Crazy Times with Uncle Ken

by Ruskin Bond

  RUSKIN BOND

  Crazy Times with Uncle Ken

  Illustrations by

  Vivek Thakkar

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  Introduction

  The Garden of Memories

  Life with Uncle Ken

  A Bicycle Ride with Uncle Ken

  The Zigzag Walk

  White Mice

  The Ghost Who Got In

  Monkey Trouble

  Uncle Ken’s Feathered Foes

  A Crow for All Seasons

  Uncle Ken Goes Birdwatching

  Uncle Ken’s Rumble in the Jungle

  At Sea with Uncle Ken

  Copyright Page

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Crazy Times With Uncle Ken

  Born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, in 1934, Ruskin Bond grew up in Jamnagar (Gujarat), Dehradun, New Delhi and Simla. His first novel, The Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written over three hundred short stories, essays and novellas (including Vagrants in the Valley and A Flight of Pigeons) and more than thirty books for children. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India in 1993, and the Padma Shri in 1999.

  He lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his extended family.

  Introduction

  Uncle Ken would have been pleased with all the attention he’s getting—a whole book to himself, chronicling his deeds and misdeeds, adventures and misadventures.

  Did he really exist, I am sometimes asked.

  Yes, I did have an Uncle Ken who helped to enliven my boyhood days. I’m afraid he did not set a good example for a growing boy. His jobs did not last very long, his grandiose schemes were unsuccessful, and he got both of us into trouble on more than one occasion. But he was well meaning and tried his best. We must forgive him his faults.

  Also, we have to remember that he lived under the dominion of several strong-minded women—his mother (my grandmother), four sisters (my intimidating aunts and my mother), and several cousins and nieces. So he needed an ally, and sometimes he found one in me.

  In his later years, when most of the family were settled abroad, Uncle Ken left for the United Kingdom, where he found a job that suited him down to the ground—a village postman.

  He was given a bike (he loved bicycles), and every day he made the rounds of a pretty English village (Kintbury in Berkshire), delivering letters, parcels, bills, etc. on behalf of Her Majesty’s postal service.

  Uncle Ken became quite popular locally, and some evenings he would sit in the local pub and regale the other customers with hair-raising tales of his exploits in faraway India—hunting man-eating tigers or crocodiles, climbing mountain peaks in the Himalayas, rescuing princesses from bands of dacoits, or playing cricket with the great Ranji (forgetting that Ranji played most of his cricket in England and for England!). His listeners did not always believe him, but they enjoyed listening to his tall tales and were happy to pay for his drinks.

  Tall tales he might have told, but the tales in this book are true. (Or almost true.) If the stories in this collection are described by the publishers as ‘fiction’, it is because they know that if they were called ‘non-fiction’, no one would believe them. ‘Stranger than fiction’ is probably best.

  But Uncle Ken was real, and you will find his name embedded in the rolls of at least two old public schools in India. He was expelled from both of them. In one instance, he put on a wig and impersonated a lady teacher—so successfully that he was able to gain admittance to the girls’ dormitory before being discovered. In the other instance—in his next school—he celebrated Diwali by setting off firecrackers in the chemistry lab and causing an explosion that shattered several windows and gave the science master a nervous breakdown.

  After that no school would have him. So Uncle Ken proceeded to educate himself, learning a few things from Grandfather (his Dad), including the art of survival.

  Surviving … he was good at that.

  So perhaps we can learn something from him, after all. In a world that has no time for losers, to be a survivor is something of an achievement.

  The Garden of Memories

  Sitting in the sun on a winter’s afternoon, feeling my age just a little (I’m over seventy), I began reminiscing about my boyhood in the Dehra of long ago, and found myself missing the old times—friends of my youth, my grandmother, our neighbours, interesting characters in our small town, and, of course, my eccentric relative—the dashing young Uncle Ken!

  Yes, Dehra was a small town then—uncluttered, uncrowded, with quiet lanes and pretty gardens and shady orchards.

