Mr Oliver's Diary Read online

  RUSKIN BOND

  MR OLIVER’S DIARY

  Illustrations by Bombay Design House

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Introduction

  7 March

  8 March

  10 March

  15 March

  18 March

  24 March

  1 April

  6 April

  10 April

  20 April

  25 April

  27 April

  4 May

  7 May

  10 May

  15 May

  20 May

  25 May

  27 May

  29 May

  31 May

  2 June

  3 June

  6 June

  10 June

  13 June

  15 June

  16 June

  20 June

  25 June

  2 July

  3 July

  7 July

  10 July

  15 July

  18 July

  20 July

  25 July

  29 July

  2 August

  5 August

  10 August

  15 August

  16 August

  18 August

  21 August

  25 August

  1 September

  2 September

  3 September

  5 September

  6 September

  10 September

  Postscript

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  MR OLIVER’S DIARY

  Born in Kasauli in 1934, Ruskin Bond grew up in Jamnagar, 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 Mountain 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 was honoured with the Padma Bhushan in 2014. He lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his extended family.

  Also in Puffin by Ruskin Bond

  Puffin Classics: The Room on the Roof

  Puffin Classics: Vagrants in the Valley

  The Room of Many Colours: A Treasury of Stories for Children

  Panther’s Moon and Other Stories

  The Hidden Pool

  The Parrot Who Wouldn’t Talk and Other Stories

  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

  Rusty and the Magic Mountain

  The Puffin Book of Classic School Stories

  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

  Uncles, Aunts and Elephants: Tales from Your Favourite Storyteller

  Ranji’s Wonderful Bat and Other Stories

  Dust on the Mountain

  Earthquake

  Cricket for the Crocodile

  Whispers in the Dark: A Book of Spooks

  For Arghya Mukherjee, friend and schoolteacher . . .

  Good luck in a difficult profession!

  Introduction

  Junior school, or ‘prep school’ as we called it then, was fun—except when we were given rhubarb for breakfast. Once we progressed to senior school, on the other side of the hill, life took a more serious turn: exams, compulsory games, punishments, speeches to listen to, early morning PT . . .

  Boys between the ages of eight and twelve are expected to be mischievous, and mischievous we were. The girls on the next hillside were not very different, from what we heard.

  The train journey up the mountain to Simla took place almost exactly as I have described it in this book. The boys were my friends and companions. The Simla Mall, with its cinemas, skating rink and cafés, beckoned us into town on holidays. We had a headmaster who played the violin. And we had a teacher named Mr Oliver.

  Mr Oliver was a good teacher, but he was a taciturn man who kept to himself. He went for long walks on his own. Sometimes he conversed with a pet parrot. One day, Mirchi and I peeped in through his study window and saw him scribbling away in a diary.

  ‘I wonder what he’s writing,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe it’s his autobiography,’ said Mirchi.

  Maybe it was. We never got to know Mr Oliver in the way we got to know other, more sociable teachers; but he always fascinated me, and over the years I have often wondered what he was really like. In presenting his ‘diary’, I have tried to explore the personality of this lonely man. As boys, we laughed at him a good deal. But was he really laughing at us?

  30 August 2016

  7 MARCH

  Pure vindictiveness on the part of the headmaster, putting me in charge of the school party for the entire duration of the train journey from Kalka to Simla. A day of sheer misery for me. Over a hundred young boys doing their best to sabotage the train! And no help from Miss Babcock, a trained nurse, who was supposed to help me control the prep-school contingent. Of course she’s deaf—or pretends to be—so she simply made herself comfortable in the compartment and slept through the entire journey.

  Normally the journey takes about eight hours by our little mountain railway but, with all the delays and unnecessary stops, it took us nearly twelve.

  I had to take a roll-call when we started; then another at Barog where we stopped for breakfast; then one at Solan, where we stopped for no reason at all; and, finally, one at Tara Devi where the engine driver had relatives. He was away for almost an hour, enjoying tea and samosas in his in-laws’ home. The boys grew restless and several of them started walking up the track, saying they’d get to Simla before the train! They probably would have, too, but I couldn’t let them take off on their own. So I had to run after them and herd them back to the station, threatening them with a supperless evening if they disobeyed.

  We were to go without supper anyway.

  My tribulations started early, at Barog, famous for its breakfasts and lunches. It was brunch-time, around noon, when we got there, and the boys were hungry, as they always are. Instead of having the regulation breakfast arranged by the school, most of the boys decided to spend their pocket money on the puris and chole that were being cooked and sold at a dhaba behind the station.

