Uncles, Aunts and Elephants Read online

  Ruskin Bond

  UNCLES, AUNTS & ELEPHANTS

  Tales from your Favourite Storyteller

  Illustrations by Archana Sreenivasan

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Foreword

  Fiction

  A Little Friend

  Boy Scouts Forever!

  Bitter Gooseberries

  Uncle Ken’s Feathered Foes

  Escape from Java

  The Black Cat

  Grandfather’s Many Faces

  He Said It with Arsenic

  Here Comes Mr Oliver

  Mr Oliver’s Diary

  Uncle Ken’s Rumble in the Jungle

  Monkey Trouble

  Owls in the Family

  Grandfather Fights an Ostrich

  Return of the White Pigeon

  The Parrot Who Wouldn’t Talk

  The Canal

  White Mice

  Wilson’s Bridge

  The Eyes of the Eagle

  Non-fiction

  A Knock at the Door

  Bird Life in the City

  Bhabiji’s House

  Fragrance to the Air

  Garden of a Thousand Trees

  Good Day to You, Uncle

  The Good Earth

  The Garden of Memories

  In Search of the Perfect Window

  The Evil Eye

  April in Landour

  Reading Was My Religion

  Miss Romola and Others

  Respect Your Breakfast

  Simla and Delhi, 1943

  Hill of the Fairies

  The Elephant and the Cassowary Bird

  A New Flower

  Poetry

  Boy in a Blue Pullover

  We Three

  Granny’s Tree-Climbing

  Love’s Sad Song

  In a Strange Cafe

  If Mice Could Roar

  My Best Friend

  The Cat Has Something to Say

  As a Boy

  The Demon Driver

  Read More

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  UNCLES, AUNTS AND ELEPHANTS

  Born in Kasauli (Himachal Pradesh) in 1934, Ruskin Bond grew up in Jamnagar (Gujarat), Dehradun, New Delhi and Simla.

  His 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 over five hundred short stories, essays and novellas (some included in the collections Dust on the Mountains and Classic Ruskin Bond) and more than forty books for children. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India in 1993, the Padma Shri in 1999, and the Delhi government’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi’s Bal Sahitya Puraskar for his total contribution to children’s literature’ in 2013 and honoured with the Padma Bhushan in 2014.

  Ruskin Bond lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his extended family.

  By the Same Author

  Also in Puffin by Ruskin Bond

  Puffin Classics: The Room on the Roof

  The Room of Many Colours: Ruskin Bond’s Treasury of Stories for Children

  Panther’s Moon and Other Stories

  The Hidden Pool

  The Parrot Who Wouldn’t Talk and Other Stories

  Mr Oliver’s Diary

  Escape from Java and Other Tales of Danger

  Crazy Times with Uncle Ken

  Rusty the Boy from the Hills

  Rusty Runs Away

  Rusty and the Leopard

  Rusty Goes to London

  Rusty Comes Home

  The Puffin Book of Classic School Stories

  The Puffin Good Reading Guide for Children

  The Kashmiri Storyteller

  Hip-Hop Nature Boy and Other Poems

  The Adventures of Rusty: Collected Stories

  The Cherry Tree

  Getting Granny’s Glasses

  The Eyes of the Eagle

  Thick as Thieves: Tales of Friendship

  Foreword

  Since my first Puffin Treasury came out, five years ago, there has been a steady flow of tales to tell. The desk near my window is overflowing with notebooks and manuscripts. My cat (‘Fat Cat’) does her utmost to knock everything to the ground, but I am a patient soul and I do my best to restore order where confusion reigns. Uncle Ken keeps popping up with new escapades; Mr Oliver endeavours to control a bunch of high-spirited students; talking parrots and playful elephants take the stage; I make friends with a mouse (Fat Cat would disapprove); recall the scenes of my childhood; and look out of my window at the mountains striding away into the distance and know that more friends and memories will come my way.

  My thanks to Mimi Basu, a kind Puffin editor, who has done all the hard work in making this selection. I have written over fifty books for the Penguin and Puffin list, so she had a busy time choosing stories that would please our readers.

  And to make Fat Cat happy, there is a cat poem too.

  Ruskin Bond

  At my window

  Landour, 12 March 2014

  FICTION

  A Little Friend

  When I first arrived in London I knew no one. I was eighteen and on my own, looking for a room, looking for a job. I spent a week in a students’ hostel, a noisy place full of foreign students talking in every tongue except English. Then I saw an ad for a room to let, for just a pound a week. I was on the dole, getting just three pounds a week, so I took the room without even looking at it.

  It turned out to be a tiny attic at the top of the building. Nothing above me but a low ceiling and a slanting tiled roof. There was a bed, a small dressing table, and a gas fire in the corner of the room. You had to shove several pennies into a slot before you could light the fire. It was November, very cold, and I kept running out of pennies. The toilet was about two floors below me. Above the potty was a notice which said ‘Do not throw your tea leaves in here.’ As I did not have anything to cook on, I had no tea leaves to deposit in the loo. I supposed that the other tenants (whom I rarely saw) were given to flushing away their tea leaves.

