AND SO THE BOTTOM HAD FALLEN OUT OF MY WORLD. A great void opened up in front of me; I knew almost immediately that my life had changed forever, and that there was nothing, absolutely nothing to look forward to.
I was in the infirmary for a day, because I had broken down and then passed out after I was given the news. I have a tendency to shut out painful memories, and I have experienced no greater pain than the loss of my father. I was ten, and the only person who had loved me, and had any use for me, was gone. Time heals, but I still cannot dwell on that day when I lay in the infirmary, breathing with some difficulty. If everything begins and ends with love—and I believe it does—my world had ended. I emerged from the desolate night somehow; that is all I am willing to recall.
A week or two later, I received a letter from my mother, telling me that I would be spending the winter holidays with her in Dehra, and that I should take care of myself and concentrate on my studies. I had been wondering if I would be put in an orphanage, so this was a welcome message. It did not make me happy, because I was already distant from my mother, but it did bring some relief. She had also written to Mr Priestley, telling him this, and asking him to keep an eye on me.
One day Priestley called me to his office and suggested that I leave my father’s precious letters with him for safekeeping; I could collect them a day or two before school closed. I think he had heard from some teacher or prefect that I had been reading those letters again and again, and brooding over them. I handed him all the letters, except one, Daddy’s last, and a couple of postcards. Two months later, when the term ended, I went to Priestley’s office and asked for the letters. He looked at me with a blank expression. What letters? Had I left some letters with him? He looked in the drawers of his desk. No letters there. He’d check with the senior master, he said. He was obviously a distracted man. Was he worried about his job, his future in a rapidly changing world? Had he just quarrelled with his wife? Or had he broken the strings of his violin?
I stood there for some time, then turned and walked away without another word. The promises of adults had ceased to mean anything to me.
I still had one letter, and some of the ‘Gran’pop’ postcards. And that was all that I had from my father, apart from his everlasting love and care; for in the coming months even his stamp collection disappeared.
AA Bond 108485 (RAF)
c/o 231 Group
Rafpost
Calcutta 20/8/44
My dear Ruskin,
Thank you very much for your letter received a few days ago. I was pleased to hear that you were quite well and learning hard. We are all quite OK here, but I am still not strong enough to go to work after the recent attack of malaria I had. I was in hospital for a long time and that is the reason why you did not get a letter from me for several weeks.
I have now to wear glasses for reading. I do not use them for ordinary wear—but only when I read or do book work. Ellen does not wear glasses at all now.
Do you need any new warm clothes? Your warm suits must be getting too small. I am glad to hear the rains are practically over in the hills where you are. It will be nice to have sunny days in September when your holidays are on. Do the holidays begin from the 9th of Sept? What will you do? Is there to be a Scouts Camp at Taradevi? Or will you catch butterflies on sunny days on the school cricket ground? I am glad to hear you have lots of friends. Next year you will be in the top class of the Prep. School. You only have 3 ½ months more for the Xmas holidays to come round, when you will be glad to come home, I am sure, to do more Stamp work and Library Study. The New Market is full of bookshops here. Ellen loves the market.
I wanted to write before about your writing, Ruskin, but forgot. Sometimes I get letters from you written in very small handwriting, as if you wanted to squeeze a lot of news into one sheet of letter paper. It is not good for you or for your eyes, to get into the habit of writing small. I know your handwriting is good and that you came 1st in class for handwriting, but try and form a larger style of writing and do not worry if you can’t get all your news into one sheet of paper—but stick to big letters.
We have had a very wet month just passed. It is still cloudy, at night we have to use fans, but during the cold weather it is nice—not too cold like Delhi and not too warm either—but just moderate. Granny is quite well. She and Ellen send you their fond love. The last I heard, a week ago, that William and all at Dehra were well also.
We have been without a cook for the past few days. I hope we find a good one before long. There are not many. I wish I could get our Delhi cook, the old man now famous for his ‘Black Puddings’ which Ellen hasn’t seen since we arrived in Calcutta 4 months ago.
I have still got the Records and Gramophone and most of the best books, but as they are all getting old and some not suited to you which are only for children under 8 yrs old—I will give some to William, and Ellen and you can buy some new ones when you come home for Xmas. I am re-arranging all the stamps that became loose and topsy-turvy after people came and went through the collections to buy stamps. A good many got sold, the rest got mixed up a bit and it is now taking up all my time putting the balance of the collection in order. But as I am at home all day, unable to go to work as yet, I have lots of time to finish the work of re-arranging the Collection.
Ellen loves drawing. I give her paper and a pencil and let her draw herself without any help, to get her used to holding paper and pencil. She has got expert at using her pencil now and draws some wonderful animals like camels, elephants, dragons with many heads—cobras—rain clouds shedding buckets of water—tigers with long grass around them—horses with manes and wolves and foxes with bushy hair. Sometimes you can’t see much of the animals because there is too much grass covering them or too much hair on the foxes and wolves and too much mane on the horses’ necks—or too much rain from the clouds. All this decoration is made up by a sort of heavy scribbling of lines, but through it all one can see some very good shapes of animals, elephants and ostriches and other things. I will send you some.
Well Ruskin, I hope this finds you well. With fond love from us all. Write again soon.
Ever your loving Daddy xxxxx
My father was forty-six when he died. Weakened by malaria, he had succumbed to hepatitis. This I discovered later. I did not attend his funeral, and his death was not discussed for many years at home. It wasn’t callousness on anyone’s part; I think they did it to protect me at first, and when I was older, I did not seek or encourage any discussion. My memories of Daddy were mine alone.
If one is present when a loved one dies, or sees him dead and laid out and later buried, one is convinced of the finality of the thing and finds it easier to adapt to the changed circumstances. But when you hear of a death, a dear parent’s death, and have only the faintest idea of the manner of his dying, it is rather a lot for the imagination to cope with—especially when the imagination is a small boy’s. There being no tangible evidence of my father’s death, it was, for me, not a death but a vanishing. And although this enabled me to remember him as a living, smiling person, it meant that I was not wholly reconciled to his death, and subconsciously expected him to turn up and deliver me from an unpleasant situation.
It took me a lifetime to come to terms with the loss, and sometimes I still wonder if I have. You never really get over the loss of a beloved. You learn to live despite it.
Was my father a happy man? Looking back, I think he was; he had managed to live the kind of life he wanted. He studied, worked and travelled in many different parts of India, and he found the time and means to pursue his interests—collecting stamps, records and butterflies, and taking photographs. He fell in love, and he tried to start a family. If he felt he had failed at this, it wasn’t something he talked about.
My mother told me later that he was very jealous, and kept her away from other men, perhaps torturing himself with imagined scenarios when she was away on her own. Who wouldn’t have been jealous? She was young, pretty, vivacious—everyone looked twice at her. It was what had probably attracted him to her.
But they were incompatible. She was outgoing, he was not. Home was his favourite place. And yet he never set up home anywhere; he seemed to like moving from one place to another and changing homes frequently. When we were living in a house for any extended period, he loved moving the furniture around, changing the bedroom into the living room and vice versa, much to the irritation of my mother, who liked having things in their familiar places.
That part of my father’s temperament surprises me, because he never gave the impression of being a restless man. But he never did settle down. Sometimes he spoke of making a home in Scotland, beside Loch Lomond, but of course it was only a dream. What was he searching for?
Perhaps it was an extended adolescence. Or it could have had something to do with his double inheritance. His father had joined the British Army and come to India when he was still a teenager. He had spent all his adult life here, marrying and raising his children, and through all that time there was ‘home leave’, when the family went to England. But England wasn’t really home. Everything they had was in India, and yet this wasn’t home, either.
In Shimla, when my father came to see me, and in Delhi, when I spent my holidays with him, he would say, ‘When the war is over, we’ll go to England. We’ll put you in a school there. There won’t be a job for me here.’ He told me he was selling off segments of his stamp collection so that we’d have money to start life afresh there. I would go with him, and probably Ellen. He was not an advocate of Empire; I don’t think he liked India less or England more—his world was mainly in his room, with his collections and his music. But as he saw it, we would always be associated with the Empire and would not be accepted in free India. He wanted comfort and security, as all of us do, for ourselves and our loved ones. He wanted the best for me, his closest companion.
After the separation from my mother, when he was alone in Delhi and his health was failing, I think he looked forward a great deal to the days that he spent with me—far more than I could have realized at the time. I was someone to come back to; someone for whom things could be planned.
My love was unconditional. And he had wanted me all to himself. It was the best kind of selfishness; it had filled my little life with so much joy.
Sometimes, well into middle age, I composed letters to my father. In my dreams, I would meet him on a busy street, after many lost years, and he would receive me with the same old warmth. We would get into a little train together, or sit in a dark hall, watching a screen lit up with bright, moving images. ‘Where were you all these years?’ I would ask him, and he would ruffle my hair. My father hadn’t died; he was a traveller in a different dimension, and he would turn up every now and then, just to see if I was all right.
It was only in 2001, when I was sixty-seven, that I finally went looking for my father’s grave. I located it in Calcutta’s Bhowanipore Cemetery. ‘Flight Lieutenant Aubrey Alexander Bond’ had been laid to rest there by his mother, Gloriana. It must have been a small affair.
School closed for the three months of winter. And I was in the train, the steam-engine snorting and chugging its way through the fields and forests of the eastern Doon, bringing me to the mother I hadn’t seen in almost three years.
Early morning in the Doon valley was always beautiful. I looked out of the carriage window as we passed over a small river, a tributary of the Ganga. A herd of elephants was walking into the clear waters.
The train slowed down as it took the gentle slopes of the valley. Fields of sugarcane and yellow mustard stretched away on either side. Village children ran out of their homes to wave to the passing train. Sometimes I waved back. Compartment windows were easily opened and closed in those days, you weren’t shut in by immovable glazed glass. Occasionally you got soot in your eyes, for steam still ruled the rails; and at the end of a journey you were in need of a good bath, but there was no shortage of water back then, and Lifebuoy soap had already been invented.
Dehra was the end of the line. The train pulled into the little station just as the sun came up. Coolies bustled about. A few fond parents were on the platform, waiting to receive their children; for there were three or four of us from Bishop Cotton School who had homes in Dehra.
I expected to see my mother on the platform, but she wasn’t there. Not a familiar face anywhere; not even an aunt. Perhaps a servant would be waiting. An elderly coolie dumped my box and bedding-roll on the platform. I asked him to wait. We both waited. I sat on my tin trunk while he chewed a paan. No one came.
‘Where do you wish to go, chhota-sahib?’ asked the patient coolie.
I thought about it. I was a slow thinker, but I did not have all day in which to make up my mind. My mother had written to say she was staying in a house with a lot of litchi trees, but even I knew this wasn’t going to be any help at all. I remembered the way to Granny’s house. Perhaps it still existed and my mother would be there.
‘Can you get me a tonga?’ I asked the coolie.
‘Yes, come with me, chhota-sahi b. Plenty of tongas.’ And he led me out of the station to the tonga stand, where he saw me and my luggage into a waiting tonga; accepted my rupee (leaving me with three), spat paan-juice over a film poster, and went his way.
‘Old Survey Road,’ I told the tonga-driver.
He cracked his whip and the pony set off at a leisurely trot.
Clip-clop through the quiet streets of Dehra. Two or three cars. More tongas. Lots of cyclists. It took the pony-cart about half an hour to get me to Granny’s house. I got down near the veranda steps. And there was Granny watering the geraniums, joylessly absorbed in herself, as I remembered her from the last time I had lived in her house. Crazy, her pariah dog, was sitting on the grass some distance away. He recognized me and came bounding up to leap on me and lick my face.
Granny was surprised to see me on her steps, with my luggage in tow. She rarely smiled, and she made no attempt to do so now.
‘I’m home for my holidays,’ I said.
‘Didn’t someone meet you?’ she asked, frowning a little.
‘No.’
‘Your mother doesn’t live here any longer. They have a place in Dalanwala. Wasn’t she expecting you?’
‘I don’t know. The school must have informed her.’
‘Well, do you know where to go?’
‘No.’
‘Then I’d better take you there, I suppose.’
Expressionless as usual, she got into the tonga with me, and gave the tonga-driver an address in Dalanwala. Off we went again, down the Canal Road and into a maze of little lanes that all seemed to end in a dry riverbed. After several attempts we found the right lane and the right house. The front door was bolted from the inside and we had to knock on it repeatedly before it was opened by a tall and swarthy man in a pyjama and shirt who salaamed Granny deferentially.
‘Where’s memsahib?’ Granny asked, sounding more tired than annoyed.
The servant told us she and ‘sahib’ were away on a shikar trip, somewhere in the forests of Motichur, hunting tigers. They weren’t expecting me home so soon, it seemed; but lunch was ready any time I wanted it.
Two small children were playing on the grass. Granny took me across to them.
‘These are your brothers,’ she said. ‘The fair one is your real brother, William. He’s three now. And the other, the younger one, is Harold, your half-brother.’
They were busy playing marbles and took no notice of me.
‘I’ll leave you now,’ said Granny. ‘You can come and see me some time.’
And she got into the tonga and drove away. At least I did not have to pay the tonga fare. And I was getting used to disappointments.
I had thought I was coming home to my mother and baby brother. I didn’t know she had remarried. No one had told me. I found out from the servant who the sahib was; it was Mr H.
MY MOTHER ARRIVED THE NEXT DAY WITH MR H, WHO WAS now my stepfather, in spite of having a wife and two children in another part of the town. They hadn’t been expecting me so soon. They had got the dates wrong. The tiger hunt was also something of a flop, as the tiger had failed to turn up. But there would be other tiger hunts, and I would be dragged along to some of them.
Meanwhile, I was made welcome and even given a small room of my own, which looked out on a rather neglected litchi and guava orchard. A few days later a small tin trunk arrived from Calcutta, forwarded to me by one of my father’s brothers. It contained some books and records, and a postcard collection, but no stamps. Where was my father’s priceless stamp collection? He had sold a few stamps, I knew, but the bulk of the collection had been with him till he died. It never did turn up, and I suspect that it was sold to dealers by impecunious relatives.
So there I was in the hamlet of Dalanwala; with two small brothers (and another on the way), and a mother and stepfather who seemed addicted to parties and tiger hunts. I made no effort to be close to them, or to my brothers; and if they made any overtures, it is likely that I rebuffed them. Daddy’s death had left me more lonely and self-centred than before.
