MAPLEWOOD LODGE, MUSSOORIE.
The summer of 1963.
The forest is still, silent; until the cicadas start tuning up for their performance. On cue, like a conductor, a barbet perched high in the branches of a spruce tree begins its chant: ‘Unneeow—unneeow-unneeow! ’
Now the forest begins to pulse with the hypnotic buzzing of the cicadas.
Big white ox-eye daisies grow on the hillside. The sorrel—‘Almora grass’—has turned red. I sit in my garden, contemplating my old Olympia typewriter. Still writing stories, still trying to sell them.
As a boy, loneliness. As a man, solitude.
The loneliness was not of my seeking. The solitude I sought. And found.
I am to spend many summers, monsoons, winters in this cottage. Mornings in the sun. Evenings in the shadows.
Some mornings I carry my small table, chair and typewriter out on to a knoll below one of the oaks, and take a little help from the babblers and bulbuls that flit in and out of the canopies of leaves. White-hooded babblers; yellow-bottomed bulbuls. Never still for a moment, they help me with my punctuation.
For dialogue I depend more on the crickets, cicadas and grasshoppers who keep up a regular exchange, debating the issues of the day. But for reflective and descriptive writing I look into the distance, at the purple hills merging with an azure sky; or I examine a falling leaf as it spirals down from the tree and settles on the typewriter keys.
The sun bathes everything with clear, warm light. Somewhere high up on the hill, cows are grazing. I don’t see them, but I hear the bells tied around their necks.
I write in leisure; there is no hurry.
I write Panther’s Moon and Angry River . I meet a lovely, smiling girl on the hillside, twirling a blue umbrella, and she becomes Binya of The Blue Umbrella .
A crow visits me from time to time, and tells me his story. I call it ‘A Crow for all Seasons’.
I discover a small stream at the bottom of the hill. An abundance of ferns—dark green and pale—flourish in the shady places along its banks, where the grass is moist and speckled with tiny white flowers.
A spotted forktail hops from boulder to boulder, uttering its low pleasant call, talking to itself.
A pair of pine martens are drinking at the stream. They see me and go bounding across the ravine and into the trees.
I walk downstream, and one day I discover a little waterfall. The sun strikes it from behind an overhanging rock and creates a tiny rainbow. I bathe beneath the rainbow. I lie on the grass, while a pair of dragonflies hover above me, making love. I could go looking for love. But you don’t find love by searching for it.
Across the stream is a grassy knoll where a single pine tree grows—a stranger among oaks, spruce, and maple. Pine trees straddle the top of the opposite hill, but this one has escaped from the community and asserted its independence, rather as I have done; so I’ve adopted it, and I come here often, to sit beneath its blue-green branches, compose a poem or simply contemplate my navel. I call it my Place of Power. I’m reading Gurdjieff.
I spend a night on the pine-knoll, stretched out beneath a cherry tree. I’m awake for hours, listening to the chatter of the stream and the occasional tonk-tonk of a nightjar, and watching, though the branches overhead, the stars turning in the sky.
The window at which I work faces the slope of the hillside, Bala Hissar, where an Afghan king lived in exile. There’s a wind humming in the pines and deodars. A small, plump squirrel climbs on the window sill, a little out of breath with the effort.
He’s been coming every day, and has learned to eat from my hand. I feed him groundnuts, bread crumbs and peas.
I have no groundnuts today. He sniffs and probes my palm and wrist, then reconciles himself to nibbling at the peas. He’s an uncomplaining sort of fellow.
A spectacular electric storm last evening. The clouds grew very dark, then sent bolts of lightning sizzling across the sky, lighting up the entire range of mountains. When the storm was directly overhead, there was hardly a pause in the frequency of the lightning; it was like a bright light being switched on and off with barely a second’s interruption. There was thunder and rain all night.
But the morning is gloriously fresh and spirited. A strong breeze is driving the clouds away, and the sun keeps breaking through. The mynahs are very busy, very noisy, looking for a nesting site in the roof. The babblers are raking over fallen leaves, snapping up absent-minded grasshoppers.
A whistling thrush is drying himself on the broken garden fence. He’s a deep, glistening purple, his shoulders flecked with white. He sits silently for a while, then flies up to the roof, from where he treats me to an enchanting musical performance. He starts with a hesitant whistle, as though trying out the tune; then, confident of the melody, he bursts into full song, a crescendo of sweet, haunting notes and variations ringing clearly across the hillside.
There’s a flurry of alarm calls in the forest. A young kakar deer strays into the garden, fleeing something. It runs around in confusion for some time till it finally finds its way into the jungle again.
Towards sunset, I watch the owlets emerge from their holes in the trees. They put out their little round heads, with large staring eyes, before shuffling out. After they have emerged they sit very quietly for a time, as though only half-awake. Then, all of a sudden, they begin to chuckle, finally breaking out in a torrent of chattering, before spreading their short, rounded wings and sailing off for the night’s hunting.
Silence descends. Only the shuffling of porcupines, and the soft flip-flop of moths beating against the window panes.
The power goes off. A yellow moon blooms above the hill.
When I moved in, Maplewood Lodge had been nestling there among the old trees for over seventy years. It had become a part of the forest. Birds nestled in the eaves; beetles burrowed in the woodwork; a jungle cat lived in the attic. Some of these denizens remained even during my residence.
I’d first seen the cottage, as I’ve written, in spring, when the surrounding forest was at its best—the oaks and maples in their fresh green raiment; flashy blue magpies playing follow-the-leader among them. There was one very tall, very old maple above the cottage, and this was probably the tree that gave the house its name. A portion of it was blackened where it had been struck by lightning, but the rest of it lived on, a favourite of woodpeckers—the ancient peeling bark harboured hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny insects. It was the Himalayan maple, of course, which is quite different from the North American maple; only the winged seed-pods are similar, twisting and turning in the breeze as they fall to the ground, for which reason the Garhwalis call it the Butterfly Tree.
A steep, narrow path ran down to the cottage from the main path that went past the Wynberg Allen School. During heavy rain, it would become a watercourse and the earth would be washed away, leaving it very stony and uneven. Actually, the path ran straight across a landing and up to the front door of the first floor, where I had my rooms. It was the ground floor that was tucked away in the shadow of the Bala Hissar hill; it was reached by small a flight of steps going down, which also took the rush of water when the path was in flood. Miss Bean, who was in her mid-eighties, lived in two small rooms on the ground floor.
Maplewood was the first place I saw, and I did not bother to see any others. The location wasn’t really ideal. The cottage faced east, and as it was built in the shadow of the hill, while it received the early morning sun, it went without the evening sun. By three in the afternoon, the shadow of the hill crept over the cottage. This wasn’t a bad thing in summer (even though Mussoorie summers were never hot), but in winter it meant a cold, dark house. There was no view of the snows from inside the house, and no view of the plains. But the forest below the cottage seemed full of possibilities, and the windows opening on to it probably decided the issue. And the whistling thrush, which had sent its song up the ravine to enchant me at exactly the right moment that afternoon.
I made a window seat and through the changing seasons, I wrote more—and I think better—than at any other time of my writing life. Most of my stories were written in Maplewood—the stories that went into Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra , The Night Train to Deoli and Time Stops at Shamli . The journals from that time provided material for the non-fiction books that followed the novellas and story collections. That old cottage was kind to a struggling young writer.
There were very few distractions. Not only was I mostly on my own for the first couple of years—except in summer, when some visitors came up—Mussoorie itself was a very quiet place, especially in the rains and in winter. Like all hill stations set up by the British, Mussoorie was in decline in the 1950s and ’60s; the Mall was not half as busy at it is today, and in winter all the hotels and most of the shops would shut down. Only a couple of restaurants would stay open for the local residents. It wasn’t tourism that sustained Mussoorie in those days; the boarding schools were the main economy, and when these, too, closed for the winter holidays, the little town would be deserted.
On the outskirts of the town there were a number of abandoned houses. Most of Mussoorie’s older cottages had been built by British residents, and all but a few of them had left in a hurry after 1947, giving their houses away or making distress sales. Property prices went down sharply, so that the houses were of little value, and as there were few takers as tenants either, many of the vacant houses were sold by the new owners to the kabaris. And the kabaris didn’t want them as residences; they proceeded to dismantle the houses, taking out the doors and windows, all the metal, the wooden flooring, the tin from the roofs, the bathroom fittings, and anything else that could be recycled or sold as scrap. Empty shells—just stone walls and bits of roof—dotted the outskirts of Mussoorie, inhabited by wild cats, bandicoots, owls, goats and the occasional coal-burner or mule driver, or the rare vagrant.
Among these ruins, some of the older British and Anglo-Indian residents like Miss Bean lived out their final years.
‘I’m the last Bean in India,’ she would say. ‘And I’ll be gone too, before long.’
She was eighty-six, but looking at her you wouldn’t have guessed—she was spry and took some care to look good. Not once in the five years that we spent together did I find her looking slovenly. The old-fashioned dresses she wore were clean and well-ironed, and sometimes she added a hat. Her memory was excellent, and she knew a great deal about the flowers, trees, birds and other wildlife of the area—she hadn’t made a serious study of these things, but having lived here for so long, she had developed an intimacy with everything that grew and flourished around her. A trust somewhere in England sent her a pension of forty or fifty rupees, and this was all the money she had, having used up the paltry sum she’d received from the sale of her property.
She’d had a large house, she told me, which she had inherited from her parents when they died, and she’d had an ailing sister whom she had nursed for many years before she too passed away. As she had no income, she kept boarders in the house, but she had no business sense and was losing money maintaining it. In the end, she sold the house for a song to one of the local traders and moved into two small rooms on the ground floor of Maplewood Lodge, a kindness for which she remained grateful to her friends, the Gordon sisters.
It must have been lonely for Miss Bean, living there in the shadow of the hill, which was why she had been excited when I moved into the floor above her. With age catching up, she couldn’t leave her rooms and her little garden as often as she would have liked to, and there were few visitors—sometimes a teacher from the Wynberg Allen School, the padre from the church in town, the milkman twice a week and, once a month, the postman. She had an old bearer, who had been with her for many years. I don’t think she could afford him any longer, but she managed to pay him a little somehow, and he continued out of loyalty, but also because he was old himself; there wouldn’t have been too many other employment opportunities for him. He came late in the morning and left before dark. Then she would be alone, without even the company of a pet. There’d been a small dog long ago, but she’d lost it to a leopard.
It had happened late one afternoon. She was in a rickshaw on Camel’s Back Road, going to a tea party at a friend’s house, the dog sitting in her lap. And suddenly, from the hillside above her, a leopard sprang onto the rickshaw, snatched the dog out of her hands, and leapt down to the other side and into the forest. She was left sitting there, empty-handed, in great shock, but she hadn’t suffered even a scratch. The two rickshaw pullers said they’d only felt a heavy thump behind them, and by the time they turned to look, the leopard was gone.
All of this I gathered over the many evenings that I spent chatting with Miss Bean in her corner of the cottage. I didn’t have anyone to cook for me in the first few years at Maplewood. Most evenings I would have tinned food, and occasionally I would go down to share my sardine tins or sausages with Miss Bean. She ate frugally—maybe she’d always had a small appetite, or it was something her body had adjusted to after years of small meals—so I wasn’t really depriving myself of much. And she returned the favour with excellent tea and coffee.
We would have long chats, Miss Bean telling me stories about Mussoorie, where she had lived since she was a teenager, and stories about herself (a lot of which went into some of my own stories). She remembered the time when electricity came to Mussoorie—in 1912, long before it reached most other parts of India. And she had memories of the first train coming into Dehra, and the first motor road coming up to Mussoorie. Before the motor road was built, everyone would walk up the old bridle path from Rajpur, or come on horseback, or in a dandy held aloft by four sweating coolies.
Miss Bean missed the old days, when there was a lot of activity in the hill resort—picnics and tea parties and delicious scandals. It was a place of mischief and passion, and she enjoyed both. As a girl, she’d had many suitors, and if she did not marry, it was more from procrastination than from being passed over. While on all sides elopements and broken marriages were making life exciting, she managed to remain single, even when she taught elocution at one of the schools that flourished in Mussoorie, and which were rife with secret affairs.
‘Do you wish you had, though,’ I asked her one March evening, sitting by the window, in the only chair she had in her bedroom.
