Rain In the Mountains Read online

  Ruskin Bond

  Rain in the Mountains

  NOTES FROM THE HIMALAYAS

  Contents

  About the Author

  Praise for the Book

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Section I – Once upon a Mountain Time

  Once Upon a Mountain Time

  Voting at Barlowganj

  Miss Bun and Others

  A Station for Scandal

  It Must be the Mountains (Play)

  Section II – Mountains in my Blood

  How Far is the River

  Four Boys on a Glacier

  Growing up with Trees

  Mountains in my Blood

  A Mountain Stream

  A Lime Tree in the Hills

  A New Flower

  The Joy of Water

  Sounds I Like to Hear

  Dragon in the Tunnel

  Hill of the Fairies

  The Open Road

  These I Have Loved

  A Dream of Gardens

  A Sweet Savour

  Great Trees I Have Known

  Picnic at Fox-Burn

  A Wayside Teashop

  All About my Walkabouts

  Great Spirits of the Trees

  Birdsong in the Mountains

  Meetings on the Tehri Road

  Guests who Fly in from the Forest

  Up at Sisters Bazaar

  Section III – Notes by the Wayside

  Section IV – Mountains are kind To writers

  In Search of a Winter Garden

  The Old Lama

  The Night the Roof Blew Off

  Mountains are Kind to Writers

  Best of All Windows

  A Knock at the Door

  Sounds of the Sea

  All my Writing Days

  The Trail to the Bank

  Where the Grass Grows Greener

  Better to Have a Bird in a Bush

  Coaxing a Garden from Himalayan Soil

  Where Rivers Meet

  After the Monsoon

  The Road to Anjani Sain

  Section V – Time to close the Window

  Epilogue

  Footnotes

  Once Upon a Mountain Time

  Miss Bun and Others

  It Must be the Mountains

  Growing up with Trees

  Best of All Windows

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  RAIN IN THE MOUNTAINS

  Ruskin Bond’s first novel, The Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written a number of novellas, essays, poems and children’s books, many of which have been published by Penguin. He has also written over 500 short stories and articles that have appeared in magazines and anthologies. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993, the Padma Shri in 1999 and the Padma Bhushan in 2014.

  Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, and grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun, New Delhi and Shimla. As a young man, he spent four years in the Channel Islands and London. He returned to India in 1955. He now lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his adopted family.

  Praise for the Book

  ‘Reading this collection of short stories, essays, poems and articles is literally like inhaling a lungful of fresh mountain air.’

  India Today

  ‘Contains several irresistible pieces in prose and verse.’

  Hindustan Times

  ‘He observes things others would never see and makes them come alive through simple prose that comes from genuine feeling. For those who seek a change of pace or a renewal of faith in life, his writings are like a refreshing mountain spring to bathe in.’

  Pioneer

  ‘In an age when steamy sex and chiller thrillers are in vogue, we need a Ruskin Bond to bring us gently back to earth, to reawaken our senses to the natural beauty around us, especially the mountains that he loves and which have produced his most inspired work.’

  India Today

  ‘He is near to the Zen concept that if you observe and recognize the presence of every feeling about phenomena around you, it is likely in such recognition you become aware of your awareness, which is a form of transcendence above mundane experience.’

  Tribune

  ‘He has helped us see what we would have otherwise missed.’

  Indian Review of Books

  ‘The uncomplicated style that is so apparent in him, disarms even the most seasoned, cynical reader.’

  Society

  For

  David Davidar,

  who gave me the concept

  for this book

  Prologue

  ALL NIGHT THE rain has been drumming on the corrugated tin roof. There has been no storm, no thunder, just the steady swish of a tropical downpour. It helps me to lie awake; at the same time, it doesn’t keep me from sleeping.

  It is a good sound to read by—the rain outside, the quiet within—and, although tin roofs are given to springing unaccountable leaks, there is a feeling of being untouched by, and yet in touch with, the rain.

  *

  When, at the age of seventeen, I went to live in Jersey (in the Channel Islands), my first job was that of a junior clerk in a solicitor’s office. The firm, believe it or not, was called Smith, Smith and Smith, but it was unusual to find all the partners in the office at the same time. The telephone would ring, and the ensuing conversation would go like this:

  ‘May I speak to Mr Smith?’

  ‘I’m sorry, he’s away on holiday.’

  ‘Then may I speak to Mr Smith?’

  ‘He just went out to lunch.’

  ‘Well, never mind. May I speak to Mr Smith?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  I left this firm to work for a well-known travel agency, which had just decided to set up a small branch office in Jersey. It was manned, or rather womanned, by a certain Mrs Manning, who had left her husband on the mainland and was busy having an affair with a man who renovated old fire-extinguishers and sold them as new. She took me on as her assistant, and then left me to man the telephone, make hotel reservations, and keep in touch with the head office while she had the time of her life. Being totally inexperienced in this line of work, I made a complete mess of everything, for I had yet to appreciate the difference between Twin Beds and Double Beds. People who had never slept together were booked into rooms with double- beds, while those who had shared the same bed for years were now forced to sleep separately. Mrs Manning and I both got the sack.