Left largely to my own devices, I got into the habit of taking long walks, usually into the fields or tea-gardens on the outskirts of Dehra. I had no friends, but I must have been wanting some, because I remember I would go down to the railway tracks near the forest, when a train was expected, and stand there, watching the carriages clatter past. One day a boy sitting at a carriage window waved and called out: ‘Hey! Hello!’ I kept looking at him till the train had gone, and I went to the same spot the next few days, expecting to see him again so that I could wave back, and maybe run alongside his carriage and ask his name and arrange to meet somewhere.
On one of my aimless walks I ended up at Granny’s house, and asked her if there were any books lying around that I could read. I had never seen her reading a book; but there was always a chance that there would be something tucked away. Books do sometimes turn up in unexpected places. She gave me a religious tract, and told me to read it carefully.
Never despair has always been my motto, and I called on Granny’s tenant next, with the same request. Miss Kellner occupied half the bungalow. She was a tiny, crippled spinster in her sixties, who had to be carried about by boys in livery and bathed by her ayah. My interaction with her till then had been limited to the occasional greeting, or a couple of sentences exchanged if we happened to be in the garden at the same time. Most of the time she was in fairly good spirits, despite her condition.
Usually she sat out in the garden, in an easy chair, in the shade of a pomelo tree.
‘Do you have anything I can read, Miss Kellner?’ I asked.
She was peering into a notebook. She looked up, and looked at me over her pince-nez glasses. ‘Yes,’ she said, and gave me a religious tract.
Apparently religious tracts were all the rage.
But hers came with a meringue and a soft nankhatai biscuit (made by a little bakery down the road), so I promised to read the tract.
Dropping in on Miss Kellner for a chat (and a snack) soon became a ritual of sorts, and I would turn up once a week, even by-passing Granny on one or two occasions. I would also play cards with her—simple games like ‘Swap’ or ‘Beggar-my-neighbour’; the only time in my life when I had the patience for card games. It’s surprising what a well-stocked larder will do when it comes to making friends with a small boy.
So there she was—my first friend after my father’s death—an ageing lady with a shattered spine, twisted hands, a very large nose (which seemed to suit her) and a frail, bent-double body. I seldom saw her out of her chair, except when she was being carried into or out of the house by her helpers. She was always neatly dressed, and I believe the morning bath courtesy her ayah was a ritual she never missed. All her close relatives had over the years passed away, and she was very much on her own. But her late parents had left her some money, which she seemed to manage quite well, employing the ayah, a cook and four boys whose job it was to carry her into the garden and back. When she needed to go out of the house, the boys carried her in a sedan chair, and when she went into town or to visit her friends for bridge parties, they took her around in her private sky-blue rickshaw. She was feather-light, and she kept the boys well fed, so the rickshaw flew down the road, and I think I once saw her clap her small hands in delight.
In spite of her infirmities, Miss Kellner had a healthy complexion and a good appetite. There was a story going around that she bathed in rosewater. I couldn’t be so familiar as to ask her if this was true, but I decided to question her ayah on the subject. From my Jamnagar days, I usually got on well with ayahs, and they were fountains of gossip and esoteric knowledge.
‘Tell me, ayah-ji, does Miss Kellner really bathe in rosewater?’ I asked quite innocently one day.
‘None of your business,’ snapped her loyal ayah. ‘And what do you bathe in, inquisitive boy?’
‘Donkey’s milk,’ I said mischievously, and allowed her to chase me around a pomelo tree.
I couldn’t ask Miss Kellner about her disability, either. It was my mother who told me that when Miss Kellner was a baby, some fond uncle had been tossing her high in the air and catching her, when he was distracted by something and dropped her. The fall broke her spine, and her limbs, which never set properly. She had been an invalid ever since.
But mentally she was very alert. She would do her hisaab—accounts—in a large notebook, and though her hands were crooked, she would correspond with friends or distant relatives (I never found out who they were or where). She had a front room filled with all kinds of bric-a-brac she had collected over the years, and she would get her staff to dust and polish it every once in a while.
Soon enough, her ayah grew a little fond of me too. After we had talked for some time and played card games, Miss Kellner would say, ‘You must be hungry’, and I’d immediately say ‘Yes’, and she’d call the ayah, who knew exactly what was needed and would come with the meringues, patties and nankhatais.
I was the only child who would sit and talk to Miss Kellner. There were other younger people in the area, including my cousins who came to visit Granny, but I think they were intimidated by her, or unwilling to be around an old and deformed person confined to her chair. Despite my mischievous nature, I was not a very outgoing person, and in those days I was confused and at a loose end; it was our shared loneliness that brought us together. It wasn’t just the meringues she gave me! I found her interesting, and oddly comforting. She had time for me, as I had time for her. In fact, she looked forward to my visits, which was not something I experienced anymore. At home, in my mother’s house or Granny’s, I felt I was usually on sufferance after my father died. This was, of course, not an entirely fair judgement. They did not dislike me, and I certainly didn’t make it easier for them to love me, expecting them to put aside their life and the rest of the family for me, as I thought my father had done. But this sort of understanding comes with age; a ten-year-old is not so forgiving.
I continued to spend time with Miss Kellner during my holidays for the next five or six years, and sometimes she wrote me cards when I was back at school in Shimla. My Granny thought a lot of her, but I don’t remember seeing them together. Granny kept a great deal to herself. But she valued and respected Miss Kellner; I learnt later that she had made it a condition in her will that after she died, my aunt Emily, who inherited the house, would continue to keep Miss Kellner there. (And when my aunt and her family sold the house and moved to Jersey, they took an undertaking from the new owners that they would not evict Miss Kellner, who lived there till she died in the early 1950s.)
There was another friend I made in Granny’s garden. Granny kept a gardener, Dukhi, a quiet man, who could have been forty, or sixty—I don’t think anyone knew. He spent almost the entire day on his haunches, weeding the flower beds with the little spade, or khurpi, that he carried around. Dandelions, daisies, thistles, and other ‘weeds’ received no mercy from that relentless khurpi. Even some common marigolds flew from his spade.
‘Don’t throw those away,’ I protested one day. ‘They’re so pretty!’
‘Your grandmother doesn’t like them,’ said Dhuki.
In their place came petunias, poppies, sweet-peas, larkspur, snapdragons.
I liked the snapdragons. They came in many colours. And the sweet-peas gave out a heady fragrance. I think Granny grew most of her flowers for the sake of their fragrance. She could be unsmiling most of the time, but at least the garden was a friendly place.
That winter I began reading a lot. My visits to Miss Kellner finally resulted in the acquisition of some fascinating literature. A friend or relative of hers in England would mail her copies of the Daily Mirror , a lively tabloid for the working classes, sets of seven bound in bright yellow folders just in case you wished to preserve them—which I did. When Miss Kellner had no further use for her Daily Mirrors she would pass them on to me—and I would feast on the latest society scandals and sensational murders, all of which were given priority over the war news. There was also an entire page devoted to comic strips, and another to films, which was fine—but nothing about books! Didn’t people in England read books? It was to be years before I saw the Manchester Guardian or News Chronicle , so the Daily Mirror was (for some time at least) to be my sole guide to the cultural preferences of Britain.
More substantial literature I found in Tara Hall, the large, friendly house close to Dilaram Bazaar that belonged to the Melvilles (an old Anglo-Indian family of Dehra whose daughter ‘Vi’ had married the English corporal). People were always dropping in for tea or badminton practice at their place and the gramophone on their veranda would be playing popular records. One of them, Mrs Chill, was a kind-hearted person who had taken an interest in me. She had lost her husband to cholera just after their marriage, and had never remarried. But I always found her cheerful and good-natured, sending me presents on Christmas (the kindest people are often those who have come through testing personal tragedies). One day I asked Mrs Chill if she had any books I could read.
An entire shelf of books was put at my disposal. But almost all the books were by her favourite author, P.C. Wren, who had written romantic sagas about life in the French Foreign Legion—Beau Geste , Beau Sabreur , etc. The novels seemed rather unreal to me, though I got through one called The Snake and the Sword , which was set in India, and told the story of an otherwise brave Army officer who had an incurable fear and horror of snakes. I would have thought someone who hated snakes could easily avoid them, but the book’s hero encountered them everywhere—in his bedclothes, in his bathroom, on parade, wherever he went. He finally got over his obsessive fear by actually killing a snake with his sword—having taken over 300 pages to get around to this final act of liberation.
Years later I discovered that P.C. Wren served in the Indian educational service and had co-authored an English grammar book which was used in schools throughout India and was still in use well into the 1970s—long after Beau Geste had been forgotten. Wren had never served in the Foreign Legion, but it’s wonderful what a lively imagination can achieve.
I was still going through Mrs Chill’s collection, beginning to despair at the number of P.C Wrens there, when I chanced upon a small treasure of novels on a memorable trip into the jungle between Dehradun and Hardwar. It was Mr H who insisted I join him and my mother and some of their friends for a shikar expedition. They usually went alone, but perhaps they were concerned about the time I was spending roaming around Dehra like a vagrant. I went reluctantly; I hated guns and shikar seemed a barbaric way to relieve boredom. But in the end I was glad I went. I refused to go out hunting with them, and spent most of my time in the forest rest-house, where I found a shelf full of books and discovered P.G. Wodehouse’s Love Among the Chickens , M.R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary , Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile and Murder at the Vicarage , A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery, and Sketches by Boz , a collection of Dickens’s short pieces—all solid English fare, for a change.
As for the shikar itself, nobody shot anything, the resident tiger having failed to put in an appearance; but while the hunters were away, I saw a leopard slinking across the clearing in front of the rest-house. Nobody believed me, but the incident made me a leopard fan as well as a Wodehouse fan.
A word about Mr H, my stepfather. He was never unkind to me in any way; most of the time he hardly noticed me, caught up as he was in his frenzied living. His attitude to me was one of benign neglect, but most of the time he seemed unaware even of his own children, from his first wife and from my mother.
He hailed from Amritsar and his marriage to a Punjabi lady had brought him a dowry consisting of a photography studio in Dehradun, where his family had shifted when he was young. It was never clear to me why he had agreed to that marriage, because the lady he married and soon abandoned, and whom I came to know well in later years, was very traditional, with no interest in the Western and city lifestyle he favoured. Perhaps it was the dowry. As he was more interested in automobiles, he sold half the studio, leaving the other half to his wife, and bought a car dealership and motor workshop. This was when he met my mother. It was the era of the jeep, and their mutual interest in shikar resulted in many a jeep-ride into the surrounding forests, where big game still abounded. When not on expeditions into the jungle, they liked to go to parties.
Like my mother, Mr H wasn’t very good with money. He was irregular with his payments and casual about keeping accounts. Repair jobs were seldom finished on time. If a customer left a nice car with him for servicing, he would drive around in it for several weeks on the pretext of ‘testing’ it, before handing it back to the irate owner (this was how he appeared in a new car every day when he was courting my mother). But he was popular with his workmen and mechanics, as he was happy to sit and drink with them, or take them along on his shikar trips. Everyone had a good time, except his customers.
Naturally the car business suffered, and Mr H was soon in debt. Rents went unpaid, and we were frequently on the move. Every time I came home for the winter holidays, I would find that they had shifted to a new address. It was with some help from the RAF that my mother was able to pay my school fees, and later, William’s. My sister Ellen was still in Calcutta with Daddy’s mother, now into her eighties, but it wouldn’t be long before she, too, had to join us in Dehra. The RAF sent an allowance for Ellen’s maintenance, but it only went so far. My mother didn’t turn away from the responsibility, but she also didn’t make things easy for herself or her children.
She lived life in a slightly haphazard fashion. Of all her sisters, with the exception of the eldest, Enid, she was the unconventional one. The others never did anything risky, and had found and kept conventional husbands, all well-settled professionals. Even Aunt Enid ensured her marriage survived and her husband did not stray, even as she herself made a habit of straying.
My mother wasn’t interested in being a good girl; she liked to drink and swear a bit. The ladies of the Dehra Benevolent Society did not approve. Nor did they approve of her going to church without a hat—this was considered the height of irreverence in those days, and there were remonstrances and anguished letters of protest from other members of the congregation. As a result, she stopped going to church.
The life choices my mother made got her nowhere socially. The snootier Anglo-Indians and domiciled Europeans cut her off for having left a decent member of the community to engage in a public affair with, and then marry, an Indian—and a non-Christian, too—who even lacked the redeeming attribute of wealth or professional status. That their disapproval made no difference to her probably infuriated them even more.
While the ladies and gents of the Dehra Benevolent Society were in church, my mother and Mr H would be in one of Dehra’s cinema halls, watching both English and Hindustani films with equal pleasure. I remember going to my first Indian films with them: Tansen , starring K.L. Saigal (Mr H’s favourite singer-actor) and Khursheed Bano, that winter of 1944; and later, Jugnu , with Noor Jehan and Dilip Kimar, and Nadiya ke Paar , with Dilip Kumar and Kamini Kaushal (who was to become my favourite).
But these ‘family excursions’ were rare events. Usually my mother and Mr H would leave the younger children in the care of the cook and ayah, and me to my own devices, and disappear into the surrounding jungles. Back in town, they would go out almost every night. The old Ford convertible we owned would bring them back at two or three in the morning. My old insecurity resurfaced, and I would lie awake wondering what I would do if they had an accident of some kind and died. Would I be expected to look after my brothers and sister? How would I do it? Where would the money come from?
No such anxieties seemed to plague my mother and stepfather. They remained committed to enjoying life instead of paying their bills in time. I returned from Miss Kellner’s one afternoon to find our boxes, bedding, furniture, pots and pans piled up on the driveway. The rent hadn’t been paid for months and the landlord had secured an eviction order.
Granny had to take us all in, her privacy and peace of mind shattered once again by her unconventional daughter. We stayed in her house for the remainder of my holidays.
Dehra in 1944–45 was a lively place. The town had been designated a rest and recreation centre for Allied troops a couple of years ago, and it was still awash with soldiers on a break from active duty in Burma and the Far East. There was some hostility between the British and American soldiers because the latter were better paid and had more money to throw around. To avoid bar fights and street brawls, the Americans were allowed into town three days a week, and the British three days a week. One day of the week was reserved for the Italian prisoners of war, a better-looking and more charming lot, but poor. They tried to earn some pocket money by selling postage stamps and wooden toys.
