The Lamp Is Lit Read online

  RUSKIN BOND

  THE LAMP IS LIT

  Leaves from a Journal

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Freelancing — The Early Years

  Writing for My Life

  All You Need Is Paper

  Summertime in Old New Delhi

  Walking the Streets of Delhi

  Bhabiji’s House

  Break of the Monsoon

  Tales of the Open Road

  On the Highway

  Rishikesh

  Mathura

  Jaipur

  Vignettes of Yesteryear

  Grandfather’s Earthquake

  Kipling’s Simla

  Life with Uncle Ken

  The Typewriter

  Mussoorie Snapshots

  In Search of John Lang

  The Himalaya Club (by John Lang)

  Mukesh’s Brush with the Art World

  The Box Man

  Ghosts of the Savoy

  Bear in the Ballroom

  A Handful of Nuts

  By the Fireside

  Leaves from a Journal

  Envoi: The Lamp Is Lit

  When the Lamp Is lit

  Raindrop

  Footnotes

  On the Highway

  Life with Uncle Ken

  In Search of John Lang

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE LAMP IS LIT

  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

  Penguin

  The Room on the Roof, Vagrants in the Valley

  Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra

  The Night Train at Deoli

  Time Stops at Shamli

  Rain in the Mountains

  Strangers in the Night

  Scenes from a Writer’s Life

  Delhi Is Not Far: The Best of Ruskin Bond

  The Penguin Book of Indian Ghost Stories (ed.)

  The Penguin Book of Indian Railway Stories (ed.)

  The Penguin Book of Indian Love Stories and Lyrics (ed.)

  Viking

  Ruskin Bond: The Complete Stories and Novels

  Puffin

  Panther’s Moon and Other Stories Room on the Roof

  Sharing your feelings with friends and companions, you shackle your mind and miss the mark. Watch out for the danger of society, and wander alone like the rhinoceros.

  When you become involved with a wife and children, you are entangled like a big bamboo tree. Be like a young bamboo tree, and wander alone like the rhinoceros.

  People keep you company and serve you for motive; real friends are hard to find these days. People are insincere, clever in pursuing their own ends. Wander alone like the rhinoceros.

  — From The Rhinoceros Horn Sutra

  Gandhari text, BC 1st century

  * * *

  When I was ten, I was lonely and read books.

  At fifteen, I played football with other boys.

  When I was twenty, I courted the girls.

  At thirty, I thought time had passed too swiftly.

  When I was forty, I concluded that I was a failure.

  But at fifty, as I was still alive and well, I knew I was a success.

  At sixty, I played old music and fell in love again.

  At seventy, I went in search of old friends.

  — RB

  Introduction

  There is no escaping the forces of nature.

  When Newton sat beneath an apple tree and an apple fell on his head, he discovered the law of gravity. When I sat beneath an apple tree and a large red Himachali apple fell on my head, I discovered that, far from keeping the doctor away, an apple can give you a headache. So I shifted to another tree, a cherry. Cherries don’t hurt, unless you eat too many of them. Suffice to say that I like sitting beneath trees : they make me feel younger, and occasionally I can write a poem or a story while enjoying their shade and the gentle flurry of their leaves.

  A young reader recently wrote to me, saying: ‘I want to be a writer like you, so that I can lie on the grass and do nothing.’ Lying on the grass and doing nothing is of course a wonderful occupation, but I did not survive as a freelance writer for over forty years simply by lying on the grass and counting ladybirds. If the grass is to mean anything, a time comes when you have to get up, brush the ladybirds from your shirt and trousers, and proceed to your desk to write, type or word-process all those ideas you get while sitting out there doing nothing.

  During my idle moments I receive many good thoughts (and some that are not so good), but these thoughts have to be translated into intelligible and readable language if they are to convey anything to others. And that’s where the hard but pleasurable work comes in. The composing, the revising, the rewriting.

  The essays and episodes (many taken from my journals) in this collection may give the reader a picture of my life both as writer and person. In my case they are one and the same thing. I live through my writing, just as my writing lives through me.

  This is not autobiography in the fullest sense. In my previous book, Scenes from a Writer’s Life, I did trace my development as an individual and as a budding writer through my childhood and teens; but there is an equal amount of autobiography to be found in my fiction. The account of my mother’s final illness in the story ‘The Last Time I Saw Delhi’ says more than any factual account that I can give; sometimes it is easier to tell the truth by disguising it as a ‘fiction’ —especially when the subject is a painful one. . . And perhaps my feelings for my father are best expressed in the short story ‘The Funeral’, although the funeral is a purely imaginary one; I was at boarding school in Simla when my father died in Calcutta.*

  The essays and journal entries presented here are factual and, to some extent, revealing, but they have been put together by me largely as a celebration of my survival as a freelance—this survival being as much the result of my stubbornness and persistence as of any talent that I may possess. I have known many talented young writers who gave up too quickly.

