Potpourri

  POTPOURRI

  Copyright © Ruskin Bond 2007

  First Published 2007

  Fourth Impression 2011

  Published by

  Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd.

  7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj,

  New Delhi 110 002

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  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

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  without the prior permission of the publishers.

  The author asserts the moral right to be identified

  as the author of this work.

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  Contents

  Introduction

  Our Great Escape

  Gone Fishing

  Susanna's Seven Husbands

  On Fairy Hill

  The Overcoat

  Do You Believe in Ghosts?

  A Face in the Dark

  The Eyes of the Eagle

  Bitter Gooseberries

  Escape from Java

  The Girl on the Train

  He Said it with Arsenic

  Hanging at the Mango-Tope

  Eyes of the Cat

  A Little Song of Love

  Binya Passes By

  Love and Cricket

  We Must Love Someone

  At the Grave of John Mildenhall in Agra

  Grandpa Fights an Ostrich

  The Zigzag Walk

  At Sea with Uncle Ken

  My Failed Omelettes—and Other Disasters

  From the Primaeval Past

  In a Crystal Ball: A Mussoorie Mystery

  A Job Well Done

  The Earthquake

  The Demon Driver

  Introduction

  A question that always irritates me is, 'And are you still writing?'

  It's like asking me if I'm still alive, because if I wasn't writing I wouldn't be alive—I'd have become a vegetable, mentally deficient, or sunk far below the poverty line. Indeed, I would also be spiritually dead, because words are my life-blood. I mean the written word. My spoken words are few. My written words are many; and sometimes true.

  I am writing this page while the walls of my room are being repaired. There is loud hammering and the sound of falling plaster. Dust everywhere. The room's a mess. Very irritating. But that doesn't stop me from writing. A compulsive writer will write anywhere—on a train or platform bench, in a noisy hotel lounge, wayside teashop, or school playground.

  Here comes Vaishnavi's rubber ball. Vaishnavi is two and a half, at home while her older brothers and sisters are at school. She wants me to play with her. I say later. She throws the ball at me, and it just misses my coffee cup. Her mother picks her up and takes her into the kitchen, where she is quite happy counting spoons. I carry on writing.

  Those young readers who have given me pens are the wise ones. They know I'm still writing—and that I'm still using a pen, albeit a ball-point or roller-ball. I'm a clumsy fellow and draw the line at fountain-pens, as inevitably I get ink all over my fingers and shirt-sleeves. So you could say I've kept up with the times. After all, Mr Amitabh Bachchan, movie star, recommends a certain elegant ball-point pen, and that's the one I'm usually given.

  I'm an old-fashioned person. Even as a boy I was old-fashioned. I liked old music, old books, old films, old places. I still do.... In fact, I'm so old-fashioned and out of date that it's a wonder I've survived for over seventy years.

  I can't drive, preferring to put my faith in the driving abilities of my friends and companions. The worst of drivers find me the perfect passenger, as I haven't the slightest idea if he's putting us at risk or not. In fact, I judge a driver by the amount of abuse he gets from other drivers. If, in the course of a day's journey, his sister or mother is insulted on at least six occasions, then I begin to suspect that there is something wrong with the way he drives. If he returns the insults tenfold, I ask him to stop, and get off before we are assaulted.

  I can row a boat at India Gate or the Model Town lake, but I can't fly a plane. When I was five, one of the Jamnagar princes took me and my mother up in a Tiger Moth, one of those four-winged contraptions that are open to the sky. I was terrified, especially when he decided to indulge in some aerial acrobatics. I was sick all over him, I'm glad to say.

  For the next fifty years I avoided aeroplanes, preferring to travel by train, camel or mule—there's nothing like sitting on a mule to stiffen to sinews and summon up the blood, as the bard would say—and even today it is with great reluctance that I trust myself to the airways. Others of my age don't seem to be bothered by the incipient hazards of flight. A lady sitting next to me was engrossed in an Agatha Christie novel, Death in the Air, while on another flight my companion, a young publisher, was reading the manuscript of a book about the hijacking of a plane that had been on the very same route as ours.

  There's no place like home, even if I do happen to be living in an earthquake zone.

  I think the hardest thing in life is dealing with failure— putting it behind and carrying on with what you're doing and trying to do it well.

  When I look back over the years, and think of the books that never took off, the long years of little or no recognition or reward, I'm surprised that I did not throw it all up and turn to something else—something boring but safe.

  I'm not one for taking risks, but I took one great risk—the risk of my life—and stuck to what I knew I could do well and what I wanted to do most. And with that came a measure of happiness. And in that happy frame of mind I could deal with all the little failures that came my way. I did not really see them as failures but rather as road-blocks. You do not retreat from a road-block; you make your way around it, or look for another route to where you are going.