Restaurants and nightclubs had sprung up in and around Astley Hall, and every evening they would be filled to capacity with roistering soldiers panting for pleasure before they returned to the warfront. Many of the younger Anglo-Indians became regulars at these watering holes and dance halls, looking for a bit of fun and maybe some romance. For the girls, it was as if the world had come to worship at their feet.
Some nights, there would be laughter and whistling in the streets and some drunken soldier would be heard weeping and swearing, looking for a girl called Gracie or Lara—a resident of Dehra, or perhaps of Brighton or Tennessee.
One of the more popular cafes, which also functioned as a nightclub, was the Casino, owned by a magician named Gogia Pasha, a Punjabi gentleman whose real name escapes me. We called him ‘Gali-gali’, because he would preface all his tricks with ‘gali, gali, gali’, producing rabbits and roosters from his pockets and eggs from his ears, or sawing a lady in half. And he kept up a rapid-fire commentary as he went along, making jokes and engaging the audience. After his magic show, a live band would start playing and the dancing would begin, and the air would be full of romantic possibilities.
The songs were from popular Hollywood films and by the American big bands. Everyone was in love with Rita Hayworth in those days, and songs and dances from her hit films like Gilda (‘Put the blame on Mame, boys’) were in great demand. There were also Ella Fitzgerald and Doris Day songs, and songs by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Delhi and Bombay had the bigger bands, of course—Rudy Cotton with his saxophone was king—but the scene was livelier in Dehradun, because it was a small place, a fun-and-games hothouse that would soon return to its pre-war slumber.
The reader might wonder how I know so much about what went on in those nightclubs when I was just ten. Well, there was this pretty Anglo-Indian girl, eighteen or nineteen years old, who would fuss over me whenever my mother took me to the store below the Casino where she worked. Her name was Irene, and both she and her sister Rhoda were regulars at the Casino, where the soldiers vied for their attention. Rhoda was even more beautiful, but Irene was my favourite. On a couple of occasions, she took me with her to the nightclub, and it was a magical new world for me, the hall full of smoke and music and laughter. I had a crush on Irene. But to her I was like a kid brother, a besotted boy whose company and attention she enjoyed. She could kiss me on the forehead or ask me to press her back, or adjust her dress in a corner while I stood guard, and think nothing of it.
Irene made that New Year’s Eve memorable. She invited me to the dance party at the Casino, and my mother and Mr H encouraged me to go. I accompanied Irene into the club, where a four-piece live band was playing the latest Glen Miller hits—‘In the Mood’ and ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ and others that I forget. The tobacco smoke and beer and whisky fumes were headier than ever before. Irene gave me a quarter glass of rum which I downed like a seasoned drinker, and then I led her to the dance floor to much applause and cheering. We did a foxtrot, and the crowd roared and whistled in approval. But as soon as the song was over, a smart soldier stole Irene from me and I retreated into a corner to sulk and glower at them. Someone—the soldier or Irene—had a plate of fish fingers and a glass of the raspberry-flavoured drink Vimto sent to me. But I continued to sulk.
But when the lights were turned off and the hall exploded into ‘Auld Lang Syne’, Irene came to me, calling my name, and she gathered me in her perfumed arms and kissed me full on the lips!
It was my first rum and my first kiss and I was quite intoxicated.
And the magic time wasn’t over yet. Two days later, it snowed in Dehra. I was out walking when it began. It came down quite suddenly, and soon the litchi and guava trees were covered with a soft mantle of snow. I vividly remember running in and telling my mother, ‘It’s snowing outside, Mum!’ and she said, ‘I don’t want any of your silly jokes right now, Ruskin,’ because she had just given birth to my second half-brother, Hansel, and was in bed. So I ran out and came back with some litchi leaves which were covered with snow, and her face lit up with a delighted smile.
Later Miss Kellner told me it had snowed in Dehradun once before, forty years earlier, when she came to Dehradun.
‘Now maybe it’s a sign that I should go,’ she said.
‘Don’t go,’ I said. ‘Wait for the next snowfall.’
This pleased her, and we played Snap. The ayah brought us ginger biscuits, and I polished them all off and asked for more.
IT WAS MARCH AND TIME TO HEAD BACK TO SCHOOL. I WAS PUT on a train to Ambala, from where I was to catch the train coming from Delhi going to Kalka. I was a big boy, almost eleven, and I could do this alone. In Ambala there would be many other boys going to BCS after the holidays. Trains usually kept to their schedule in those days, but this one didn’t, and when I reached Ambala station I had missed the train from Delhi. So there I was on the platform, with my trunk and bedding, and I didn’t know what to do. It would soon be night.
I walked around on the platform for a while, and then I left my luggage in the waiting room and walked out of the station and kept walking, with no plan, except to keep moving till something happened to resolve the situation. After some time, I saw a police post, and I walked over to the post and told the policeman I’d missed my train and I wanted to inform my parents. Fortunately, my mother and stepfather had a telephone in the house. I gave the policemen their names and the number and they put me through and I told my mother I was stuck at Ambala station.
Gosh, she said. Was I really? Well, not to worry, I should just stay there and someone would be with me soon to sort things out. I went back to the station and went to sleep on the bench—Ambala was a busy enough station and there were a few other people, sitting or lying on the benches and on the floor. It was morning by the time help arrived—someone from my stepfather’s workshop, who got my ticket made and put me on the next train to Kalka. A few other boys had arrived with a parent or guardian and I joined the group.
In Kalka, as was the practice, there were a couple of teachers to escort batches of students to the school. The small narrow-gauge train took all day to get us up the mountains to Shimla. The rhododendron trees were flaunting their scarlet blossoms, but there was snow on the ground, and when we approached Shimla we found the tracks blocked by snow. We spent a cold and uncomfortable night, all crowded together and sitting upright, until dawn broke, when we got off the train and began the long trudge to school, about three miles distant. The luggage came a day later. I don’t remember if there were hot baths at the end of the long trek through the snow; probably not.
We were a hardy lot, I suppose. Unlike the posh boarding schools of today, BCS had no heating, and there were no fireplaces for us in the dormitories, and not enough hot water in the winter. However, the school was developed enough to have installed a flush system—almost all homes and most establishments in India, even big hotels, used some version of thunder boxes at the time (many did so well into the 1960s). But going to the toilet at BCS was still an adventure. There was a long line of potties, and there was a flush but you didn’t have chains to pull, the water came down automatically every ten minutes. And usually, because of the large population of boys using the potties or because they were poorly maintained, they would overflow. So as soon as you heard a rumble approaching, you knew the water was coming down and you leapt up and ran before a wave rose under you!
Not posh, then, but infinitely more comfortable than the lives that millions in India lived, and which we were almost completely insulated from in schools like Bishop Cotton’s. None of us had experienced hunger. There were wartime shortages, but we weren’t deprived of much. Omelettes were made from ‘egg powder’—a mysterious thing, which I later discovered was dehydrated egg and that the Chinese had been making it centuries earlier. Deadly-looking sausages were also made up of several mysterious ingredients and were known to soldiers as ‘sweet mysteries of life’—named after the Nelson Eddy–Jeanette Macdonald love duet ‘Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life’, featured in the film Naughty Marietta . The Keventer’s farm at Taradevi supplied us with butter, but refined sugar was hard to come by, and our tea was sweetened with raw gur or shakkar, which was probably healthier. The school tuck-shop was a popular destination if you had any pocket money in hand. The fare was limited to buns, samosas, pakoras and jalebis, which was fine with most of us. (The fast-food era had yet to dawn; the nearest to it being the packets of chewing-gum which American soldiers dispensed freely until they were sent home at the end of the war.)
This was probably the norm for most boarding schools of the time. Bishop Cotton’s was, after all, one of the most prestigious. Apart from English and Anglo-Indian boys—some of them fairly privileged—the Indian, Nepali and Tibetan boys were from royal families or landed gentry. There were very few from families of professionals. Although royalty didn’t mean we had too many future kings and dewans with us. A lot of these boys lived in the shadow of royalty, and they would do so all their lives.
There were the Patiala boys, for instance—the sons of the late Maharaja of Patiala, Bhupinder Singh, from women he slept with but did not marry. There were a great number of them. But he looked after all the women and their children. Several of the boys were sent to BCS and the girls to the nearby Auckland House; other progeny went to boarding schools in Dehradun and Mussoorie. In my time, there were about twenty Patiala brothers in BCS. He used to give them all English names, in addition to their Sikh names: Hemender was also Maurice, Devinder was Cecil, another boy was Dennis—it was a quaint fancy of the Maharaja’s. I remember we had a funny situation once, when the football team from Colonel Brown’s school in Dehradun came to play a match against us: half their team were my friend and teammate Hemender’s brothers—all the sons of the Maharaja of Patiala from different women!
I was by then a regular member of the football team. My affair with the game—alas, cut short very soon after school—had begun in my second or third year in BCS. All games were compulsory, which I neither understood nor appreciated, but I was surprised how quickly I took to football, and how much I liked it (I ended up as captain of the school team!). I was happy with hockey, too, but not so happy with cricket, which bored me.
But the two sports I disliked were boxing and swimming. I figured out soon enough that I could get myself disqualified in a boxing match by butting my opponent in the head or midriff, and so end the torture. There was no clever way out of swimming, however, and I had to overcome my fear of water and struggle to contain my panic as I thrashed about noisily in the pool, trying to come to grips with the freestyle and the butterfly and back stroke. Finally, it was a kind and wise teacher, Mr Jones, who taught me the breast stroke, saying it was more suited to my temperament.
Like sports, church-going was also compulsory, although unlike at the Mussoorie convent, no one was fanatical about it. For the boys—many of them not Christian, anyway—it was like going to the library or PT class. Some of them even enjoyed it, especially the choir, where again not all the boys were Christian. I remember we had two or three Sikh boys in the church choir, and they’d sing beautifully, looking very sweet in their cassocks and turbans—a lovely advertisement for mixing up religions and cultures and making the world a far more interesting and colourful place.
But I couldn’t sing. Our music teacher, Mrs Knight, put me in the school choir because, she said, I looked like a choir boy, all pink and shining in a cassock and surplice. But she forbade me from actually singing.
‘You will open your mouth with the others, Bond,’ she said, ‘but you are not to allow any sound to issue forth!’
She reminded me of the strict nuns at the Mussoorie convent, and I feared for my pink knuckles.
But there were some good teachers. A little odd, but nice. Like kind Mr Jones, who smoked a cigar and had a pet pigeon which was often perched on his head. He didn’t bring it to class, but he would walk around outside with the pigeon on his head—and he had a bald head, so it was a very amusing sight. In his bachelor quarters, the pigeon was completely at home in the middle of untidy piles of books and papers and clothes, all reeking of cigar smoke.
Mr Jones was a rare teacher who got on well with the younger boys. Without exception, we all liked him, one reason being that he never punished us. He was a lone crusader against the custom of caning boys for their misdemeanours, for which he was ridiculed as an eccentric by the other masters and lost his seniority.
In Mr Jones I found a sympathetic soul. He was a Welshman, retired from the army, who taught us divinity. He seemed to sense I had no interest in religion, but that did not upset or disappoint him, and such were his gentle ways that he actually got me to read the complete Bible! It was the King James version, and though it did not make me a good Christian, or even a bad one, I was affected deeply by the classical simplicity of its style.
He was a Dickens fan, and when I told him I’d read Sketches by Boz , he gave me access to his set of the Complete Works of Charles Dickens , handsome illustrated editions all, and I was lost for days in the life sagas of David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist. If I had to choose a moment when I began to think seriously about becoming a writer, it would have to be this period.
Being a socialist, Mr Jones had an aversion to P.G. Wodehouse, whose comic novels I greatly enjoyed. According to him, Wodehouse glamourized upper-class English life, which was true. But he did not try to dissuade me from reading about Bertie Wooster and Jeeves and all the rest. In a few years, I would discover that the world Wodehouse described, and so many of his readers across the world were charmed by, did not really exist.
Nevertheless, I continued to read and enjoy Wodehouse, but with Mr Jones’s encouragement, I began to spend as much time as I could in the school library—the Anderson Library. It was very well stocked, and it became something of a haven for me for the rest of my school years.
The callous and classist headmaster, Priestley, was still around. But the war was coming to an end, and he and several English expatriate teachers and students would soon be leaving. Indian Independence was also just around the corner, and many Anglo-Indian families were emigrating to England and Australia. With Independence would come Partition, and I would lose a couple of dear friends to arbitrarily drawn borders and the hate and violence that often come in the wake of such political upheavals.
In that last year at prep. school, my friends included Azhar Khan, who came from Lahore; Cyrus Satralkar, from Bombay; and Brian Adams, an Anglo-Indian boy from New Delhi. We called ourselves ‘The Four Feathers’, the feathers—of a falcon, a peacock, a parakeet and a woodpecker—signifying that we were companions in adventure, comrades-in-arms. Our occasional escapades were confined to breaking bounds when opportunity arose, or sharing our food parcels, or going into town together on Sunday afternoons to watch movies. Satralkar received the largest number of food parcels from home, and he became the most valued member of the group.
But it was Azhar who became my closest friend. He was a quiet, precocious boy, the ideal companion on long walks or scrambles down the hillsides. While I was losing much of my shyness, and was not as much of a loner as before, he was an introvert and took no part in the form’s feverish attempts to imitate the Marx Brothers at the circus. He showed no resentment at the prevailing anarchy in the classroom, nor did he make a move to participate in it. Once he caught me looking at him, and he smiled ruefully, tolerantly. Did I sense another adult in the class? Someone who was a little older than his years?
Even before we began talking to each other, Azhar and I developed an understanding of sorts, and we’d nod to each other when we met in the classroom corridors or in the dining hall. We were not in the same house. The house system practiced its own form of apartheid, whereby a member of, say, Curzon House was not expected to fraternize with someone belonging to Rivaz or Lefroy. But these barriers vanished when Azhar and I found ourselves selected for the school hockey team—Azhar as a full-back, I as goalkeeper. A good understanding is needed between goalkeeper and full-back, and we were on the same wavelength. I anticipated his moves, he was familiar with mine.
It wasn’t until we were away from the confines of school, classroom and dining hall that our friendship flourished. The hockey team travelled to Sanawar, on the next mountain range, where we were to play a couple of matches against our traditional rivals, the Lawrence School, which was then still a military school (my father’s old school, in fact). Azhar and I were thrown together a good deal during the visit to Sanawar, and in our more leisurely moments, strolling undisturbed around a school where we were guests and not pupils, we exchanged life histories. Azhar was from the North-West Frontier Province, and he had lost his father too, shot in some family dispute. A wealthy uncle was seeing to his education, as the RAF was seeing to mine.
