Crazy Times with Uncle Ken

by Ruskin Bond

  Uncle Ken and I had some exhilarating bicycle rides during my winter holidays, and the most memorable of these was our unplanned visit to a certain ‘Rest Home’ situated on the outskirts of the town. It isn’t there now, so don’t go looking for it.

  We had cycled quite far that day, and were tired and thirsty. There was no sign of a tea shop on that particular road, but when we arrived at the open gate of an impressive building with a signboard saying ‘Rest and Recuperation Centre’, we presumed it was a hotel or hostelry of sorts and rode straight into the premises. There was an extensive lawn to one side, surrounded by neat hedges and flowering shrubs. A number of people were strolling about on the lawn; some were sitting on benches; one or two were straddling on a wall, talking to themselves; another was standing alone singing to a non-existent audience. Some were Europeans; a few were Indians.

  We left our cycles in the porch and went in search of refreshment. A lady in a white sari gave us cool water from a surahi and told us we could wait on a bench just outside their office. But Uncle Ken said we’d prefer to meet some of the guests, and led me across the lawn to where the singer was practising his notes. He was a florid gentleman, heavily-built.

  ‘Do you like my singing?’ he asked, as we came up.

  ‘Wonderful!’ exclaimed Uncle Ken. ‘You sing like Caruso.’

  ‘I am Caruso!’ affirmed the tenor, and let rip the opening notes of a famous operatic aria. ‘Your tiny hand is frozen,’ he sang, although it was an unusually warm day.

  We hurried on, and met an elegant couple who were parading up and down the lawn, waving their hands to an invisible crowd.

  ‘Good day to you, gentlemen,’ said a flamboyant individual. ‘You’re the ambassadors from Sweden, I suppose.’

  ‘If you so wish,’ said Uncle Ken gallantly. ‘And I have the honour of speaking to—?’

  ‘The Emperor Napoleon, of course.’

  ‘Of course. And this must be the Empress Josephine.’ Uncle Ken bowed to the lady beside him.

  ‘Actually, his Marie Waleska,’ said Napoleon. ‘Josephine is indisposed today.’

  I was beginning to feel like Alice at the Mad Hatter’s tea party, and began tugging at Uncle Ken’s coat-sleeve, whispering that we were getting late for lunch.

  A turbaned warrior with a tremendous moustache loomed in front of us. ‘I’m Prithviraj Chauhan,’ he announced. ‘And I invite you to dinner at my palace.’

  ‘Everyone’s royalty here,’ observed Uncle Ken.

  ‘It’s such a privilege to be with you.’

  ‘Me too,’ I put in nervously.

  ‘Come with me, boy, and I’ll introduce you to the others.’ Prithviraj Chauhan took me by the hand and began guiding me across the lawn. ‘There are many famous men and women here. That’s Marco Polo over there. He’s just back from China. And if you don’t care for Caruso’s signing, there’s Tansen under that tamarind tree. Tamarind leaves are good for the voice, you know that of course. And that fashionable gentleman there, he’s Lord Curzon, who used to be a Viceroy. He’s talking to the Sultan of Marrakesh. Come along, I’ll introduce you to them … You’re the young prince of Denmark, aren’t you?’

  ‘Hamlet himself,’ said Uncle Ken with a wink.

  Before I could refute any claims to royalty, we were intercepted by a white-coated gentleman accompanied by a white-coated assistant. They looked as though they were in charge.

  ‘And what are you doing here, young man?’ asked the senior of the two.

  ‘I’m with my uncle,’ I said, gesturing towards Uncle Ken, who approached and gave the in-charge an affable handshake.

  ‘And you must be Dr Freud,’ said Uncle Ken. ‘I must say this is a jolly sort of place.’

  ‘Actually, I’m Dr Goel. You must be the new patient we were expecting. But they should have sent you over with someone a little older than this boy. Never mind, come along to the office and we’ll have you admitted.’

  Uncle Ken and I both protested that we were not potential patients but had entered the grounds by mistake. We had our bicycles to prove it! But Dr Goel was having nothing of this deception. He and his assistant linked arms with Uncle Ken and marched him off to the office, while I trailed behind, wondering if I should get on my bicycle and rush back to Granny with the terrible news that Uncle Ken had been incarcerated in a lunatic asylum.