  My landlady was Jewish, and I did not see much of her either, except when the rent was due. She was a Polish refugee, and I think she’d had a hard time in Europe during the War. It was seldom that she emerged from her room.

  There was no bath in the building. I had to use the public baths some way down Belsize Road. I took my meals, the cheapest I could get, at a snack bar near the underground station. Some evenings I would bring home a loaf of bread and a tin of sardines; this was luxury.

  Was I lonely? You can bet I was . . . terribly lonely. I had no friends in that great city. Even the city looked lonely, all grey and fogbound. Every day I visited the employment exchange, and after two weeks I landed a job as a ledger clerk in a large grocery store. The pay was five pounds a week.

  I was rich! For once I could have a proper lunch instead of the usual beans on toast. I bought ham and cheese and celebrated with sandwiches and a bottle of cheap sherry. Soon there were crumbs all over the floor of my room. My landlady wouldn’t like that. I was about to get up to sweep them away when there was a squeak and a little mouse ran across the floor with a bit of cheese that it had found. He darted across the room and disappeared behind the dressing table.

  I decided not to clear away the crumbs; let the mouse have them. ‘Waste not, want not,’ as my grandmother used to say.

  I did not see the mouse again, but after I’d put the light out and gone to bed, I could hear him scurrying about the room, collecting titbits. Now and then he emitted a little squeak, possibly of satisfact
ion.

  ‘Well, at least I did not have to celebrate alone,’ I said to myself, ‘a mouse for company is better than no company at all.’

  I was off to work early next morning, and in my absence the landlady had my room cleaned. I came back to find a note on the dressing table which said: ‘Please do not scatter food on the floor.’

  She was right, of course. My room-mate deserved better than a scattering of crumbs. So I provided him with an empty soap dish, which I placed near the dressing table, and I filled it with an assortment of biscuit crumbs. But for some reason he wouldn’t go near the soap dish. I stayed up quite late, waiting for him to appear, and when he did, he explored all corners of the room and even approached my bed, but stayed well away from the soap dish. Perhaps he didn’t like the colour, a bright pink. I’ve been told by a scientist that mice are colour-blind and wouldn’t be able to distinguish a pink soap dish from a blue one. But I think the scientist got it wrong. Quite often, they do.

  I couldn’t tell if my mouse was a male or a female, but for some indefinable reason I felt that he was a bachelor, like me. Surely a female mouse would be living with her family. This one was very much a loner.

  I threw the soap dish away, and the following evening, on my way home from work, I bought a pretty little saucer, and this I placed near his residence, with a piece of cheese in the middle. He came to it almost instantly, nibbled at the cheese, approved of it, and carried the rest of it back to his hole behind the dressing table.

  A fussy mouse! No soap dish for him. He had to have a saucer with a Chinese willow-pattern design.

  After some time we become protective of our own. Summer came to London early in May, and finding the room stuffier than usual, I opened the small window that looked out upon a sea of rooftops, all similar to ours and to each other. But I could not leave it open for long. Suddenly I heard an agitated squeak from below my bed, and the mouse scurried across the room to the safety of the dressing table. Looking up, I saw a large tabby cat framed in the open window, looking in with a speculative air. I think he had seen, or sensed, that there was a free lunch in the offing if he was patient enough.

  ‘No free lunches for cats,’ I said. I closed the window and kept it shut.

  On weekends I roamed the city, occasionally visiting suburban cinemas where the seats were cheap; but on weekdays I’d stay at home in the evenings, working on my novel, my romance of India, and occasionally reading aloud from my manuscript.

  The mouse wasn’t a very good listener, he was never long in one place, but he was now trusting enough to take a piece of cheese or bread from my fingers, and if I spent too much time on my book, he would remind me of his presence by giving several little squeaks — scolding me for not paying attention to his needs.

  Alas, the time came when I had to consider parting from the ‘Lone Ranger’, as I had come to call my fellow lodger. A slight increase in salary, and a cheque from BBC radio for a couple of stories, meant I could move to bigger and better lodgings in a more congenial area of London. My landlady was sorry to see me go, for, in spite of my untidy ways, I had been regular with the rent. And the little mouse — would he too be sorry to see me go? He would have to forage further afield for his meals. And the next tenant might prefer cats to mice!

  This was my worry, not his. Unlike humans, mice don’t worry about the future — their own or the world’s.

  The problem was partly resolved by the arrival of another tenant — not a human tenant, but another mouse, presumably a female, because she was a little smaller and a little prettier than my room-mate. Two or three days before I was to leave, I came home to find them chasing each other about the room with a great deal of squeaking and acrobatic play. Was this romance?

  I felt a twinge of envy. My little friend had found a companion, and I was still without one. But when the time came for me to leave, I made sure they were well supplied with an assortment of crackers and rusks — enough to last well over a month, provided our landlady did not find them first.

  I packed my battered, old suitcase and left that small attic behind. As we journey through life, old friends and new friends are often left behind, never to be met with again. There are times when we are on our own, lonely, in need of a friendly presence. Just someone to be there when we return to that empty, joyless room. And at such times, even a little mouse, can make a big difference.

  Boy Scouts Forever!