I had already started writing my first book. It was called Nine Months , but had nothing to do with a pregnancy; it referred merely to the length of the school term, the beginning of March to the end of November, and it detailed my friendships and escapades at school and lampooned a few of our teachers. I had filled three slim exercise books with this premature literary project, and I allowed Azhar to go through them. He was my first reader and critic. ‘They’re very interesting. But you’ll get into trouble if someone finds them.’ And he read out an offending verse, chuckling in obvious delight:
Olly, Olly, Olly, with his balls on a trolley,
And his arse all painted green!
This bit was about our melancholic mathematics master, Mr Oliver. I had no quarrel with Mr Oliver, but I hated maths.
We returned to Shimla, having won our matches against Sanawar, and were school heroes for a couple of days. And then my housemaster discovered my literary opus and took it away and read it. I was given six of the best with a Malacca cane, and my manuscript was torn up. Azhar knew better than to say ‘I told you so’ when I showed him the purple welts on my bottom. Instead, he repeated the more scurrilous bits he remembered from the notebooks and laughed, till I began to laugh too.
‘Will you go away when the British leave India?’ Azhar asked me one day.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘My stepfather is Indian.’
‘Everyone is saying they’re going to divide the country. I think I’ll have to go away.’
‘Oh, it won’t happen,’ I said glibly. ‘How can they cut up such a big country?’
‘Gandhi will stop them,’ he said.
But even as we dismissed the possibility, Jinnah, Nehru and Mountbatten and all those who mattered were preparing their instruments for major surgery.
Before their decision impinged on our life, we found a little freedom of our own—in an underground tunnel that we discovered in a corner of the school grounds. It was really part of an old, disused drainage system, and when Azhar and I began exploring it, we had no idea just how far it extended. After crawling along on our bellies for some twenty feet, we found ourselves in complete darkness. It was a bit frightening, but moving backwards would have been quite impossible, so we continued writhing forward, until we saw a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Dusty, a little bruised and very scruffy, we emerged at last on to a grassy knoll, a little way outside the school boundary. We’d found a way to escape school!
The tunnel became our beautiful secret. We would sit and chat in it, or crawl through it just for the thrill of stealing out of the school to walk in the wilderness. Or to lie on the grass, our heads touching, reading comics or watching the kites and eagles wheeling in the sky. In those quiet moments, I became aware of the beauty and solace of nature more keenly than I had been till then: the scent of pine needles, the soothing calls of the Himalayan bulbuls, the feel of grass on bare feet, and the low music of the cicadas.
Lord Mountbatten, viceroy and governor-general-to-be, came for our Founder’s Day that year and gave away the prizes. I had won a prize for something or the other, and mounted the rostrum to receive my book from this towering, handsome man. Bishop Cotton’s was the ‘Eton of the East’. Viceroys and governors had graced its functions. Many of its boys had gone on to eminence in the civil services and armed forces. There was one ‘old boy’, of course, about whom they maintained a stolid silence—General Dyer, who had ordered the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar in 1919.
Now Great Britain wanted to do the right thing. Mountbatten spoke of the momentous events that were happening all around us—World War II had just come to an end, the United Nations held out the promise of a world living in peace and harmony, and India, an equal partner with Britain, would be among the great nations…
He mentioned Independence, without, as far as I can recall, actually using the word. He said nothing about dividing the country.
A few weeks later, Bengal and Punjab provinces, with their large Muslim populations, were bisected. Everyone was in a hurry—Jinnah and company were in a hurry to get a country of their own; Nehru, Patel and others were in a hurry to run a free, if truncated, India; and Britain was in a hurry to get out. Riots flared up across northern India, and there was a great exodus of people crossing the newly drawn frontiers of Pakistan and India. Homes were destroyed, thousands lost their lives.
The common room radio and the occasional newspaper kept us abreast of events, but in our tunnel Azhar and I felt immune from all that was happening, worlds away from all the pillage, murder and revenge. Outside the tunnel, there was fresh untrodden grass, sprinkled with clover and daisies, the only sounds the hammering of a woodpecker, and the distant insistent call of the Himalayan barbet. Who could touch us there?
‘And when all wars are done,’ I said, ‘a butterfly will still be beautiful.’
‘Did you read that somewhere?’ Azhar asked.
‘No, it just came into my head.’
‘It’s good. Already you’re a writer.’
Though it felt good to hear him say that, I made light of it. ‘No, I want to play hockey for India or football for Arsenal. Only winning teams!’
‘You’ll lose sometimes, you know, even if you get into those teams,’ said wise old Azhar. ‘You can’t win forever. Better to be a writer.’
When the monsoon rains arrived in June, the tunnel was flooded, the drain choked with rubble, and Azhar and I had to suspend our little adventures. But now the town was out of bounds, too. One Sunday, we were allowed out to the cinema, to see Lawrence Olivier’s Hamlet , a forbidding film which did nothing to raise our spirits on a wet and gloomy afternoon, and we had barely returned, when communal riots broke out in Shimla’s Lower Bazaar as well.
One morning after chapel, the headmaster announced that the Muslim boys—those who had their homes in what was now Pakistan—would have to be evacuated. They would be sent to their homes across the border with an armed convoy.
It was time for Azhar to leave, along with some fifty other boys from Lahore, Rawalpindi and Peshawar. The rest of us—Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs and Parsis—helped them load their luggage into the waiting British Army trucks that would take them to Lahore. A couple of boys broke down and wept, including our departing school captain, a Pathan who had been known for his unemotional demeanour. Azhar waved to me and I waved back. We had vowed to meet again some day. We both kept our composure; either our experiences had hardened us, or we truly believed that we would be together again.
The headmaster announced a couple of days later that all the boys had reached Pakistan and were safe. But their journey hadn’t been without incident. Though we weren’t informed officially, we learned that the amiable Muslim baker who ran the school canteen, bringing up our favourite buns and pakoras from his home in Chhota Shimla, had been killed. He and two of the school’s Muslim bearers who were travelling with the boys had strayed into an off-limits area when the convoy made a halt in Kalka. They were set upon by a mob, and while the bearers managed to escape, the baker hadn’t been able to outrun the mob armed with sickles and knives.
As in the rest of Punjab on both sides of the border, chaos and violence reigned in Shimla. There weren’t enough soldiers to stop the rioting—the British were abandoning the country, and the local administration had collapsed. Our school was under threat; the authorities had equipped some of the teachers and senior boys with rifles, and we were forbidden from stepping outside. We remained confined to the school till the end of the term, the only exception being the morning of August 15, 1947, when we were marched up to town to witness the Indian flag being raised for the first time. Shimla was still the summer capital of India, so it was quite an event.
It was raining that morning. We were in our raincoats and gum-boots, while a sea of umbrellas covered the Mall. What did I feel as I saw the Union Jack being lowered and the Indian Tricolour replacing it? My father had seldom spoken about India or Britain or our place in either country, except to say, occasionally, that we would be going away once the war was over. I was still a boy, and I don’t think I had strong feelings about the issue, one way or the other. I remember being more interested in the colours and design of the Indian flag than in the speeches that were being made from the rostrum. (Two years later, as a school prefect, it became my duty to raise the Indian flag on the school flat. It seemed quite natural to be doing so; and it seemed quite natural and thrilling to be a member of the NCC, the National Cadet Corps.)
What I did feel strongly about was the senseless division of the country that had separated me from my friends. Towards the end of the school year, just as I was getting ready to leave for Dehradun for the three-month winter holidays, I received a letter from Azhar. He told me something about his new school and how he missed my company and our games and our tunnel to freedom. I replied and gave him my home address, but I did not hear from him again. We were always shifting houses in Dehradun, so if a letter did come, it might easily have been lost. And there were many new borders in any case. Even without those borders, the land, though divided, was still a big one, and we were very small.
Eighteen years later, I did get some news, but in an entirely different context. India and Pakistan were at war and in a bombing raid over Ambala, a Pakistani plane was shot down. An old school friend wrote to say he had heard the pilot’s name was Azhar, but he couldn’t be sure if it was the Azhar we knew.
The war had come to the borders of India and changed our world forever. But as a boy I barely understood the consequences. Later, I would read and hear about the horror of that global war—the concentration camps and Hitler’s extermination of the Jews; Japanese atrocities in China and Southeast Asia; and finally, America dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wiping out hundreds of thousands of civilians.
As with over-ambitious conquerors before them, the aggressive had over-reached themselves, and brought about their own defeat. But Europe had been left in a shambles. Britain’s colonial Empire was no longer sustainable, which, at least, was a positive outcome—if anything positive can result from war—and Independence had come to India a little earlier than expected. But the rejoicing had been marred by tragedy.
Partition was a messy, nasty business. It resulted in a chaotic exchange of populations, inevitable conflicts, and murder and mayhem on a massive scale. Even small towns like Dehra and tranquil hill stations such as Shimla and Mussoorie were not spared during those months of communal passion.
While the Muslim boys of BCS had been evacuated safely, others were not so fortunate. Domestic servants, small shopkeepers, labourers, humble workers were slaughtered in the streets. This happened all over northern India, and in what had become Pakistan. In Dehra, my mother told me, the little canal was jammed with dead bodies. Only the rich could afford to get away. Others survived by taking sanctuary in refugee camps. My stepfather, a Hindu, was one of the few who went out of their way to assist people in those months of savagery. He helped many of his Muslim friends and employees to escape across the border—driving them through hostile territory till he got them to some frontier crossing, where they would disappear under cover of darkness. He risked his life doing this, and he did it more than once.
By the time I came home from school, things had settled down to some extent. In India, periods of great turmoil are often followed by uneasy calm—a sudden cessation of violent events, the need to recover from the shock of what has happened, and to look around to see who is missing.
Dehra Granny was missing, but it wasn’t the Partition violence that had taken her. She had died a few months after Independence. She had been visiting a friend in Ranchi when she died, probably of a heart attack, and she was buried there. Typically, I hadn’t been informed.
That winter I was soon back on my walkabouts, browsing in the local bookshops, or visiting the cinemas when I had pocket money. Three of the several cinema halls were still showing English, or rather, American films, and one of them, the Hollywood on Chakrata Road, was new, showing all the latest Warner Brothers and MGM releases.
I must have been a familiar figure on the quiet roads and lanes of Dehra—a solitary youth, fair-haired, more pink than white, hands in his pockets, head lowered as though searching for something on the pavements. It was a habit I’d acquired in Jamnagar, looking for seashells on the beach. Of course, there were no seashells in Dehra, although sometimes I’d stop to pick up a coloured pebble. I had a small collection of coloured pebbles.
No one took much notice of me on my walks. Occasionally an urchin would call out ‘lal bandar !’—red monkey!—but I was used to that. On one occasion some college boys on cycles crowded me off the sidewalk and into a ditch before riding on, shouting obscenities; but this was an isolated incident, something that college boys did even to their own.
Up in Shimla I had school friends, English-speaking boys, but in Dehra I was very much a loner—until one day, while crossing the maidan (the old parade ground) a football came bouncing towards me, and being a decent football player, I gave the ball a good kick and sent it back into play. An informal game was in progress, the players being Hindi-speaking, or rather Hindustani-speaking boys from Paltan Bazaar and other market areas, and one of them called out: ‘Good kick! Aap khelega ?’ I accepted the invitation and joined in the game, and soon I was a regular fixture in that little group, playing football in the evenings and sometimes joining them at the chaat or gol-guppa stall near the clock tower.
And suddenly, my world had expanded a little.
Dehra was well served with cinemas, but I was a lonely picture-goer. I would trudge off on my own to the Orient or Odeon or Hollywood, to indulge in a few hours of escapism. There were books, of course, providing another and a better form of escape, but books had to be read at home, and sometimes I wanted to get away from the house and pursue a solitary other-life in the anonymous privacy of a darkened cinema hall.
The little Odeon cinema opposite the old Parade Ground—now gone—was my preferred hall. It was probably the most popular meeting place for English cinema buffs in the 1940s and ’50s. You could get a good idea of the popularity of a film by looking at the number of bicycles ranged outside. The Odeon was a twenty-minute walk from the Old Survey Road, where we lived at the time, and after the evening show I would walk home across the deserted parade ground, the starry night adding to my dreams of a starry world, where tap-dancers, singing cowboys, swordsmen and glamourous women in sarongs reigned supreme in the firmament.
During the intervals (five-minute breaks between the shorts and the main feature), the projectionist or his assistant would play a couple of gramophone records for the benefit of the audience. Unfortunately, the Odeon management had only two or three records, and the audience would grow restless listening to the same tunes at every show. I must have been compelled to listen to Bing Crosby singing ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ about a hundred times, and felt thoroughly fenced in.
I had a good collection of gramophone records at home, passed on to me by relatives and neighbours who had started leaving India a couple of years before Independence, and were still leaving. I decided it would be a good idea to give some of them to the cinema’s management so that we could be provided with a little more variety during the intervals. I made a selection of about twenty records—mostly dance music of the period—and presented them to the manager, Mr Mann, an Indian Christian, who wasn’t very communicative but had a kind face.
He was surprised, but pleased, and in return, he presented me with a free pass which permitted me to see all the pictures I liked without having to buy a ticket! Any day, any show, for as long as Mr Mann was the manager.
This unexpected bonanza lasted for almost two years, with the result that during my school holidays I saw a film every second day. Two days was the average run for most films. Except Gone With the Wind , which ran for a week, to my great chagrin. I found it very boring and I left in the middle. But there were many that I enjoyed—usually the films based on famous or familiar books. Dickens was a natural for the screen; David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Tale of two Cities, A Christmas Carol (Scrooge), all made successful films. Daphne du Maurier’s novels also transferred well to the screen. As did Somerset Maugham’s works: Of Human Bondage, The Razor’s Edge and several others.
Those films made that winter, and the two that followed, memorable for me, and I had Mr Mann to thank. I believe he did me the favour because he was sympathetic towards me—maybe he had seen me roaming the streets of Dehra with no fixed address, almost always alone. A local man, he was aware of my circumstances. My giving him the records gave him an excuse to help me. He could see that I was fond of movies and couldn’t always afford the price of the ticket.
Sometime after I went to England, the little cinema closed down, and when I returned, preparations were being made to demolish the entire building. Mr Mann had moved to some other place, where, I like to think, other cinema buffs received the same kindness that I had.
