Our Trees Still Grow In Dehra Read online

  RUSKIN BOND

  Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra

  Stories

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also By Ruskin Bond

  Dedication

  Return to Dehra

  Maplewood: An Introduction

  Escape from Java

  The Bent-Double Beggar

  Untouchable

  All Creatures Great and Small

  Coming Home to Dehra

  What’s Your Dream?

  The Last Tonga Ride

  Calypso Christmas

  The Last Time I Saw Delhi

  The Good Old Days

  Binya Passes By

  As Time Goes By

  From Small Beginnings

  Death of the Trees

  The Bar That Time Forgot

  Desert Rhapsody

  Footnotes

  As Time Goes By

  From Small Beginnings

  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  OUR TREES STILL GROW IN DEHRA

  Ruskin Bond’s first novel, The Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written several novellas (including Vagrants in the Valley, A Flight of Pigeons and Delhi Is Not Far), essays, poems and children’s books, many of which have been published by Penguin India. He has also written over 500 short stories and articles that have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993 and the Padma Shri in 1999.

  Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, and grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun, Delhi and Shimla. As a young man, he spent four years in the Channel Islands and London. He returned to India in 1955 and has never left the country since. He now lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his adopted family.

  Also By Ruskin Bond

  Fiction

  The Room on the Roof & Vagrants in the Valley

  The Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories

  Time Stops at Shamli and Other Stories

  Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra

  A Season of Ghosts

  When Darkness Falls and Other Stories

  A Flight of Pigeons

  Delhi Is Not Far

  A Face in the Dark and Other Hauntings

  The Sensualist

  A Handful of Nuts

  Non-Fiction

  Rain in the Mountains

  Scenes from a Writer’s Life

  The Lamp Is Lit

  The Little Book of Comfort

  Landour Days

  Notes from a Small Room

  Anthologies

  Dust on the Mountain: Collected Stories The Best of Ruskin Bond

  Friends in Small Places

  Indian Ghost Stories (ed.)

  Indian Railway Stories (ed.)

  Classical Indian Love Stories and Lyrics (ed.)

  Tales of the Open Road

  Ruskin Bond’s Book of Nature

  Ruskin Bond’s Book of Humour

  A Town Called Dehra

  Classic Ruskin Bond

  Poetry

  Ruskin Bond’s Book of Verse

  For Prem and the family

  As my stuff settles into shape, I am told (and sometimes myself discover, uneasily, but feel all right about it in calmer moments) it is mainly autobiographic and even egotistic after all—which I finally accept, and am contented so.

  – Walt Whitman

  Return to Dehra

  So this is old Dehra of mangoes and lemons,

  Where I grew beside the jackfruit tree

  Planted by my father on the sunny side

  Of the house since sold to Major-General Mehra.

  The town’s grown hard, none know me now or knew

  My mother’s laughter. Most men come home as strangers.

  And yet, the trees my father planted here, these

  Trees—old family trees—are growing still in Dehra.

  Maplewood: An Introduction

  It isn’t many years since I left Maplewood, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the cottage has disappeared. Already, during my last months there, the trees were being cut and the new road was being blasted out of the mountain. It would pass just below the old cottage. There were (as far as I know) no plans to blow up the house; but it was already shaky and full of cracks, and a few tremors, such as those produced by passing trucks, drilling machines and bulldozers, would soon bring the cottage to the ground.

  If it has gone, don’t write and tell me: I’d rather not know.

  When I moved in, it had been nestling there among the oaks 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 moved into the attic. Some denizens remained, even during my residence. And I was there—how long? Eight, nine years, I’m not sure; it was a timeless sort of place. Even the rent was paid only once a year, at a time of my choosing.

  I first saw the cottage in late spring, when the surrounding forest was at its best—the oaks and maples in new leaf, the oak leaves a pale green, the maple leaves red and gold and bronze, turning to green as they matured; this is the Himalayan maple, 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, so that the Garhwalis call it the Butterfly Tree.

  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 haunt of woodpeckers: the ancient peeling bark seemed to harbour any number of tiny insects, and the woodpeckers would be tapping away all day, seeking to dislodge and devour their sweet, succulent prey.

  A steep path ran down to the cottage. During heavy rain, it would become a watercourse and the earth would be washed away to leave it very stony and uneven. I first took this path to see Miss Mackenzie, an impoverished old lady who lived in two small rooms on the ground floor and who was acting on behalf of the owner. It was she who told me that the cottage was to let—provided she could remain in the portion downstairs.

  Actually, the path ran straight across a landing and up to the front door of the first floor. It was the ground floor that was tucked away in the shadow of the hill; it was reached by a flight of steps, which also took the rush of water when the path was in flood.