  I was a Boy Scout once, although I couldn’t tell a slip knot from a granny knot, or a reef knot from a thief knot, except that a thief knot was supposed to be used to tie up a thief, should you happen to catch one. I have never caught a thief, and wouldn’t know what to do with one since I can’t tie a knot. Just let him go with a warning, I suppose. Tell him to become a Boy Scout.

  ‘Be prepared!’ That’s the Boy Scout motto. And a good one, too. But I never seem to be well prepared for anything, be it an exam or a journey or the roof blowing off my room. I get halfway through a speech and then forget what I have to say next. Or I make a new suit to attend a friend’s wedding, and then turn up in my pyjamas.

  So how did I, the most impractical of boys, become a Boy Scout? I was at boarding school in Simla when it happened.

  Well, it seems a rumour had gone around the junior school (I was still a junior then) that I was a good cook. I had never cooked anything in my life, but of course I had spent a lot of time in the tuck shop making

  suggestions and advising Chippu, who ran the tuck shop,

  and encouraging him to make more and better samosas, jalebis, tikkees and pakoras. For my unwanted advice he would favour me with an occasional free samosa, so naturally I looked upon him as a friend and benefactor. With this qualification I was given a cookery badge and put in charge of our troop’s supply of rations.

  There were about twenty of us in our troop, and during the summer break our Scoutmaster, Mr Oliver, took us on a camping expedition to Tara Devi, a temple-crowned mountain a few miles outside Simla. That first night we were put to work, peeling potatoes, skinning onions, shelling peas and pounding masalas. These various ingredients being ready, I was asked — as the troop’s cookery expert — what should be done with them.

  ‘Put everything in that big degchi,’ I ordered. ‘Pour half a tin of ghee over the lot. Add some nettle leaves and cook for half an hour.’

  When this was done, everyone had a taste, but the general opinion was that the dish lacked something.

  ‘More salt,’ I suggested.

  More salt was added. It still lacked something.

  ‘Add a cup of sugar,’ I ordered.

  Sugar was added to the concoction. But still it lacked something.

  ‘We forgot to add tomatoes,’ said Bimal, one of the Scouts.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘We have tomato sauce. Add a bottle of tomato sauce!’

  ‘How about some vinegar?’ asked another boy.

  ‘Just the thing,’ I agreed. ‘A cup of vinegar!’

  ‘Now it’s too sour,’ said one of the tasters.

  ‘What jam did we bring?’ I asked.

  ‘Gooseberry jam.’

  ‘Just the thing. Empty the bottle!’

  The dish was a great success. Everyone enjoyed it, including Mr Oliver, who had no idea what went into it.

  ‘What’s this called?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s an all-Indian sweet-and-sour jam-potato curry,’ I ventured.

  ‘For short, just call it a Bond-bhujji,’ said Bimal.

  I had earned my cookery badge!

  *

  Poor Mr Oliver! He wasn’t really cut out to be a Scoutmaster, any more than I was meant to be a Scout. The following day he announced that he would give us a lesson in tracking. He would take a half-hour start and walk into the forest, leaving behind him a trail of broken twigs, chicken feathers, pine cones and chestnuts, and we were to follow the trail until we found him.

  Unfortunately, we were not very good trackers. We did follow Mr Oliver’s trail some way into the f
orest, but were distracted by a pool of clear water which looked very inviting. Abandoning our uniforms, we jumped into the pool and had a great time romping around or just lying on the grassy banks and enjoying the sunshine. A couple of hours later, feeling hungry, we returned to our campsite and set about preparing the evening meal. Bond-bhujji again, but with further variations.

  It was growing dark, and we were beginning to worry about Mr Oliver’s whereabouts when he limped into camp, assisted by a couple of local villagers. Having waited for us at the far end of the forest for a couple of hours, he had decided to return by following his own trail, but in the gathering gloom he was soon lost. Some locals returning from the temple took charge of him and escorted him back to camp. He was very angry and made us return all our good-conduct and other badges, which he stuffed into his haversack. I had to give up my cookery badge, too.

  An hour later, when we were all preparing to get into our sleeping bags for the night, Mr Oliver called out: ‘Where’s dinner?’

  ‘We’ve had ours,’ said Bimal. ‘Everything is finished, sir.’

  ‘Where’s Bond? He’s supposed to be the cook. Bond, get up and make me an omelette.’

  ‘Can’t, sir.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You have my badge. Not allowed to cook without it. Scout rule, sir.’

  ‘Never heard of such a rule. But you can have your badges back, all of you. We return to school tomorrow.’

  Mr Oliver returned to his tent in a huff. But I relented and made him an elaborate omelette, garnishing it with dandelion leaves and an extra chilli.

  ‘Never had such an omelette before,’ confessed Mr Oliver, blowing out his cheeks. ‘A little too hot, but otherwise quite interesting.’

  ‘Would you like another, sir?’

  ‘Tomorrow, Bond, tomorrow. We’ll breakfast early tomorrow.’

  But we had to break up our camp very early the next day. In the early hours, a bear had strayed into our camp, entered the tent where our stores were kept, and created havoc with all our provisions, even rolling our biggest degchi down the hillside.