  My third job consisted of carrying pay-packets down to workers in the island’s ancient sewers. Actually, there was a literary connection here, because Victor Hugo (who had lived on the islands for some time), had apparently visited them in order to collect ‘atmosphere’ for his novels. They certainly had atmosphere.

  But why am I telling you all this? This is a book about my life in the Himalayan foothills.

  Well, when I finally got back to India, I felt I’d had enough of doing uncongenial work and that henceforth I would make a living from freelance writing.

  I could not immediately take to the mountains, but from my small flat in Dehradun I began bombarding every newspaper and magazine editor in the land with articles, stories, essays and even poems. In those days there were hardly any book publishers around (apart from those who brought out text-books), so that one really had to concentrate on journalism. There was, of course, The Statesman and The Illustrated Weekly and a couple of other well-known papers; and there was also The Tribune of Ambala (it shifted to Chandigarh in the 1960s), and The Leader of Allahabad, and Shankar’s Weekly, and Baburao Patel’s Mother India and The Hindu’s Sport and
Pastime, which actually published fiction along with its sports features. Mother India was not about motherhood, it was about Baburao Patel, who solved your personal problems along with the world’s problems in each monthly issue. Payments varied from five to fifty rupees per article, but for several years I managed to eke out a living as a freelance. That man is strongest who stands alone!

  This was in the Fifties and Sixties. Things got better in the Seventies. I discovered The Christian Science Monitor in Boston, Blackwood’s in Edinburgh, and The Asia Magazine in Hong Kong, and I was able to realize my dream of living in the hills. My children’s books began to be published in different parts of the world, too, and then in the Eighties along came Penguin India. When they expressed an interest in publishing some of my work, I was, like a good boy scout, ‘fully prepared’! Those hundreds of stories and essays and poems and sketches were all there, just waiting to be collected and published between beautiful covers. And people even bought my books, thus proving wrong those Jeremiahs who had always said my work would never ‘sell’! Of course, more people are reading books than ever before in spite of, or possibly because of, the TV– video boom. The lack of any thought-content in these soap operas is driving intelligent people back to literature.

  So how did this book come about?

  The journals, the diary extracts, the play and even some of the essays and poems have not been published before. But they were lying in one of my boxes, forgotten for many years until Boston University offered to keep my papers in their Special Collections Library. Going through those old diaries and exercise books again, I thought they made, if not a complete, then a fairly entertaining record of the twenty-five years or more that I have spent here on the mountain-top. When I showed them to David Davidar, he suggested that if I linked them up with my personal and nature essays and poems, they would make a book of some substance.

  I think I should explain that the book is divided into five sections. The first section has the journals written in the Seventies and ends with a play written about the same time. The second section contains some of my essays written in the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties; these are followed by the third section which are diary extracts. The fourth section is a selection of essays written in the Nineties. Section five, the Epilogue, ends the book.

  Some of my poems were jotted down as spontaneous diary entries, so that they are almost nature notes in themselves. We felt that a selection would not be out of place here.

  I couldn’t have done it without his help and the guidance and support of his colleagues, especially Rima Handa, who has arranged everything so neatly, in order to make this book a complete reading experience.

  *

  Bells in the hills. A school-bell ringing, and children’s voices drifting through an open window. A temple bell heard faintly from across the valley. Heavy silver ankle bells on the feet of sturdy hill women. Sheep bells heard high up on the mountainside.

  There are sounds that come from a distance, beautiful because they are far away, voices on the wind—‘they walketh upon the wings of the wind.’ Drums beating rhythmically in a forest clearing. The croaking of frogs from the rainwater pond behind the house.

  And so we return to the rain, with which my favourite sounds began. I have sat out in the open at night, after a shower of rain, when the whole air is murmuring and tinkling with the voices of crickets and grasshoppers and little frogs. There is one melodious sound, a sweet repeated trill, that I have never been able to trace to its source. Perhaps it is a little tree frog, or it may be a small green cricket. I shall never know. There is so much that we shall never know. Ah, sweet mystery of life!

  Once upon a Mountain Time

  Pages from a Journal

  Once Upon a Mountain Time

  My solitude is not my own, for I see now how much it belongs to them—and that I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not just in my own. It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone they are not ‘they’ but my own self. There are no strangers!

  From Confessions of a Guilty Bystander

  —Thomas Merton

  THE TREES STAND watch over my day-to-day life. They are the guardians of my conscience. I have no one else to answer to, so I live and work under the generous but highly principled supervision of the trees—especially the deodars, who stand on guard, unbending, on the slope above the cottage. The oak and maples are a little more tolerant, they have had to put up with a great deal, their branches continually lopped for fuel and fodder. ‘What would they think?’ I ask myself on many a occasion. ‘What would they like me to do?’ And I do what I think they would approve of most!

