A Town Called Dehra Read online

  ‘There was a wild flower, a weed, that grew all over Dehra and still does. We called it Blue Mint. It grow in ditches, in neglected gardens, anywhere there’s a bit of open land... I have known it since I was a boy, and as long as it’s there I shall know that a part of me still lives in Dehra’.

  In this delightful collection, Ruskin Bond introduces us to the Dehradun he knows intimately and loves unreservedly—the town that he had spent many years of his childhood and youth in. A town which, when he knew it, was one of pony-drawn tongas and rickshaws; a town fond of gossip but tolerant of human foibles; a town of lush lichi trees, charming winter gardens and cool streams; a small town, a sleepy town, a town called ‘Dehra’.

  With classic stories and poems like ‘Masterji’, ‘Growing up with Trees’ and ‘A Song for Lost Friends’ and previously unpublished treasures like ‘Silver Screen’, ‘Dilaram Bazaar’ and ‘Lily of the Valley’, this anthology is replete with journal entries, extracts from the author’s memoirs and, of course, poetry, non-fiction and stories set in or inspired by Dehra.

  Evocative, wistful and witty as only Ruskin Bond can be, A Town called Dehra is a celebration of a dearly loved town as well as an elegy for a way of life gone extinct.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  A TOWN CALLED 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

  Strangers in the Night: Two Novellas

  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

  Non-fiction

  Rain in the Mountains

  Scenes from a Writer’s Life

  The Lamp Is Lit

  The Little Book of Comfort

  Landour Days

  Anthologies

  Collected Fiction (1955–1996)

  The Best of Ruskin Bond

  Friends in Small Places

  Indian Ghost Stories (ed.)

  Indian Railway Stories (ed.)

  Classic Indian Love Stories and Lyrics (ed.)

  Tales of the Open Road

  Ruskin Bond’s Book of Nature

  Ruskin Bond’s Book of Humour

  Poetry

  Ruskin Bond’s Book of Verse

  A Town Called Dehra

  RUSKIN BOND

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Group (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Penguin Books India 2008

  Copyright © Ruskin Bond 2008

  All rights reserved

  ISBN 978-01-4306-469-5

  This Digital Edition published 2011. e-ISBN: 978-81-8475-052-2

  Digital conversion prepared by DK Digital Media, India.

  This e-book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above-mentioned publisher of this e-book.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Introduction

  A Childhood in the Shade of Lichi Trees

  Coming Home to Dehra

  Dehradun—Winter of ’45

  The Last Tonga Ride

  Growing Up with Trees

  Adventures in a Banyan Tree

  The Old Gramophone

  The Photograph

  A Vagrant in the Doon Valley

  On the Road to Dehra

  The Window

  What’s Your Dream?

  As Time Goes By

  The Silver Screen

  In My Twenties: Writing and Living

  First Time I Saw My Novel in Print

  Living Without Money

  Meena

  Geoffrey Davis

  The Garlands on His Brow

  Looking for the Dehra I Knew

  Landour Days: Notes from My Journal

  In Search of a Winter Garden

  Lily of the Valley

  The Dilaram Bazaar

  Pedestrian in Peril

  My Father’s Trees in Dehra

  A Song for Lost Friends

  Parts of Old Dehra

  Introduction

  Formally, it’s known as Dehradun, but in the 1940s and 1950s, when we were young, everyone called it Dehra.

  That’s where I spent much of my childhood, boyhood, and early manhood, and it was the Dehra I wrote about in many of my books and stories.

  It was very different from the Dehradun of today—much smaller, much greener, considerably less crowded; sleepier too, and somewhat laid-back, easy-going; fond of gossip, but tolerant of human foibles. A place of bicycles and pony-drawn tongas. Only a few cars; no three-wheelers. And you could walk almost anywhere, at any time of the year, night or day.

  The Dehra I knew really fell into three periods. The Dehra of my childhood, staying in my grandmother’s house on the old Survey Road (not much left of that bungalow now). The Dehra of my schooldays, when I would come home for the holidays to stay with my mother and stepfather—a different house on about every vi
sit, right up until the time I left for England. And then the Dehra of my return to India, when I lived on my own in a small flat above Astley Hall, and wrote many of the stories that you will find in this book.

  Front veranda of Granny’s house in Dehradun. The dog was called ‘Crazy’.