  My early forays into literary magazines are described in the first part of this book, along with some examples of my work at the time. Most people think of me as a small-town or hill-station person, for that is what I have become; but I did spend four years of my life in London, and five years (summers included) in New Delhi. But it was only when I came to live in the hills, some thirty years ago, that I ‘blossomed’ into the sort of personal nature writer and children’s writer described in my largely autobio- graphical Rain in the Mountains. And I have learnt to laugh at myself. When I was younger, I took myself too seriously.

  Recently someone asked me why I did not write on social issues. Well, I had always thought that man’s relationship with the natural world was a social issue, but apparently he was thinking of issues such as caste, class, religious bigotry, the economic uplift of the masses, etc., all i
mportant issues, and all dealt with far more effectively by writers who are more gifted in that direction. I was hoping that there was still room in this world for a simple storyteller, one who strives to give pleasure to both child and adult, not by hiding our scars but by showing that we can be beautiful in spite of them. I find it easier to see God in a raindrop then in a place of worship. My credo, for what it’s worth, is given in the last chapter, ‘When The Lamp Is Lit.’

  Among writers, I am not one of the big guns. I am not even a little gun. I’m just a pebble lying on the beach. But I like to think that I’m a smooth, round, colourful pebble, and that someone will pick me up, derive a little pleasure from holding me, and possibly even put me in his, or her, pocket. Could you be that wanderer by the sea? I shall nestle there, close to you. I shall try to make you feel better. And if you tire of me, you can always throw me back into the sea. Perhaps a kindly wave will wash me ashore again, and someone else will pick me up.

  * * *

  This extract from my journal may be relevant here:

  It is worth noting that some of the great story writers, like Gorki, were tramps. Stevenson did a lot of tramping before he settled down on his South Sea Island. On one of his tramps through Europe his sole companion was a donkey. They got on famously, and their journey together resulted in a classic travelogue, Travels With a Donkey. Wordsworth, wandering lonely as a cloud, tramped about a good deal, all the while recording nature’s bounty. Kalidas’s wanderings in the Vindhya mountains gave him his incomparable knowledge of nature’s ways, described with such loving exactitude in The Cloud Messenger and his verse dramas. Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ celebrates America’s great open spaces. Conard tramped the high seas, commanding little tramp steamers, and then held a mirror to the sea in finely crafted novels and romances.

  These were lonely men, wanderers rather than travellers. In spirit I have always been one of them, although I wander less today than I did as a young man. Although I have become a stay-at-home, taken up with family concerns and the necessity to make a decent income, I remain at heart a wanderer, and my heroes are Kim, Huck Finn, and Captain Marlowe.

  I mention these great literary figures not in order that I might rub shoulders with them (we do that when we read their books) but simply to show that loneliness is a vital part of the artist’s creativity. Even today, surrounded by loved ones, I am often conscious of being alone. Every man is an island, no matter how hard he tries to paddle away. A woman may often have the comfort of a child feeding at her breast; men grow up insecure.

  You can be amongst people and still be lonely. The loneliest period of my life consisted of the two years I spent in Jersey, a real island, where I lived with relatives. They were not unkind to me, but we did not really love each other; I suppose I wasn’t very loveable in those days! And I yearned for all that I had left behind in India. Alone, I walked the waterfront, the rainswept, windswept sea wall, talking to myself, promising myself that I’d be a published writer some day soon, and return to the sensuous welcoming arms of the land I had left. . . I was only seventeen. But out of my loneliness I produced a novel, raw, naïve and imperfect, but brimming with life and joy and truth, my own truth, for to be true to oneself is to be true to others.

  I

  Freelancing — The early years

  Writing for My Life

  Money talks—and it’s usually saying goodbye.

  Most of mine had gone in paying for my passage back to India, and when I arrived in my home town of Dehra Dun I had about eight hundred rupees to show for my three years abroad. It didn’t help to find that my stepfather was now bankrupt, and that he and my mother were planning to start a new life in Delhi, free of the encumbrance of a non-functioning motor workshop and unmanageable income tax arrears. If they were hoping that I would return from England with my fortune made, they must have been disappointed. That fifty-pound advance from Andre Deutsch for my first book, The Room on the Roof, had melted away, and the book was yet to be published. I’d have to write and sell some short stories and articles, and soon, if I was to survive in the India of 1955.

  Within a couple of months of my return, my mother and stepfather, school-going brother and half- brothers, handicapped sister, along with my mother’s dogs (about six of them) had left for Delhi. I did not accompany them. I had not returned to India in order to live in Delhi. And while I have nothing against dogs, I find it difficult to share a small flat with a number of yapping poms, pekes and dachshunds.

  I wanted to be near old friends; I wanted new friends. I wanted the proximity of the hills and rivers. And above all, I wanted the freedom of being my very own person.