  After leaving Barog, the train enters a tunnel—the longest of the 100-odd tunnels that are cut through these ranges—and it takes a full five minutes for it to emerge into daylight. By the time we were out in the open, a number of boys were sick, the puri-chole having been far from fresh. Several boys had also been left behind at the station.

  The engine driver, very courteously, stopped and waited for them. I sent our biggest boys, Tata and Mirchandani, to fetch them. They disappeared into the tunnel and took a long time coming back, one of them having sprained his ankle in the dark. We woke Miss Babcock, who said there was nothing she could do until we got to Simla, there being no water on the train.

  We stopped again at Solan, as mentioned, and Tata very kindly asked me if I’d like a beer.

  ‘I don’t d
rink,’ I said. ‘But why do you ask?’

  ‘They make beer here,’ he said. ‘It’s called the Solan Brewery.’

  ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘see that nobody gets off the train. We can’t have the boys wandering about in a brewery.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ said Tata, and set off to see that my orders were carried out. Must recommend him for head prefect this year.

  Someone came around selling glasses of nimbu pani. Mirchandani drank two glasses and fell asleep!

  ‘Must have been some beer in it,’ said Tata knowledgeably. ‘They call it a shandy, sir.’

  These twelve-year-olds seem to know everything. Classes 1 to 6, that’s the prep school range. And by the time they get to senior school, there’s nothing you can teach them.

  Anyway, it was late evening and getting dark by the time we left Tara Devi, well behind schedule.

  Then it began to snow!

  And it snowed and snowed.

  The train had to stop about three miles from Simla. The engine’s wheels kept slipping, and, at times, we were going backwards instead of forwards. Finally we came to a dead halt, and the guard came around telling us we could go no further. We had a choice between getting out and walking to the station, and then another three miles to school, or spending the night in the train.

  By now it was dark and snowing heavily. We could not see the railway lines.

  ‘We’ll stay where we are until someone comes and gets us!’ declared Miss Babcock, who had finally come to life.

  I had to agree with her. There was no sense in marching off into the blizzard like brave Scott looking for the South Pole—not with a hundred schoolboys in tow!

  The boys rather liked the idea of spending the night in our cramped little compartments. But after an hour’s excitement, it dawned on all that they would have to go without supper. There was no food on the train!

  ‘Everyone’s hungry,’ complained Tata.

  ‘Well, they’ll have to stay hungry till morning,’ I snapped. ‘They can have breakfast in school.’

  ‘Breakfast, sir! They’ll die of starvation before that!’

  There was much grumbling and mumbling, and then all along the length of the train, a howl went up. ‘Supper, sir, supper! Water, water!’

  Finally, I decided I would walk up the track to the station to see if some food could be arranged. I asked for volunteers; Tata, Mirchandani and two or three others offered to accompany me.

  We trudged through the snow for half an hour until we reached the station. There was no food there. All the vendors had gone home. However, the boys, very enterprisingly, dashed up to the Lower Bazaar, where they made a deal with a small restaurant. And the result was a continuous supply of kulchas, puris and curries being sent in relays back to the stationary train, where it was being wolfed down by our contingent of hungry boys.

  I had to fork out several hundred rupees for this feast, and I have yet to be reimbursed.

  There was no sleeping accommodation on the train either, and we had to spend the night sitting upright on our bunks. But this did not prevent Miss Babcock from sleeping. She moved into my compartment and soon nodded off. But her snoring kept us all awake. It reverberated through the night and she sounded just like a bear with a bad cold.

  Tata tried to solve the problem by slipping a paper bag over her head, but the bag simply floated away.

  ‘Try a pillowcase,’ someone suggested.

  ‘Haven’t got one. All our boxes were sent ahead in trucks.’

  Mirchandani produced a towel and this was placed gently over Miss Babcock’s slumbering countenance. It mitigated the snoring somewhat, although I was alarmed when it sounded as though the good lady was choking to death.

  I lifted the towel slightly to allow her to breathe more freely. She opened one eye, and gave me a long, malevolent stare. I dropped the end of the towel in a hurry and made no further attempts at resuscitation. Miss Babcock was imperishable.

  Came the dawn, and we all shuffled wearily out of our seats and into the freezing cold outside.

  ‘Let’s start walking, boys,’ I said cheerfully, although I felt pretty miserable.

  Another trudge through the snow, past the station, and then—tramp, tramp, tramp—along the highway—tramp, tramp, tramp—the road was free! We straggled into Chhota Simla and through the familiar gates of our famous prep school. The boys to their dormitories and then to the dining hall, where parathas and porridge—an odd combination of the East and the West—awaited them. And I to my quarters—a large bed-sitting room above the bakery, with a view of the headmaster’s vegetable garden and of a corner of the playing field, where the school bell—a large, brass gong—hung from a branch of an old willow tree. I was to live with that bell for the next nine months.