‘Do I wish I had what?’ she said from her bed, where she was tucked up with three hot-water bottles.
‘Married. Or fallen in love.’
She chuckled.
‘I did fall in love, you know. But my dear father was a very good shot with pistol and rifle, so I had to be careful for the sake of the young gentlemen. As for marriage, I might have regretted it even had it happened.’
A fierce wind had built up and it was battering at the doors and windows, determined to get in. It slipped down the chimney, but was stuck there, choking and gurgling in frustration.
‘There’s a ghost in your chimney and he can’t get out,’ I said.
‘Then let him stay there,’ said Miss Bean.
Above us rose an uninhabited mountain called Pari Tibba, Fairy Hill. The villagers said only aerial spirits dwelt there. Miss Bean called it Burnt Hill or Witch’s Hill. Burnt Hill, because it was frequently struck by lightning; Witch’s Hill because it was supposedly haunted.
‘You know about Pari Tibba, don’t you?’ she asked.
I said I didn’t, so she told me.
In the early days, when Mussoorie was being settled, a few houses had come up on Pari Tibba but they were frequently hit by lightning and burnt down, so people stopped living on it. Then there was a young couple who fell in love and wanted to marry, but they were of different faiths and their families opposed their union; so they ran away together, and took shelter at night in one of the ruined houses on Pari Tibba, where no one would stop them from consummating their love.
‘Then a storm came up—as it often does here—the building was struck again by lightning, and the lovers perished in each other’s arms. A shepherd found their charred bodies many days later.’
‘A romantic tale,’ I said.
‘But a true one,’ she averred.
It was said the star-crossed lovers haunted the hill. Miss Bean herself did not believe in ghosts, but she had seen a few. Her family was haunted by a malignant phantom head that always appeared before the death of one of her relatives. She said her brother saw this apparition the night before their mother died, and both she and her sister saw it before the death of their father. The sisters slept in the same room, and they were both awakened one night by a curious noise in the cupboard facing their beds. One of them began getting out of bed to see if their cat was in the room, when the cupboard door suddenly opened and a luminous head appeared. It was covered with matted hair and appeared to be in an advanced stage of decomposition. And as they crossed themselves, it vanished.
The next day they learned that their father, who was in Lucknow, had died suddenly, at about the time that they had seen the head.
Mussoorie only had about three cars that year, all owned by doctors, and there may have been a taxi or two. There were rickshaws, but hand-drawn, and sometimes, on steep ascents, you needed three people to pull one. The rickshaw pullers were poor men from the villages of Tehri Garhwal, who continued to make a precarious living in this way till hand-drawn rickshaws were abolished in the 1970s and the men were given cycle rickshaws.
But you used rickshaws only if you were in a hurry or had a medical emergency, or if the distance to cover was considerable, or if you had a load too heavy to carry. Mostly you walked.
Two or three times a week I would walk into town, to visit the Allahabad Bank, the post office, and the bookshop, occasionally stopping at Kwality’s for a coffee or a snack. By mid-November the main town would be deserted. If it snowed, youngsters trudged up from Rajpur to revel in snow-fights on the Mall, but no one stayed overnight. The few people who had nowhere to go would ask me why I wasn’t going anywhere for the winter. Even Miss Bean went away for a month, to the YWCA in Dehradun.
Winter or summer or rain, I was happy to write or laze in my rooms, or to step out and take a path, any path, and follow it till it led to a forest glade or stream or hilltop. I liked walking at night. There would be no one else about at that hour, except the odd drunk who usually needed guidance, and as I always had time on my hands, I would help him find his way home. But for that, my walks were solitary, quite peaceful and pleasant. No one ever bothered me, neither man nor beast.
I was conscious all the time of the silent life in the surrounding trees and bushes, and on the road. I smelt a leopard on a couple of occasions, but did not see it. I felt the warmth of a body very close behind me, but when I turned there was no one.
Sometimes the silence was broken: jackals barked and howled in the distance; a nightjar announced itself with a loud grating sound, like a whiplash cutting the air. A little scops owl, which spoke only in monosyllables, said ‘Wow’, softly but with great deliberation. He would then continue to say ‘Wow’ every other minute for several hours throughout the night.
Or there would be a rustling overhead and I would look up to see a flying squirrel glide from the top of one deodar tree to another. (On a moonlit night, it was a beautiful scene.)
And sometimes I stood and stared. Because far above the trees, streams of stars were overlapping in the sky. If I was lucky, I also caught the wash and glow of the Milky Way.
A solitary man, I met solitary people. Fleeting encounters.
One evening I wandered much further down the Tehri road than I had intended to, and by the time I returned, it was very late. Some lights still twinkled on the hills, but shopfronts in the old Landour Bazaar were shuttered and silent. The people living on either side of the narrow street could hear my footsteps, perhaps, or they might have been asleep, for it was a cold night; doors and windows were shut. A three-quarter moon was up, and the tin roofs of the bazaar, drenched with dew, glistened in the moonlight. Although the street was unlit, I needed no torch.
The rickshaw stand was deserted. A jackal slunk across the road like a thief or an adulterer. A field rat wriggled through a hole in a rotting plank, on its nightly foray among sacks of grain and pulses.
As I passed along the deserted street, under the shadow of the clock tower, I saw a boy huddled in a recess, a thin shawl wrapped around his shoulders. He was awake and shivering. He was aware of my presence, but he did not look up at me; he continued to shiver, and I passed by, my thoughts already on the warmth of the little cottage. Until something stopped me—it wasn’t anything I had seen in his face, there wasn’t light enough for that. I think it was the fact that he hadn’t looked up—he was resigned to his abandonment; he expected nothing at all from the world.
I walked back to the shadows where the boy was crouched. He didn’t say anything when I sat down next to him, but this time he did look up, puzzled and a little apprehensive, ready to shrink away or even to beg forgiveness for a crime he hadn’t committed. I could tell from his features that he had come from the hills beyond Tehri. He had come here looking for work and he was yet to find any.
‘Have you somewhere to stay?’ I asked. He shook his head; but something about my tone of voice gave him confidence, because now there was a glimmer of hope, a friendly appeal in his eyes.
‘If you can walk some way,’ I offered, ‘I can give you a bed and blanket.’
He got up immediately—a thin boy, wearing only a shirt and a pyjama. He wrapped his thin shawl around himself and followed me without any hesitation.
He had trusted me. I couldn’t now fail to trust him.
So now there were two in the sleeping moonlit bazaar. I glanced up at the tall, packed, haphazard houses. They seemed to lean towards each other for warmth and companionship.
The boy walked silently beside me. He was a quiet one. Soon we were out of the bazaar and on the footpath. The mountains loomed over us. And although no creature of the forest had ever harmed me, I was glad to have a companion walking next to me.
In the morning, I gave him hot water for a bath. He made us tea, I brought out some old buns, and we made a breakfast of these. Then he went away. It was only later that it occurred to me I could have offered to take him on as a cook or bearer. I didn’t have the income to pay him a respectable salary, but he wouldn’t have starved, and he would have had a place to stay, while he looked for something more suitable.
But something about him, and the circumstances of our meeting, prevented me from doing that. It seemed to me that an act of charity, or anything transactional, would have ruined whatever it was that had brought us briefly together. Perhaps he had felt the same, because I never saw him again.
Without a cook, unwilling to learn to cook myself, and tired of tinned sardines and sausages, I would walk into town in the evening, to the Kwality restaurant, give myself a drink, have dinner and walk back home at about ten. I never carried a torch; it was a good road up to the Wynberg Allen School, where there was a lone street lamp at the gate—which worked sometimes and sometimes not, and lit a tiny bit of the path going down to the cottage, but then it was quite dark as the path went through a bit of jungle, and up to the landing—you walked by memory and habit.
One night, the lamp at the school gate was working, and a little distance from it, three or four red foxes were prancing and dancing around in a small clearing. I walked quietly down the path, not wanting to disturb them. I had walked a fair distance, and when I was halfway down, I looked back from the dark, and there was a single fox, still dancing in the diffused light. He gave me a little poem:
As I walked home last night
I saw a lone fox dancing
In the bright moonlight.
I stood and watched,
Then took the low road, knowing
The night was his by right.
Sometimes, when words ring true,
I’m like a lone fox dancing
In the morning dew.
Winter was a good time for writing poetry.
The knoll beneath the pine tree was too windy; the garden was too cold; the sun did not reach the stream for long. It was better to sit by a charcoal brazier with a pen and notebook—just as I am doing today, fifty years later, only now it’s a large stove burning firewood, and I have my adopted children plying me with cocoa or my favourite onion soup. It’s mid-January, and we expect snow; but a good snowfall has been elusive during the last two years.
I remember the first time it snowed in Maplewood. From the windows I could see, up at the top of the hill, the deodars clothed in a mantle of white. It was a fairyland: everything still and silent. The only movement was the circling of an eagle over the trees. But it was very cold and I stayed in bed most of the time. A boy from a nearby bakery would come down occasionally, bringing bread or buns or biscuits. Sometimes his sister came instead. She was a lively, precocious girl, always ready to sit and talk and even flirt a little. I called her Miss Bun.
One morning, I opened the door and there was several inches of snow on the ground; fresh snow, and a leopard’s pug marks along the pathway and up to the front door. Up at the school, closed for the winter, the chowkidar’s mastiff had disappeared. I had no dog for the leopard, but I decided to stay indoors after dark for some days. Do leopards hunt foxes? Probably not. But they might hunt a writer if there’s nobody else available.
I WOULD BE GIVING THE READER A WRONG IMPRESSION IF I TRIED to present myself as another Thoreau, living alone beside Walden Pond with only birds and beasts for company. I was on my own quite often, particularly in the early days at Maplewood, but there were human companions too.
Maplewood Lodge was in a slightly isolated spot, but it was a sociable little corner. Along the stretch from the clock tower down to the Wynberg Allen School, all the houses were occupied, many of them by school teachers, and a few by Anglo-Indians or long-time British residents, many of them quite old and living alone. They were a friendly lot, and they would come to see me at Maplewood, or invite me over for small get-togethers. A little further away lived some ex-royals, usually a migratory species, and I got to know at least one of them quite well.
I had many friends among the local families, too, and people from the nearby villages who came selling milk, or students who came to the government school nearby. And there were outstation boys studying in Mussoorie’s private schools who dropped in from time to time, to show me their essays or raid my larder when they felt hungry. Spending time with them—and, later, with the young ones in my adopted family—I began writing stories for children. And became a child myself!
But it was old people I befriended first. There was Miss Bean; and then, along came Sir Edmund Gibson, an eighty-six-year-old bachelor, whom I’d met a couple of times in my Dehradun days. He’d been the British Resident in the Kathiawar states during the Raj, where he’d known my parents, though I have no memory of him from that time. After Independence, he had retired in Dehradun, where he was running a large farm, but at a loss—he was doing it more as a hobby. He didn’t want to go back to England, and divided his time between the Dehradun farm and a sprawling bungalow close to Maplewood Lodge, maintaining a large retinue of servants and their dependants like an eighteenth-century nawab.
‘I’m at the mercy of my servants,’ he would complain, but he had placed himself at their mercy long ago. One or two of them, like his Gurkha manservant, Trilok, were genuinely fond of him; the others hoped to get bits of his farm and would have preferred that he made an early exit.
But like his old Hillman car, which he kept in Dehradun because it couldn’t get up the hill, Sir Edmund had a rugged constitution; despite his many illnesses, it looked as though he would outlive his hardy servants. He had come to India in 1910, and survived cholera, typhoid, dysentery and malaria. Now, despite congested lungs, a bad heart, gout, weak eyes, bad teeth, recalcitrant bowels, he was still deriving some pleasure from living. Many mornings I would find him sitting under an oak tree—probably as old as him—and looking timeless. One day he said to me, ‘I don’t mind being dead, Ruskin, but I shall miss being alive.’ Which was a good summing up of his attitude to life.
I think the secret of his longevity was that he refused to go to bed when he was unwell. Nothing would prevent him from getting up, dressing up, writing letters, or getting on with a Wodehouse or the latest Blackwood’s Magazine, to which he had been subscribing for fifty years (he was pleased to find that some of my own essays were appearing in Blackwood’s ).
And nothing would keep him from his afternoon tea, or his evening whisky and soda, which he sometimes shared with me.