  And you learn to zigzag ... Take a different route, albeit a longer one. Try something different. If the novel fails, write a a story for children. If no one wants your poetry, write a prose-poem. Go back to writing for yourself. If you can't be a Dickens, be a Lamb. There's room in the world for all kinds of writers, all kinds of talents. Be different. Use your own voice. It will take a little longer for readers to get used to your own unique voice, but when they do, they will want more of it.

  There are no fresh starts in life, but there are always new directions.

  Ruskin Bond

  July 2007

  Our Great Escape

  It had been a lonely winter for a fourteen-year-old. I had spent the first few weeks of the vacation with my mother and stepfather in Dehra. Then they left for Delhi, and I was pretty much on my own. Of course, the servants were there to take care of my needs, but there was no one to keep me company. I would wander off in the mornings, taking some path up the hills, come back home for lunch, read a bit and then stroll off again till it was time for dinner. Sometimes I walked up to my grandparents' house, but it seemed so different now, with people I didn't know occupying the house.

  The three-month winter break over, I was almost eager to return to my boarding school in Simla.

  It wasn't as though I had many friends at school. I needed a friend but it was not easy to find one among a horde of rowdy, pea-shooting eighth formers, who carved their names on desks and stuck chewing gum on the class teacher's chair. Had I grown up
with other children, I might have developed a taste for schoolboy anarchy; but in sharing my father's loneliness after his separation from my mother, and in being bereft of any close family ties, I had turned into a premature adult.

  After a month in the eighth form I began to notice a new boy, Omar, and then only because he was a quiet, almost taciturn person who took no part in the form's feverish attempt to imitate the Marx Brothers at the circus. He showed no resentment at the prevailing anarchy: nor did he make a move to participate in it. Once he caught me looking at him, and he smiled ruefully, tolerantly. Did I sense another adult in the class? Someone who was a little older than his years?

  Even before we began talking to each other, Omar and I developed an understanding of sorts, and we'd nod almost respectfully to each other when we met in the classroom corridors or the environs of the dining hall or the dormitory. We were not in the same house. The house system practised its own form of apartheid, whereby a member of one House was not expected to fraternise with someone belonging to another. Those public schools certainly knew how to clamp you into compartments. However, these barriers vanished when Omar and I found ourselves selected for the School Colts' hockey team, Omar as a full-back, I as the goalkeeper.

  The taciturn Omar now spoke to me occasionally, and we combined well on the field of play. A good understanding is needed between a goalkeeper and a full-back. We were on the same wavelength. I anticipated his moves, he was familiar with mine. Years later, when I read Conrad's The Secret Sharer, I thought of Omar.

  It wasn't until we were away from the confines of school, classroom and dining hall that our friendship flourished. The hockey team travelled to Sanawar on the next mountain range, where we were to play a couple of matches against our old rivals, the Lawrence Royal Military School. This had been my father's old school, so I was keen to explore its grounds and peep into its classrooms.

  Omar and I were thrown together a good deal during the visit to Sanawar, and in our more leisurely moments, strolling undisturbed around a school where we were guests and not pupils, we exchanged life histories and other confidences. Omar, too, had lost his father—had I sensed that before?—shot in some tribal encounter on the Frontier, for he hailed from the lawless lands beyond Peshawar. A wealthy uncle was seeing to Omar's education.

  We wandered into the school chapel, and there I found my father's name—A. A. Bond—on the school's roll of honour board: old boys who had lost their lives while serving during the two World Wars.

  'What did his initials stand for?' asked Omar. 'Aubrey Alexander.'

  'Unusual names, like yours. Why did your parents call you Rusty?'

  'I am not sure.' I told him about the book I was writing. It was my first one and was called Nine Months (the length of the school term, not a pregnancy), and it described some of the happenings at school and lampooned a few of our teachers. I had filled three slim exercise books with this premature literary project, and I allowed Omar to go through them. He must have been my first reader and critic. They're very interesting,' he said, 'but you'll get into trouble if someone finds them, especially Mr Fisher.'

  I have to admit it wasn't great literature. I was better at hockey and football. I made some spectacular saves, and we won our matches against Sanawar. When we returned to Simla, we were school heroes for a couple of days and lost some of our reticence; we were even a little more forthcoming with other boys. And then Mr Fisher, my housemaster, discovered my literary opus, Nike Months, under my mattress, and took it away and read it (as he told me later) from cover to cover. Corporal punishment then being in vogue, I was given six of the best with a springy Malacca cane, and my manuscript was torn up and deposited in Mr Fisher's waste-paper basket. All I had to show for my efforts were some purple welts on my bottom. These were proudly displayed to all who were interested, and I was a hero for another two days.

  'Will you go away too when the British leave India?' Omar asked me one day.

  I' don't think so,' I said. 'I don't have anyone to go back to in England, and my guardian, Mr Harrison, too seems to have no intention of going back.'

  'Everyone is saying that our leaders and the British are going to divide the country. Simla will be in India, Peshawar in Pakistan!'

  'Oh, it won't happen,' I said glibly. 'How can they cut up such a big country?' But even as we chatted about the possibility, Nehru, Jinnah and Mountbatten, and all those who mattered, were preparing their instruments for major surgery.