  Miss Mackenzie was eighty-six. I helped her up the steps and she opened the door for me. It led into an L-shaped room. There were two large windows, and when I pushed the first of these open, the forest seemed to rush upon me. The maples, oaks, rhododendrons, and an old walnut, moved closer, out of curiosity perhaps. A branch tapped against the window-panes, while from below, from the ravine, the deep-throated song of the whistling thrush burst upon me.

  I told Miss Mackenzie I would take the place. She grew excited; it must have been lonely for her during the past several years, with most of the cottage lying empty, and only her old bearer and a mongrel dog for company. Her own house had been mortgaged to a moneylender. Her brothers and sisters were long dead. ‘I’m the last Mackenzie in India,’ she told me.

  I told her I would move in soon: my books were still in Delhi. She gave me the keys and I left a cheque with her.

  It was all done on an impulse—the decision to give up my job in Delhi, find a cheap house in a hill-station, and return to freelance writing. It was a dream I’d had for some time; lack of money had made it difficult to realize. But then, I knew that if I was going to wait for money to come, I might have to wait until I was old and grey and full of sleep. I was thirty-five—still young enough to take a few risks. If the
dream was to become reality, this was the time to do something about it.

  I don’t know what led me to Maplewood; it was the first place I saw, and I did not bother to see any others. The location was far from being ideal. It faced east, and stood in the shadow of the Balahissar Hill; so that 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 was all right in summer, but in winter it meant a cold, dark house.

  There was no view of the snows and no view of the plains. In front stood Burnt Hill, or Pari Tibba (Hill of the Fairies), where apparently lightning played and struck more frequently than elsewhere. But the forest below the cottage seemed full of possibilities, and the windows opening on to it probably decided the issue. In my romantic frame of my mind, I was susceptible to magic casements opening wide.

  I would make a window-seat and lie there on a summer’s day, writing lyric poetry ….

  But long before that could happen I was opening tins of sardines and sharing them with Miss Mackenzie. And then Prem came along. And there were others, like Binya.

  I went away at times, but returned as soon as possible. Once you have lived with mountains, there is no escape. You belong to them.

  Most of these stories (including those about my childhood) were written in Maplewood. So were many of the stories in my other two collections The Night Train to Deoli and Time Stops at Shamli. The old cottage was kind to a struggling young writer.

  Mussoorie

  October 1991

  Ruskin Bond

  Escape from Java

  It all happened within the space of a few days. The cassia tree had barely come into flower when the first bombs fell on Batavia (now called Jakarta) and the bright pink blossoms lay scattered over the wreckage in the streets.

  News had reached us that Singapore had fallen to the Japanese. My father said: ‘I expect it won’t be long before they take Java. With the British defeated, how can the Dutch be expected to win!’ He did not mean to be critical of the Dutch; he knew they did not have the backing of an Empire such as Britain then had Singapore had been called the Gibraltar of the East. After its surrender there could only be retreat, a vast exodus of Europeans from South-East Asia.

  It was World War II. What the Javanese thought about the war is now hard for me to say, because I was only nine at the time and knew very little of worldly matters. Most people knew they would be exchanging their Dutch rulers for Japanese rulers; but there were also many who spoke in terms of freedom for Java when the war was over.

  Our neighbour, Mr Hartono, was one of those who looked ahead to a time when Java, Sumatra and the other islands would make up one independent nation. He was a college professor and spoke Dutch, Chinese, Javanese and a little English. His son, Sono, was about my age. He was the only boy I knew who could talk to me in English, and as a result we spent a lot of time together. Our favourite pastime was flying kites in the park.

  The bombing soon put an end to kite flying. Air raid alerts sounded at all hours of the day and night, and although in the beginning most of the bombs fell near the docks, a couple of miles from where we lived, we had to stay indoors. If the planes sounded very near, we dived under beds or tables. I don’t remember if there were any trenches. Probably there hadn’t been time for trench digging, and now there was time only for digging graves. Events had moved all too swiftly, and everyone (except of course the Javanese) was anxious to get away from Java.

  ‘When are you going?’ asked Sono, as we sat on the veranda steps in a pause between air raids.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It all depends on my father.’

  ‘My father says the Japs will be here in a week. And if you’re still here then, they’ll put you to work building a railway.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind building a railway,’ I said.

  ‘But they won’t give you enough to eat. Just rice with worms in it. And if you don’t work properly, they’ll shoot you.’

  ‘They do that to soldiers,’ I said. ‘We’re civilians.’

  ‘They do it to civilians, too,’ said Sono.

  What were my father and I doing in Batavia, when our home had been first in India and then in Singapore? He worked for a firm dealing in rubber, and six months earlier he had been sent to Batavia to open a new office in partnership with a Dutch business house Although I was so young, I accompanied my father almost everywhere My mother left when I was very small, and my father had always looked after me. After the war was over he was going to take me to England.