  The only time in my life that I was fortunate enough to live in a house with a real garden—as opposed to a backyard or balcony or windswept veranda—was during those three years when I spent my winter holidays (December to March) in Granny’s bungalow on the Old Survey Road.

  The best months were February and March, when the garden was heavy with the scent of sweet peas, the flower beds a many-coloured quilt of phlox, antirrhinum, larkspur, petunia and Californian poppy. I loved the bright yellows of the Californian poppies, the soft pinks of our own Indian poppies, the subtle perfume of petunias and snapdragons and, above all, the delicious, overpowering scent of the massed sweet peas which grew taller than me.

  Flowers made a sensualist of me. They taught me the delight of smell, colour and touch—yes, touch too, for to press a rose to one’s lips is very like a gentle, hesitant, exploratory kiss …

  Granny decided on what flowers should be sown, and where. Dhuki, the gardener, did the digging and weeding, sowing and transplanting. He was a skinny, taciturn old man, who had begun to resemble the weeds he flung away. He did not mind answering my questions, but never did he allow our brief conversations to interfere with his work. Most of the time he was to be found on his haunches, hoeing and weeding with a little spade called a khurpi. He would throw out the smaller marigolds because he said Granny did not care for them. I felt sorry for these colourful little discards, collected them and transplanted them to a little garden patch of my own at the back of the house, near the garden wall.

  Another so-called weed that I liked was a little purple flower that grew in clusters all over Dehra, on any bit of wasteland, in ditches, on canal banks. It flowered from late winter into early summer, and it will be growing in the valley and beyond long after gardens have become obsolete, as indeed they must, considering the rapid spread of urban clutter. It brightens up fields and roads where you least expect a little colour. I have since learnt that it is called Ageratum, and that it is actually prized as a garden flower in Europe, where it is described as ‘Blue Mink’ in the seed catalogues. Here it isn’t blue but purple, and it grows all the way from Rajpur (just above Dehra) to the outskirts of Meerut; then it disappears.

  Other garden outcasts include the lantana bush, an attractive wayside shrub; the thorn apple, various thistles, daisies and dandelions. But both Granny and Dhuki had declared a war on weeds, and many of these commoners had to exist outside the confines of the garden. Like slum children, they survived rather well in ditches and on the roadside, while their more pampered fellow citizens were prone to leaf diseases and parasitic infections of various kinds.

  The veranda was a place where Granny herself could potter about, attending to various ferns, potted palms and colourful geraniums. She averred that geraniums kept snakes away, although she never said why. As far as I know, snakes don’t have a great sense of smell.

  One day I saw a snake curled up at the bottom of the veranda steps. When it saw me, or became aware of my footsteps, it uncoiled itself and slithered away. I told Granny abo
ut it, and observed that it did not seem to be bothered by the geraniums.

  ‘Ah,’ said Granny. ‘But for those geraniums, the snake would have entered the house!’ There was no arguing with Granny. Or with Uncle Ken, when he was at his most pontifical.

  One day, while walking near the canal bank, we came upon a green grass snake holding a frog in its mouth. The frog was half in, half out, and with the help of my hockey stick, I made the snake disgorge the unfortunate creature. It hopped away, none the worse for its adventure.

  I felt quite pleased with myself. ‘Is this what it feels like to be god?’ I mused aloud.

  ‘No,’ said Uncle Ken. ‘God would have let the snake finish its lunch.’

  Uncle Ken was one of those people who went through life without having to do much, although a great deal seemed to happen around him. He acted as a sort of catalyst for events that involved the family, friends, neighbours, the town itself. He believed in the fruits of hard work: other people’s hard work.

  Ken was good looking as a boy, and his sisters (including my mother, the youngest) doted on him. He took full advantage of their devotion, and, as the girls grew up and married, Ken took it for granted that they and their husbands would continue to look after his welfare. You could say he was the originator of the welfare state: his own.

