The Kitemaker: Stories Read online

  Ruskin Bond

  THE KITEMAKER

  Stories

  Contents

  About the Author

  Penguin Evergreens

  Life with Father

  My Father’s Last Letter

  Untouchable

  The Photograph

  The Boy Who Broke the Bank

  The Fight

  Love Is a Sad Song

  Time Stops at Shamli

  The Kitemaker

  The Tunnel

  A Face in the Dark

  He Said It with Arsenic

  The Last Time I Saw Delhi

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE KITEMAKER

  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.

  Penguin Evergreens

  The Penguin Evergreens are collections of classic stories—fiction and non-fiction—that build on Penguin’s original paperback mission of publishing the best books for everyone to enjoy. The Evergreens are drawn from Penguin’s wide-ranging list of classics and bestsellers by some of the most recognized writers in the Indian Subcontinent.

  The first list of books is

  The Mark of Vishnu: Stories, Khushwant Singh

  Building a New India, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

  My Experiments with Truth, M.K. Gandhi

  Feluda: Stories, Satyajit Ray

  Kabuliwallah: Stories, Rabindranath Tagore

  Kamasutra: Selections, Vatsyayana

  The Mahabharata: Droupadi’s Marriage and

  Other Selections, Vyasa

  Malgudi: Stories, R.K. Narayan

  Valmiki Ramayana: The Book of Wilderness

  The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling

  The Kitemaker: Stories, Ruskin Bond

  The Quilt: Stories, Ismat Chughtai

  The Shroud: Stories, Premchand

  Toba Tek Singh: Stories, Saadat Hasan Manto

  Life with Father

  During my childhood and early boyhood with my father, we were never in one house or dwelling for very long. I think the ‘Tennis Bungalow’ in Jamnagar (in the grounds of the Ram Vilas Palace) housed us for a couple of years, and that was probably the longest period.

  In Jamnagar itself we had at least three abodes—a rambling, leaking old colonial mansion called ‘Cambridge House’; a wing of an old palace, the Lal Bagh I think it was called, which was also inhabited by bats and cobras; and the aforementioned ‘Tennis Bungalow’, a converted sports pavilion which was really quite bright and airy.

  I think my father rather enjoyed changing houses, setting up home in completely different surroundings. He loved rearranging rooms too, so that this month’s sitting room became next month’s bedroom, and so on; furniture would also be moved around quite frequently, somewhat to my mother’s irritation, for she liked having things in their familiar places. She had grown up in one abode (her father’s Dehra house) whereas my father hadn’t remained anywhere for very long. Sometimes he spoke of making a home in Scotland, beside Loch Lomond, but it was only a distant dream.

  The only real stability was represented by his stamp collection, and this he carried around in a large tin trunk, for it was an extensive and valuable collection—there was an album for each country he specialized in: Greece, Newfoundland, British possessions in the Pacific, Borneo, Zanzibar, Sierra Leone; these were some of the lands whose stamps he favoured most . . .

  I did share some of his enthusiasm for stamps, and they gave me a strong foundation in geography and political history, for he went to the trouble of telling me something about the places and people depicted on them—that Pitcairn Island was inhabited largely by mutineers from H.M.S. Bounty; that the Solomon Islands were famous for their butterflies; that Britannia still ruled the waves (but only just); that Iraq had a handsome young boy king; that in Zanzibar the Sultan wore a fez; that zebras were exclusive to Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika; that in America presidents were always changing; and that the handsome young hero on Greek stamps was a Greek god with a sore heel. All this and more, I remember from my stamp-sorting sessions with my father. However, it did not form a bond between him and my mother. She was bored with the whole thing.

  *

  My earliest memories don’t come in any particular order, but most of them pertain to Jamnagar, where we lived until I was five or six years old.

  There was the beach at Balachandi, and I remember picking up seashells and wanting to collect them much as my father collected stamps. When the tide was out I went paddling with some of the children from the palace.

  My father set up a schoolroom for the palace children. It was on the ground floor of a rambling old palace, which had a tower and a room on the top. Sometimes I attended my father’s classes more as an observer than a scholar. One day I set off on my own to explore the deserted palace, and ascended some wandering steps to the top, where I found myself in a little room full of tiny stained- glass windows. I took turns at each window pane, looking out at a green or red or yellow world. It was a magical room.

  Many years later—almost forty years later, in fact—I wrote a story with this room as its setting. It was called ‘The Room of Many Colours’ and it had in it a mad princess, a gardener and a snake.

  *

  Not all memories are dream-like and idyllic. I witnessed my parents’ quarrels from an early age, and later when they resulted in my mother taking off for unknown destinations (unknown to me), I would feel helpless and insecure. My father’s hand was always there, and I held it firmly until it was wrenched away by the angel of death.

  That early feeling of insecurity was never to leave me, and in adult life, when I witnessed quarrels between people who were close to me, I was always deeply disturbed—more for the children, whose lives were bound to be affected by such emotional discord. But can it be helped? People who marry young, even those who are in love, do not really know each other. The body chemistry may be right but the harmony of two minds is what makes relationships endure.