  My mother, age six or seven, in a Dehradun garden (circa 1920).

  While I was in England I wrote my first novel, The Room on the Roof, which was all about the Dehra I had left and the people and young friends I had known and loved. It was a little immature but it came straight from the heart—the heart and mind of a seventeen-year-old—and if it’s still fresh today, fifty years after its first publication, it’s probably because it was so spontaneous and unsophisticated.

  Back in Dehra, I wrote a sequel of sorts, Vagrants in the Valley. It wasn’t as good, probably because I had exhausted my adolescence as a subject for fiction; but it did capture aspects of life in Dehra and the Doon Valley in the early fifties.

  I had returned to India and Dehra when I was twenty-one, and set up my writing shop, so to speak, in that flat above Bibiji’s provision store.

  Bibiji was my stepfather’s first wife. He and my mother had moved to Delhi, leaving Bibiji with the provision store. I got on very well with her and helped her with accounts, and she gave me the use of her rooms above the shop. I think it’s only in India that you could find such a situation—a young offspring of the Raj, somewhat at odds with his mother and his stepfather, choosing to live with the latter’s abandoned first wife!

  Bibiji made excellent parathas, shalgam pickle, and kanji, a spicy carrot juice. And so, romantic though I may have been, I was far from being the young poet starving in a garret.

  Bibiji was, of course, much older than me. Heavily built, strong. She could toss sacks of flour about the shop. Her son, rather mischievous, kept out of her reach; a cuff about the ears would send him sprawling. She suffered from a hernia, and was immensely grateful to me for bringing her a hernia-belt from England; it provided her with considerable relief.

  Early morning she would march off to the mandi to get her provisions (rice, atta, pulses, etc.) wholesale, and occasionally I would accompany her. In this way I learnt the names of different pulses and lentils—moong, urad, malka, arhar, masoor, channa, lobia, rajma, etc. But I’ve never been tempted to write a cookbook or run a ration-shop of my own.

  I was quite happy cooking up stories, most of them written after dark, by the light of a kerosene lantern. Bibiji hadn’t been able to pay the flat’s accumulated electricity bills, and as a result the connection had been cut. But this did not bother me. I was quite content to live by candlelight or lamplight. It lent a romantic glow to my writing life.

  And a lot of romance went into those early stories. There was the girl on the train in ‘The Eyes Are Not Here’, and the girl selling baskets on the platform at Deoli and romantic episodes in places as unlikely as Shamli and Bijnor (Pipalnagar). However, as my intention is to give the reader a picture of Dehra as I knew it, the stories in the collection are all set in Dehradun and its immediate environs. I was writing for anyone who would read me. It was only much later that I began writing stories for children.

  Some favourite places for my fictional milieu were the Parade Ground or maidan, the Paltan Bazaar and its offshoots, the lichi gardens of Dalanwala, the tea gardens, the quiet upper reaches of the Rajpur Road (now transformed into shopping malls), the sal forests near Rajpur, the approach to Dehra by road or rail, and of course the railway station which is much the same as it used to be.

  When I was a boy, many of the bungalows (such as the one built by my grandfather) had fairly large grounds or compounds—flower gardens in front, orchards at the back. Apart from lichi, the common fruit trees were papaya, guava, mango, lemon, and the pomals, a sort of grapefruit. Most of those large compounds have now been converted into housing-estates. Dehra’s population has gone from 50,000 in 1950 to over 7 lakhs at present. Not much room left for fruit trees!

  Some of these stories, such as ‘A Handful of Nuts’ and ‘Living Without Money’, were written long after I’d left Dehra, but I think the atmosphere of the place comes through quite strongly in them. When a writer looks back at a particular place or period in his life, he tries to capture the essence of the place and the experience.

  During the two years I freelanced from Bibiji’s flat (1956–58), I produced over thirty short stories, a couple of novellas, and numerous articles of an ephemeral nature. I managed to sell some of the stories to the BBC’s Home Service programme—The Thief, Night Train at Deoli, The Woman on Platform 8, The Kitemaker—others to the Elizabethan, Illustrated Weekly of India, Sunday Statesman. (Over the years a few have been lost.) In India, Rs 50 was the most you got for a short story or article, but you could live quite comfortably on three or four hundred rupees a month—provided your mode of transport was limited to the bicycle. Only successful businessmen and doctors owned cars.