When he was Resident in Kathiawar, he was once shot at from close range. The man took four shots and missed every time. He must have been a terrible shot, or perhaps the pistol was faulty, because Sir Edmund was a big man and should have made a large target. Sir Edmund loved to recount this to everyone he met. That an attempt was made to assassinate him was proof that he was a mighty man; that he had survived the attempt made him mightier still.
He also treasured two letters from Mahatma Gandhi—which were written from prison—although he had himself arrested Gandhi in Rajkot on one occasion.
‘I liked Gandhi,’ he said. ‘He had a sense of humour. No politician today has any humour. They all take themselves far too seriously. When I went to see Gandhi in prison, I asked him if he was comfortable, and he smiled and said, “Even if I was, I wouldn’t admit it!”’
Sir Edmund wasn’t without humour himself. When someone asked him for permission to shoot a bird on his land in Ramgarh, he refused.
‘I need it for a biology class. It’s in the interests of science and humanity,’ protested the man. ‘Do you think a bird is better than a human being?’
‘Infinitely ,’ said Sir Edmund. ‘Infinitely better.’
When he was bored, he went down to his farm in Dehra and to his beloved Hillman, but he would be back sooner than he’d have said he would. And I was always happy to have him back, for his wit and the whisky he generously shared with me, even though it was a strange local brew that could give you a nasty hangover.
Sir Edmund finally died of a stroke, and according to his wishes, he was cremated on his Dehra farm.
A couple of years later, Miss Bean passed away in her sleep, and I never found old friends like them again.
Sometime in 1964, an interesting family from Almora moved into the neighbourhood—Zohra Verma and her four children. Zohra’s husband had died and left her a cottage just above Maplewood Lodge, which she hoped to sell. It took her over a year to find a suitable buyer, during which time her children stayed with her, two of them attending school in Mussoorie.
Zohra had been an English teacher at Aligarh University, and was very opinionated about books and writing—in fact, about everything under the sun—but she was good company despite this. The child of a Hindu-Muslim marriage, she herself had been married twice—first to a Muslim, from whom she’d had a daughter, and then to a Hindu, who was in the air force, and from whom she had two daughters and a son. All four children were quite bright and talented—even a little eccentric, as bright people often are—and for this, I’m certain, they had their mother to thank; the fathers would have been no match for her. She was a tough, spirited little woman—a tiny bundle of energy, and rather overwhelming. You could see she must have been a very passionate person too, when she was younger.
All the daughters took after Zohra, but it was the second daughter, Surekha, who seemed to have inherited her passionate nature more than the others. Surekha was a bit of a free spirit, of a sensual and artistic nature, whom sleepy Mussoorie would have found difficult to contain, and it was a good thing that she soon went to Delhi and joined the National School of Drama. I lost touch with her after her marriage, but I would keep hearing about her work. She acted in a film during the Emergency, but it was never released because it was a satire on Indira Gandhi and it got into trouble with Indira’s hot-headed younger son, Sanjay Gandhi. The film was called Kissa Kursi Ka and Surekha had played Mrs Gandhi. She didn’t get many film roles after that, but she was very active in the theatre in Delhi. Later, she had some good character roles in films, which brought her recognition and awards, and now I see her on television, playing the strong older woman in a couple of those interminable soap operas that would be difficult to watch if it were not for some fine actors like her.
Surekha’s younger sister, Phoolmani, was very charming, still in school at the time. But it was the eldest sister with whom I was more friendly. We called her Punni. She was about my age and had recently returned from London, where she had studied to become a doctor. She was something of a tomboy, almost always dressed in trousers and shirts, and smoked very heavily. She was also rather strong-willed, not really interested in running a home or settling down with anyone, so I was surprised when I heard some years later that she had married someone several years her junior, a man I had met when he would visit Zohra’s family in Mussoorie. His name was Naseeruddin Shah and I think he was still in college when I first saw him. The marriage didn’t last very long, and Punni went away to Iran. Naseer went on to make quite a name for himself in Hindi cinema and theatre.
Naseer had a Mussoorie connection too—his father owned a house here. He was a nice old gentleman whom I had met just once, when I was looking for a place to rent. The house was sold when he died and I didn’t see Naseer for many years after that.
But I’ve almost forgotten about Zohra’s youngest, her son. And that isn’t surprising because he was a quiet boy, and with the three dominating sisters and a dominating mother, almost invisible! Fortunately for him, there was no lasting damage—he went into the army and ended up as a general.
Strong, dominating women seemed to find me all the time. One day I received an invitation to a party from Robin Jind, one of the sons of the erstwhile Maharaja of Jind, and a well-known announcer on Doordarshan in the 1960s. A very good-looking man, he was also a talented painter who’d had a few exhibitions in Delhi, and it was at one of these that I’d met him.
On one of his visits to Mussoorie, Robin ran into me on the Mall and said, ‘Come over in the evening, my mother is giving a party.’ That was the first time I went over to the Maharani of Jind’s place—Her Highness Prithvi Bir Kaur; HH to her friends. She was Robin’s stepmother, the Maharaja’s second wife (the first having died in mysterious circumstances).
It was quite a wild party. There were all sorts of strange people, and an hour into the merriment, HH was walking around balancing a bottle of expensive whisky on her head. We met regularly after that. She was a very social person; she liked company and would come down to see me in Maplewood, but more often I would drop in—or rather she would order me to come. We would drink together, though I could never keep up with her—she was a daytime drinker, like her husband, who had died from too much alcohol; sometimes she would start after breakfast, have a late lunch, at around four, and start drinking again in the evening. But it didn’t seem to affect her in any way.
HH was great fun over a few drinks, especially when she got going on all the disasters that had overtaken her friends and acquaintances: someone had been knocked down by a truck; someone else had been sucked into the fuselage of an aeroplane; and a dear old friend, a retired mountaineer, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s, poor man, had died searching for the Annapurna base camp on the Delhi Ridge. She recounted all these tragedies with great sympathy and great relish.
She hadn’t yet found Bill Aitken, the writer who would also become a good friend of mine. He was still living the ascetic’s life in an ashram up in the mountains above Almora, and she was having an affair with the Peruvian chargé d’affaires , a typical Spanish type, with the money to go with his charm. He used to supply all the imported booze for her wild parties. He had rented a cottage for his wife and children who went to school in Mussoorie, but he hardly ever visited them. He would come to see HH, however, and they would go off on trips together. That stopped after he went back to Peru and she began to visit the ashram in Almora, where she met Bill, and they became partners for life.
Bill was a calming influence on HH, and I think after a long time she found genuine companionship in him. I don’t suppose it was always easy for him, but Bill had been wandering too long himself, and once he had made the commitment, he stuck to her.
HH had two sons who gave her a lot of trouble. This was partly her fault—she had indulged them to begin with, and then suddenly cut them off. But you couldn’t tell her that. She was, after all, a maharani. I tried not to contradict her, and for that reason she remained fond of me till the end.
Bill continues to live in their home in Mussoorie, though we rarely see each other, age having caught up with both of us.
When summer came around and tourists flocked to the hill station, there were friends and their families from Rajouri Garden and Patel Nagar who would turn up, often unannounced, to prevent me from being too much of a recluse.
Kamal would come up on and off, sometimes staying for several weeks at a stretch, so that he wasn’t so much a visitor as a roommate. I got used to having him in the house and soon we were spending a lot of time together; he would paint, while I wrote, and then we would take a break and go for long walks, or on treks into the neighbouring hills and mountains.
It was a busy little household, for apart from the two of us, there were two black Pomeranians my mother had given me on one of my visits to Delhi, and a Siamese cat, and all of us got along quite well. The Poms—Toffee and Pickle; brother and sister—insisted on being taken along when we went out walking; the cat, being a cat, preferred some independence and would stay back, wanting to do her own thing.
She was a pretty cat, and deserves a proper introduction; and you must indulge me as I turn to my old Maplewood journal for a small tribute to the only pet who became intimate enough with me to share my bed.
Suzie came into my life when she was just three weeks old. I’d been in Maplewood for a few months and it was beginning to get a little lonely, so I told a friend that I needed a pet. I had expected to receive a dog; but when the kitten arrived, its small questing head with the chocolate-tipped ears thrust out of the friend’s coat pocket, I fell in love at first sight. And, taking its sex for granted, I named the kitten Suzie.
Suzie spent her first night curled up in a tea cosy. She showed her good breeding right from the start by selecting a commodious pot of geraniums for her morning ablutions, and then I loved her even more, because I had no idea how to train a cat.
But, like most Siamese cats, she showed a dislike for milk; and I was faced with the problem of obtaining a regular supply of meat. As I lived two miles from the nearest butcher, I took meat only once or twice a week; but Suzie disdained a vegetarian diet. I solved the problem by purchasing a month’s supply of tinned sardines and feeding her exclusively on fish. She liked butter too, and used it to polish her coat. All this proved expensive, but I was hoping that as she grew older her natural instincts would result in her bringing in her own supplies.
I was not disappointed. She was barely a month old when she snapped up a large moth that flew in through the open windows on a balmy September night. A few days later I found, on the kitchen floor, the head and tail of a mouse. The bright innocence of Suzie’s sky blue eyes told me where the rest of the mouse was now lodged.
Cats rarely answer to their names; but Suzie often did. Moreover, I had tied a little bell to her neck, and this generally told me where she was. Her favourite haunt was a cherry tree. When a pair of thrushes were building a nest, she learnt to climb this tree beautifully—and the birds went elsewhere.
If a cat and a dog are properly introduced to each other, they make the best of friends. It did not take Suzie long to develop a playful, nose-tapping relationship with a neighbour’s dog, a Peke. Another dog, a rather doleful, good-natured Cocker Spaniel, permitted Suzie to sleep beneath her on cold days. Such was Suzie’s charm that she was soon being fed by my neighbours, and this generosity solved my food problems. People took pity on us. Bachelors and kittens are suitable objects for compassion.
Suzie must have been about five months old when I discovered, to my dismay and embarrassment, that she was really a male. But I scorned all suggestions for a change of name: he had been Suzie from his infancy, and he would keep his girl’s name. And if this confused the world, it was the world that needed to sort itself out; I was all right with this ambiguous state of affairs. (When Kamal came to stay, he suggested we change Suzie’s name to Souza. But I had a friend called D’Souza who was built like a wrestler, and it would have been odd to have D’Souza jump into my lap or nuzzle my chest.)
I had been warned that as soon as Suzie was eight months old he would start staying out late at nights, or even remaining away for several days in his search for a suitable mate. But Suzie was not like other males. He stayed at home, and the queens came to him. There was a beautiful black creature with yellow eyes, straight out of Edgar Allan Poe, and a handsome wild cat from the forest, who came to the front door on alternate nights (never together). Suzie would go out and meet his admirers, and frolic with them in the long, dew-drenched monsoon grass, before returning indoors to sleep deeply and sweetly at the foot of my bed.
Suzie liked people. I think he found them comfortable. If there were guests, he would always choose the one with the broadest, most accommodating lap. At night, he usually slept on my tummy (he liked its rise and fall, as I breathed) and if it got cold, he curled up in the hollow behind my knees. One morning, when there was a small blizzard blowing outside, I woke up to find he had somehow crawled under my shirt and woollen vest and was splayed out on my chest, his head tucked under my chin.
In the house, during the day, he was unobtrusive. Outside, he had his own pursuits and pleasures, whether it be stalking garden lizards or too familiar mynahs and crows. Sometimes I found him curled up on my typewriter, reminding me that I had not been working regularly of late. He liked music, and a favourite spot of his, ever since childhood, had been beside the radio. That’s where I found him one morning, and he stayed there while I brought out my camera and took a picture. It will always be my favourite picture of Suzie.
So we lived happily, Suzie, Pickle, Toffee and I, and Kamal, whenever he same to spend time with us. But good things, like bad things, must come to an end, and one by one, over the next couple of years, we all went our separate ways
Pickle was the first to go. It was a November evening, a little after sunset. The kitchen door opened out to the forest, and the young cook we had recently employed had left it open. Suddenly, Pickle charged out barking, and the bark became a yelp—and we ran out, Kamal and I, to see what had happened. There was no sign of Pickle. The cook came running after us and said, ‘Baghera le gaya !’—A leopard’s taken him! We took our torches and all three of us went looking, all the way down to the edge of the ravine, but there was no sign of Pickle. The next morning, when we went to search again, we found his paws in the gully.