  Just then an ambulance arrived with the real patient, a school principal suffering from a persecution complex. He kept shouting that he was perfectly sane, and that his entire staff had plotted to have him put away. This might well have been true, as the staff was there in force to make sure he did not escape.

  Dr Goel apologized to Uncle Ken. Uncle Ken apologized to Dr Goel. The good doctor even accompanied us to the gate. He shook hands with Uncle Ken and said, ‘I have a feeling we’ll see you here again.’ He looked hard at my uncle and added, ‘I think I’ve seen you before, sir. What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Bruce Hallam,’ said Uncle Ken mischievously, and rode away before they changed their minds and kept him in their ‘Rest Home’.

  The Zigzag Walk

  Uncle Ken always maintained that the best way to succeed in life was to zigzag. ‘If you keep going off in new directions,’ he declared, ‘you will meet new career opportunities!’

  Well, opportunities certainly came Uncle Ken’s way, but he was not a success in the way that Dale Carnegie or Deepak Chopra would define a successful man …

  In a long life devoted to ‘muddling through’ with the help of the family, Uncle Ken’s many projects had included a chicken farm (rather like the one operated by Ukridge in Wodehouse’s Love Among the Chickens) and a mineral water bottling project. For this latter enterprise, he bought a thousand soda water bottles and filled them with sulphur water from the springs five miles from Dehra. It was good stuff, taken in small quantities, but drunk one bottle at a time it proved corrosive—‘sulphur and brimstone’ as one irate customer described it—and angry buyers demonstrated in front of the house, throwing empty bottles over the wall into Grandmother’s garden.

  Grandmother was furious—more with Uncle Ken than with the demonstrators—and made him give everyone’s money back.

  ‘You have to be healthy and strong to take sulphur water,’ he explained later.

  ‘I thought it was supposed to make you healthy and strong,’ I said.

  Grandfather remarked that it did not compare with plain soda water, which he took with his whisky. ‘Why don’t you just bottle soda water?’ he said. ‘There’s a much bigger demand for it.’

  But Uncle Ken believed that he had to be original in all things.

  ‘The secret to success is to zigzag,’ he said.

  ‘You certainly zigzagged round the garden when your customers were throwing their bottles back at you,’ said Grandmother.

  Uncle Ken also invented the zigzag walk.

  The only way you could really come to know a place well was to walk in a truly haphazard way. To make a zigzag walk you take the first turning to the left, the first to the right, then the first to the left and so on. It can be quite fascinating, provided you are in no hurry to reach your destination. The trouble was that Uncle Ken used this zigzag method even when he had a train to catch.

  When Grandmother asked him to go to the station to meet Aunt Mabel who was arriving from Simla, he zigzagged through town, taking in the botanical gardens in the west and the limestone factories to the east, finally reaching the station by way of the goods yard, in order, as he said, ‘to take it by surprise’.

  Nobody was surprised, least of all Aunt Mabel who had taken a tonga and reached the house while Uncle Ken was still sitting on the station platform, waiting for the next train to come in. I was sent to fetch him.

  ‘Let’s zigzag home again,’ he said.

  ‘Only on one condition, we eat chaat every fifteen minutes,’ I said.

  So we went home by way of all the most winding bazaars, and in north-Indian towns they do tend to zigzag,
stopping at numerous chaat and halwai shops, until Uncle Ken had finished his money. We got home very late and were scolded by everyone; but as Uncle Ken told me, we were pioneers and had to expect to be misunderstood and even maligned. Posterity would recognize the true value of zigzagging.

  ‘The zigzag way,’ he said, ‘is the diagonal between heart and reason.’

  In our more troubled times, had he taken to preaching on the subject, he might have acquired a large following of dropouts. But Uncle Ken was the original dropout. He would not have tolerated others.

  Had he been a space traveller he would have gone from star to star, zigzagging across the Milky Way.

  Uncle Ken would not have succeeded in getting anywhere very fast, but I think he did succeed in getting at least one convert (myself) to see his point: ‘When you zigzag, you are not choosing what to see in this world but you are giving the world a chance to see you!’