January, 1948. I was watching a film—in the Hollywood, for a change, the cinema on Chakrata Road. After the film had been running for about ten minutes, the show was stopped, the lights came on and the manager came up front to announce that news had just been received that Mahatma Gandhi had been assassinated, shot dead at his morning prayer meeting. The film would have to be discontinued, and the cinema would be closed for a week.
I walked back home across the vast maidan, shocked and confused by the news, and dejected that there would be no films to see for a week. I was thirteen, so my lack of sensitivity could perhaps be excused. But I remember clearly passing little groups of people who looked stunned and grief-stricken, talking in hushed tones and wondering what turn the country would take now. The assassin was a Hindu, and there was undisguised relief that the tragedy would not result in more communal riots. At home, my mother and stepfather and the household helps looked bewildered, even bereaved.
But it was my sister Ellen who took it to heart more than anyone else in the family. In the days that followed, she did not draw dragons, elephants and tigers. She would spend hours drawing pictures of Gandhi. Her eyesight was poor, and some of the portraits took strange shapes, but we could recognize Gandhi’s round-rimmed glasses, sandals and walking stick. Nobody had thought she noticed or understood a lot of the things around her, much less in the world outside. Somehow, the Mahatma had touched her.
We never knew what went on in Ellen’s mind, which would remain that of a five-year-old all her life.
THE WINTER BREAK OF 1947–48 WAS OVER TOO SOON, AND I WAS back in boarding school, getting bored with cricket nets and early morning PT and sermons on Sundays. Three of the Four Feathers gang were in different parts of the world—Pakistan, England and New Zealand—and I missed them, Azhar most of all.
The lone Feather did not enjoy being at BCS anymore. I wrote to my mother asking if I could shift to a school in Dehra, and she said she’d try, but I thought better of it. The school library and my love of books helped me get through that year.
Then it was December, and I was glad of the three-month winter break.
I came home to find my mother managing an old hotel, the Green’s, situated a little way off the main Rajpur Road. Dehra was having a slump, and my stepfather’s business ventures continued to fail, and this time my mother had taken matters into her own hands and moved out. Mr H, I gathered, had been reconciled to his first wife and moved in with her, albeit temporarily.
The Green’s was a large single-storey bungalow-type hotel with about twenty rooms. It was a rather rundown place, which had been bought over by a Sikh family who owned a large shop nearby called Perfection House. They had employed my mother as the manager and she’d been given a little cottage behind the hotel, where she was staying with my brothers—William, and half-brothers Harold and Hansel—and Ellen. The effects of the damage Ellen had suffered at birth had become severe. She was epileptic, unable to do very much on her own, and needed constant care and attention. My mother could not run the hotel and look after her and three growing boys at the same time, so she had employed a widowed lady, Mrs Kennedy, to work as a full-time nanny for Ellen. The hotel salary being modest, it was almost hand-to-mouth, despite the RAF allowance for Ellen.
It was very cramped in the cottage, and as the hotel seldom had any guests, my mother arranged for me to stay in one of the smaller empty rooms through my holidays. The room was separated from a larger one by a locked door with a cupboard in front of it, but that did not prevent the sound of loud arguments waking me up late at night. On the other side of the door were an Anglo-Indian mother and son duo, who had fallen on hard times and were always at each other’s throats. It was depressing listening to the despair and nastiness, but there was nothing to do but to put up with it—I had been allowed use of the room because it was the smallest in the hotel; the owners wouldn’t agree to my being given a bigger room for free.
But the owners’ son, Jasbir, was a very friendly boy, and we would spend a lot of time playing badminton together. We’d made a badminton court on the rather neglected garden of the hotel and soon it became popular and other boys and some girls began coming to play. It didn’t do very much for the hotel’s earnings, as they bought nothing there except the occasional lemonade, but at least the place became a little livelier.
There were no long-term residents at the hotel, only some people in transit—medical salesmen, tourists on their way to Mussoorie, and, rarely, parents of students enrolled in one of the town’s smaller boarding schools. There was a very basic breakfast service, and no functioning restaurant. There was a bar, however, a bit dark and dank, attached to a billiards room, which was patronized by a few non-resident regulars. The marker who ran the billiards room was an entertaining man of indeterminate age who had been with the hotel for fifteen or twenty years, and recalled a time when there was a bandstand in the garden and a dance floor in the veranda. The hotel was abuzz with activity then, with Europeans and well-to-do Indians—zamindars, members of royal families and successful professionals—coming to stay or to dine. If that was true, the decline in the hotel’s fortunes had been very swift and dramatic. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, that could be said about Dehradun itself. All but a few of the British and Anglo-Indian families had left, and the Partition had resulted in an exodus of the old Muslim families. The Sikh and Punjabi refugees had only just started arriving, and were struggling to establish themselves, having lost their properties in Pakistan.
So there wasn’t much work at the Green’s Hotel. Every morning, at about ten, I would go to my mother’s office, supposedly to help her with the accounts and some paperwork, but there wasn’t a lot to do, and I went really for the coffee and pakoras that were brought to her, and to read the newspaper. That done, I would go to the cottage to chat with Mrs Kennedy.
Mrs Kennedy was Irish, with tales to tell, and I was happy to listen to her. She had seen better days, as had many of the poorer Anglo-Indians and Europeans who had been affected by the sudden departure of the British. People like Mrs Kennedy, who had worked for more prosperous white employers, suddenly found themselves stranded. Her husband had been a travelling salesman of sorts, selling termite-control chemicals, but he had died in a train accident, and there were no pensions for the widows of pesticide salesmen. Mrs Kennedy would, in due course, be repatriated to England or Ireland, but in the meantime she had to make a living, and looking after my sister did not require any great skills—just patience and sympathy. Mrs Kennedy had a bit of both.
She told me that her husband had been a wonderful singer, rather like the great Irish tenor John McCormack, and he was often in demand at parties, marriages, even funerals. Mrs Kennedy liked to sing too—she had a passable contralto voice—and gave us sentimental renditions of ‘Danny Boy’, ‘Sweet Rosie O’Grady’ and ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’.
And she had a good appetite, two helpings of any dish being her norm. As my brothers also had voracious appetites, my mother had to make sure there was plenty of dal, rice, and potatoes in the larder. Mrs Kennedy, being Irish, liked her potatoes, especially in a stew, and she was proud of the fact that potatoes had been introduced to India a century or so before by her namesake, Captain Kennedy, in the Shimla Hills, and by a fellow Irishman, Captain Young, on the Mussoorie ranges. Now, of course, everyone ate potatoes—in curries, with other vegetables, and as potato chips to go with fried fish, or as an adjunct to almost anything.
‘What would we do without potatoes?’ she wanted to know.
‘Eat turnips,’ I said. ‘We always had turnips in India.’
‘You’d soon get tired of turnips. Only good for pickles!’
Mrs Kennedy chided me for my fickle appetite. I wasn’t in the same gourmand class as her or my brothers.
‘You’ll never marry,’ she said.
‘Why’s that?’
‘You can’t stick to any one thing,’ she said. ‘Sometimes you want fried egg, soft-centred, sometimes scrambled, sometimes half-boiled. And something different with each toast—mango chutney on one, marmalade on another, mustard on a third! You’ll never marry.’
‘What’s the connection?’ I asked.
‘You won’t settle on anyone—wives, mistresses, sweethearts, jobs, whatever—you’ll be wanting something different every day!’
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘pass the guava jelly.’
Maybe she was right. Or was it just Irish folklore? I think my craving for variety in what I ate stemmed from the fact that the diet in school was plain and rather monotonous. And maybe I was wise not to marry or find a partner for life—I really can’t say. As for sweethearts, I did not have the looks to attract them. And yet, there were loves; some unrequited, some mutual and intense—a few of these I have put in my stories and I will recall them in these pages, and a few will not be spoken of, for some passions are private, and the world is no poorer not knowing of them.
But as a young man I did go through a number of jobs, and as a writer I must have been published by some thirty or forty publishers over the years. I haven’t slept with any of them, so I don’t think they would qualify as wives, mistresses or sweethearts. But two or three have been good friends.
Mrs Kennedy loved to talk, and I enjoyed all of it because she had a lovely sing-song voice and an accent that I liked. But Ellen took a strong dislike to her, as indeed she did to anyone who was put in charge of her. She hated bananas, and if Mrs Kennedy tried to get her to eat one, saying, ‘Bananas are good for you, dear,’ bananas would fly about the room and everyone present would have to duck for cover.
Anything that was ‘good for her’ was immediately resented and cast aside. So I tried a different tack. ‘Brain cutlets,’ I informed her one day as this delicacy arrived on the dining table. ‘Bad for you. You’re not supposed to eat them.’ She immediately devoured three brain cutlets and asked for more. To her dying day she loved brain cutlets, which my stepsister Premila, who took charge of her in later years, had a tough time arranging in Ludhiana, where she settled after her retirement, taking Ellen with her.
Mrs Kennedy, however, decided to leave us the day she received a grapefruit in her eye. Ellen was actually aiming at me—I had been teasing her—but her vision being poor, the grapefruit, thrown with considerable force, struck Mrs Kennedy instead.
She went to work as a dormitory matron in a local convent school, and was later repatriated to Ireland.
Dehra was emptying of British and Anglo-Indian families, as indeed were many other towns and cities across India. The Bowens, the Shepherds, the Clarks, the Clerkes, the Whites, the Browns, the Greshams, the Greens—they had all left, or were preparing to leave. Some would stay, including my mother. She was the only one remaining of her large family. All her sisters, even her happy-go-lucky half-brother, Ken, had chosen to emigrate.
The exodus had begun in the final years of World War II. For some, the choice was a hard one. They had no prospects in England, and often no relatives there. And they had no prospects in India, unless they were very well qualified. For many of them, ‘assisted passages’ to England were the order of the day: for a couple of years after Independence, ‘poor whites’ and down-and-out Anglo-Indians could go to the British High Commission and ask to be sent to Britain, and they were given the fare to make the journey—an assisted passage. They were usually people who felt stranded—people without an occupation, or women and the elderly without any support.
I suppose I qualified as a ‘poor white’ with an uncertain future. But there were many whose circumstances were much worse than mine. One such was Mrs Deeds.
Mrs Deeds, a woman in her late thirties, and her seventeen-year-old son, Howard, were the two occupants of the room next to mine at the Green’s Hotel. They were waiting, with all their possessions, for an assisted passage. God knows where they had come from, or why they were in Dehra, where they had no friends or relatives. They were the flotsam of Empire, jettisoned by the very people who had brought them into existence. Mrs Deeds was an intelligent, good-looking woman, but an alcoholic. Over a few conversations, my mother gathered that she had been deserted by her husband, who had also sold their house and left her with nothing. She had no other family, or at least no one who would help her. She had worked in a store somewhere for a few years and brought up her son, but now there was no job, either.
When she was hitting the bottle, her son ridiculed her, and they had the most terrible fights, of which I could hear every word. He was a self-righteous young man who blamed her for the situation they were in. He was always in need of pocket money, and she would accuse him of stealing and selling her meagre personal belongings. He would retaliate by calling her a lying drunk, and on a couple of occasions he accused her of sleeping with any man who would buy her some drinks. Her feeling of guilt was compounded by her son’s attacks on her, and as a result she hit the bottle with renewed vigour. When she was broke, she would cadge a drink from my mother. When he was broke, he would borrow a rupee from me.
To no one’s surprise, Mrs Deeds could not pay her bills, and the mother and son had to leave the hotel. They took up residence in the second-class waiting room at the Dehradun railway station. An indulgent stationmaster allowed them to stay there for several weeks; then they moved into a cheap, seedy little hotel outside the station.
Mrs Deeds was always expecting a money order from someone who’d bought a little property she had inherited in Nainital. It never came. She’d sold her wedding ring and her watch to pay for drink and the rent. Howard loafed around, talking big—when they got to England or Australia or wherever they were going, he’d find a job to his liking. It did not occur to him to look for one in Dehra.
Late one evening, after Mrs Deeds had been drinking at a small liquor shop near the clock tower, she set out to cross the maidan to see someone at the club who had promised her some help. She was set upon by a gang of three or four young men who beat her badly and then raped her. Although she cried out for help, no one came to her assistance. The maidan had always been a safe place; but times were changing.
My mother went to see her and gave her what help she could. Then the remittance for their passage to England arrived from the High Commission, and Mrs Deeds and her son went their way, and presumably started a new life somewhere.
But not all stories were tragic, or about going away. Quite a contrast to Mrs Deeds was my mother’s friend Doreen. Everyone called her the Jungle Princess, because she had grown up in a jungle, and because she was dusky and very attractive. Her parents had land at the edge of the forest outside Herbertpur, a small township between Dehradun and Paonta Sahib, originally settled by an Anglo-Indian family in the nineteenth century. After her parents died, Doreen—whose husband had also deserted her—took over the land and farmed it on her own, as none of her siblings were interested and had all gone away.
She had a young daughter, who grew up on the land, both surviving quite successfully out in the wilderness with assistance from a couple of loyal farmhands. By Independence, theirs was the only family in the area. Doreen’s income came from her mango and guava orchards, and she seemed quite happy living in this isolated rural area near the Jamuna (the Yamuna River; but for old-timers like me it will always be the Jamuna). Occasionally she came into Dehradun, a bus ride of a couple of hours, when she would visit my mother, a childhood friend, and stay overnight.
One winter, I went with my mother to spend a few days at Doreen’s farm. She possessed two or three guns, and could handle them very well. I saw her bring down a couple of pheasants with her twelve-bore spread shot. It was said that she had also killed a cattle-lifting tiger which had been troubling a nearby village.
When I last saw her, some forty years ago, Doreen was in her seventies and still managing the farm. Shortly afterwards, she sold her land and went to live elsewhere with her daughter, who by then had a family of her own.
MY LAST TWO YEARS AT SCHOOL, 1949 AND 1950, WERE FAIRLY tempestuous. I was in and out of hospital, first with dysentery and then with jaundice. My face, never much to admire, was disfigured by a severe form of acne. And I was constantly at odds with the new headmaster, Mr Fisher, and out of favour with his wife, who was a great one for favourites. Sometimes, briefly, I would be in the grip of anger and a feeling of hopelessness that I did not understand—and one day I found I had smashed the windowpanes of the school library for no good reason. Perhaps this was part of the mood swings teenagers experience, and might have been aggravated by the Fishers, or my dispiriting illnesses, or the continuing sadness of the separation from Azhar and other friends which I could not articulate.