  Before their decision impinged on our lives and everyone else's, we found a little freedom of our own, in an underground tunnel that we discovered below the third flat.

  It was really part of an old, disused drainage system, and when Omar and I began exploring it, we had no idea just how far it extended. After crawling along on our bellies for some twenty feet, we found ourselves in complete darkness. Omar had brought along a small pencil torch, and with its help we continued writhing forward (moving backwards would have been quite impossible) until we saw a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Dusty, musty, very scruffy, we emerged at last on to a grassy knoll, a little way outside the school boundary.

  It's always a great thrill to escape beyond the boundaries that adults have devised. Here we were in unknown territory. To travel without passports—that would be the ultimate in freedom!

  But more passports were on their way—and more boundaries.

  Lord Mountbatten, viceroy and governor-general-to-be, came for our Founder's Day and gave away the prizes. I had won a prize for something or the other, and mounted the rostrum to receive my book from this towering, handsome man in his pinstripe suit. Bishop Cotton's was then the premier school of India, often referred to as the 'Eton of the East'. Viceroys and governors had graced its functions. Many of its boys had gone on to eminence in the civil services and armed forces. There was one 'old boy' about whom they maintained a stolid silence— General Dyer, who had ordered the massacre at Amritsar and destroyed the trust that had been building up between Britain and India.

  Now Mountbatten spoke of the momentous events that were happening all around us—the War had just come to an end, the United Nations held out the promise of a world living in peace and harmony, and India, an equal partner with Britain, would be among the great nations...

  A few weeks later, Bengal and the Punjab provinces were bisected. Riots flared up across northern India, and there was a great exodus of people crossing the newly-drawn frontiers of Pakistan and India. Homes were destroyed, thousands lost their lives.

  The common-room radio and the occasional newspaper kept us abreast of events, but in our tunnel, Omar and I felt immune from all that was happening, worlds away from all the pillage, murder and revenge. And outside the tunnel, on the pine knoll below the school, there was fresh untrodden grass, sprinkled with clover and daisies; the only sounds we heard were the hammering of a woodpecker and the distant insistent call of the Himalayan barbet. Who could touch us there?

  'And when all the wars are done,' I said, 'a butterfly will still be beautiful.'

  'Did you read that somewhere?'

  'No, it just came into my head.'

  'Already you're a writer.'

  'No, I want to play hockey for India or football for Arsenal. Only wining teams!'

  'You can't win forever. Better to be a writer.'

  When the monsoon arrived, the tunnel was flooded, the drain choked with rubble. We were allowed out to the cinema to see Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, a film that did nothing to raise our spirits on a wet and gloomy afternoon; but it was our last picture that year, because communal riots suddenly broke out in Simla's Lower Bazaar, an area that was still much as Kipling had described it—'a man who knows his way there can defy all the police of India's summer capital'—and we were confined to school indefinitely.

  One morning after prayers in the chapel, the headmaster announced that the Muslim boys—those who had their homes in what was now Pakistan—would have to be evacuated, sent to their homes across the bord
er with an armed convoy.

  The tunnel no longer provided an escape for us. The bazaar was out of bounds. The flooded playing field was deserted. Omar and I sat on a damp wooden bench and talked about the future in vaguely hopeful terms; but we didn't solve any problems. Mountbatten and Nehru and Jinnah were doing all the solving.

  It was soon time for Omar to leave—he left along with some fifty other boys from Lahore, Pindi and Peshawar. The rest of us—Hindus, Christians, Parsis—helped them load their luggage into the waiting trucks. A couple of boys broke down and wept. So did our departing school captain, a Pathan who had been known for his stoic and unemotional demeanour. Omar waved cheerfully to me and I waved back. We had vowed to meet again some day.

  The convoy got through safely enough. There was only one casualty—the school cook, who had strayed into an off-limits area in the foothill-town of Kalika and been set upon by a mob. He wasn't seen again.

  Towards the end of the school year, just as we were all getting ready to leave for the school holidays, I received a letter from Omar. He told me something about his new school and how he missed my company and our games and our tunnel to freedom. I replied and gave him my home address, but I did not hear from him again.

  Some seventeen or eighteen years later I did get news of Omar, but in an entirely different context. India and Pakistan were at war, and in a bombing raid over Ambala, not far from Simla, a Pakistani plane was shot down. Its crew died in the crash. One of them, I learnt later, was Omar.

  Did he, I wonder, get a glimpse of the playing fields we knew so well as boys? Perhaps memories of his schooldays flooded back as he flew over the foothills. Perhaps he remembered the tunnel through which we were able to make our little escape to freedom.

  But there are no tunnels in the sky.

  Gone Fishing

  The house was called 'Undercliff, because that's where it stood—under a cliff. The man who went away—the owner of the house—was Robert Astley. And the man who stayed behind— the old family retainer—was Prem Bahadur.