A Book of Simple Living

  About the book:

  ‘Mist fills the Himalayan valleys, and monsoon rain sweeps across the hills. Sometimes, during the day, a bird visits me—a deep purple whistling thrush. She perches on the window sill, and looks out with me at the rain.’

  This personal diary records the many small moments that constitute a life of harmony—with the self, the natural world, and friends, family and passersby. In these pages, we watch a wild plum blossom and the moon come up between two deodar trees; we hear a redstart whistle and the rain drum on a tin roof; we recognize the aftermath of loss and the consolation of old companions.

  A Book of Simple Living is a gift of beauty and wisdom from India’s most loved, and most understated, writer.

  About the author:

  Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli in 1934. He grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun and Shimla, worked briefly in Jersey, London and Delhi, and moved to Mussoorie in the early 1960s to write full time.

  One of India's best loved and most popular authors, Ruskin Bond has written over a hundred books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, including the best-selling classics Room on the Roof (winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), A Flight of Pigeons, The Blue Umbrella, Time Stops at Shamli, Night Train at Deoli, Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra (winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award) and Rain in the Mountains. He was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 1999 and the Padma Bhushan in 2014.

  A Book of Simple Living

  In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

  —Leo Tolstoy

  After all, it is a good thing to laugh…and if a straw can tickle a man, it is an instrument of happiness.

  —John Dryden

  Introduction

  What have I learnt after eighty years on planet earth? Quite frankly, very little. Dear reader, don’t believe the elders and philosophers. Wisdom does not come with age. Maybe it is born in the cradle—but this too is conjecture. I only know that for the most part I have followed instinct rather than intelligence, and this has resulted in a modicum of happiness. You will find your own way to this reward, which is in the end the only reward worth having. All that this book can do is to show you that there was a fellow traveller.

  To have got to this point in life without the solace of religion says something for all the things that have brought me joy and a degree of contentment. Books, of course; I couldn’t have survived without books and stories. And companionship—which is sometimes friendship, sometimes love and sometimes, if we are lucky, both. And a little light laughter, a sense of humour. And, above all, my relationship with the natural world—up here in the hills; in the dusty plains; in a treeless mohalla choked with concrete flats, where I once found a marigold growing out of a crack in a balcony. I removed the plaster from the base of the plant, and filled in a little earth which I watered every morning. The plant grew, and sometimes it produced a little orange flower, which I plucked and gave away before it died.

  This much I can tell you: for all its hardships and complications, life is simple. And a nature that doesn’t sue for happiness often receives it in large measure.

  Was it accidental, or was it ordained, or was it in my nature to arrive unharmed at this final stage of life’s journey? I love this life passionately, and I wish it could go on and on. But all good things must come to an end, and when the time comes to make my exit, I hope I can do so with good grace and humour.

  But there is time yet, and many small moments to savour.

  Landour, Mussoorie RUSKIN BOND

  New Year’s Day, 2015

  A small ginger cat arrives on my terrace every afternoon, to curl up in the sun and slumber peacefully for a couple of hours.

  When he awakes, he gets on his feet with minimum effort, arches his back and walks away as he had come. The same spot every day, the same posture, the same pace. There may be better spots—sunnier, quieter, frequented by birds that can be hunted when the cat is rested and restored. But there is no guarantee, and the search will be never-ending, and there may rarely be time to sleep after all that searching and finding.

  It occurs to me that perhaps the cat is a monk. By this I do not mean anything austere. I doubt anyone in single-minded pursuit of enlightenment ever finds it. A good monk would be a mild sort of fellow, a bit of a sensualist, capable of compassion for the world, but also for himself. He would know that it is all right not to climb every mountain.

  A good monk would know that contentment is easier to attain than happiness, and that it is enough.

  And what of happiness, then?

  Happiness is a mysterious thing, to be found somewhere between too little and too much. But it is as elusive as a butterfly, and we must never pursue it. If we stay very still, it may come and settle on our hand. But only briefly. We must savour those moments, for they will not come our way very often.

  A cherry tree bowed down by the night’s rain suddenly rights itself, flinging pellets of water in my face. This, too, is happiness.

  Mist fills the Himalayan valleys, and monsoon rain sweeps across the hills. Sometimes, during the day, a bird visits me—a deep purple whistling thrush, hopping about on long dainty legs, peering to right and left, too nervous to sing. She perches on the window sill, and looks out with me at the rain. She does not permit any familiarity. But if I sit quietly in my chair, she will sit quietly on her window sill, glancing quickly at me now and then just to make sure that I’m keeping my distance. When the rain stops, she glides away, and it is only then, confident in her freedom, that she bursts into full-throated song, her broken but haunting melody echoing down the ravine.