  Well, it’s nice to have someone to turn to . . . .

  The leaves are a fresh pale green in the spring rain. I can look at the trees from my window—look down on them almost, because the window is on the first floor of the cottage, and the hillside runs away at a sharp angle into the ravine. The trees and I know each other quite intimately, and we have much to say to each other from time to time.

  I do nearly all my writing at this window-seat. The trees watch over me as I write. Whenever I look up, they remind me that they are there. They are my best critics. As long as I am aware of their presence, I can try to avoid the trivial and the banal.

  Ramesh, the son of the municipal cleaner, looms darkly in the doorway. He is a stunted boy with a large head, but has wide gentle eyes. His orange-coloured trousers brighten up the surrounding gloom.

  ‘What do you want, Ramesh?’

  ‘Newspapers.’

  ‘To sell to the kabari?’

  ‘No. For wrapping my school-books.’

  ‘Well, take a few.’ I give him half a dozen old newspapers, the headlines already look meaningless. ‘Sit down and wait for it to stop raining.’

  He sits awkwardly on a mora.

  ‘And what is your cousin Vinod doing these days?’ (Vinod is a good-looking ne’er-do-well who seldom does anything apart from hanging around cinema halls.)

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Doesn’t he go to school?’

  ‘He has stopped going to school. He got a job at fifty rupees a month, but he left after a week. He says he will join the army in September.’

  The rain stops and Ramesh departs. The clouds begin to break up, the sun strikes the steep hill on my left. A woman is chopping up sticks. I hear the tinkle of cow-bells. Water drips from a leaking drain-pipe. And suddenly, clear and pure, the song of the whistling-thrush emerges like a dark sweet secret from the depths of the ravine.

  *

  Bijju is back from school and is taking his parents’ cattle out to graze. He sees me at the window and waves, then grabs his favourite cow Neelu by the tail and tells her to hurry up.

  Bijju is twelve, a fair, good-looking Garhwali boy. His younger sister and brother are very pretty children. The father, an electrician, is a rather self-effacing man. The mother is a strong, hard woman. I have watched her on the hillside cutting grass. She has the muscular calves of a man, solid feet and heavy hands; but she is a handsome woman. They live in a rented outhouse further up the hill.

  Bijju doesn’t visit me very often. He is rather shy. But one day I looked out of the window and there he was in the branches of the oak tree, smiling at me rather hesitantly. We spoke to each other across the three or four yards that separate house from oak tree.

  ‘If I jump, I can land in your tree,’ I said.

  ‘And if I jump I will be in your house,’ said Bijju.

  ‘Come on then, jump!’

  But he shook his head. He was afraid of me. The tree was safe. He put his arms round the thickest branch and held himself close to it. He looked very right in the tree, as though he belonged there, a boy of the woods, a tree-spirit peeping out from a house of glossy new leaves.

  ‘Come on, jump!’

  ‘You jump,’ he said.

  In the evening his sister brings the cows home. I meet her on the path above the house. She is
only a year younger than Bijju, a very bonny girl who is going to be ravishingly beautiful when she grows up, if they don’t marry her off too soon. She too has the same timid smile. But if these children are timid of humans, they are not afraid in the forest, and often wander far afield with Neelu the blue cow and others. (And S, who is eighteen and educated at an English-medium private school, wouldn’t go alone into the forest if you paid him!) But the trees know their own. They will cherish the wild spirits and frighten the daylight out of the tame.

  *

  The whistling-thrush is here, bathing in the rain-water puddle beneath the window. He loves this spot. So now, when there is no rain, I fill the puddle with water, just so that my favourite bird keeps coming.

  His bath finished, he perches on a branch of the walnut tree. His glossy blue-black wings glitter in the sunshine. At any moment he will start singing.

  Here he goes! He tries out the tune, whistling to himself, and then, confident of the notes, sends his thrilling full-throated voice far over the forest. The song dies down, trembling, lingering in the air; starts again, joyfully, and then suddenly stops, as though the singer had forgotten the words or the tune.

  *

  Vinod, the ne’er-do-well, turns up with a friend, asking me to give them some work. They want to go to the pictures but have no money.

  ‘You can dig up this slope below the house,’ I tell them. ‘The soil is good for growing vegetables.

  This sounds too much like hard work for Vinod, who says, ‘We’ll come and do it tomorrow.’

  ‘No, we’ll do it now,’ says his more enterprising friend, and to my surprise they set to work.

  Now and then I look out of the window. They are digging away with fair enthusiasm.

  After about half an hour, Vinod keeps sitting down for short rests, to the increasing irritation of his partner. They are soon snapping at each other. Vinod looks very funny when he sulks, because he has a snub nose, and somehow a snub nose and a ferocious expression only reminds me of Richmal Crompton’s William. But the work gets done by evening and they are quite pleased with their earnings.