Some months later, Suzie disappeared. It couldn’t have been a leopard, because leopards, as far as I know, don’t eat cats. I never found out what happened. I consoled myself with the thought that someone had seen him on the road, fallen in love with him, like I had, and taken him home, to look after him better than I had done.
Kamal brought home four rabbits—thinking this would cheer us up. We let them roam around in the garden for much of the day and brought them in for the night, but they made a mess inside. One day we bought a wire cage and put them inside and left them in the garden. By morning they were gone. A leopard—or jackals, perhaps—had dug under the wiring. Two of the rabbits had been carried away, and two had died of fright.
Only Toffee lived to a healthy old age, and when she died, we buried her in the garden.
Late in the summer in 1964, Sushila came up to Maplewood. I had last seen her, after a gap of over two years, on a recent visit to Delhi, and perhaps because I was thirty—a dangerous age for dreamers, when youth is beginning to say goodbye—and because I had lived a hermit’s existence for months, I lost my heart to her. She was sixteen; dark and slender, with large expressive eyes; and I became aware of her in a way I hadn’t been when I used to spend time with Kamal’s family. Perhaps subconsciously I had always been aware of her, but in a somewhat paternal way, because she was often in her school uniform then. She still had three years of school left, but only because she’d been failing her exams.
She lived with her parents and brothers in a dusty, flyblown locality somewhere on the fringes of Delhi, where many of the poorer refugees had settled after Partition. I had always been drawn to people from backgrounds very different from my own, and who seemed to be a little out of step with the world, as I was; and Sushila, in her hand-me-down clothes, dreaming of one day travelling the world and happy to spend time with the boys and get up to mischief, began to occupy my thoughts that fortnight in Delhi.
I was living with Kamal’s family (I was on reasonable terms with my own family, but this was only possible from a distance), and Sushila was staying there too—she was on a long visit with her mother, who frequently came to Rajouri Garden to recover from the toil and drudgery of her marital home. I looked for ways to be close to Sushila and talk to her alone, but this was impossible in a house overflowing with busy women, noisy children and men who sat around doing very little. So I would take her, with Kamal and her ten-year-old brother Sunder, to Connaught Place for coffee and snacks. Once, I took them to see a movie, where I had thought I would hold her hand, but Sunder sat between us. He had grown very fond of me, as small boys will of anyone who buys them sweets and takes them to the pictures.
When I left Delhi for the hills that time, Sushila cried. At first, I thought it was because I was going away. Then I realized it was because she couldn’t go anywhere herself. I think she both envied and resented me that freedom. But she gave me a garland of marigold flowers as a parting gift, which I wore, feeling like a groom, though nothing had been said.
So I was happy when she turned up at Maplewood sometime later with Kamal and her little brother. Sunder insisted on sleeping with me, and he wouldn’t let his sister leave his side at night, so the three of us slept in my bed, and Kamal shifted to the second room, which he had converted into his studio. I was tense with longing through the first night, like some wound-up machine. I stayed awake, looking at her dark, long-fingered hand on Sunder’s chest, till sleep finally came to me in the early hours.
The next day we went to the stream for our first picnic, where again we were surrounded by people—Kamal, Sunder, and a couple of our Maplewood neighbours. But that night, I put my hand on Sunder sleeping between us, and my fingers brushed hers, and she took my hand and held it against her soft warm cheek. I reached across and kissed her eyes and her neck. Sunder woke up and I pulled back. He put his arm and a leg around me and after a while Sushila turned her back to us and was soon fast asleep.
We began to take long walks after that, at all times of the day, when I would tell them love stories disguised as fairy tales—which confused Sunder and amused his sister. And they bored Kamal, because he began to absent himself from these walks, saying he wanted to focus on his painting. (Stories, in any case, didn’t interest him; in all the time I knew him, he never read any of mine, or indeed anyone else’s.)
He wasn’t with us on our next picnic at the stream, and there were no neighbours. Sunder and I bathed in the cool, refreshing water while Sushila sat on a rock, with her feet in the water. I splashed water on her and she threw a small stone at me. I begged forgiveness and she asked me to kiss her feet, which I did and we all laughed and went back to the cottage, where Kamal scolded me for neglecting my writing. I was hardly ever in the house, he said, something had happened to me. I laughed it off, saying I was entitled to a holiday, but some stories were brewing. I didn’t like lying to him, and to cover my guilt I asked if he had made any progress at all on the painting he’d been struggling with for days. He looked angry, but decided to let it be.
I couldn’t write; it was true that something had happened to me. I wanted to be with Sushila all the time; I imagined her standing naked in the stream, or lying naked in our bed, or walking naked in the garden with flowers in her hair. When she showed me a boy’s photograph and told me he was in love with her and wrote her letters, I was jealous. I tried not to show it, but became gloomier every minute, till she sensed my dismay and tried to make amends. She assured me the correspondence was one-sided and she was no longer interested in the boy. I was elated again. Euphoric one minute and in deep despair the next—I had never known such upheaval.
One morning, Kamal took Sunder to the skating rink on the Mall. It was a warm day.
‘Let’s go to the stream,’ Sushila said, snatching the book I was reading out of my hands. ‘I’ll bathe you.’
We went down the steep path, and I took her to the waterfall, and showed her the small cave behind it. We lay down on the damp rock and I kissed her. I kissed her eyes, lips and her long, slim neck, till her shy responsiveness turned to passion and she clung to me, and suddenly I became afraid of myself and broke free of her embrace. I told her it wasn’t safe outside.
That night, in whispers, I told her I had never loved anyone in my life as much as I loved her. I wanted to spend my life with her, and I would take care of her. I must have sounded like Majnu or Romeo, and I wanted to say much more, but there are no words bigger than these in love, and I think I was truly in love. No woman had responded to me as tenderly as she had.
‘Do you love me?’ I asked her, and there was silence. I asked again, telling her I wanted to marry her and I would wait for her all my life if I had to, and then I convinced myself that she had nodded yes and I hadn’t seen it in the dark.
We were lying on the bed one afternoon, Sushila’s head on my arm, and Sunder sleeping beside us, when Kamal walked in unexpectedly. We were too startled to react. He didn’t say anything, merely passed through the room to his studio. Sushila pulled away and looked afraid. ‘He knows,’ she said. I said he would understand; I would tell him I wanted to marry her and meant to talk to her mother.
I asked Kamal out for a walk, and when we were some distance from the house, we had a row. He said I had deceived and used him. He also accused me of seducing an innocent girl.
‘She’s hardly a child,’ I said in my defence. ‘And I’m not exactly old. I’m thirty.’
‘She’s still almost half your age,’ he said. ‘Does she love you?’
‘I think so.’
‘You think so? You are a fool. Look at her, look at yourself. This is India.’
‘I want to marry her,’ I said to stop him. ‘Will you help me?’
I didn’t know what I was doing; I hadn’t thought it through, but if it was marriage that would keep Sushila with me, I would marry her.
Kamal took her and Sunder back to Delhi two days later. And I was left with the brooding mountains and a house that seemed emptier than before. I kept finding things that she’d left behind—strands of hair on the pillow, a broken bangle, a little box of kajal. At night I drank brandy and wrote listlessly, while the rats scurried about on the rafters.
In the monsoon there was a constant drizzle and drumming on the corrugated tin roof. The mist rose at intervals through the day, thin vapour one minute and dense cloud the next. It covered the trees and made the forest ethereal, but I couldn’t respond to the beauty.
Then a letter came from Kamal, saying that he wanted to move out and live on his own. He couldn’t afford the rent and wanted me to share a flat with him in Delhi for a year. During that time he would help me to convince Sushila’s family and arrange the marriage. I packed a few things and took the bus to Delhi.
We found a flat, but I could hardly meet Sushila there. In fact, through the weeks I was in Delhi, I saw her just once, in Kamal’s family home, which was full of people for some celebration. We did not speak, but I spoke to one of her uncles. He seemed happy on his sister’s behalf. The girl had to be married soon, he said, and it might as well be me; I was almost a part of their extended family already. It would happen; I should be patient.
I had little reason to stay in Delhi after that. I could only wait now, and I would rather wait in my quiet corner in the hills. Kamal didn’t seem to enjoy being with me, either. He used to joke that it was unnatural for me not to have a girl in my life; now that I had found one, I had obviously done it all wrong. But neither of us wanted to be the first to express our unhappiness. It was the landlord who put us out of our misery. He asked us to vacate the place—Kamal’s nephews and cousins, who would stay with us all day and sometimes at night, made too much noise, he said, and used up all the water.
I returned to Mussoorie with half an assurance from Sushila’s uncle. But I didn’t hear from anyone for months after that. When I couldn’t wait any longer, I took the bus to Delhi again, and when I reached Kamal’s family home, I wasn’t welcome anymore. One of his brothers met me outside the door and told me I should go back to Mussoorie and stay away for some time. There had been a mistake; Sushila was engaged to be married.
She was married off some months later, to a man with better prospects, and from their community. She’s still married and lives somewhere in the great sprawl of North India (for which reason I have had to disguise her identity). Whether she wears bangles anymore, or strings marigolds into garlands, I do not know. She’s probably a grandmother now. It’s the grandchildren who keep us going!
Kamal didn’t continue his painting and went into more commercial work, something to do with textiles and garment design, after he too married. We rarely met after that year, but I would hear of him from time to time because one of his nephews, Anil, lived with me for a couple of years to complete his education. Anil’s family had come on hard times after his father abandoned them, and the boy was pulled out of the private school he was attending in Delhi. I got him admitted to Wynberg Allen, where he did well and later he joined a medical college in Dehradun. He became a doctor and settled in America some years later.
One way to get over a failed love affair is to get married. Another is to trek into beautiful, deserted places.
In the months after I returned from Delhi, turned away by Sushila’s relatives, I began frequenting uninhabited spots high up on the hills of Mussoorie. There was a hill called Cloud’s End. From its naked, windswept crest, one had a view of the plains on one side, and of the snow peaks on the other. Wild sorrel grew among the rocks, and there were many flowers—clover, wild begonia, dandelion—sprinkling the hillside.
On the spur of the hill stood the ruins of an old brewery. Some enterprising Englishman had spent a lifetime here making beer for his thirsty compatriots down in the plains. Now, moss and ferns grew from the walls. In a hollow beneath a flight of worn steps, a wildcat had made its home. It was a beautiful grey creature, black-striped, with pale green eyes. Sometimes it watched me from the steps or the wall, but it never came near.
No one lived on the hill, except occasionally a coal burner in a temporary grass-thatched hut. But villagers used the path, grazing their sheep and cattle on the grassy slopes. It was mostly young boys and girls who brought their families’ cattle and sheep there. I found a boy who played a flute. Its rough, sweet notes travelled clearly across the mountain air. I saw him often, and he would greet me with a nod of his head, without taking the flute away from his lips.
And there was a girl who was nearly always cutting grass for fodder. She wore heavy anklets on her feet, and she did not speak much either, but she had a wide grin on her face whenever she met me on the path. She was always singing to herself, or to the sheep, or to the grass, showing me how much I still needed to learn about contentment. What’s all the running around for, she seemed to say. Sit down, stop chasing, and the words will come, and maybe love, too.
There was a boy who carried milk into town, who would often fall into step with me. He had never been away from the hills. He had never been on a train. He asked why my hair wasn’t black, and seemed to understand easily when I told him why—there was no surprise or wonder (a lesson for those who think cosmopolitanism is acquired in big cities and universities). He told me about his village; how they made rotis from maize, how fish were to be caught in the mountain streams, and how bears came to steal maize from their fields and pumpkins from the roof of their house.
On Pari Tibba, I walked among the abandoned buildings, many struck by lightning. I saw no ghosts or witches, but one day I saw a bear. I was sitting in an oak tree, just to see if I was still as agile as I used to be as a boy, when I heard a whining grumble, and a small bear ambled into the clearing beneath the tree. He was little more than a cub, not threatening in the least, and I sat very still, waiting to see what he would do.
The young bear put his nose to the ground and sniffed his way along, until he came to an anthill. And here he began huffing and puffing, blowing rapidly in and out of his nostrils, and the dust from the anthill flew in all directions. But the anthill was a ruin, too, deserted by the ants long ago! And so, grumbling and whining, the bear made his way up a nearby plum tree and soon he was perched high in the branches. He had only just made himself comfortable, when he noticed me in the neighbouring tree.