  White Mice

  Granny should never have entrusted my Uncle Ken with the job of taking me to the station and putting me on the train for Delhi. He got me to the station all right, but then proceeded to put me on the wrong train!

  I was nine or ten at the time, and I’d been spending part of my winter holidays with my grandparents in Dehra. Now it was time to go back to my parents in Delhi, before joining school again.

  ‘Just make sure that Ruskin gets into the right compartment,’ said Gran to her only son Kenneth. ‘And make sure he has a berth to himself and a thermos of drinking water.’

  Uncle Ken carried out the instructions. He even bought me a bar of chocolate, consuming most of it himself while telling me how to pass my exams without too much study. (I’ll tell you the secret some day.) The train pulled out of the station and we waved fond goodbyes to each other.

  An hour and two small stations later, I discovered to my horror that I was not on the train to Delhi but on the night express to Lucknow, over 300 miles in the opposite direction. Someone in the compartment suggested that I get down at the next station; another said it would not be wise for a small boy to get off the train at a strange place in the middle of the night. ‘Wait till we get to Lucknow,’ advised another passenger, ‘then send a telegram to your parents.’

  Early next morning the train steamed into Lucknow. One of the passengers kindly took me to the stationmaster’s office. ‘Mr P.K. Ghosh, Stationmaster,’ said the sign over his door. When my predicament had been explained to him, Mr Ghosh looked down at me through his bifocals and said, ‘Yes, yes, we must send a telegram to your parents.’

  ‘I don’t have their address as yet,’ I said. ‘They were to meet me in Delhi. You’d better send a telegram to my grandfather in Dehra.’

  ‘Done, done,’ said Mr Ghosh, who was in the habit of repeating certain words. ‘And meanwhile, I’ll take you home and introduce you to my family.’

  Mr Ghosh’s house was just behind the station. He had his cook bring me a cup of sweet milky tea and two large rasgullas, syrupy Indian sweetmeats.

  ‘You like rasgullas, I hope, I hope?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘Now let me show you my family.’

  And he took me by the hand and led me to a boarded-up veranda at the back of the house. Here I was amazed to find a miniature railway, complete with a station, railway bungalows, signal boxes, and next to it a miniature fairground complete with swings, roundabout and a ferris wheel. Cavorting on the roundabout and ferris wheel were some fifteen to twenty white mice! Another dozen or so ran in and out of tunnels, and climbed up on a toy train. Mr Ghosh pressed a button and the little train, crowded with white mice, left the station and went rattling off to the far corner of the veranda.

  ‘My hobby for many years,’ said Mr Ghosh. ‘What do you think of it—think of it?’

  ‘I like the train, sir.’

  ‘But not the mice?’

  ‘There are an awful lot of them, sir. They must consume a great many rasgullas!’

  ‘No, no, I don’t give them rasgullas,’ snapped Mr Ghosh, a little annoyed. ‘Just railway biscuits, broken up. These old station biscuits are just the thing for them. Some of our biscuits haven’t been touched for years. Too hard for our teeth. Rasgullas are for you and me! Now I’ll leave you here while I return to the office and send a telegram to your grandfather. These new-fangled telephones never work properly!’

  Grandfather arrived that evening, and in the meantime I helped feed the white mice with railways biscuits, then watched Mr Ghosh operate the toy train. Some of the mice took the train, some played on the swings and roundabouts, while some climbed in and out of Mr Ghosh’s pockets and ran up and down his uniform. By the time Grandfather arrived, I had consumed about a dozen rasgullas and fallen asleep in a huge railway armchair in Mr Ghosh’s living room. I woke up to find the stationmaster busy showing Grandfather his little railway colony of white mice. Grandfather, being a retired railwayman, was more interested in the toy train, but he said polite things about the mice, commending their pink eyes and pretty little feet. Mr Ghosh beamed with pleasure and sent out for more rasgullas.

  When Grandfather and I had settled into the compartment of a normal train late that night, Mr Ghosh came to the window to say goodbye.