The jaundice came on insidiously, my urine going from pale ale to dark amber, and laid me low just as I finished taking part in the school play—Tonnes of Money , or a similar farce. I was despatched to the Ripon Hospital, the local government hospital, where I spent two nights in the general ward, in some agony from abdominal pains. Then I was shifted to a small private ward, a tiny room, but all my own, and I was here for nearly three weeks, making a slow recovery. The treatment consisted of rest, plenty of barley water and Dr Beecham’s Liver Pills which were supposed to increase the flow of bile to the liver. I spent a lot of time on the bed-pan.
A kindly matron discovered a cache of old books and magazines in a storeroom, and soon my bedside table was taken up by old numbers of Punch , as well as the novels of such authors as A.A. Milne, Barry Pain, Stacy Aumonier, W.W. Jacobs, and other popular storytellers from the 1920s. Stacy Aumonier, an actor, was also a first-class short story writer. Jacobs wrote stories about comical seafarers. A.A. Milne was of course the popular author of the Winnie-the-Pooh books, but I knew him better as the author of a detective novel, The Red House Mystery (still readable today), and plays such as Mr Pym Passes By , which had been put on by Shimla’s Gaiety Theatre the previous year.
A visit from Kasper Kirschner did something to cheer me up in hospital. He was a German boy who, with his parents and younger brother, had spent the war in various prison camps. Interned first by the Dutch in Indonesia and later by the British in India, they were fellow prisoners in Dehra with Heinrich Harrer, who escaped to Tibet and later wrote about his experiences there in Seven Years in Tibet . After the war, Kasper’s father, an enterprising man, worked at first in the Nahan Iron foundries, then became the manager of the Keventer’s Dairy Farm at Taradevi, outside Shimla. Kasper and his brother Andreas joined my school in 1948 and soon proved themselves to be brilliant scholars. Kasper’s best subject was science, but he took an interest in literature, and we were soon discussing the rival merits of Dickens and Thackeray, Maugham and Hugh Walpole, Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. It was amazing how quickly he had mastered the English language in the few years since leaving Indonesia.
He was a solid, restraining influence on me during those last years at school; reasonable when I was rebellious, mature where I was raw. In the years to come we would stay in touch, correspond, even meet occasionally—in London in 1953, and then here, in Landour, in the early 1980s, when he and his wife came to see me at Ivy Cottage in the course of a hiking expedition.
I digress from my incarceration in the Ripon Hospital, if only to explain why Kasper’s visit meant something to me. He was my only visitor. As I was on a strict diet, he could not bring me any of the delicious cookies that his mother used to make, but he brought me his favourite book, R.D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone . A romantic streak obviously lurked beneath his solid, unexcitable nature.
Both he and his brother Andreas were fine swimmers, having learnt to swim in the sea off the Sumatra coast. But he was an awkward footballer, using his knees instead of his feet. Still, he made it to the school football team, and I still have the group photo of 1950, in which he stands just behind me, easily the tallest in the team…
I had been in the BCS football team since 1948, mostly as the goalkeeper (I’ve always preferred walking to running), and in 1950 I was made captain of the team—an achievement of which I remain shamelessly proud.
Only the other day someone asked me about the team photograph from that year, which I still display in my living room. And I surprised myself by remembering, almost seventy years later, the names of all the players. Besides Kasper Kirschner, there were Boga, an Irani boy; Lama, from Nepal; Plunkett, an Anglo-Indian boy who later went to England and joined Scotland Yard; a Sikh boy, Jogi, always smiling, and his brother Nepinder; Shakabpa, a Tibetan boy, whose father was the Dalai Lama’s finance minister; Hemender, one of the sons of the late Maharaja of Patiala; Kruschandel, an Austrian boy, whose father was running Shimla’s Clarks hotel; and Hilton, an English boy.
We played quite a few games with rival schools, most of which we won, and though we lost to all the professional Shimla teams who would come to play in our field, we rarely disgraced ourselves. Football was the one game in which I really excelled, and so I was naturally resentful when, after a game in which we lost narrowly to a visiting team, Mrs Fisher criticized me for letting in a goal and called me a ‘doodhwala’ (milkman). I’m not sure why she thought that was an insult—or why I took it as one. I retaliated by calling her a ‘doodhwali’ (milkmaid), and I was summoned to her husband’s office and given the mandatory caning—this time four strokes of the cane instead of the usual three!
The reader must not take my exchange with Mrs Fisher as proof of my command over Hindi. I was terrible at it. Hindi was only introduced into our school in 1948. Our first Hindi teacher didn’t last very long, and he was replaced by a new teacher, a promising young Hindi playwright named Mohan Rakesh. He became quite famous later on. I’m told one of his most successful plays was Aadhe Adhoore , about marital discord and general dissatisfaction with life. Perhaps it reflected his own experience—he married and divorced a few times, living a somewhat tortured life. But that happened later; in school, he was a popular teacher, though he gave up on me soon enough—but not before I had surprised him on one occasion. He asked me to translate an English poem into Hindi and I chose the opening lines of Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’:
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league forward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
And my translation went roughly like this:
Aadha meel, Aadha meel
Aaadhe meel aage
Chhe sau aadmi ghoda pe bhaage
I’d skipped one line and I knew my grammar was probably wrong, but he was delighted with it!
Some sixty years later, I was in Dehradun interacting with some readers and signing books, and a lady came up to me and scolded me for my poor Hindi. ‘Mr Bond,’ she said, ‘you’ve lived in India all your life and yet your Hindi is so bad.’ I said, ‘Well, ma’am, it was your husband who taught me!’ She was one of Mohan Rakesh’s ex-wives whom I had recognized.
I didn’t put Mohan Rakesh into any of my stories, but I did write one about his predecessor. I called it ‘Masterji’, and it became quite popular. There was some exaggeration in it, but not very much. He wasn’t fooling everyone by teaching us spoken Punjabi, as in that story, but his Hindi wasn’t much better than ours. And the part about him being up to no good and getting arrested is not so dramatic an invention, either, when I compare it to how some of the BCS boys ended up in later life. Though their stories are rather grim—it was almost traditional for Bishop Cotton boys to get murdered or have accidents.
There was this Sikh boy who grew up to be a senior police officer. He married and had children, but he used to play around with other women, and one morning he was fished out of the Chandigarh lake. The official verdict was death by drowning, but later an autopsy revealed there was poison in his system. It was widely believed his feisty wife had had him poisoned and then dumped in the lake to make it look like drowning. She was under investigation for many years, but in the end she escaped conviction.
Hemender, one of the by-products of amorous and over-sexed royalty, got into a brawl in Calcutta and was killed. A couple of his older half-brothers had already died in suspicious hunting and car accidents.
Among other Old Cottonians who came to tragic ends were the Sikand boys, whose family owned a big motor company in Delhi (my stepfather would later work for them). One of them, Kishen, whom I remember as a very pleasant-mannered boy, began a love affair at the age of forty with the estranged wife of an army colonel. On his next birthday, Kishen received a beautifully wrapped-up present from the colonel, and when he opened the parcel, it blew up in his face and killed him.
I don’t know what it was about those years at BCS. I suppose I should count myself lucky for being one of the few survivors.
My feud with the Fishers came in the way of any serious study. On one occasion I answered an exam paper with the words ‘Exams are rubbish’, which earned me not one but two zeros. Another day, at lunch time, Fisher asked me, as the senior-most boy in my house, if the food was satisfactory, and I replied, quite bluntly, that it was not. In those days, in boarding schools, you did not complain about the food. There followed the mandatory caning, and I was forced to apologise in front of the rest of the house—the alternative being immediate expulsion from the school.
Anyway, Kasper, the only schoolmate from that period who became a close friend, was always a calming influence. At the end of 1950, school days over, we went our different ways—he to college and university in Germany, I to the small back room in Green’s Hotel, Dehradun.
Three years later, in the summer of 1953 (I think it was the time of the present Queen’s coronation), Kasper and Andreas turned up in their hiking clothes, on a walking tour of Britain. I wanted to put them up in my small attic room on Glenmore Road (the first of many habitations in London), but my landlady, who was Jewish, grew alarmed at the prospect. ‘Are they Germans?’ she asked anxiously, memories of the Nazi regime haunting her. Kasper and Andreas were both very blond and Germanic, and my landlady was not convinced that they had grown up with me in India.
Very enterprisingly, the boys walked down the road to the Belsize Police Station, declared that they were short of funds and had nowhere to stay, and were allowed to spend the night in an empty cell, where they were classified as ‘vagrants’. Next morning, they were given a jail breakfast and sent on their way; a pleasant example of Anglo-German fellowship seven years after the conclusion of hostilities.
But I have made too big a jump, and must return to dear old BCS and my friends and familiars in its hallowed halls. There was the Irwin Hall, where we staged plays and held important school functions. Long, boring speeches were made there. As a prefect, I was supposed to see that small boys did not drop off to sleep in the middle of the Governor’s speech. It must have been torture for those little fellows. I fell asleep myself, on more than one occasion, only to be given a poke in the ribs by Fisher, forever on his rounds.
The jaundice had left me weak, and so had the treatment for my acne: female hormones administered from a little bottle of pills called Stilboestrol. Whenever someone says, ‘This is the latest in medical science,’ I am immediately suspicious. It usually results in side-effects and other abnormalities. After a month of Stilboestrol, my breasts swelled up, and my muscles became flabby. Was I undergoing a sex-change? When the doctor saw what was happening, he switched me over to male hormones—testosterone—with the result that my testicles became enlarged and hair started growing from my ears. Through all this, the acne persisted. Kasper proved a better doctor. He made me strip to the waist twice a day (my back was covered with pus-filled pimples) and scrubbed me down with good old Lifebuoy soap. By the end of that final year, the acne had disappeared. But not the effects of those hormones.
I took it philosophically, and resigned myself to coming last in the school marathon (also mandatory). At least by coming last I could stop, unobserved, at Kwality’s on the Shimla Mall and help myself to an ice-cream while the other boys carried on, huffing and puffing to their medals and consolations. Every cloud has a silver lining.
For Shimla’s boarding school inmates, the Mall Road was our enchanted mile—brimming with restaurants, shops and cinemas. How we looked forward to our ten-day summer and autumn breaks, when we couldn’t go home but would be allowed into town. We lost no time in getting to the Mall for snacks and then tramping up to the Ridge to take in the last pictures. Sometimes we’d arrive wet or perspiring, but the changeable weather did not prevent us from enjoying the film. Packaged chips and colas hadn’t yet reached us, but roasted peanuts or bhuttas (corn on the cob), would keep us going. They were cheap, too. The cinema ticket was just over a rupee. If you had five rupees in your pocket you could enjoy a pleasant few hours in the town.
Shimla had three cinemas, one of them owned by the family of Virbhadra Singh, who was to become chief minister of Himachal Pradesh. Virbhadra was my junior in BCS and he would oblige us—we would pressure him to—with free passes. I have to admit I was grateful for those passes, as I rarely had pocket money in those days.
Back in school, the library became my retreat and harbour. A kind teacher had put me in charge of the library. I had the keys, and would go there at odd hours, ostensibly to catalogue the books but, in reality, to pore over them and become familiar with both the illustrious and the neglected. Over a year and a half, I read Dickens, Stevenson, Jack London, H.G. Wells, J.B. Priestley, the Brontës, Maugham and Ben Travers; the complete plays of J.M. Barrie and Bernard Shaw; and the essays—a form that I have always liked—of A.G. Gardiner, Belloc, Chesterton and many others. And then, of course, there were the humorous writers—Mark Twain, Thurber, Wodehouse, Stephen Leacock, Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain, Damon Runyon—and George and Weedon Grossmith, whose The Diary of a Nobody remains my favourite humorous book.
My own life being rather dull, it was good to lose myself in the worlds conjured up by these writers.
The best place in school after the library was the common room. Every house had a junior and a senior common room. These came up in my final two years in school. Here you could relax in comfortable chairs—there were books to read, and there was a radio, and we were encouraged to listen to the news and the cricket or football commentaries. I remember it was All India Radio that was on most of the time, because this was after Independence. But even before Independence, AIR was popular in the school. Our school had a very good choir in the early 1940s, and I remember its recital of Handel’s Messiah was broadcast on AIR.
But the boys were more interested in dance music. I became a radio buff later, when I had finished with school and come home, and then I would listen to BBC’s talk shows and comedy programmes. But I enjoyed the radio broadcasts in the common room, too. It was the era of the big bands, the swing jazz bands—Benny Goodman, Gloria Parker and others were popular—and ballroom dancing was all the rage. We boys would practice the dance steps with each other, there being no girls to dance with.
Dances with girls happened once or twice a year at the most, when the senior boys were taken to Auckland House for socials, so that we would know there was another sex too—in the real world, outside films and comics—and there were possibilities we could have beyond each other. We could chat with the Auckland House girls, and dance with them—which was a big thing to look forward to. I danced with a girl called Indu in 1949–50, a princess from Jazdan, a tiny princely state in Kathiawar. Perhaps we had even met as infants at one of the Jam Sahib’s parties in Jamnagar and fate had brought us together again—who is to tell? And we met again as oldies over half a century later—she dropped in one day, grey-haired, still slim (I was not) and smart and very charming, and we spent a pleasant evening indulging in a bit of nostalgia.
I remember writing Indu a letter after our first dance. It was intercepted by her headmistress or some other teacher and it was sent to my nemesis, Fisher, and of course I got into trouble—I always did with him. We had a karmic misconnection, Fisher and I!
But one result of that episode was that I became popular, and was sought after by some of the boys who wanted me to write similar letters for them. Some years later, when I was in Dehradun after school, I wrote many love letters for the boys and young men there. They didn’t care for my stories, but they would come to me to get their love letters and job applications written!
In my final year in BCS, we staged a one-act play called Borrowed Blooms , a farce by some English humourist whose name I forget. I played the part of a drunk, which I enjoyed, except that the bottle contained tea without sugar or milk, to look like whisky. This tepid liquid was all I had to put me in high spirits. Anyway, I did it quite convincingly and was given the best actor’s award that year. My schoolmates were convinced I was a secret drinker, to have delivered such a realistic performance. I wish I was. There was no liquor to be found inside the school, not even in the masters’ quarters.