  I’ll say this for Uncle Ken, he had a large fund of curiosity in his nature, and he loved to explore the town we lived in, and any other town or city where he might happen to find himself. With one sister settled in Lucknow, another in Ranchi, a third in Bhopal and a fourth in Simla, Uncle Ken managed to see a cross section of India by dividing his time between all his sisters and their long-suffering husbands.

  Uncle Ken liked to walk. Occasionally he borrowed my bicycle, but he had a tendency to veer off the main road and into ditches and other obstacles after a collision with a bullock cart, in which he tore his trousers and damaged the handlebar of my bicycle. He concluded that walking was the best way of getting around Dehra.

  Uncle Ken dressed quite smartly for a man of no particular occupation. He had a blue-striped blazer and a red-striped blazer; he usually wore white or off-white trousers, immaculately pressed (by Granny). He was the delight of shoeshine boys, for he would always have his shoes polished. Summers he wore a straw hat, telling everyone he had worn it for the Varsity Boat Race while rowing for Oxford (he hadn’t been to England, let alone Oxford); winters he wore one of Grandfather’s old felt hats. He seldom went bareheaded. At thirty he was almost completely bald, prompting Aunt Mabel to remark: ‘Well, Ken, you must be grateful for small mercies. At least you’ll never have bats getting entangled in your hair.’

  Thanks to all his walking Uncle Ken had a good digestion, which kept pace with a hearty appetite. Our walks would be punctuated by short stops at chaat shops, sweet shops, fruit stalls, confectioners, small bakeries and other eateries.

  ‘Have you brought any pocket money along?’ he would ask, for he was usually broke.

  ‘Granny gave me five rupees.’

  ‘We’ll try some rasgullas, then.’

  And the rasgullas would be followed by gulab jamuns until my five rupees was finished. Uncle Ken received a small allowance from Granny, but he ferreted it away to spend on clothes, preferring to spend my pocket money on perishables such as ice creams, kulfis and Indian sweets.

  On one occasion, when neither of us had any money, Uncle Ken decided to venture into a sugar cane field on the outskirts of the town. He had broken off a stick of cane, and was busy chewing on it, when the owner of the field spotted us and let out a volley of imprecations. We fled from the field with the irate farmer giving chase. I could run faster than Uncle Ken, and did so. The farmer would have caught up with Uncle Ken if the latter’s hat hadn’t blown off, causing a diversion. The farmer picked up the hat, examined it, seemed to fancy it, and put it on. Several small boys clapped and cheered. The farmer marched off, wearing the hat, and Uncle Ken wisely decided against making any attempt to retrieve it.

  ‘I’ll get another one,’ he said philosophically.

  He wore a pith helmet, or sola-topee, for the next few days, as he thought it would protect him from sticks and stones. For a while he harboured a paranoia that all the sugar cane farmers in the valley were looking for him, to avenge his foray into their fields. But after some time he discarded the topee because, according to him, it interfered with his good looks.

  Granny grew the best sweet peas in Dehra. But she never entered them at the Annual Flower Show held every year in the second week of March. She did not grow flowers to win prizes, she said; she grew them to please the spirit of Grandfather, who still hovered about the house and grounds he’d built thirty years earlier.

  Miss Kellner, Granny’s crippled but valued tenant, said the flowers were grown to attract beautiful butterflies, and she was right. In early summer, swarms of butterflies flitted about the garden.

  Uncle Ken had no compunction about winning prizes, even though he did nothing to deserve them. Without telling anyone, he submitted a large display of Granny’s sweet peas for the flower show, and when the prizes were announced, lo and behold! Kenneth Clerke had been awarded first prize for his magnificent display of sweet peas.

  Granny refused to speak to him for several days.

  Uncle Ken had been hoping for a cash prize, but they gave him a flower vase. He told me it was a Ming vase. But it looked more like Meerut to me. He offered it to Granny, hoping to propitiate her; but, still displeased with him, she gave it to Mr Khastgir, the artist next door, who kept his paintbrushes in it.