The bear at once scrambled several feet higher up his tree and lay flat on a branch. It wasn’t a very big branch, so there was a lot of bear showing on either side. He tucked his head behind another branch, and as he couldn’t see me, he seemed to be satisfied that he was hidden. But like all young ones, he was full of curiosity. So, slowly, inch by inch, his black snout appeared over the edge of the branch, and as soon as he saw me, he drew his head back and hid his face.
He did this several times. I waited until he wasn’t looking, then moved slowly some way down my tree. When the bear looked over again, and saw that I was missing, he slowly stretched across to another branch and helped himself to a plum, and whined in pleasure. At that, I couldn’t help bursting into laughter, and the startled bear tumbled out of the plum tree, landed with a thump on a pile of dried leaves on the ground, and fled from the clearing, grunting and squealing. He looked determined to complain to his mother, so I quickly clambered down the oak tree and hurried downhill (someone had told me bears find it difficult to run downhill).
I was whistling and smiling when I reached my study, and I sat down and wrote a story about bears. The next day, I wrote a second story, and began an essay. Words came easily, and I was singing Nelson Eddy and Eartha Kitt songs and making myself mugs of tea and coffee.
How to mend a broken heart and get past the dreaded writer’s block? Find a young bear in a plum tree.
BY MY MID-THIRTIES, I WAS LOSING MY OLD RESTLESSNESS, and writing regularly, although there was little money. English-language publishers in India were only interested in textbooks, and newspapers and magazines didn’t pay very much. In order to survive, I had to produce as many stories, essays and middles as possible, so I kept banging away at my sturdy old typewriter.
It might have been a little easier if I’d shifted to Delhi or Bombay or Calcutta. But now the mountains were in my blood. The changing seasons of Mussoorie determined the rhythm of my life and writing. Even in the bitter winter months, I looked out for the white-capped redstart that would perch on the bare branches of the pear tree in the garden and whistle cheerfully at me, giving me the opening lines of a poem. And I looked out for the milkman who came on his old bicycle, his milk-cans crowned with snow, to sell me water adulterated with cow’s milk and teach me Garhwali love songs.
I only left the hills to make the occasional trip to Delhi to see my family—mainly my mother, and Ellen. William had left for England around the time that I came to live in Mussoorie, and from England he had emigrated to Canada.
In the summer of 1969, I received a letter from my mother. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She was fifty-four, and I had never seen her in bed with an illness, and when I went to see her, she dismissed the diagnosis as a nuisance rather than a worry. She looked a little older than her years, but her liveliness was undiminished.
At home, Mr H was trying to take charge of the situation. He didn’t expect much support from me, for which I couldn’t really blame him. My half-brothers, like my mother, were in denial; and William couldn’t afford a trip to India. The only reliable support Mr H had was from Premila, my step-sister—Bibiji’s daughter—who was living with him and my mother after an unsuccessful marriage. She had found a job with the YWCA in Delhi and was becoming a sort of anchor for the family.
I returned to Maplewood to lock up the place and come back to Delhi in time for my mother’s operation. The doctors had said her left breast would have to be removed if she was to have any chance of survival.
Before leaving Mussoorie, I gathered some old photographs I had kept from the days when Daddy, my mother and I were still together. Perhaps she’d like to have them—it was my small gesture of reconciliation. There was also a faded negative, yellow and spotted with age. It was a picture of my maternal grandparents which my mother had given me long ago but I hadn’t bothered to get a print made. I did now, and when I got the photograph and saw Granny’s face for the first time in twenty-two years, I was immediately struck by my resemblance to her. I had become a little like her, without realizing it—I led a Spartan life, I lived tidily, and I had grown to like gardens. But I hadn’t realized the physical resemblance was so close—the fair hair, the heavy build, the wide forehead. She looked more like me than my mother.
In the photograph, she was seated on her favourite chair, at the top of the veranda steps, and Grandfather was standing behind her in the shadows thrown by a large mango tree which was not in the picture. He was a slim, trim man, with a drooping moustache that was fashionable in the 1920s. By all accounts he had a mischievous sense of humour, although he looked unwell in the picture. He appeared to have been quite swarthy. No wonder he had been so successful in dressing up ‘native’ style and passing himself off as a street-vendor. My mother had told me stories of his escapades. In his own way, he had been a little wild, his character in strong contrast to my grandmother’s forbidding personality and Victorian sense of propriety. So it was him you took after, I said to my mother in my head, and I put the picture and the negative in my suitcase with the others.
I got off the bus in Delhi and went straight to the Lady Hardinge Hospital, where my mother had been admitted the previous day. It was early August and the sweat oozed through my shirt as I sat in the back of a stuffy little taxi taking me through the busy roads leading to Central Delhi.
I found my mother in a small ward, a cool, dark room with a ceiling fan whirring overhead. A nurse was writing something on a chart tied to the side of the bed, and I stood behind her. When she left, my mother saw me, standing there with my small suitcase.
She gave me a wan smile and beckoned me to come nearer. Her cheeks were slightly flushed, possibly due to fever; otherwise she looked her normal self. I found it hard to believe that the operation she would have the following day would only give her, at the most, another year’s lease on life.
I sat at the foot of her bed. ‘How do you feel?’ I asked.
‘All right. They say they’ll operate in the morning. They’ve stopped my smoking.’
‘Maybe they’ll let you have your rum,’ I said.
‘No. Not until a few days after the operation.’
She sat up and put the pillow behind her to support her back. I produced her parents’ photograph and handed it to her.
‘The negative was lying with me all these years. I had it printed recently. I thought you’d like to have it.’
‘I can’t see without my glasses,’ she said.
The glasses were lying on the locker near her bed. I handed them to her. She put them on and studied the photograph, and laughed. ‘Look at him!’
‘You resemble your father,’ I said. ‘And funnily enough I look like Granny.’
‘Your grandmother was always very fond of you.’
‘It was hard to tell. She wasn’t a soft woman.’
‘It was her money that got you to Jersey. The only person who ever left you anything. I’m afraid I’ve nothing to leave you, either.’ She sounded almost apologetic, which didn’t suit her.
‘You know very well I’ve never cared about money. Daddy taught me to write. That was inheritance enough.’
‘And what did I teach you?’
‘I’m not sure…Perhaps you taught me how to enjoy myself now and then!’
She looked pleased at this. ‘Yes, I’ve enjoyed myself between troubles. But your father didn’t know how to enjoy himself. That’s why we quarrelled so much.’
‘He was much older than you. You were different people.’
‘You’ve always blamed me for leaving him, haven’t you?’
‘I was very small at that time. You left us suddenly. He was sick and he had to look after me. Naturally I blamed you.’
‘He wouldn’t let me see you. He kept you away from me, did you know that?’
‘Because you were going to marry someone else—’
I broke off; we had been over this before. I wasn’t there as my father’s advocate, and the time for recrimination had passed.
It began to rain outside, and the scent of wet earth came through the open doors, overpowering the odour of medicines and disinfectants. The nurse, a pleasant Malayali woman, came in to inform me that the doctor would soon be on his rounds. I could come again in the evening, or early morning before the operation.
‘Come in the evening,’ my mother said. ‘The others will be here then.’
‘I haven’t come to see the others.’
‘Won’t you be staying with them?’
‘I don’t know. I might.’
‘As you like.’
I got up to leave.
‘Ruskin,’ she said, as I picked up my suitcase. ‘Will you look after Ellen?’
‘You shouldn’t worry about that. I will. You need to think about getting better.’
I promised to see her in the morning, and then I was on the road again, standing on the pavement, on the fringe of a chaotic rush of traffic, with a vague fear—apprehension, more than fear—that I may not see my mother again.
To everyone’s relief, the operation was successful, and when she was discharged, I went back to Maplewood. But the cancer returned within a few months. The round of tests began again, and one evening someone from the family phoned a neighbour with a message for me, saying I should come to Delhi. When I phoned back, my half-brother Harold took the call.
‘You’d better come, Ruskin,’ he said. ‘She won’t last long.’
She was back in hospital the night I reached the Patel Nagar flat. Harold was with her. Sometime after we’d finished dinner, he called to say that she had died.
We cremated her at Nigambodh Ghat the following morning, and immersed her ashes in the Jamuna.
For better or worse, we are all shaped by our parents. My mother’s sensuality, I think, was stronger than her intelligence; in me, sensuality and intelligence have always been at war with each other. And I probably also inherited her unconventional attitude to life, her stubborn insistence on doing things that respectable people did not approve of—traits that she probably got from her father, a convivial character, who mingled with all and shocked not a few. She must have been quite a handful for my poor father, bookish and intellectual, who probably wanted her to be a ‘lady’. But this was something that went against her nature.
I like to believe I had mended my relationship with my mother before she died. It wasn’t about forgiveness, there was nothing to forgive. If I did not, as a child, receive the same love from her as I did from my father, it was not entirely her fault. As she had married again and was engaged in bringing up my stepbrothers, a clash of interests was only to be expected. A note of resentment creeps in here. I did resent my stepfather, stepbrothers and the whole unwanted step-scene that I had to live with after my father’s death. It had also affected my relationship with William, whom I identified with a family that I couldn’t relate to. Perhaps that was my failing—after all, if I was living in a kind of no-man’s-land, so was he. (William has never returned to India, and we’ve exchanged a handful of letters in fifty years.)
I had a better connection with Ellen, and now that our mother was no more, I felt responsible for her. I asked Mr H if I should take Ellen with me, but he said he would keep her. The RAF allowance was for her lifetime, and that would allow him to keep an ayah to look after her. He kept his word, and after he died, Premila took over the responsibility of looking after Ellen, and she did it far better than I could have done. Ellen lived to the age of seventy-eight, spending her last years in Ludhiana, where Premila had shifted after her retirement.
My mother had been worried about Ellen when she realized she was dying; it must have been a lifelong worry. But at least she was spared the heartache of burying her sons. Both Harold and Hansel died tragically young some years after her.
It was late Christmas Eve in 1975, when Harold set out from Dehra in his father’s car, to try and get to Delhi in time for a party at the Anglo-Indian club. Although he was a good driver, having taken part in car rallies and other tests of speed and endurance, he had become a heavy drinker and he was in no condition to undertake a long and arduous drive late at night. He was alone, and he was killed instantly, or so we were told. Apparently, his car had been caught and crushed between two trucks, which had speedily disappeared into the night.
Harold had been a bit of a tearaway. He was attractive to women, but they had a hard time looking after him. And he wrecked their lives in addition to his own. There were lessons about life and highways that he never learnt.
But perhaps there aren’t any lessons to learn. A few months after Harold, my second half-brother Hansel, who had emigrated to Australia, was killed in a motorcycle accident. He was the careful one, who seldom took risks. He was sober, but someone else on the road was not.
After my mother died, even the tenuous connection I had with the world beyond Mussoorie was gone.
And then, with the coming of Prem, life changed again, and for the first time in my life I became a family man.
Prem was seventeen or eighteen when I first saw him. I was still in Maplewood, and had finally acquired a cook and helper who would often take off for days without warning, but he wasn’t a bad cook and he was an honest man, which was reason enough to put up with him. So when I found this boy—tall, dark, with good teeth and brown, deep-set eyes, dressed smartly in white drill—on the landing outside the kitchen door, looking for a job, I had to refuse.
‘I already have someone working for me,’ I said.
‘Yes, sir. He is my uncle.’
In the hills, back then, everyone was a brother or uncle.
‘You want me to dismiss your uncle?’ I asked.
‘No, sir. But he says you can find a job for me.’
‘I’ll try. I’ll make enquiries and let you know. Have you just come from your village?’
‘Yes. Yesterday I walked ten miles to Pauri. There I got a bus.’
‘Sit down. Your uncle will make some tea.’
He sat down on the steps, removed his white keds and wriggled his toes. I liked his ease of manner and his easier confidence.
‘I need to know something about you, If I’m going to recommend you to people,’ I said. ‘Do you smoke?’
‘No, sir.’
‘It is true,’ said his uncle, who had joined us on the steps. ‘He does not smoke. All my nephews smoke, but this one is a little peculiar, he does not smoke—neither beedi nor hookah.’
‘Do you drink?’
‘It makes me vomit.’
‘Do you take bhang?’
‘No, sir.’
‘You have no vices. It’s unnatural.’
‘He is unnatural, sahib,’ said his uncle.