  A squirrel comes, too, when his home in the oak tree gets waterlogged. Apparently he is a bachelor; anyway, he lives alone. He knows me well, this squirrel, and is bold enough to climb on to the dining table looking for tidbits, which he always finds, because I leave them there. Had I met him when he was a youngster, he would have learned to eat from my hand, but I have only been in this house a few months. I like it this way. I’m not looking for pets; it is enough that he seeks me out when he wants company.

  A cold, cold January. There is a blizzard. The storm rages for two days—howling winds, hail, sleet, snow. The power goes out. There’s coal to burn but it is hardly enough. Worst weather that I can recall in this hill station. Sick of it. Why do I stay here?

  In March, there’s gentle weather at last. Peach, plum and apricot trees in blossom, birds making a racket in the branches. So this is why I stay.

  As I walked home last night,

  I saw a lone fox dancing

  In the cold moonlight.

  I stood and watched; then

  Took the low road, knowing

  The night was his by right.

  Sometimes, when words ring true,

  I’m like a lone fox dancing

  In the morning dew.

  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 at a sharp angle into the ravine. I do nearly all my writing at this window seat. Whenever I look up, the trees remind me that they are there. They are my best critics. As long as I am aware of their presence, I may avoid the thoughtless and the trivial.

  In the days when I walked a lot I went among the trees on my hillside often, acknowledging their presence with a touch of my hand against their trunks—the walnut’s smooth and polished; the pine’s patterned and whorled; the oak’s rough and gnarled, full of experience. The oak had been there the longest, and the wind had bent its upper branches and twisted a few, so that it looked shaggy and undistinguished. It was a good tree for the privacy of birds, its crooked branches spreading out
with no particular effect; and sometimes the tree seemed uninhabited until there was a whirring sound, as of a helicopter approaching, and a party of long-tailed blue magpies shot out of the leaves and streamed across the forest glade.

  After the monsoon, when the dark red berries had ripened on the hawthorn, this pretty tree was visited by green pigeons, the kokla birds of Garhwal, who clambered upside-down among the fruit-laden twigs. And during winter, a white-capped redstart perched on the bare branches of the wild pear tree and whistled cheerfully. He had come to winter in the garden.

  The pines grew on the next hill. But there was a small blue one, a Himalayan chir, a little way below my cottage, and sometimes I sat beneath it to listen to the wind playing softly in its branches.

  Opening the window at night, I usually had something else to listen to—the mellow whistle of the pygmy owlet, or the cry of a barking deer which had scented the proximity of a panther.

  Some sounds I could not recognize at the time. They were strange night sounds that I now know as the sounds of the great trees themselves, scratching their limbs in the dark, shifting a little, flexing their fingers.

  Sometimes, there would be a strange silence, and I would see the moon coming up, and two distant deodars in perfect silhouette.

  In bed with fever. Beside my bed is a window and I like looking out at all that’s happening around me; it distracts me from the aches and pains.

  The cherry leaves are turning a dark green. On the maple tree, winged seeds spin round and round. There is fruit on the wild blackberry bushes. Two mynah birds are building a nest in a hole in the wall above the window. They’re very noisy about it, quarelling like good married people; bits of grass keep falling on the window sill. High up the spruce tree, a hawk cuckoo calls: ‘I slept so well! I slept so well!’ (And so did I, happy bird, despite the fever!) A small squirrel climbs on the window sill. He’s been coming every day since I’ve been ill, and I give him crumbs from my plate. A boy on a mule passes by on the rough mountain track. He sees my face at the window and waves to me. I wave back to him. When I’m better, I’ll ask him to let me ride his mule.

  Winter is here again. When it gets dark I take my place by the large stove in the little dining room. Rakesh sits with me, his wife Beena is making comforting music in the kitchen, frying and stirring masalas in the kadhai. Their children, Siddharth, Shrishti and Gautam, are making a racket in the room above us. The little cat has curled itself into a ball next to my chair.

  This is my family, and it began with friendship, with Prem Singh, Rakesh’s father, who came to work for me in the 1960s. I was used to living alone by then, having done so since my teens. But it was very quiet in the cottage (which was at the edge of a forest). The ghosts of long dead residents were sympathetic and unobtrusive and they kept to themselves. The song of the whistling thrush was beautiful, but I knew he was not singing for me. Up the valley came the sound of a flute sometimes, but I never saw the flute player.

  It wasn’t service that I needed but companionship. Prem, and then his wife and firstborn, little Rakesh, gave me that. They brought much love and laughter into my life. What more could a lonely man ask for?

  It has been a long companionship. But it is the small things I remember. They come to me like pieces of cinema—coloured slides slipping across the screen of memory…

  From the pine knoll across the valley, I see my cottage, Maplewood, washed by sunlight. Prem is in the garden, putting the mattresses out in the sun. From here he is just a speck on the far hill, but I know it is Prem by the way he moves slowly about the garden, pausing once in a while to look at the sky.

