  There were four rickshaw boys—poor boys from a village near Tehri in the hills—and although they ran barefoot, they were smartly turned out in sky-blue uniforms. The boys were always laughing and chatting among themselves, even as they sped along Dehra’s narrow lanes.

  Most people went about in tongas (horse-drawn buggies) and there were hundreds of tongas plying in the town in the 1940s. They were uncomfortable contraptions, and Miss Kellner would not have been able to ride in one of them. Cars were then as rare as rickshaws; so she had her own little hand-pulled carriage, and a pretty sight it was, the boys in blue, pattering along the metalled Rajpur Road, and going quite fast as Miss Kellner was no weight at all.

  I went over to talk to her about twice a week, and she seemed glad to see me; young people seldom came her way. The magic biscuit tin was always sent for, and it was always full. It was like a lucky dip. I would take a chance and take out the first biscuit that came to hand. I wasn’t fussy!

  There were other surprises too. The occasional meringue or lemon tart. And there were marzipans kept in a glass jar. My culinary education was in full flow.

  Here, Rakesh is reading about himself in The Cherry Tree, which was first published as a little book in 1979. It has never been out of print and remains one of my most popular stories for children.

  Sometimes Miss Kellner asked me to read to her. All that letter writing tired her eyes, she said.

  Although I was only eight, I could read quite well. Miss Kellner produced a book that she had loved as a girl—Black Beauty, the story of a horse (as told by the horse)—and I read to her in my shrill, unformed voice. Presently she fell asleep, but I kept on reading—first out loud, then to myself—the story enthralled me, and when she woke up she rewarded me with a chocolate soldier. Yes, they made chocolate soldiers in those far-off days!

  My visits to Miss Kellner become more frequent. She seemed to have an unlimited store of confectionery. I suspect she had a sweet tooth herself. Occasionally I found her sucking a lemon drop or a bull’s eye. As she never went out shopping, I presume she received parcels from distant friends and relatives. But the baker came regularly.

  Preceding two pages: Friends of my Dehra days. Sahib Singh on my right, Kishen on my left. From 1955 to 1958 I was freelancing from Dehradun, writing The Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories. Sahib Singh settled in the UK. Over the years Kishen and I often met; then he lost his life while trying to save a child from drowning, off the coast of Goa.

  Mohammed Sharif had a small bakery in the Dilaram Bazaar, and he made all kinds of biscuits and cakes, including the most delicious soft nankatties. He supplied Granny with bread and, sometimes, vegetable patties, but Miss Kellner went in for more exotic items—pastries and curry puffs and meringues—and I suspect she was his favourite customer.

  Those were the days of the ‘box man’. Sundry vendors would roam the residential areas with tin trunks balanced on their heads (or on the heads of their assistants), selling everything from household articles to fruits and vegetables.

  The baker or his boy came every day. So did the sabzi-wallah with his basket of fresh fruit or vegetables. So did the box man with combs and ribbons, soaps and scents, cups and saucers, almost anything that the householder might find useful or decorative. Sometimes they kept stationery too, and I remember buying a little notebook and using it to make lists of various things—the names of flowers and trees, the titles of famous books, the names of cities and countries. I think my writing career started with those lists I used to mak
e.

  Rakesh, Dolly and Mukesh, planning mischief. The family was still a small one during our early years at Ivy Cottage. Dolly was born in 1980, the year we moved in. Now all three are married, with families of their own. The cottage often vibrates with their comings and goings.

  In this way the winter holidays passed quickly. But I was soon back in boarding school, and when my next holidays came around I went to my father in New Delhi.

  It was two or three years before I came to Dehradun again, and then it was to stay with my mother and stepfather in another part of town.

  A lot had happened in the interval. My parents had separated; my father, who had been taking care of me, had died suddenly; and I had to adjust to a new home and a different, and sometimes difficult, life.*

  But I hadn’t forgotten Miss Kellner.

  Hiring a bicycle, I rode over to Granny’s house. She was out of town, visiting one of her daughters in Ranchi; but Dhuki the gardener was still there, and so was Miss Kellner.

  But she was not the same. Her eyesight had deteriorated and her hands trembled. She did not know who I was until I spoke to her. And then, of course, she did remember me, and she said, ‘You’re Ruskin, the boy who used to play Snap with me. Come and sit down.’

  I sat beside her, and she chatted away, her mind as alert as ever. But I got the feeling that she was not as well off as before. Her clothes were old, and there was no sign of the rickshaw boys. She had stopped going out to bridge parties, and the boys had gone home to their village. The rickshaw stood in the back veranda gathering dirt and cobwebs.

  Still, she hadn’t forgotten my healthy appetite.

  ‘Fetch the biscuit tin, ayah.’

  The magic biscuit tin arrived, and I dipped my hand into it.

  It was less than half full, but I came up with a ginger biscuit. And after a little while I left and cycled home.