‘Does he chase girls?’
‘They chase him, sahib. So he left the village and came looking for a job.’
The boy grinned, then looked away, began rubbing his feet.
‘Your name is?’
‘Prem Singh.’
‘All right, Prem, I will try to do something for you,’
I did not see him for a couple of weeks. I forgot about finding him a job. But when I met him again, on the road to the bazaar, he told me that he had got a temporary job in the Survey, looking after the surveyor’s tents.
‘Next week we will be going to Rajasthan,’ he said.
‘It will be very hot. Have you been in the desert before?’
‘No sir.’
‘It is not like the hills. And it is far from home.’
‘I know. But I have to collect some money in order to get married.’
In his region, there was a bride price, usually of two thousand rupees.
‘Do you have to get married so soon?’
‘I have only one brother and he’s still very young. My mother needs a daughter-in-law to help her in the fields and with the cows.’
I had travelled up to the villages of Garhwal beyond and above Mussoorie, and seen how little the villagers had to live by—the mountains were immense and beautiful, but, as a villager had said to me, ‘You can’t eat mountains.’ No family had more than a few terraced fields, and these were narrow and stony, usually perched on a hill or mountainside, above a stream or river. The villagers grew rice, barley, maize and potatoes—just enough to live on. Even if they produced sufficient quantities for sale, the absence of roads made it difficult to get the produce to the market towns. There was no money to be earned in the villages, and money was needed for clothes, soap, medicines, and recovering the family jewellery from the money-lenders. So the young men left to find work in the plains. The lucky ones got into the army. Others entered domestic service or took jobs in garages, restaurants and hotels, dhabas and wayside teashops. Some of this has changed, but not very much.
In Mussoorie the main attraction was the large number of schools, which employed cooks and bearers. But the schools were full when Prem arrived. He’d been to the recruiting centre at Roorkee, hoping to get into the army; but they’d found a deformity in his right foot, the result of a bone broken when a landslip carried him away one dark monsoon night; he was lucky, he said, that it was only his foot and not his head that had been broken.
He came to the house to inform his uncle about the job and to say goodbye. I thought: another nice person I probably won’t see again; another ship passing in the night, the friendly twinkle of its lights soon vanishing in the darkness. I said ‘Come again,’ held his smile with mine so that I could remember him better, and returned to my study and my typewriter.
Prem disappeared into the vast faceless cities of the plains, and a year slipped by, and then there he was again, thinner and darker and still smiling and still looking for a job. I should have known that hill men don’t disappear forever. The spirit-haunted rocks don’t let their people wander too far, lest they lose them forever.
I was able to get him a job in a school. The headmaster’s wife needed a cook, and Prem assured me he could cook. And he hadn’t lied, because the headmaster’s wife was delighted with ‘the lovely Pahari boy’, and he seemed satisfied too, sleeping in their veranda and getting fifty rupees a month, which was a little more than what most other households paid.
But after barely two months ‘the lovely Pahari boy’ had become ‘the insolent Pahari boy’, who answered back, was not sufficiently grateful for the ‘baksheesh’ he was given and laughed so loudly it was an assault on the memsahib’s ears.
It was the end of his job. ‘I’ll have to go home now,’ he told me. ‘I won’t get another job in this area. The Mem will see to that.’
‘Stay a few days,’ I said.
‘I have only enough money with which to get home.’
‘Keep it for going home. Your uncle won’t mind sharing his food with you.’
His uncle did mind. He did not like the idea of working for his nephew as well; it seemed to him no part of his duties. And he was apprehensive lest Prem might get his job.
So Prem stayed no longer than a week.
After he had returned to his village, it was several months before I saw him again. His uncle told me he had taken a job in Delhi.
And then the uncle gave me notice. He’d found a better-paid job in Dehradun and was anxious to be off. I didn’t try to stop him.
For the next six months I lived in the cottage without any help. I did not find this difficult. I was used to living alone. It wasn’t service that I needed but companionship. It was very quiet in the cottage; sometimes I imagined I heard Miss Bean pottering about in the garden, but it was usually the old vagrant woman who came to raid the walnut tree and who sometimes grinned at me by way of apology for the theft, but more often didn’t seem to notice me. The song of the whistling thrush was still beautiful, but on some days I wished he would speak words, and address them to me. Up the valley, some evenings, came the sound of a flute, but I never saw the flute player.
One November afternoon, having typed the last sentence of a story, I decided to celebrate and took a long walk up the Tehri road. It was a good day for walking, and it was dark by the time I returned to Maplewood. Someone stood waiting for me on the road above the cottage.
‘Prem?’ I said. ‘Why are you sitting out here in the cold? Why didn’t you go to the house?’
‘I went, sir, but there was a lock on the door. I thought you had gone away.’
‘And you were going to stay here, on the road?’
‘Only for tonight. I would have gone down to Dehra in the morning.’
‘Come, let’s go home. I tried to find you. Your uncle told me you were working for someone in Delhi, but he didn’t have the address.’
‘I’ve left them now.’
‘And your uncle has left me. So will you work for me now?’
‘For as long as you wish.’
‘For as long as the gods wish.’
We did not go straight home, but returned to the bazaar and took our meal in the Sindhi Sweet Shop; hot puris with chhole, and strong sweet tea.
Then we walked home together in the moonlight.
It was the beginning of a long association, which continues to this day, as his family has grown, and become mine. Of course there were times when he could be infuriating, stubborn, deliberately pig-headed, sending me little notes of resignation—but I never found it difficult to overlook these little acts of self-indulgence. He had brought much love and laughter into my life, and what more could a lonely man ask for?
Two years after he made Maplewood his home, Prem went to his village near Rudraparayg to get married and returned with his tiny wife, Chandra, who was sixteen then. They took over all the household duties, leaving me to concentrate on my writing. And I was doing a fair amount of writing during those Maplewood years—producing stories and essays for anyone who would publish me.
In 1973, Prem became a father. It was a cold, wet and windy March evening when Prem came back from the village with his wife and first-born child, then barely four months old. In those days they had to walk to the house from the bus stand; it was a half-hour walk in the late winter rain, and the baby was all wrapped up when they entered the front room. Finally, I got a glimpse of him, and he of me, and it was friendship at first sight. Little Rakesh (as he was to be called) grabbed my nose and held on, and I played with his little dimpled chin until he smiled.
Little Rakesh is now in his forties, and I am in my eighties—‘Da’, or grandfather, to him and his wife Beena; to his three children—Siddharth, Shrishti and Gautam; to his brother Mukesh and sister Dolly, and to their children!
But those Maplewood years don’t seem that distant. Time, in the hills, moves at its own sweet pace, the seasons follow each other in a reassuringly predictable manner, the walnuts and horse-chestnuts ripen and fall; we ripen too, in our own way, and get a little older and not much wiser, blundering along but surviving somehow.
While Rakesh was still only a few months old I would carry him around the steep paths above the cottage, much to the amusement of the teachers and others who lived in the area. When he was old enough to manage the paths on his own, he would hold my hand and accompany me up to the ‘big bend’ of the motor road, to watch the cars and buses coming up from Dehradun. He helped me in the garden, planting fruit trees and waiting patiently for them to come up. So that we could take him further afield, we bought a pram (the first time I owned any sort of vehicle), and one day we set out on the Tehri road, then still a stony path suitable only for mules. After two hours of trundling along, we reached the village of Suakholi, where we subsided on to a grassy knoll, the pram and I greatly in need of rest and repair. It was almost dark by the time we got home. After that, our excursions were limited to less remote destinations, and I would let Prem do all the pushing.
Somewhere around this time I was approached by the editor-owner of a magazine called Imprint , published from Bombay, who asked me if I’d be interested in joining his editorial staff. I had been writing for Imprint for a year or two, publishing some of my longer stories in it; stories such as ‘Panther’s Moon’ and ‘A Flight of Pigeons’. R.V. Pandit, Imprint ’s owner, liked my work and wrote to me, offering me a job either in Hong Kong with The Asia Magazine (of which he was a part owner) or with Imprint in Bombay. I had no intention of leaving Mussoorie (which would have meant abandoning Prem and his growing family, and a lifestyle to which I had grown accustomed), so I turned down the job offer but agreed to write for both magazines on a regular basis. A compromise of sorts was reached when Pandit agreed to my being his managing editor, getting people to write for the magazine and putting it together every month; I could do this from Mussoorie, visiting Bombay just three or four times in the year.
This arrangement worked quite well. The first time I met Pandit he was recovering from a heart attack which he had suffered on a flight from Hong Kong to Bombay. I had come to Bombay to finalize our arrangement, and I found him in bed, recovering in the flat of his friend and business partner, Nusli Wadia of Bombay Dyeing, a grandson of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.
I spent an hour at Pandit’s bedside, nodding sagely at all his instructions, which were many. He was an unusual man, Goan by birth and Catholic by religion, who had ‘converted’ to Hinduism and had become a staunch nationalist and supporter of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, the precursor of the Bharatiya Janata Party. He was out of favour with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, having attacked her policies and style of functioning in a number of hard-hitting editorials. However, my apolitical attitude seemed to suit him, and although we met only occasionally during the next two or three years, we got on quite well. I was told that this was unusual. Not many people got on with Pandit.
He was to be an absentee editor-publisher, because when Indira Gandhi declared Emergency in 1975, Pandit very wisely stationed himself in Hong Kong, otherwise he would surely have been arrested along with the hundreds of scribes and political opponents of the regime who were effectively silenced for a couple of years. So while Pandit cooled his heels in Hong Kong, I ran the magazine for him, my editorials concentrating largely on environmental issues!
Even so, I was to find myself under arrest, although for very different reasons.
I was in our small garden, playing with two-year-old Rakesh and his baby brother Suresh, when an unfamiliar policeman turned up at the gate; unfamiliar, in that he was dressed a little differently from the local Uttar Pradesh police. He carried with him a non-bailable warrant for my arrest; the warrant described me as an editor of Time magazine, and an absconder wanted on an obscenity charge, the said ‘obscenity’ having been committed by my writing and publishing an obscene short story in a Bombay magazine.
I had indeed published a story called ‘The Sensualist’ in Debonair , a risqué magazine edited by Vinod Mehta, who was trying to enliven it with some literary inputs to counter the semi-nude full-page blow-ups of local beauties. ‘The Sensualist’ was a mildly erotic story about a recluse who reminisces about his misspent youth; but it was no Lady Chatterley’s Lover . Anyway, I had no option but to accompany the friendly policeman to the Mussoorie police station, while Prem went scurrying off to find someone to come to the aid of the ‘wanted’ author. Professors Ganesh Saili (a good friend and drinking and travelling partner) and Sudhakar Misra readily did so, and with the help of a local lawyer, Mr Jain, and a friendly station house officer, the warrant was changed into a bailable offence after I had undertaken to appear in a Bombay court the following month.
When invited to Bombay by R.V. Pandit, I had been put up at the Taj. Now I was on my own, and the Taj was well beyond my means. Instead I found sanctuary in the YMCA on Wodehouse Road, and stayed there for over a week, consulting with Debonair ’s lawyers, owners and editors, and appearing in court on the given date.
The case dragged on for two years, but I was given exemption from all but two appearances before the judge—a stern and somewhat irritable old gentleman who was, nevertheless, fair and impartial in his dealings. The complaint had been made by a local legislator, so the police had no option but to pursue the matter; but the prosecution did not appear to be very enthusiastic, and after several hearings I was given an honourable acquittal. Only two writers had appeared on my behalf—Nissim Ezekiel, the poet, and Vijay Tendulkar, the Marathi playwright. Khushwant Singh, then the editor of The Illustrated Weekly , declined to do so, although he had known me from my Delhi days; possibly because he did not hit it off with the Debonair people.
Pandit always felt that the case had been brought against me as an indirect way of getting at him, and he may have been right. I shall never know. The Emergency also ended about the time the case wound up.
It was always good to return to Maplewood after these trips to Bombay, and I was more than ever determined not to move to that fine city. On this last trip, freed from the spectre of spending time in a Bombay jail, I was in a happy state of mind as I took the path down through the oaks and maples to the little cottage. The petunias Miss Bean had planted still flourished on the cottage steps, and we had taken good care of them; and the lightning-scarred maple tree was still being visited by woodpeckers, finches and bulbuls. Prem was putting a mattress out in the sun; Chandra was sweeping the landing with a broom of twigs; Rakesh and Suresh were asleep in a corner of the small garden. I was home.