  Words of wisdom from a disappointed bachelor!

  I don’t suppose I would have written so much about childhood or even about other children if my own childhood had been all happiness and light. I find that those who have had contended, normal childhoods, seldom remember much about them; nor do they have much insight into the world of children. Some of us are born sensitive. And, if, on top of that, we are pulled about in different directions (both emotionally and physically), we might just end up becoming writers.

  No, we don’t become writers in schools of creative writing. We become writers before we learn to write. The rest is simply learning how to put it all together.

  *

  I learnt to read from my father but not in his classroom.

  The children were older than me. Four of them were princesses, very attractive, but always clad in buttoned-up jackets and trousers. This was a bit confusing for me, because I had at first taken them for boys. One of them used to pinch my cheeks and hug me. While I thought she was a boy, I rather resented the familiarity. When I discovered she was a girl (I had to be told), I wanted more of it.

  I was shy of these boyish princesses, and was to remain shy of girls until I was in my teens.

  *

  Between Tennis Bungalow and the palace were lawns and flower beds. One of my earliest memories is of picking my way through a forest of flowering cosmos; to a five-year- old they were almost trees, the flowers nodding down at me in friendly invitation.

  Since then, the cosmos has been my favourite flower—fresh, open, uncomplicated—living up to its name, cosmos, the universe as an ordered whole. White, purple and rose, they are at its best in each other’s company, growing almost anywhere, in the hills or on the plains, in Europe or tropical America. Waving gently in the softest of breezes, they are both sensuous and beyond sensuality. An early influence!

  There were of course rose bushes in the palace grounds, kept tidy and trim and looking very like those in the illustrations in my first copy of Alice in Wonderland, a well-thumbed edition from which my father often read to me. (Not the Tennial illustrations, something a little softer.) I think I have read Alice more often than any other book, with the possible exception of The Diary of a Nobody, which I turn to whenever I am feeling a little low. Both books help me to a better appreciation of the absurdities of life.

  There were extensive lawns in front of the bungalow, where I could romp around or push my small sister around on a tricycle. She was a backward child, who had been affected by polio and some damage to the brain (having been born prematurely and delivered with the help of forceps), and she was the cross that had to be borne by my parents, together and separately. In spite of her infirmities, Ellen was going to outlive most of us.

  *

  Although we lived briefly in oth
er houses, and even for a time in the neighbouring state of Pithadia, Tennis Bungalow was our home for most of the time we were in Jamnagar.

  There were several Englishmen working for the Jam Saheb. The port authority was under Commander Bourne, a retired British naval officer. And a large farm (including a turkey farm) was run for the state by a Welsh couple, the Jenkins. I remember the veranda of the Jenkins home, because the side table was always stacked with copies of the humorous weekly, Punch, mailed regularly to them from England. I was too small to read Punch, but I liked looking at the drawings.

  The Bournes had a son who was at school in England, but he had left his collection of comics behind, and these were passed on to me. Thus I made the acquaintance of Korky the Kat, Tiger Tim, Desperate Dan, Our Wullie and other comic-paper heroes of the late thirties.

  There was one cinema somewhere in the city, and English-language films were occasionally shown. My first film was very disturbing for me, because the hero was run through with a sword. This was Noel Coward’s operetta, Bitter Sweet, in which Nelson Eddy and Jennette MacDonald made love in duets. My next film was Tarzan of the Apes, in which Johny Weissmuller, the Olympic swimmer, gave Maureen O’Sullivan, pretty and petite, a considerable mauling in their treetop home. But it was to be a few years before I became a movie buff.

  Looking up one of my tomes of Hollywood history, I note that Bitter Sweet was released in 1940, so that was probably our last year in Jamnagar. My father must have been over forty when he joined the Royal Air Force (RAF), to do his bit for King and country. He may have bluffed his age (he was born in 1896), but perhaps you could enlist in your mid-forties during the War. He was given the rank of pilot officer and assigned to the cipher section of Air Headquarters in New Delhi. So there was a Bond working in Intelligence long before the fictional James arrived on the scene.

  The War wasn’t going too well for England in 1941, and it wasn’t going too well for me either, for I found myself interned in a convent school in the hill station of Mussoorie. I hated it from the beginning. The nuns were strict and unsympathetic; the food was awful (stringy meat boiled with pumpkins); the boys were for the most part dull and unfriendly, the girls too subdued; and the latrines were practically inaccessible. We had to bathe in our underwear, presumably so that the nuns would not be distracted by the sight of our undeveloped sex! I had to endure this place for over a year because my father was being moved around from Calcutta to Delhi to Karachi, and my mother was already engaged in her affair with my future stepfather. At times I thought of running away, but where was I to run?