  Prem rocking his infant son to sleep—crooning to him, passing his large hand gently over the child’s curly head.

  Prem following me down to the police station where I was arrested (for a story that appeared in Debonair magazine), and waiting outside until I reappeared.

  Prem scolding Suzy the cat for the mess it had made.

  Prem’s large, irrepressible laughter, most in evidence when he was seeing an old Laurel and Hardy movie…

  Most of my life I have given of myself, and in return I have received love in abundance. Life hasn’t been a bed of roses. And yet, quite often, I’ve had roses out of season.

  We must love someone.

  We must keep loving, all our days,

  Someone, anyone, anywhere

  Outside our selves;

  For even the sarus crane

  Will grieve over its lost companion,

  And the seal its mate.

  Somewhere in life

  There must be someone

  To take your hand

  And share the torrid day.

  Without the touch of love

  There is no life, and we must fade away.

  I sit 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 swift repeated trill, which I cannot place. Perhaps it is a tiny tree frog. Or it may be a small green cricket. I shall never know.

  I’m not sure that I really want to know. In an age when a scientific and rational explanation has been given for almost everything we see, it is good to have a mystery, a mystery sweet and satisfying and entirely my own.

  It’s the simple things in life that keep us from going crazy. They contribute more to our general happiness and health than acts of passion and high excitement.

  Like that pigeon in the skylight in the Delhi nursing home where I was incarcerated for two or three days. I was in a bad way, and even worse than the illness that had brought me there were the series of tests the doctors insisted I had to go through—ECGs, ultrasounds, endoscopies, X-rays, blood tests, probes into any orifice they could find, and at the end of it all a fat bill designed to give me a heart attack.

  The only thing that prevented me from running into the street, shouting for help, was that pigeon in the skylight. It sheltered there at various times during the day, and its gentle cooing soothed my nerves. I owe my sanity to that pigeon.

  And as I write this, I’m reminded of other consolations.

  The winter sun on old bones.

  The laughter of a child.

  A cricket singing in a shady nook.

  The smell of frying onions.

  A small bird’s nest.

  A kiss in the dark.

  New moon in a deep purple sky.

  The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man, help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces. Let cheerfulness abound with industry. Give us to go blithely on our business all this day, bring us to our resting-beds weary and content and undishonoured, and grant us in the end the gift of sleep.

  —Robert Louis Stevenson

  Sleep—‘the gentlest of the gods’, says Ovid. Cherish it. Honour it by giving it most of your night and an hour of your day when you can.

  The evening drink, a good, light meal, a hot-water bottle in winter and an open window in summer—these are good sleeping aids, but none more important than a free and easy mind. ‘With quiet mind go take they rest,’ said a wise man, and there is much truth in that statement. Forget and forgive at sunset, and then the day’s deeds are truly done. Then sleep.

  I think I have learnt something of the value of stillness. I don’t fret so much; I laugh at myself more often; I don’t laugh at others. I live life at my own pace. Like a banyan tree.

  Is this wisdom, or is it just old age?

  There is an old cane chair in the living room that has supported my considerable weight for well over thirty years. My wooden bed has done service for forty. My typewriter, too, which I used till it could no longer be repaired, did service for forty years. Since then I have relied on the pen and my fingers—which have served me quite well for at least seventy-five of my eighty years.

  My books are old, most of my pictures are old; my shoes are old, my only suit is very old.


  Only I am young.

  Growing up was always a difficult process for me, and I gave up trying many years ago. I have the temper of a child, and a tendency to be mischievous. And I still retain a childlike trust in grown-ups, which sometimes works to my detriment. But it doesn’t matter. In the long run, the exploiters and manipulators meet with their comeuppances; they are their own worst enemies.

  Meanwhile, I’ll continue being an eight-year-old. Recently, I was feeling a bit low, so I played marbles with the children. They won all my marbles, but I felt better.

  I need some water, says the red geranium. Summer is just around the corner.

  So, I water all the geraniums. And the nasturtiums. And the pea which is flaunting a little white flower at me.

  The steps leading up from the road to our flat need repairing. But there are daisies growing in the cracks, so I shall let them finish flowering before doing anything about the steps.

  A long and ne’er-say-die search for the perfect window. This would be one way to sum up my life. It began in my teens, and there were some rooms with passable views, but it wasn’t until I moved into my present abode, a windswept, rather shaky old house on the edge of a spur, that I was truly satisfied. My bedroom window opens on to blue skies, mountains striding away into the far distance, winding rivers in the valley below (and, just to bring me down to earth, the local television tower).

  The window is so positioned that I can lie on my bed and look at the sky, or sit at my desk and look at the hills, or stand at the window and look at the road below.