But all was not well at home. Little Suresh was seriously ill, suffering from high fever and frequent convulsions. The set of his jaw and the rigidity of his limbs made me think of tetanus; but the doctors at the Community Hospital pooh-poohed the idea and sent us home with a course of antibiotics. There was no improvement. We sent for a local physician who diagnosed meningitis. We then took Suresh to the Civil Hospital, where they said it was tetanus. I had been right in the first place. But it was too late to do much for little Suresh, who passed away after much suffering. It is terrible to see a little child suffer and be unable to do anything to relieve the agony. We were all quite heartbroken. It was almost as though the cottage, the hillside, had turned against us.
And even the hillside was being ravaged. The powers that be had decided to build a highway past the cottage, to link up the road to Tehri and the upcoming dam there. Soon trees were being felled, and rocks blasted by dynamite. Stones clattered down on the roof. Birds and small creatures fled. Oaks, maples and walnut trees came crashing down. Miss Bean’s flower-beds disappeared, as the road was being taken right through the property.
We fled too—up the hill, to a flat just below the Mall Road. It was all we could find at the time.
Pandit was urging me to come to Bombay, and after we’d lost Suresh to inadequate health care, I was almost tempted to go. But there was no accommodation in Bombay for all of us. And much as I enjoy the sea breeze, I was unwilling to give up the deodars. Pandit, now back from exile (Mrs Gandhi having been voted out of power), wanted an editor who could be seen as well as heard or read. This seemed natural enough. We parted amicably.
Follow the dictates of the heart—that had always been my way. It had often left me in some financial loss or difficulty, but I had overcome this by spending more time at the typewriter, and to my typewriter I now returned, full-time again.
There was now no regular income, just the odd cheque from a magazine or newspaper. Ismat Chughtai, the famous Urdu writer whom I had never met, must have been informed by a migrating bird or the wind about a fellow writer in distress up in the mountains, for she recommended my 1857 story, ‘A Flight of Pigeons’, to the film director Shyam Benegal. He liked it too, and decided to make a movie of it (which he called Junoon ). He and Shashi Kapoor, who produced and acted in the movie, gave me ten thousand rupees for the film rights.
This did not go very far, even in 1978, and by the time the film was released, I was an indigent writer again. Financial security would come to me only in the late 1990s—when I was in my sixties—about a decade after international publishers like Penguin had set up shop in the country and discovered that I was still alive and writing; and after Indian publishers like Rupa and Ratna Sagar had come into their own.
Before Indian book publishers found me, I was commissioned by a couple of institutions to write books for them. The only one I can now remember is a biography of Jawaharlal Nehru for children, and the reason I remember it is because I enjoyed researching Nehru’s life, and meeting the charming Padmaja Naidu on several occasions.
The idea was Karan Singh’s, and as he knew me, and thought well of my writing, he recommended my name to the Nehru Memorial Fund. Padmaja Naidu, daughter of Sarojini Naidu, was the chairman of the Nehru Memorial Fund, and it was she who commissioned me. She was a very friendly, pleasant lady, in her mid seventies then and living on the Teen Murti estate, where I would meet her for tea. At that time I had only published two or three books—many stories, but only a few books. Grandfather’s Private Zoo had just been published by India Book House and I gave her a copy, which she liked very much. She was a child at heart—and I had never really grown up! I think our mutual fondness had a lot to do with that.
Indira Gandhi had been shown the manuscript of the biography, and she said there were some episodes and people from Nehru’s life which could be added, so I asked for an appointment with her. I met her for about half an hour in her office; she was sitting behind an oval table, dressed in a cotton sari and looking smaller than I’d thought she would be. She told me mainly about her father’s family life—their trips to Kashmir and Mussoorie, his love of nature, and how much he liked to walk, especially in the hills
At the end of the interview, I asked, ‘Do you really have caviar for breakfast?’ There was a rumour going around that she did.
She laughed and said, ‘No, I don’t. But when I was in Russia recently, they used to give me caviar for breakfast. So people now probably think I have caviar for breakfast every day! I can’t get it, actually. It isn’t available.’
She was quite relaxed and shook my hand when I left. It had been quite a pleasant interaction; you wouldn’t have guessed she was the prime minister who had imposed a state of emergency in the country, and politicians and journalists were being arrested even as we spoke.
AS I WRITE, HAIL-STONES ARE RATTLING ON THE OLD TIN ROOF OF Ivy Cottage. The roof and the old stone walls have been through hundreds of hail-storms, snow-storms, monsoon downpours, gale-force winds, and hot summer sunshine. I like the sunshine most of all—but best after a shower, when the earth gives out a scent of its own, dusty leaves and grass are washed clean, and the cloud shapes keep changing, so that the light from my window arrives on my writing-pad in various shades—bright marigold yellow to pale nasturtium and balsam tints. The raindrops settle on the window panes, and the sun striking through them converts them into beads of bright topaz, effervescent jewels meant only for a few moments of reverie.
We came to this old building in the autumn of 1980, after some wandering about in search of a suitable home. The flat near the Mall, where we moved after leaving Maplewood, was too public. The house we moved to next, on the summit of Landour—Prospect Point—was a good 1,000 feet higher. The views were magnificent—a chain of Himalayan peaks etched against a sharp blue sky. At night the heavens brimmed with stars, and the Valley below with the twinkling lights of Dehra.
And here, at the top of the mountain, I acquired (for the second time in my life) something like writer’s block. Maybe it was too pretty up there, too relaxing; and those Himalayan peaks made one feel rather inadequate.
There was certainly no incentive to write, though there was enough reason to. The family was growing. Rakesh had started going to school, Mukesh, his new infant brother, was a few months old. Money was in short supply and royalties practically non-existent. Our landlord was a rapacious old man who kept thinking up new ways of extracting money from us. And the neighbours were not exactly friendly. These consisted mostly of Australian or European hippies, most of them on drugs; they had taken the place of the more sedate American missionaries who had once proliferated in Landour. There were also a few Brown Sahibs, retired brigadiers, air-marshals and their memsahibs, who looked on us with some disapproval. What was a bachelor-writer doing, living with a Pahari family who would normally be working as domestics for the high and mighty on the hillside?
There was only one walk, around the ‘chakkar’, encircling the higher reaches of the mountain. The view was splendid, provided the weather was clear. On misty monsoon days all you could see were crosses rising from a gloomy old cemetery. No one seemed interested in rising from the dead.
At one time the area had been a convalescent station for sick and weary British soldiers stationed in India and Burma, but even before Independence the British had stopped using it for this purpose. In the 1950s the Indian government had taken over the hospital and other buildings for ‘the defence institute of study work’, and the area had been revived a little.
There were a number of residences, most of them old houses, but they were at some distance from each other, separated by clumps of oak or stands of deodar. After sundown, flying-foxes swooped across the roads, and the nightjar set up its ‘tonk-tonk’ chant, and leopards circled the houses with dogs—one night, walking home, I saw a mother leopard jump over a parapet, with two cubs scurrying after her.
We shared a large building with several other tenants, one of whom, a French girl in her thirties, was learning to play the sitar and played it badly. She and her tabla-playing boyfriend would sleep by day, but practice all through the night, making sleep impossible for our household. Even a raging forest fire, which forced everyone else to evacuate the building for a night, did not keep her from her sitar. Mercifully, her stay there was brief. The hippies who came and went, sometimes laughing through the night, high on marijuana, were far less trouble; many of them were gentle people.
The friends I had were all a thousand feet below Prospect Point—Bill Aitken, the Maharani of Jind, Ganesh Saili and his wife Abha (who once shepherded me home after I’d had a few bhang pakoras at a party!), and Nandu Jauhar, who owned the iconic Savoy Hotel. The Savoy, where ancient bearers and sundry ghosts outnumbered the guests, became my favourite watering hole for some years.
But most of my time was spent with the family. Early morning, I would accompany Rakesh down to the little convent school, St Clare’s, at the end of Landour Bazaar, about two miles distant. I would take a light breakfast before setting out; but by the time I returned, struggling up that steep mountain, I was ready for a second breakfast. Despite all the walking, I began to put on weight, and I haven’t stopped since.
On the way to school, Rakesh would often ask me to tell him a story, preferably one about animals. So I made up a man-eating leopard, and every day it would snap up and devour one of the residents of Landour, much to Rakesh’s amusement and my own satisfaction. Brigadiers, naval commanders, the odd missionary, and our greedy old landlord, all fell victim to the marauding leopard. Finally, when we left Prospect Point, the leopard had to die, presumably of acute indigestion.
Our fortunes changed when we moved into Ivy Cottage. In spite of rumours that the ground floor had once been used as the morgue of a local hospital, the building brought no ill-luck. On the contrary, I found myself writing regularly again, and stories, essays, poems and novellas rained down upon my desk.
It may have had something to do with the little room.
A ‘real’ writer should be able to write anywhere—on board a ship, in a moving train, in a prison cell, in a hospital bed, in a five-star hotel room, or in a dingy attic—and I have written a few things in several of these places; but over a period of time, it helps to have a permanent abode, a familiar room, and above all, a window from which to look out upon the world. It gives me the sky, clouds of every description, mountain ranges, several roads, red tin roofs in masses of green trees, and a garbage dump as a reality check. I have no garden outside the window, and no walnut and maple trees, but the window-sill affords just enough space to grow geraniums in old tins and small plastic buckets.
I have lived and worked and loved and grown old in this room over thirty-six years, and I now wear it like an old suit, a little frayed but still comfortable.
The house has more rooms now, and has been repaired and reinforced piecemeal, but in the early days, the walls were weak and the windows rattled, and on one occasion the roof blew away.
Built at the very edge of a spur by missionaries in the late nineteenth century, the house had received the brunt of wind and rain that swept across the hills from the east. We’d lived on the top floor of the building for over ten years without any untoward happening. It had even taken the shock of an earthquake without sustaining any major damage.
The roof consisted of corrugated tin sheets, the ceiling, of wooden boards—the traditional hill-station roof. It had held fast in many a storm, but one night the wind was stronger than we’d ever known it. It was cyclonic in its intensity, and it came rushing at us with a high-pitched eerie wail. The old roof groaned and protested at the unrelieved pressure. It took this battering for several hours while the rain lashed against the windows, and the lights kept coming and going.
There was no question of sleeping, but we remained in bed for warmth and comfort. The fire had long since gone out, the chimney stack having collapsed, bringing down a shower of sooty rain water.
After about four hours of buffeting, the roof could take it no longer. My bedroom faces east, so my portion of the roof was the first to go. The wind got under it and kept pushing, until, with a ripping, groaning sound, the metal sheets shifted from their moorings, some of them dropping with claps like thunder onto the road below.
So that’s it, I thought, nothing worse can happen. As long as the ceiling stays on, I’m not getting out of my bed. We’ll pick up the roof in the morning.
Icy water cascading down on my face made me change my mind in a hurry. Leaping from my bed, I found that much of the ceiling had gone too. Water was pouring onto my open typewriter—my trusty companion for almost thirty years!—and onto the bedside radio, bedcovers, and clothes cupboard.
Picking up my precious typewriter and abandoning the rest, I stumbled into the front sitting-room (cum library), only to find that a similar situation had developed there. Water was pouring through the wooden slats, raining down on the bookshelves.
By now I had been joined by the children—Rakesh, Mukesh and Dolly (born the year we moved into Ivy Cottage). They had come to rescue me; their section of the roof hadn’t gone as yet. Their parents were struggling to close a window that had burst open, letting in lashings of wind and rain.
‘Save the books!’ shouted Dolly, and that became our rallying cry for the next hour or two.
I have open shelves, vulnerable to borrowers as well as to floods. Dolly and her brothers picked up armfuls of books and carried them into their room. But the floor was now awash all over the apartment, so the books had to be piled on the beds. Dolly was helping me gather up some of my manuscripts when a large field rat leapt onto the desk in front of her. Dolly squealed and ran for the door.
‘It’s all right,’ said Mukesh, whose love of animals extends even to field rats. ‘He’s only sheltering from the storm.’
Big brother Rakesh whistled for our mongrel, Toby, but Toby wasn’t interested in rats just then. He had taken shelter in the kitchen, the only dry spot in the house.