  ‘Are we going to win the war?’ I asked.

  ‘It doesn’t look it from here,’ he said.

  No, it didn’t look as though we were winning. Standing at the docks with my father, I watched the ships arrive from Singapore crowded with refugees—men, women and children, all living on the decks in the hot tropical sun; they looked pale and worn-out and worried. They were on their way to Colombo or Bombay. No one came ashore at Batavia. It wasn’t British territory; it was Dutch, and everyone knew it wouldn’t be Dutch for long.

  ‘Aren’t we going too?’ I asked. ‘Sono’s father says the Japs will be here any day.’

  ‘We’ve still got a few days,’ said my father. He was a short, stocky man, who seldom got excited. If he was worried, he didn’t show it. ‘I’ve got to wind up a few business matters, and then we’ll be off.’

  ‘How will we go? There’s no room for us on those ships.’

  ‘There certainly isn’t. But we’ll find a way, lad, don’t worry.’

  I didn’t worry. I had complete confidence in my father’s ability to find a way out of difficulties. He used to say, ‘Every problem has a solution hidden away somewhere, and if only you look hard enough you will find it.’

  There were British soldiers in the streets but they did not make us feel much safer. They were just waiting for troop ships to come and take them away. No one, it seemed, was interested in defending Java, only in getting out as fast as possible.

  Although the Dutch were unpopular with the Javanese people, there was no ill-feeling against individual Europeans. I could walk safely through the streets. Occasionally small boys in the crowded Chinese quarter would point at me and shout, ‘Orang Balandi!’ (Dutchman!) but they did so in good humour, and I didn’t know the language well enough to stop and explain that the English weren’t Dutch. For them, all white people were the same, and understandably so.

  My father’s office was in the commercial area, along the canal banks. Our two-storied house, about a mile away, was an old building with a roof of red tiles and a broad balcony which had stone dragons at either end. There were flowers in the garden almost all the year round. If there was anything in Batavia more regular than the bombing, it was the rain, which came pattering down on the roof and on the banana fronds almost every afternoon. In the hot and steamy atmosphere of Java, the rain was always welcome.

  There were no anti-aircraft guns in Batavia—at least we never heard any—and the Jap bombers came over at will, dropping their bombs by daylight. Sometimes bombs fell in the town. One day the building next to my father’s office received a direct hit and tumbled into the river. A number of office workers were killed.

  The schools closed, and Sono and I had nothing to do all day except sit in the house, playing darts or carrom, wrestling on the carpets, or playing the gramophone. We had records by Gracie Fields, Harry Lauder, George Formby and Arthur Askey, all popular British artists of the early 1940s. One song by Arthur Askey made fun of Adolph Hitler, with the words, ‘Adolph, we’re gonna hang up your washing on the Siegfried Line, if the Siegfried Line’s still there!’ It made us feel quite cheerful to know that back in Britain people were confident of winning the war!

  One day Sono said, ‘The bombs are falling on Batavia, not in the countryside. Why don’t we get cycles and ride out of town?’

  I fell in with the idea at once. After the morning all-clear had sounded, we mounted our cycles and rode out of town.
Mine was a hired cycle, but Sono’s was his own. He’d had it since the age of five, and it was constantly in need of repairs. ‘The soul has gone out of it,’ he used to say.

  Our fathers were at work; Sono’s mother had gone out to do her shopping (during air raids she took shelter under the most convenient shop counter) and wouldn’t be back for at least an hour. We expected to be back before lunch.

  We were soon out of town, on a road that passed through rice fields, pineapple orchards and cinchona plantations. On our right lay dark green hills; on our left, groves of coconut palms and, beyond them, the sea. Men and women were working in the rice fields, knee-deep in mud, their broad-brimmed hats protecting them from the fierce sun. Here and there a buffalo wallowed in a pool of brown water, while a naked boy lay stretched out on the animal’s broad back.

  We took a bumpy track through the palms. They grew right down to the edge of the sea. Leaving our cycles on the shingle, we ran down a smooth, sandy beach and into the shallow water.

  ‘Don’t go too far in,’ warned Sono. ‘There may be sharks about.’

  Wading in amongst the rocks, we searched for interesting shells, then sat down on a large rock and looked out to sea, where a sailing ship moved placidly on the crisp, blue waters. It was difficult to imagine that half the world was at war, and that Batavia, two or three miles away, was right in the middle of it.

  On our way home we decided to take a short cut through the rice fields, but soon found that our tires got bogged down in the soft mud. This delayed our return; and to make things worse, we got the roads mixed up and reached an area of the town that seemed unfamiliar. We had barely entered the outskirts when the siren sounded, to be followed soon after by the drone of approaching aircraft.

  ‘Should we get off our cycles and take shelter somewhere?’ I called out.