Though it was considered glamorous to drink, we were so far out of town, drinks weren’t available. I remember fondly the time when one of the younger teachers got married, and he invited some of the senior school prefects to his reception in a restaurant on the Mall. We all tucked into the beer and the wine which was being passed around, till someone noticed and put a stop to it. Walking back that afternoon, the sky was bluer than before, the leaves and the grass greener and the birdsong sweeter. I was light-headed, and in the mood for love, but there was no one to love!
One day, on being summoned to Mr Fisher’s study for some silly instructions he liked to give the prefects, I noticed that his bookshelf was lined with the works of Guy de Maupassant, that French genius who contracted syphilis, went mad, and then cut his own throat. So Mr Fisher was a Maupassant fan. And Maupassant was a ladies’ man, mistresses abounding, women of the streets in and out of his apartment. An admirable quality in a writer of tragic fiction, but it made me wonder…Did Fisher model himself on this man-about-town, this Casanova of the Paris boulevards?
The answer came the following year, when I was no longer in school, no longer in India. But the old school grapevine brought me the startling news that the Fishers had, like naughty children, been expelled, dismissed at short notice.
Like a good Maupassant hero, the respectable Mr Fisher had been enjoying a long-standing affair with the junior school housekeeper, an attractive widow in her thirties. Not to be outdone, the plump and cuddlesome Mrs Fisher had taken up with one of the senior boys, who felt his education would not be complete without a little intimate education from the headmaster’s wife. While Fisher was busy on a midnight round of the junior school, one of his head prefects was slipping into bed with his buxom lady. The perfect Maupassant story.
However, the Board of Governors had not, as far as I know, read Maupassant or even Zola for that matter, and when the whole affair blew up, the Fishers had to leave. Unlike Maupassant, Fisher did not cut his own throat, nor did his good wife take to the streets. Instead, they emigrated to Australia.
IN SPITE OF MY AVERSION TO EXAMS AND EXAMINERS, I OBTAINED my Senior Cambridge School Certificate—the equivalent, I suppose, to today’s Class X Board exam. And that was the end of my academic career. I received the rest of my education in old libraries and second-hand bookshops.
Aunt Emily, who had sold the Dehra house and moved to the Channel Islands with her husband—Dr Heppolette, a successful gynaecologist—and her children, had expressed a willingness to put me up, should I decide to leave India for the United Kingdom. My mother thought it would be a good idea.
‘Have you decided what you want to do with yourself?’ she had asked me, on my return from school.
‘Well, I’d like to be a writer,’ I’d said.
‘Don’t be silly. You can’t make a living as a writer. Go and join the army.’
The army was the only alternative to joining Dehradun’s DAV College, an admirable institution, but it would involve sitting for more exams! We did not, in those far-off days, have the considerable variety of career choices that young people have today. Most of the boys I knew were going into the army. Those who did not like the idea of army life were training to become lawyers. Very few studied to become doctors or engineers, the chances of success there being low. For those who had some public school education and spoke English well, the easy option was to join the tea estates as managers—the tea companies weren’t fussy about degrees.
My mother was being pragmatic, for once, when she told me I should join the army—by which she meant the British Army. As my father had died in service, the RAF would have paid for my passage to England and for my stay there, provided I joined the RAF or the British Army or Navy. My mother pressed me to, saying my future would be secured that way, but I was not interested in a career in the armed forces. However, I wasn’t averse to the idea of going to Britain. It seemed to me the natural thing to do if I hoped to be a writer—that was where all the writers I admired had made their careers.
But I was in no hurry. After ten years of boarding-school (two in Mussoorie and eight in Shimla) I was determined to have at least ten months of relative freedom.
The Green’s Hotel was sold that winter, and we moved (for the fifth time in five years) to a flat in the old Station Canteen building behind the Orient cinema; here we were joined again by my stepfather, who seemed to come and go at unpredictable intervals. My mother had been given a little money after the sale of Granny’s house, so we were not too badly off.
I was sixteen, stubborn, hoping for adventure, and with ambitions to see my name in print—on the cover of a book, most of all. I was young enough to be scornful of money, and while fame would have been nice, it wasn’t my primary concern. The romance of being a writer was what attracted me.
But I was—have always been—by nature a lazy person. Disciplined, but lazy, because beauty interested me more than anything else—a beautiful person, beautiful in mind or body; a delicate flower; birds and birdsong; sunlight and moonlight on trees and tin roofs.
And there was enough beauty and romance, or at least the possibility of it, in Dehra in 1950–51. Hands in my pockets, I wandered about town—to gaze at girls in sunny balconies and young wrestlers under the peepal tree; feast my eyes on colourful film posters; look at the trains arriving and departing at the station; study a hoopoe looking for insects on a lawn; watch the dhobis washing clothes on the canal banks; listen to the cool sizzle of rain on twilit roads and then take shelter in a little food stall in the bazaar and eat hot pakoras and wash them down with steaming tea.
And yet I did write occasionally—my early stories, some of which soon appeared in a couple of magazines. These stories were written in a room that I had all to myself, a room on the roof that I acquired because I quarrelled with my mother.
We had a radiogram in the house, which I would listen to a lot—talks, commentaries, and my favourite comedy shows on the BBC, especially Much-Binding-in-the Marsh , set in a fictional RAF station. One evening my mother asked me not to listen to the radio all the time, because Mr H (whom I still resented) wanted to listen to something and never got a chance. I got very upset, and I said, ‘All right, you can have it. I don’t want to stay here any longer,’ and I put some books and clothes in a bag and marched off into the sunset! I was very touchy in those days.
I reached the maidan, and I realized I couldn’t spend the night in the open—it was late January and Dehra was reeling under a cold wave. Off I went again, this time to the railway station, but all the benches were occupied by other vagrants, bundled up in blankets that smelled mightily even from a distance. I hadn’t brought a blanket, and I didn’t want to share one of theirs, so I landed up at Bhim’s—an enterprising fourteen-year-old who had become my friend on the football field the previous year. His father was an eye surgeon and they had a bungalow on Rajpur Road, where I had gone a couple of times.
I spent the night in Bhim’s small bedroom, and in the morning I said, ‘Bhim, I’m not going home.’
‘You don’t have to worry about finding a place to stay,’ he said. ‘You can stay here. But what will you do for money?’
‘Well, I’ve got these school prizes, I’ll sell them.’ I’d got a few prizes for essay writing and acting in school—expensive volumes of the collected Shakespeare, biographies of Dickens and others, and some medals.
‘The medals are useless,’ said Bhim. ‘But I’ll sell the books for you for a commission. There’s a shop opposite St Joseph’s Academy which buys second-hand books.’ And he went and got me forty or fifty rupees for the lot, and I was okay for a couple of days.
On the third day, I was passing Geoffrey Davis’s gate and he stopped me for a chat and I told him I’d left home. Geoffrey had been with me at BCS; he knew me as a reserved but headstrong boy and he didn’t seem surprised by my decision—he managed to look admiring, sympathetic and amused all at the same time. When he met me later that day, he said, ‘My aunt asked me to give you this,’ and slipped me ten rupees.
Geoffrey’s aunt was Charlie Wilson’s widow. Charlie had inherited a lot of property from his father, ‘Pahari’ Wilson, the legendary Englishman ‘gone native’ who had been the Raja of Tehri’s contractor and had raided the forests for timber, amassing a large fortune. Charlie had squandered almost all of it, but his widow was still well off. Geoffrey’s parents, who weren’t well-to- do, lived in her house.
With Mrs Wilson’s grant I managed another day. And then I went to the Cambrian Hall School and asked for a job. It was run by the Mainwarings, who’d taught at BCS. They asked me why, and I told them, and Mr Mainwaring, a good man, sat me down and had a chat with me.
‘Don’t be upset, Ruskin. You’ve only got one mother, she means well. Go home, as if nothing has happened, and everything will be all right.’
I took his advice—it was already the fourth day and things were getting difficult!
My mother was in the veranda as I entered.
‘Is lunch ready?’ I said to the air.
‘It’s on the table,’ she said to the air.
And that was the end of it!
But my little rebellion worked to my benefit. Perhaps my mother and stepfather were worried, because to appease me they got me a separate room a couple of months later—a barsati on the roof of the building. Until then I’d been sharing a room with my brother and half-brothers, a noisy trio who left me a bundle of frayed nerves. I did not resent them, but I hadn’t learned to love them. They were seven, nine and ten years younger than me, and we had spent very little time together. We were all relieved when I was given the barsati.
So I had a room of my own. I got myself a second-hand typewriter, joined a ‘Typing and Shorthand Institute’ around the corner from our building, and that was the beginning of my writing life.
There is supposed to be something very romantic about being a writer, and some of us set out to write as if we are on the road to romance. Very often, for those who persist, it is the road to drudgery; we end up as hacks or literary critics. I was fortunate in that I ventured into the literary world with a certain wide-eyed innocence, and managed to maintain that innocence for most of my life.
I had a typewriter, a table and a chair and a clay surahi for my drinking water—and I discovered that’s all you really need. Sixty-five years later I still need the table and chair (or bedside), but I have dispensed with the typewriter, it makes for too much clutter, and I now write with a ball-point or roller-ball. I like the physical connection, or rapport, between pen and paper, and pen, hand and mind. I like using words to make poems and stories and vignettes of prose, and that is probably why I never gave up writing, even in the worst of times.
Of course I did not expect to make a lot of money when I started out. My mother, and later my aunt, both thought my desire to be a writer was a passing whim, and that I would sooner or later settle into a job or profession with a ‘future’. I came dangerously close a few times, but survived without any lasting damage.
My first efforts on that typewriter were little more than exercises in story-writing, but I sent them all over the place and they came back with rejection slips attached. But there was a little magazine down south (published from Madras) which was prepared to publish almost anything I sent them, even paying me the handsome sum of five rupees per story or article.
Well, I could do a lot with five rupees in 1951. See four movies if I wanted. Or buy three magazines and a paperback book. Or give a chaat party for the young friends I was beginning to acquire. I did not scorn those five-rupee money orders.
The magazine itself—called My Magazine of India —survived on advertisements for lucky gemstones, aphrodisiacs, digestive powders, astrological predictions, watches and perfumes, all available by post. You paid for them when the parcel arrived. I never did order any of these attractive items, but I am sure a lot of people did, because the magazine was still around when I returned from England four years later. The pages without ads they would fill up with pulp fiction. For me it was a good magazine—all my rejects from other magazines and papers would go here and they would all be accepted. I even contributed to its finances, though unwittingly. One day, along came a money order for two rupees eight annas for a story, instead of the standard five rupees, and I wrote them a very strong letter asking why they had reduced my fee. They replied promptly, saying they hadn’t cut down my rate, they had only deducted one year’s subscription to the magazine!
None of the stories I sent them have survived, which is fortunate, because they were terrible. They were based on characters from the mystery movies I had seen—Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Earl Biggers’s Charlie Chan of the Honolulu police. In my stories the detective was myself, chasing killers and hoodlums in Delhi and Shimla after dark, but I usually lost interest in the chase midway and the story lost its way, but no one at My Magazine noticed or bothered.
I also wrote a couple of stories of a more personal nature, and one was picked up by a magazine called Caravan , and another—‘The Untouchable’—by the prestigious Illustrated Weekly of India , which sent me a cheque for the magnificent sum of fifty rupees. I had arrived! (Or so I thought.)
All the time I was keeping a diary, or journal, in school exercise books, recording some of the events of my daily life, including my friendships and the comings and goings of the people who lived in and around the Station Canteen building.
My tiny barsati opened on to the flat concrete roof of the building. There was no other construction on the roof, and a flight of stone steps ran up to it on the outside of the building, so it was quite private. I lived more or less independent of my family—I saw them two or three times a day when I went down for my meals. My steps were steep and people seldom came up to see me, the exceptions being the boys of the neighbourhood—Somi, Haripal, Krishan and Ranbir being the friendliest of them.
But they came later. In the beginning, there was only the woman who came to sweep the room, and several visitors who were not of the human kind.
There was a banyan tree just opposite. Squirrels were busy in it all afternoon, sparrows, crows and other birds in the morning and evening, and flying foxes at night. This was the first time I’d had a room with a view all to myself, and I think this was when I really began responding to the sights, smells, colours and everyday theatre of the world around me.
A broad path ran beside the building which wasn’t very busy, but the activity on it was always interesting: a ‘boxwallah’, with a tin trunk on his head, selling everything from bread and biscuits from the bakeries to hair oil, safety pins and elastic for pyjamas; an ayah with a baby in a pram; the rent-collector, with the teeth and nostrils of a horse; the postman on his brand new Atlas bicycle; the fruit-seller calling his wares in high-pitched, rather eccentric cries; a line of schoolgirls with red ribbons in their pigtails.
When it rained, there was greater activity. At the first rumblings, women would rush outside to bring in the washing—and if there was a strong breeze, to chase a few garments across the compound. When the rain came, it came with a vengeance, making a muddy river of the path. A cyclist would come riding furiously down the path; an elderly gentleman would be having difficulty with a large umbrella; naked children would be frisking about in the downpour.
I had a window and two doors. One door was at the top of a flight of twenty-two steps by which I entered the room (by an odd coincidence, my present abode, Ivy Cottage, also has twenty-two steps leading up to the front door). Another door opened on to the flat cemented roof of the building. It was hot by the end of April, and as I had no fan I kept the doors and windows open day and night to let in whatever breeze might be coming down from the hills. Sometimes it was a hot wind from Delhi, but occasionally the wind came off the Tibetan plateau and the distant snows to provide a little relief from the soaring temperatures.
Open doors and windows meant easy access for birds and other small creatures. A pair of noisy mynahs—one of them bald after a fight—were frequently in and out of the room, paying no attention to me as I sat at my desk or lay supine on my bed in vest and shorts. Sparrows were resting in the little skylight, and I dared not open it, for fear of knocking down their rather precarious abode. A chameleon circled the room in search of lost friends, and sometimes raised its head to look in from the threshold.
Two or three lizards were always to be found clinging to the walls or ceiling, on the prowl for moths or mosquitoes. Occasionally one of these lizards would lose its foothold and land with a plop on desk, bed, floor, or my person. The sweeper-woman told me that it was usually lucky for a lizard to fall on some part of my body.
‘Lucky for the lizard or for me?’ I asked.