  As the train began moving, he thrust a cardboard box into my hands and said, ‘A present for you and your grandfather!’

  ‘More rasgullas,’ I thought. But when the train was underway and I had lifted the lid of the box, I found two white mice asleep on a bed of cotton wool.

  Back in Dehra, I kept the white mice in their box; I had plans for them. Uncle Ken had spent most of the day skulking in the guava orchard, too embarrassed to face me. Granny had given him a good lecture on how to be a responsible adult. But I was thirsty for revenge!

  After dinner I slipped into my uncle’s room and released the mice under his bed-sheet.

  An hour later we had all to leap out of our beds when Uncle Ken dashed out of his room, screaming that something soft and furry was running about inside his pyjamas.

  ‘Well, off with the pyjamas!’ said Grandfather, giving me a wink; he had a good idea of what had happened.

  After Uncle Ken had done a tap dance, one white mouse finally emerged from the pyjamas; but the other had run up the sleeve of his pyjama-coat and suddenly popped out beneath my uncle’s chin. Uncle Ken grew hysterical. Convinced that his room was full of mice—pink, white and brown—he locked himself into the storeroom and slept on an old sofa.

  Next day Grandfather took me to the station and put me on the train to Delhi. It was the right train this time.

  ‘I’ll look after the white mice,’ he said.

  Grandfather grew quite fond of the mice, and even wrote to Mr Ghosh, asking if he could spare another pair. But Mr Ghosh, he learnt later, had been transferred to another part of the country, and had taken his family with him.

  The Ghost Who Got In

  It was Grandfather who finally decided that we would have to move to another house.

  And it was all because of a Pret, a mischievous north-Indian ghost, who had been making life difficult for everyone.

  Prets usually live in peepal trees, and that’s where our little ghost first had his abode—in the branches of a massive old peepal tree which had grown through the compound wall and spread into our garden. Part of the tree was on our side of the wall, part on the other side, shading the main road. It gave the ghost a commanding view of the entire area.

  For many years the Pret had lived there quite happily, without bothering anyone in our house. It did not bother me, either, and I spent a lot of time in the peepal tree. Sometimes I went there to escape the adults at home, sometimes to watch the road and people who passed by. The peepal tree was cool on a hot day, and the heart-shaped leaves were always revolving in the breeze. This constant movement of the leaves also helped to disguise the movements of the Pret, so that I never really knew exactly where he was sitting. But he paid no attention to me. The traffic on the ro
ad kept him fully occupied.

  Sometimes, when a tonga was passing, he would jump down and frighten the pony, and as a result the little pony cart would go rushing off in the wrong direction.

  Sometimes he would get into the engine of a car or a bus, which would have a breakdown soon afterwards.

  And he liked to knock the sola-topees (pith helmets) off the heads of sahibs or officials, who would wonder how a strong breeze had sprung up so suddenly, only to die down just as quickly. Although this special kind of ghost could make himself felt, and sometimes heard, he was invisible to the human eye.

  I was not invisible to the human eye, and often got the blame for some of the Pret’s pranks. If bicycle riders were struck by mango seeds or apricot stones, they would look up, see a small boy in the branches of the tree, and threaten me with dire consequences. Drivers who went off after parking their cars in the shade would sometimes come back to find their tyres flat. My protests of innocence did not carry much weight. But when I mentioned the Pret in the tree, they would look uneasy, either because they thought I must be mad, or because they were afraid of ghosts, especially Prets. They would find other things to do and hurry away.

  At night no one walked beneath the peepal tree.

  It was said that if you yawned beneath the tree, the Pret would jump down your throat and ruin your digestion. Our gardener, Chandu, who was always taking sick leave, blamed the Pret for his tummy troubles. Once, when yawning, Chandu had forgotten to snap his fingers in front of his mouth, and the ghost had got in without any trouble.

  Now Chandu spent most of his time lying on a string-bed in the courtyard of his small house. When Grandmother went to visit him, he would start groaning and holding his sides, the pain was so bad; but when she went away, he did not fuss so much. He claimed that the pain did not affect his appetite, and he ate a normal diet, in fact a little more than normal—the extra amount was meant to keep the ghost happy!