  Picture postcards from my father brought me some cheer. These postcards formed part of Lawson Wood’s ‘Granpop’ series—Granpop being an ape of sorts, who indulged in various human activities, such as attending cocktail parties and dancing to Scottish bagpipes. ‘Is this how you feel now that the rains are here?’ my father had written under one illustration of Granpop doing the rumba in a tropical downpour.

  I enjoyed getting these postcards, with the messages from my father saying that books and toys and stamps were waiting for me when I came home. I preserved them for fifty years, and now they are being looked after by Dr Howard Gotlieb in my archives at Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library. My own letters can perish, but not those postcards!

  I have no cherished memories of life at the convent school. It wasn’t a cruel place but it lacked character of any kind; it was really a conduit for boys and girls going on to bigger schools in the hill station. I am told that today it has a beautiful well-stocked library, but that the children are not allowed to use the books lest they soil them; everything remains as tidy and spotless as the nuns’ habits.

  One day in mid-term my mother turned up unexpectedly and withdrew me from the school. I was overjoyed but also a little puzzled by this sudden departure. After all, no one had really taken me seriously when I’d said I hated the place.

  Oddly enough, we did not stop in Dehradun at my grandmother’s place. Instead my mother took me straight to the railway station and put me on the night train to Delhi. I don’t remember if anyone accompanied me—I must have been too young to travel alone—but I remember being met at the Delhi station by my father in full uniform. It was early summer, and he was in khakis, but the blue RAF cap took my fancy. Come winter, he’d be wearing a dark blue uniform with a different kind of cap, and by then he’d be a flying officer and getting saluted by juniors. Being wartime, everyone was saluting madly, and I soon developed the habit, saluting everyone in sight.

  An uncle on my mother’s side, Fred Clark, was then the station superintendent at Delhi railway station, and he took us home for breakfast to his bungalow, not far from the station. From the conversation that took place during the meal I gathered that my parents had separated, that my mother was remaining in Dehradun, and that henceforth I would be in my father’s custody. My sister Ellen was to stay with ‘Calcutta Granny’—my father’s seventy-year-old mother. The arrangement pleased me, I must admit.

  *

  The two years I spent with my father were probably the happiest of my childhood—although, for him, they must have been a period of trial and tribulation. Frequent bouts of malaria had undermined his constitution; the separation from my mother weighed heavily on him, and it could not be reversed; and at the age of eight I was self-willed and demanding.

  He did his best for me, dear man. He gave me his time, his companionship, his complete attention.

  A year was to pass before I was re-admitted to a boarding school, and I would have been quite happy never to have gone to school again. My year in the convent had been sufficient punishment for uncommitted sins. I felt that I had earned a year’s holiday.

  It was a glorious year, during which we changed our residence at least four times—from a tent on a flat treeless plain outside Delhi, to a hutment near Humayun’s tomb; to a couple of rooms on Atul Grove Road; to a small flat on Hailey Road; and finally to an apartment in Scindia House, facing the Connaught Circus.

  We were not very long in the tent and hutment—but long enough for me to remember the scorching winds of June, and the bhisti’s hourly visit to douse the khas-khas matting with water. This turned a hot breeze into a refreshing, fragrant zephyr—for about half an hour. And then the dust and the prickly heat took over again. A small table fan was the only luxury.

  Except for Sundays, I was alone during most of the day; my father’s office in Air Headquarters was somewhere near India Gate. He’d return at about six, tired but happy to find me in good spirits. For although I had no friends during that period, I found plenty to keep me occupied—books, stamps, the old gramophone, hundreds of postcards which he’d collected during his years in England, a scrapbook, albums of photographs . . . And sometimes I’d explore the jungle behind the tents; but I did not go very far, because of the snakes that proliferated there.

  I would have my lunch with a family living in a neighbouring tent, but at night my father and I would eat together. I forget who did the cooking. But he made the breakfast, getting up early to whip up some fresh butter (he loved doing this) and then laying the table with cornflakes or grapenuts, and eggs poached or fried.

  The gramophone was a great companion when my father was away. He had kept all the records he had collected in Jamnagar, and these were added to from time to time. There were operatic arias and duets from La Bohème and Madame Butterfly; ballads and traditional airs rendered by Paul Robeson, Peter Dawson, Richard Crooks, Webster Booth, Nelson Eddy and other tenors and baritones, and of course the great Russian bass, Chaliapin. And there were lighter, music-hall songs and comic relief provided by Gracie Fields (the ‘Lancashire Lass’), George Formy with his ukelele, Arthur Askey (‘big-hearted’ Arthur—he was a tiny chap), Flanagan and Allan, and a host of other recording artistes. You couldn’t just put on some music and lie back and enjoy it. That was the day of the wind-up gramophone, and it had to be wound up fairly vigorously before a 75 rmp record could be played. I enjoyed this chore. The needle, too, had to be changed after almost every record, if you wanted to keep them in decent condition. And the records had to be packed flat, otherwise, in the heat and humidity they were inclined to assume weird shapes and become unplayable.