  Bibiji, my stepfather’s first wife, offered me a room and balcony above her small provision store in Astley Hall. I got on well with Bibiji, a well-built woman from Amritsar who flung sacks of flour around as though they were shuttlecocks. I could see that she had probably been a little too much for my diminutive stepfather. She ran the small store by herself, paying the rent out of her meagre profits. She was understandably bitter about my stepfather’s second marriage, and did not have a good word for him or for my mother. Having me stay on the premises and pay her a monthly rent gave her a victory of sorts.

  Apart from the room, Bibiji gave me breakfast— mooli or aalu parathas with my favourite shalgam (turnip) pickle. I was never any good as a cook and I took my lunch and dinner in assorted small restaurants and dhabas, ruining my digestion in the process. But these eating places were quite cheap, and for five rupees I could have a decent non-vegetarian meal. And if I stuck to the basics—daal and rice and a vegetable curry—I could eat in three rupees.

  Bibiji lived in the back of her shop and seldom came up to my room. As she hadn’t been in a position to pay the electricity bill for a couple of years, the connection had been cut and I was without electric light. Not that I particularly cared. I lit candles for a few days; but finding that I could not write or read by candlelight without getting a headache, I bought a kerosene lantern and set it up on my desk.

  My ‘desk’ was really a large dining table on which I spread out my notebooks, paper and typewriter. A couple of smooth rounded stones from the Rispana river bed acted as paperweights. There was a framed photograph of my father—it’s still on my desk today, forty years on—and one of Vu-Phuong, the Vietnamese girl to whom I had proposed marriage when I was in London, and from whom I hoped to hear some day. As the months went by and I received no news from her (or of her), the photo moved from its frame into my album and remained there as a memory of a distant dream.

  It would have been nice to see Raj again, the Punjabi girl with whom I used to play badminton the year before I left for England. A fine, athletic girl, she used to beat me 15-0, 15-1 (the last point in my favour being an act of mercy on her part), and I used to put up with these walkovers just so that I could be with her. The things we do for love! But now her father, like my stepfather, had lost his money in ill-conceived business ventures and had left Dehra Dun with his family. In the 1950s, Dehra Dun was going through a slump; it would recover only a decade or so later.

  Reading and writing by lamplight must have aggravated my already weak eyesight, because I had to start wearing glasses by the time my twenty-first birthday came around. They did nothing to improve my appearance; but passers-by who had previously been but a blur from my balcony lookout, were now more clearly defined, and I wasted a good deal of time gazing at college girls walking or cycling past Astley Hall.

  I’d be lying if I said I burnt the midnight oil in my striving to make a living as a freelance writer. If I could manage one thousand words a day, I was satisfied. And this could be accomplished in a couple of hours. Afterwards I’d drop in at the Indiana Café for a cup of coffee. Evenings I’d walk to the clock tower for tikkias or kababs with my friends. The lamp was lit much later, and then I’d jot down stray thoughts and ideas, or write a letter.

  Then, as now, I wrote in longhand, and as I wasn’t a bad typist, I typed up my o
wn fair copy, making minor revisions as I went along. My more ambitious stories went to The Illustrated Weekly of India, then edited by C.R. Mandy, an amiable Irishman who had made the magazine a happy blend of the literary and the artistic, along with some popular entertainment highlighted by a page devoted to pictures of newly- weds; so serious and apprehensive did the young brides and bridegrooms look, that this page was considered even funnier than the jokes column. In 1956, the Weekly serialized The Room on the Roof, followed a year later by its sequel, Vagrants in the Valley. The Room had been written in England, out of my homesickness and longing for India. Vagrants was written in Dehra, after my return, and lacked some of the youthful optimism of my first book; but it had more of my sensuality. And Dehra was a sensual sort of place, the summers steamy and sub-tropical. (One of my few regrets in life is that I have never really lived in a steamy, jungle sort of place such as the Malaysian archipelago as described by Conrad in An Outcast of the Islands or Tomlinson in The Sea and the Jungle. No doubt it’s the literary landscape of such regions that appeals to me. Living in these remote outposts may not have been much fun.)

  The Weekly paid about a hundred rupees for a story. A few of these stories—those that ran to about fifteen minutes of reading time—were also submitted to the BBC in London, where they were broadcast in the Home Service short-story slot. Others went to the Elizabethan, an excellent magazine for older children.

  I wrote short articles too—on a variety of subjects, ranging from ghosts to buffaloes—and some of these were published in The Sunday Statesman, The Hindu and The Tribune. I was also quite adept at finding new, offbeat markets for my work. Sainik Samachar (the Armed Forces weekly) provided a home for some of my stories. I never met anyone who read Sainik Samachar, and I doubt if the Defence Ministry even knew that they were its publishers; but it paid me twenty-five rupees for a thousand words, and that was good enough for me. About five years later, when I was living in Delhi, I located its office in a dingy corner of a government building, and met its editor, an elderly, defeated individual who put the magazine together entirely on his own. Mountains of back issues climbed towards the ceiling. The editor confessed that no one read the paper, but that it gave him a salary and in a year’s time he would be eligible for a pension. He died before he could start enjoying the pension, and the magazine seemed to go into limbo.