At this point, two rooms were practically roofless, and the sky was frequently lighted up for us by flashes of lightning. There were fireworks inside too, as water sputtered and crackled along a damaged electric wire. Then the lights went out altogether, which in some ways made the house a safer place.
Prem, always at his best in an emergency, had already located and lit two kerosene lamps; so we continued to transfer books, papers, and clothes to the children’s room.
We noticed that the water on the floor was beginning to subside a little.
‘Where is it going?’ asked Dolly, for we could see no outlet.
‘Through the floor,’ said Mukesh. ‘Down to the rooms below.’
He was right, too. Cries of consternation from our neighbours told us that they were now having their share of the flood.
Our feet were freezing because there hadn’t been time to put on enough protective footwear, and in any case, shoes and slippers were awash. Tables and chairs were also piled high with books. I hadn’t realized the considerable size of my library until that night.
The available beds were pushed into the driest corner of the children’s room and there, huddled in blankets and quilts, we spent the remaining hours of the night, while the storm continued to threaten further mayhem.
But then the wind fell, and it began to snow. Through the door to the sitting-room I could see snowflakes drifting through the gaps in the ceiling, settling on picture frames, statuettes and miscellaneous ornaments. Mundane things like a glue-bottle and a plastic doll took on a certain beauty when covered with soft snow. The clock on the wall had stopped and with its covering of snow reminded me of a painting by Salvador Dali.
Most of us dozed off.
I sensed that the direction of the wind had changed, and that it was now blowing from the west; it was making a rushing sound in the trees rather than in what remained of our roof. The clouds were scurrying away.
When the dawn broke, we found the window-panes encrusted with snow and icicles. Then the rising sun struck through the gaps in the ceiling and turned everything to gold. Snow crystals glinted like diamonds on the empty bookshelves. I crept into my abandoned bedroom to find the philodendron in the corner by the bed looking like a Christmas tree.
Prem went out to find a carpenter and a tin-smith, while the rest of us started putting things in the sun to dry them out. And by evening, we’d put much of the roof on again. Vacant houses are impossible to find in Mussoorie, so there was no question of moving.
But it was a much improved roof after that, and we looked forward to approaching storms with some confidence. And now, as I give the final touches to this autobiography, Rakesh and his wife Beena are having the roof raised and reinforced, so another generation can live here, safe from storms and ill winds of every description.
In 2002, as my financial condition had improved somewhat, I was finally persuaded by my family, and Ram Chander, our landlord, to buy Ivy Cottage. Fortunately, it only cost a couple of lakh of rupees, and for the first time in my life I became the owner of a piece of property.
I became old and found myself in demand. People started recognizing me and asking for my autograph (sometimes on books written by Mark Twain, Mark Tully and Rudyard Kipling). I suppose if you keep at something for fifty or sixty years, you will have produced so much material—pictures or cuckoo clocks or monkey-caps or books—that people will begin to take notice. Perseverance does pay. Men who work steadily for money get rich; men and women who work day and night for fame or power reach their goal. And those who work for deeper, more artistic or spiritual achievements will find them too. What we seek may come to us when we no longer have any use for it, but if we have been willing it long enough, it will come!
I have never desired fame, and I have never wanted to be the lone, loud man on the summit. I no longer scorn money, but wealth doesn’t interest me very much once my needs and the needs of those who depend on me have been met. I’m happiest just putting pen to paper—writing about a dandelion flowering on a patch of wasteland, and a stunted deaf and mute child I fell in love with; writing about the joys and sorrows and strivings of ordinary folk, and the ridiculous situations in which we sometimes find ourselves. I’m lucky that many readers, both children and adults, have enjoyed what I’ve written.
Some of them come up to Mussoorie to see me. They expect to find a recluse living in a cottage full of eccentric birds and animals and surrounded by trees, and they are surprised by this little flat right at the edge of the road. Sometimes they find a grumpy old man in pyjamas whose sleep has been interrupted; more often someone from the family will meet them at the door to explain why a family needs privacy and a writer needs time alone to write.
Not everyone is easily dissuaded, especially people who come with manuscripts they want me to read—they don’t want a frank assessment; they want an endorsement and a letter of recommendation to my publishers. I remember this very persistent lady who wouldn’t go away even when I told her I had the ’flu, of a very contagious variety.
‘I have to talk to you,’ she said, standing at the door, one foot inside. ‘I’ve written a novel. I think it’s better than Arundhati Roy’s but I don’t have her connections and publishers won’t see me. I want you to read it and write a foreword.’
‘Well, why don’t you leave the manuscript with me and I’ll write you a letter when I’ve read it,’ I said.
‘I haven’t finished it yet, I want to tell you the story.’
‘That might take a long time, and I’m expecting an important phone call. Why not come back when the book is finished?’ And I encouraged her down the stairs.
‘You are very rude, Ruskin Bond,’ she said. ‘You did not even ask me in. I’ll report you to Khushwant Singh. He’s a friend of mine. He’ll put you in his column.’
‘If Khushwant Singh is your friend,’ I said, ‘why are you bothering with me? He knows all the big publishers and he’s very famous. Ask him for a foreword.’
She went off in a huff, and fortunately I never saw her again. And I never got into Khushwant Singh’s column.
Oddly enough, some of the most frequent visitors to my humble flat are honeymooners. Why, I don’t know, but they always ask for my ‘blessings’, even though I am hardly an advertisement for marital bliss, and have never written a steamy novel that might prove useful in their fertile season. Maybe they are under the impression that I’ve been a celibate man, and the blessings of sexually innocent adults are believed to be potent.
It is seldom that these honeymooners happen to be readers or book-lovers; and they are too much in love to make interesting conversation. I should really send them to more suitable elders, or at least to someone who goes to places of worship. However, since the young couples are attractive, and full of high hopes for their future and the future of mankind, I’m happy to talk to them and wish them well. And if it’s a blessing they want, I bless them—my hands are far from being saintly, but at least they are well-intentioned.
Even Bollywood has come calling. Vishal Bhardwaj made a film based on one of my stories, ‘Susanna’s Seven Husbands’ (the film is called Saat Khoon Maaf ), and gave me a small role in it. I played a padre and was required to exchange a few pleasantries with the beautiful Priyanka Chopra and give her a fatherly peck on the cheek. But I must have been very bad, because I was never offered another role!
My friend Shubhadarshini Singh, however, has a high opinion of my acting skills, and keeps threatening to put me in her television productions. She produced a very nice TV series of my Rusty stories—called Ek tha Rusty —which was shown on Doordarshan in the mid-1990s and got my books some attention. She and her director had put together an excellent cast, bringing in the old-timers Nadira, Zohra Sehgal, Pearl Padamsee and Begum Para. Most of the episodes were shot in Mussoorie, and they were all staying at the Savoy Hotel, where I would meet them. Begum Para was lively and flamboyant even at that age, and you could see what had made her a star. She was the glamour girl of Bombay back in the 1940s and ’50s, and I remember seeing her pictures in the papers when I was a boy. Life magazine had published a photo feature on her, which had made her popular with American GIs in Korea.
My experience with Begum Para was less heady, limited to mutton curry. She loved cooking and displaced the hotel chef to cook us a meal. But she was defeated by the hardy Mussoorie goat, which resisted all her endeavours to turn it into an edible rogan josh. She gave up some two hours later, and we chomped our way through stringy meat.
If you live in one place for a long time, the years slip by almost unnoticed, the seasons bring much the same, and the trees and houses on the hillside appear practically unchanged.
Of course children grow up, and middle-aged authors become ageing authors. Today, Rakesh, Mukesh and Dolly are all married, with children. Dolly lives in Punjab with her husband’s family, and Mukesh and his wife and children live with Prem and Chandra in a second house half a kilometre below Ivy Cottage.
Rakesh and Beena, and their three children, live with me and take good care to see that I wash and shave and bathe and change my pyjamas regularly. The papers, manuscripts and correspondence pile up on my desk, but I manage to handle most of it, and my literary production is on a par with what it used to be forty or fifty years ago. But I have abandoned the old typewriter and gone back to writing by hand. I write books and letters by hand, and in the age of email and mobile phones, I send postcards. I’m a very backward person, stubbornly refusing to use a computer or cell-phone. New tricks don’t suit an old fox.
Fifty years in the hills has made a great change from all those comings and goings during my boyhood and youth. It’s good to be in one place for a certain length of time, in order to savour the passing seasons, the changes in the foliage of the hillside, the comings and goings of people, and above all, to watch the children grow up.
I haven’t tired of the two windows in my room. The view hasn’t changed, but the cloud patterns are never the same, the birdsong varies, so does the blue dome of the sky, which at night is like a tent of deep purple spangled all over. Some nights are dark, lit up only by fireflies. Other nights are bright with the full moon coming up over the crest of the mountain and sending a moonbeam in at my window, over my bed and then across my desk to light up the face of the Laughing Buddha who sits there. He seems more amused than ever in the light of the moon; laughing tolerantly at the foibles of the human race and mine in particular. But he encourages me to blunder on, and to keep writing, building up a store of stories and sketches and random tales.
I’m like a shopkeeper hoarding bags full of grain, only, I hoard words. There are still people who buy words, and I hope I can keep bringing a little sunshine and pleasure into their lives to the end of my days.
LAST YEAR RAKESH AND BEENA ACCOMPANIED ME TO Bhubaneshwar, and from there we went on to Konarak and Puri. In Puri they visited the Jaganath temple. I was not allowed inside. So I sat in the car for almost three hours, reading a fascinating book on Oriya history by J.P. Das.
At Konarak I was told I was a ‘foreigner’ and had to pay the extra entry fee. Standing behind me was a Sikh gentleman with a British passport, who was allowed in as an ‘Indian’. Rakesh and Beena protested, saying I was as Indian as the banyan tree outside, but the gatekeeper was not convinced. ‘Nothing to fuss about,’ I said, and I paid the foreigners’ enhanced fee.
The Sikh gentleman asked me where I’d been born and I told him Kasauli, which at the time was part of the Sikh State of Patiala, later amalgamated with East Punjab and now Himachal Pradesh.
‘And where were you born?’ I asked.
‘Birmingham,’ he said.
Being Indian, and feeling Indian, has little to do with one’s place of birth or one’s religion. While I was still at school I wasn’t particularly conscious of being anything in particular. It was only after I had left India, in 1951, at the age of seventeen, that I realized that I was Indian to the core and could be nothing else.
It wasn’t family that brought me back, it was the country, the land itself, and all that lived and grew upon it. It is India that has made me. I have loved it, and for the most part, it has loved me back.
And in a small flat on a small hill in the vastness of India, I’m writing the last lines of my autobiography. In the still of the afternoon, the deodars stand like sentinels on the northern slopes of Landour. It is late April and the oaks and horse-chestnuts are in new leaf. There is a certain tenderness in the air, and in today’s world that is something to be valued.
Rakesh and Beena sit beside me on the parapet. Friend and publisher Ravi hovers protectively over us. Gautam, Rakesh’s youngest, is busy with a camera, pretending to be Raghu Rai or Cartier-Bresson. His elder brother Siddharth is in Bombay, working with a film costume designer; his sister Shrishti is in Bhubaneshwar, at KIIT University. Friends and familiars come and go, the earth still revolves around the sun, the world is once again in crisis, but the cricket chirping on my window-sill sounds optimistic about it all.
The lone fox still dances occasionally, but at eighty-three he is not as agile as he used to be. ‘When you are old and grey and full of sleep’, it is good to have someone to lean on from time to time, and in that respect this agnostic has been blessed by the gods. I still value my solitude, but it is also nice to have someone tucking me into bed at night.
As for my writing life, it is a running stream, for there is no limit to the field of my remembrance. Even as this book comes to an end, I am conscious of not having written about important people, important events; but it is a personal history, and it is the ‘unimportant’ people who have made my life worthwhile, as an individual and as a writer.
And both as individual and writer, I have known my limitations, and I think I have done my best with the talents I possess. Sometimes it is good to fail; to lose what you most desire; to come second. And the future is too unpredictable for anxiety.
This is the evening of a long and fairly fulfilling life. And it is late evening in Landour. A misty, apricot light suffuses the horizon. Down in the villages the apricots are ripening. A small boy brought me the fresh fruit this morning—still very sour, very tangy, but full of promise. And if apricots could take precedence over missiles, the world would be full of promise too.
I’m afraid science and politics have let us down.
But the cricket still sings on the window-sill.