‘For you, of course.’ And she elaborated by telling me that if the lizard fell on my tummy, I’d become fat and greedy; if it fell on my feet, I’d travel; if it fell on my exposed back, I’d have many friends. And so on…
She was a good lady who came from one of the slums to sweep the rooms of the tenants. She made about thirty rupees a month, with which she fed a small family. She liked to gossip, and finding me a good listener, would keep me updated on events in the locality. Such as: Mr Lal had got drunk and fallen down his stairs, breaking an arm. Mrs Saigal was down with typhoid. Someone’s son had been caught cheating in his exams. Another boy had been caught shoplifting. An incoming train had run over an elephant. My stepfather’s first wife was suing him. The circus was coming to town. The Prime Minister (Mr Nehru) was passing through, on his way to Mussoorie. And she had a pain in her lower back which wouldn’t go away. I gave her a strip of Aspirin tablets (Aspro was the commercial name), and after that I became her medical adviser, listening to all her complaints and handing out Aspirin or Anacin, Oriental Balm, and occasional doses of Eno’s fruit salts.
As I have mentioned, I would leave the front door open, even at night. But late one night, I was woken from deep sleep by a hideous howling right next to my bed. Switching on the light, I found a jackal right beside me, baying at the moon or the stars or some lost love on the rooftops. I gave a shout and it ran away, down the steps and across the road, hotly pursued by all the dogs in the area barking furiously. I expect the poor jackal had received a bigger fright than I had; but after that, I kept the front door closed at night.
But during the day the door was always open, and through it, one morning, came a light-eyed Sikh boy of about twelve, as yet unbearded, wearing khaki shorts and chappals, looking at me as if I were an exotic and endangered bird. Then he laughed, and it was like a shower of rain on a hot summer day.
This was Somi, whom I’d met briefly at his brother Haripal’s house.
I don’t remember how I met Haripal. Perhaps it was Bhim who introduced me to Ranbir, who introduced me to Haripal—H.P. Sauce to his friends. Haripal had pen friends in Germany, Mexico and Japan, and he said I was his first British friend. I told him I wasn’t British, I had been born in India, where my family and I had always lived. He nodded: Yes, I couldn’t be British, I didn’t speak like one; in fact, my English wasn’t very good. So I was his first Anglo-Indian friend, he said. Even back then I didn’t care very much for the term Anglo-Indian, but I didn’t feel strongly enough about it to object.
Haripal was fifteen, studying in the tenth standard, after which he wanted to join the army or navy—which did not impress me, because I had a low opinion of regimentation of any kind. I told him I wanted to be a writer—which did not impress him, because that was not a career, and in any case, that sort of thing was possible only in England or America, and I was in India.
He took me home for lunch one day, and it was there I met his mother, who made me welcome, and his brothers Somi and Chhotu and his cousins Dipi and Daljit. Their home was on the outskirts of the town, where civilization began to merge with the jungle. It was the first of the few large families I would attach myself to over the years, and they were all kind enough to put up with me, letting me come and go as I pleased. The arrangement suited me; I found it easier to be a visitor rather than a resident, a habit that I would lose only in my forties.
After that first visit, when he came wanting help with English lessons—which were soon forgotten—Somi would turn up at odd hours. Soon, we were laying out a roof garden. Somi played truant from school and we spent two days carrying up mud in a bucket from a nearby field. By the evening of the second day, we had laid out a neat little flowerbed. Somi and Chhotu buried some pumpkin seeds in it, though I would have preferred flowers, and we had a little argument about this and later made up by going out to eat chaat.
Many were the afternoons we spent lazing around and chatting in that room. When it was evening and time for them to go home, I would have to carry them piggyback down the stairs. Somi enjoyed this even more than Chhotu, laughing in delight and urging me to go faster, faster—I was his favourite tattu, his donkey, and at the foot of the stairs, when I deposited him on the ground so he could get on his bicycle and pedal off home, he would declare I was his ‘best favourite friend’ and that he loved me dearly.
It was cycling Somi enjoyed most of all. I wasn’t much of a bicycle rider; I was always falling off, and once went sailing into a buffalo cart and fractured my arm. But it was fun being with Somi and his brothers, and I would hire an old bicycle from a cycle-hire shop and accompany them on rides in the hot sun—sometimes to the sulphur springs, or to Premnagar (where the Military Academy was situated), or into the tea gardens along the Hardwar road, or across the dry riverbed at Lachiwala and into the forest. We would spend hours sitting by the canal and discuss our hopes and dreams.
Everyone wanted to go away. Dehra was too small for our ambitions, and at that age we all wanted to conquer the world. My dream—to be a writer—could only be realized in England, where, I believed, the doors of the literary world would open for me.
After the long cycle rides, we would end up in my room, tired and thirsty, and my five-rupee money order from My Magazine of India would be splurged on ices and cold drinks. Those money orders helped me make a bit of an event of my seventeenth birthday—for the first time in my life, I celebrated with a party. Six boys, some crows and a dog (Chhotu’s pet) feasted on samosas, ice-cream (homemade, from blancmange powder), lemonade and Indian sweets and English confectionery, served in plates and tumblers borrowed from the neighbours. Chhotu and Somi got the most to eat because one was the youngest and the other the most loving and good-looking of the gang.
Krishan and Ranbir, my neighbours, were also part of the gang but much as we all loved them, they were far from good-looking. Krishan, a couple of years younger than me, had beetling eyebrows and a frequently dripping nose; Ranbir possessed hardly any forehead, so that he looked a bit like a Neanderthal man.
Ranbir was a sturdy boy, but his athleticism did not compare with his sister’s. Raj, older than him by three or four years, was a champion badminton player who could vanquish the best of us on the open-air court that we had laid out on a small patch of wasteland. She could also vanquish most boys with sidelong glances from her dark and fiery eyes. I don’t think she meant to, but that was the effect she had. I used to love watching her play, because she was one of the most unusual-looking girls I had known. She had lovely loose limbs, the legs of a long-distance runner, supple arms, strong wrists, sturdy shoulders—some attributes of the male but feminine all the same.
It was a pleasure to play with her and be beaten by her. She played barefoot, and on one occasion a large thorn pierced her heel and went some way into her flesh. She subsided onto the grass and tried removing the thorn but it broke off in her hands. I am not the most resourceful of people, but I surprised myself by coming to the aid of the damsel in dress. Taking her slender foot in my hands, I got to grips with the thorn and removed it quite deftly. Everyone clapped, and Raj showed her gratitude by allowing me to take a few points off her in the next game. She enjoyed my company, perhaps because for the most part I treated her as I did any of my male friends. It must have been liberating for her, and it allowed her to come up to the roof with Ranbir one evening and hold my hand while we talked about nothing in particular, and on her way down she stuck her tongue out at me and bit me lightly on the cheek.
I was fond of Raj without being in love with her. It was different with Krishan’s mother. She must have been fifteen or sixteen years older than me, a very beautiful person, both by nature and by physicality. Gracious, dignified, but at the same time radiating a tremendous amount of sexual energy, she looked like the actress Kamini Kaushal. I adored her, as one adores a goddess; and she took my puppy love in her stride, neither encouraging it nor rejecting it. I was her young son’s friend, and that was enough for her. I could come and go as I pleased. We played carom in the evenings, while her alcoholic husband slumbered in the veranda. He’d lost his job as a PWD engineer and was drinking himself into the next world. Sometimes I was asked to type out his appeals and petitions to the authorities, but they had no effect. I forget what his misdemeanour was, exactly; something to do with unaccounted money lying around in his Mussoorie residence—a common enough practice, in the fine old traditions of the Public Works Department, but Mr Lal hadn’t been clever enough to get away with it.
All these good friends and neighbours went into my journals, although at the time I had no idea that some of them would later be fictionalized and turn up in my first book, The Room on the Roof . The ‘room’ in my novel was certainly the real one, the room I shared with the wall lizards and the mynah birds. And Somi and Krishan and Ranbir went into the book unchanged. But the plot (if you can call it that), the incidents, the sequence of events, the running away, the relationship with Meena, the going away and the return, were all part of the ‘novelization’ of my journal.
I suppose most writers, to a greater or lesser extent, base their fictional characters upon real people. Mine come very close to the reality. It is my own response to them that varies. The most fictional of all my characters is myself.
AND YOUNG RUSKIN, STILL ONLY SEVENTEEN, WAS NOW LEAVING for England.
My passage was booked on the P & O liner S.S. Strathnaver , one of several smart passenger liners that plied between Bombay and London; or rather, Sydney and London, because it began its voyage in Australia. My ticket arrived. It cost Rs 450, which included meals on the ship. The voyage would last just over a fortnight. The ticket and some clothes and a few other belongings for my early days in England were bought with some money that Dehra Granny had left me in her will. She did not have much, but she had thought of me. She hadn’t told me, and up until now my mother hadn’t either, and now that stern old Granny wasn’t around for me to thank her.
As the day for my departure approached, I began to panic at the thought of leaving, and an old feeling of loneliness returned. Leaving my family wasn’t the hardest part; it was the friends I had made that enchanted summer I would miss the most. But I was clumsy at expressing my feelings, as were most of the other boys—except Somi, always frank and spontaneous in his affection.
‘I will be sad, Ruskin,’ he said simply.
‘I’ll come back,’ I said.
‘You won’t. You will forget us.’
A week later he was ill with pneumonia. I didn’t think I could leave, but Haripal, always pragmatic, told me not to worry. Somi would get well soon enough, but I would lose my only chance to do what I’d always wanted to do. My staying wouldn’t help.
And Somi willed himself to health, as if he was determined to send me off without guilt or worry. His mother took me aside the last time I went to their home. ‘Do you need anything, son?’ she asked. ‘You belong to this family, you must tell me if there’s anything you need.’
She took my face in her hands and I broke down. ‘Be brave,’ she whispered, and kissed my forehead.
It was early November when I left Dehra. My mother and Mr H came to the station to see me off. A far cry from that day some six years earlier, when they had failed to meet me—a ten-year-old schoolboy—arriving in Dehra after my father’s passing. But time heals many wounds, and I was now more or less reconciled to the circumstances of my life. And they had high hopes for me.
My friends were also at the station to see me off. Somi and his brothers, Krishan and Ranbir. So it was quite a jolly affair in the end. No tears, no regrets. Everyone admired me for going off on my own, while still a minor.
‘You’re going to be a great writer,’ pronounced Krishan. ‘Best in the world!’ And I was naïve enough to believe him. Krishan, whose favourite reading was the Beano comic paper.
How I loved those loving boys, now being left behind in a small town called Dehradun, unheard of outside India, while I set off for the land of Dickens and Buckingham Palace!
The train set off for Bombay, and as I looked out of the window and saw them standing there on the platform, waving and cheering, I knew I was saying goodbye to my own boyhood and to theirs, and that if I ever saw them again we would all be grown men, the days of innocence far behind us.
Somi ran beside the carriage, shouting goodbye, and laughing as he ran, tears streaming down his face.
I wouldn’t see these friends again till we were almost old men—except Dipi and Krishan, who remained in Dehra for some years, and Ranbir, who disappeared into India’s vastness, and Daljit, who died young.
Haripal—H.P.S. Ahluwalia—did join the army, and became one of the first Indians to climb Mount Everest. Some months later, in the 1965 war, he received gunshot wounds which resulted in his being confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Never one to give up, he set up the Indian Spinal Injuries Centre in New Delhi, which he still heads.
Somi studied engineering and moved to America, from where he has made a few trips to India and met me on a couple of occasions—a silver-bearded father of married children. But he remains fixed in my memory as an eternal innocent, a boy in shorts, his turban slightly askew, riding his bicycle down an empty road.
Daljit joined the air force after finishing school, and lost his life soon after in a training flight.
Krishan was to reappear at different periods of my life—in Dehra, Delhi and Mussoorie—our easy friendship undiminished, till I lost him too. He was in his forties, a successful engineer in Bombay, when he died trying to save a child from drowning in Goa.
I spent two days and nights in a seedy, unsanitary hotel on Bombay’s Lamington Road, and then boarded my ship, feeling quite unwell. It was a day or two before I could eat anything. But for that, it was a smooth voyage—an eighteen-day voyage from the time we left Bombay to the time we docked in South London, including three stops on the way—Aden, Port Said and Marseilles.
There was a first class and a second, or tourist, class. I was in the tourist class, where you shared the cabin with one other passenger, but I was lucky to have the cabin to myself till Port Said. The P&O liners would start in Australia those days, stop in Bombay and then continue to England. So there were a lot of Australian passengers on the voyage, including a team of professional all-in wrestlers from Australia—‘all-in’ being the term for ‘anything goes’. They would practice and wrestle on the decks most of the time, throwing each other about, and sometimes drinking a lot of beer and getting out of hand. There was also an Australian lady, very slim and elegant, who was a classical pianist, going to England to give a concert, and she’d practice in the salon where there was a piano, while rowdy wrestling sessions were going on outside. King Kong moves to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata —it was sublime comedy.
Equally entertaining was a Parsi man from Bombay, hoping to make a fortune when he got to England. Everyone was showing him their palms. He read mine too, looking very pessimistic, and said I would have a difficult time till middle age, and then I would die in my fifties. That kind of thing wasn’t going to make him a fortune, but one never knew. Later, when I was in London, I didn’t see him, but I saw a lot of other astrologers and palmists there, all of them from India.
At Port Said, a down-and-out Englishman who had been stranded in Egypt for some years, and was being sent back to England, was put in the second berth in my cabin. He was a sorry kind of character, broke and always trying to scrounge a drink off me. I had barely enough for myself, so I didn’t enjoy his company very much! Luckily, there was enough going on to distract me. There were film shows in the evenings, and fancy-dress balls—I attended one sitting in a pram, dressed in a bathing costume and sucking on a pacifier. I thought I was quite amusing, but they didn’t give me a prize.
Like most P&O liners which took that route, our ship passed the volcanic island of Stromboli, north of Sicily. As evening settled over the volcano, the captain called us to the deck, and we saw a spectacular fountain of lava-rays and fire rising from the summit hundreds of metres into the darkening sky. We were at a distance, so we only witnessed nature’s beauty and not its destructive force.
When we stopped at Marseilles, I went ashore and bought postcards with French stamps to send home. And then we were on the last stretch, to the Tilbury docks.
Towards the end of the voyage I wrote a little poem, which has managed to survive these many, many years. I write from memory:
I boarded the big ship bound for the West,
The clean white liner.
In a cold grey fog we docked
In London’s great river.
But I saw only a cow at rest
And a boy who sang to himself
In the shade of an old Sal tree,
And his song would be mine forever.