  My stepfather was an exception. He was an unsuccessful businessman, who used a different car every month. That was because, before leaving Dehra, he ran a motor workshop, and if a car was left with him for repairs or overhauling (‘oiling and greasing’ he called it) he would use it for a month or two on the pretext of trying it out, before returning it to its owner. This he would do only when the owner’s patience had reached its limit; sometimes the car had to be taken away by force. Occasionally my stepfather would relent and return the car of his own accord—along with a bill for having looked after it for so long!

  1945: With my siblings, playing in the sand near the Ganga, Rishikesh.

  His talent went unappreciated in Dehra. When he moved to Delhi he became a successful salesperson.

  Some of the characters in my Dehra stories were fictional, some were based on real people. Granny was real of course. And so were the boys in ‘The Room on the Roof’ and ‘Vagrants in the Valley’. But did Rusty really make love to Meena Kapoor? It’s a question I have often been asked. And must leave unanswered. It might have happened. And then again, it might not. I prefer to leave it as a sweet mystery that will never be solved.

  One thing is certain. Dehra played an integral part in my development as a writer. More than Shimla, where I did my schooling. More than London, where I lived for nearly four years. More than Delhi, where I spent a number of years. As much as Mussoorie, where I have passed half my life. It must have been the ambience of the place, something about it that suited my temperament.

  But it’s a different place now, and no longer do I feel like ‘“singin” in the rain’ as I walk down Rajpur road. I am in danger of being knocked down by a speeding vehicle if I try out my old song and dance routine. So I keep well to the side of the pavement and look out for known landmarks—an old peepul tree, a familiar corner, a surviving bungalow, a bookshop, the sabzi-mandi, a bit of wasteland where once we played cricket.

  There was a wild flower, a weed, that grew all over Dehra and still does. We called it Blue Mint. It grows in ditches, in neglected gardens, anywhere there’s a bit of open land. It’s there nearly all the year round. I’ve always associated it with Dehra. The burgeoning human population has been unable to suppress it. This is one plant that will never go extinct. It refuses to go away. I have known it since I was a boy, and as long as it’s there I shall know that a part of me still lives in Dehra.

  No, I don’t ‘sing in the rain’ any more—at least not in Dehra’s traffic—although in a fit of depression, I did pen another kind of song, a lament of sorts, to match the mood of the day. But don’t take it to heart, dear reader. Let us, instead, hope and work for better days in the Doon.

  DIRGE FOR DEHRADUN

  I wonder where the green grass went?

  All buried under new cement.

  I wonder where the birds have flown?

  They’ve gone to find another home.

  I wonder where the footpath’s gone?

  Right underneath your car, my son.


  I wonder where the old folks go?

  The Nursing Homes will surely know.

  What grows so fast before my eyes?

  A garbage dump, a million flies.

  Is this the place you celebrate?

  In prose you made it sound so great!

  It was . . . before I knew it’s fate.

  Ruskin Bond

  17 April 2006

  A Childhood in the Shade of Lichi Trees

  Coming Home to Dehra

  The faint queasiness I always feel towards the end of a journey probably has its origin in that first homecoming after my father’s death.

  It was the winter of 1944—yes, a long time ago—and the train was running through the thick sal forests near Dehra, bringing me at every click of the rails nearer to the mother I hadn’t seen for four years and the stepfather I had seen just once or twice before my parents were divorced. I was eleven and I was coming home to Dehra.

  Three years earlier, after the separation, I had gone to live with my father. We were very happy together. He was serving in the RAF, at New Delhi, and we lived in a large tent somewhere near Humayun’s tomb. The area is now a very busy part of urban Delhi but in those days, it was still a wilderness of scrub jungle, where black buck and nilgai roamed freely. We took long walks together, exploring the ruins of old tombs and forts; went to the pictures (George Fornby comedies were special favourites of mine); collected stamps; bought books (my father had taught me to read and write before I started going to school); and made plans for going to England when the war was over.

  Six months of bliss, even though it was summer and there weren’t any fans, only a thick khus reed curtain which had to be splashed with water every hour by a bhisti (water-carrier) who did the rounds of similar tents with his goat-skin water bag. I remember the tender refreshing fragrance of the khus, and also the smell of damp earth outside, where the water had spilt.