  Although I was sometimes a stubborn and unruly boy (my hero was Richmal Crompton’s ‘William’), I got on well with old ladies, especially those who, like Miss Kellner, were fond of offering me chocolates, marzipans, soft nankhatai biscuits (made at Yusuf’s bakery in the Dilaram Bazaar), and pieces of crystallized ginger. Miss Kellner couldn’t walk—had never walked—and so she could only admire the garden from a distance, but it was from her that I learnt the names of many flowers, trees, birds and even butterflies.

  Uncle Ken wasn’t any good at names, but he wanted to catch a rare butterfly. He said he could make a fortune if he caught a leaf butterfly called the Purple Emperor. He equipped himself with a butterfly net, a bottle of ether, and a cabinet for mounting his trophies; he then prowled all over the grounds, making frequent forays at anything that flew. He caught several common species—Red Admirals, a Tortoiseshell, a Painted Lady, even the occasional dragonfly—but the high-flying Purple Emperor and other exotics eluded him, as did the fortune he was always aspiring to make.

  Eventually he caught an angry wasp, which stung him through the netting. Chased by its fellow wasps, he took refuge in the lily pond and emerged sometime later draped in lilies and water weeds.

  After this, Uncle Ken retired from the butterfly business, insisting that tiger-hunting was safer.

  Life with Uncle Ken

  Granny’s fabulous kitchen

  As kitchens went, it wasn’t all that big. It wasn’t as big as the bedroom or the living room, but it was big enough, and there was a pantry next to it. What made it fabulous was all that came out of it: good things to eat like cakes and curries, chocolate fudge and peanut toffee, jellies and jam tarts, meat pies, stuffed turkeys, stuffed chickens, stuffed eggplants, and hams stuffed with stuffed chickens.

  As far as I was concerned, Granny was the best cook in the whole wide world.

  Two generations of Clerkes had lived in India and my maternal grandmother had settled in a small town in the foothills, just where the great plain ended and the Himalayas began. The town was called Dehradun. It’s still there, though much bigger and busier now. Granny had a house—a large rambling bungalow—on the outskirts of the town, on Old Survey Road. In the grounds were many trees, most of them fruit trees. Mangoes, litchis, guavas, bananas, papaya, lemons—there was room for all of them, including a giant jackfruit tree casting its shadow on the walls of the house.

  Bless
ed is the house upon whose walls

  The shade of an old tree softly falls.

  I remember those lines of Granny’s. They were true words, because it was a good house to live in, especially for a nine year old with a tremendous appetite. If Granny was the best cook in the world, I must have been the boy with the best appetite.

  Every winter, when I came home from boarding school, I would spend about a month with Granny before going on to spend the rest of the holidays with my mother and stepfather. My parents couldn’t cook. They employed a khansama—a professional cook—who made a good mutton curry but little else. Mutton curry for lunch and mutton curry for dinner can be a bit tiring, especially for a boy who liked to eat almost everything.

  Granny was glad to have me because she lived alone most of the time. Not entirely alone, though … There was a gardener, Dhuki, who lived in an outhouse. And he had a son called Mohan, who was about my age. And there was Ayah, an elderly maidservant, who helped with the household work. And there was a Siamese cat with bright blue eyes, and a mongrel dog called Crazy because he ran circles round the house.

  And, of course, there was Uncle Ken, Granny’s only son, who came to stay whenever he was out of a job (which was quite often) or when he felt like enjoying some of Granny’s cooking.

  So Granny wasn’t really alone. All the same, she was glad to have me. She didn’t enjoy cooking for herself, she said; she had to cook for someone. And although the cat and the dog and sometimes Uncle Ken appreciated her efforts, a good cook likes to have a boy to feed, because boys are adventurous and ready to try the most unusual dishes.

  Whenever Granny tried out a new recipe on me, she would wait for my comments and reactions, and then make a note in one of her exercise books. These notes were useful when she made the dish again, or when she tried it out on others.