  Went to the bathroom for a hot shower. Undressed, turned on the tap. Nothing happened. The pipes had frozen.

  8 MARCH

  Morning duty.

  Stepped out of my front door into bright sunshine and received a snowball full in the face.

  Caught a glimpse of a bunch of boys scurrying around the side of the building, but could not recognize any of them. Got my own back by making the whole lot wait an extra ten minutes before opening the dining-room doors for breakfast.

  During the morning break, while I was sitting in my room, going through the newspaper, I heard them chanting outside my window. That tiresome, stale old ditty they’ve made up:

  Olly, Olly, Olly, with his big nose on a trolley,

  And his wig all painted green.

  I don’t mind the bit about my big nose—in fact, I’m rather proud of it. ‘You have a Roman nose,’ my mother used to say. But I’m still rather touchy about the wig. It was late last year when one of the boys—Rudra, I suspect—had pinched it while I was out, and returned it the next day, coated with green paint.

  Fortunately, I have two wigs—one to wear in school and one to wear when I’m going out.

  It was the latter that had been painted green and rendered perfectly useless.

  And then a few days later, Rudra and his friends had come to me and asked, very innocently, if they could borrow the wig for the school play.

  ‘And who’s going to wear it?’ I asked sarcastically. ‘Hamlet?’

  ‘Oh no, sir. It’s for the Phantom of the Opera!’

  Such a pity that caning has been banned.

  10 MARCH

  Two boys ran away. Naturally, I was assigned the task of locating them and bringing them back to school. Headmaster hates leaving his office and his violin. Junior masters, irresponsible. Lady teachers, not to be trusted. So HM turns to me in times of trouble.

  The offending youths are Devinder Singh and Hirday Gupta, both new boys studying in class 4. Barely ten years old. Very enterprising. It seems they took off early morning, at about five, when it is still dark at this time of the year. They would have gone to the bus stand and taken the first bus to Kalka. So I hired a taxi, certain that I would overtake them somewhere near Solan, where I would await the arrival of the bus. But the taxi had a tyre-burst just outside Simla. And as the driver had neglected to keep a spare tyre, we had to wait on the road for almost an hour until one of his fraternity came by and lent him a tyre.

  The bus had already left Solan by the time we got there, and we caught up with it around midday, just outside Kalka. I was waiting at the bus stop when the passengers got down from the bus, and there, sure enough, were young Singh and Gupta, looking rather sheepish as they found me confronting them.

  Fortunately, they did not try to run away, as I was in no condition for a chase through the bazaars and byways of Kalka.

  ‘Enjoyed the ride, boys?’ I asked in my most jocular tone.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Devinder.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Hirday.

  ‘Hungry, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ said both.

  ‘Missed your breakfast. Very important meal, breakfast. Never start the day without a good breakfast.’
r />   ‘But we don’t get a good breakfast, sir,’ said Hirday.

  ‘Or lunch. Or dinner,’ added Devinder. ‘The meat’s too tough and the chapattis are too rubbery.’

  ‘Good for the teeth,’ I said.

  ‘And the dal’s too watery,’ said Hirday.

  ‘Well, I’ll see what I can do about it,’ I said. ‘Now come and have breakfast with me, and then we’ll travel back together.’

  I took them to the station restaurant and gave them a hefty lunch. It wasn’t much better than the school lunch, but, afterwards, I let them gorge on gulab jamuns—as many as they could consume. They were sick on the drive back to Simla. Punishment enough. I told the headmaster that a lecture and a warning would suffice, and he agreed. He didn’t want their parents turning up and making a fuss.

  Of course, everyone in school knew about their escapade, and they were heroes for a day and a half. As a special treat, I asked our food matron to serve gulab jamuns with lunch the next day. Devinder and Hirday wouldn’t touch theirs.

  ‘Not hungry today, boys?’ I asked.

  A sickly sweet smile was the only response.

  15 MARCH

  Blossoms on the plum tree outside my window. A pretty picture. And if the boys and the monkeys leave the fruit alone, maybe I’ll have a few plums this summer.

  Can’t leave my window open without the monkeys getting in. This morning, they made off with a loaf of cinnamon bread, of which I am particularly fond. Yesterday, one of them made off with my underwear, abandoning it on a rose bush in the headmaster’s garden. I was about to retrieve it when HM’s wife appeared and wished me a hearty good morning, at which, I beat a retreat, feeling too embarrassed to claim my underwear. She mistook it for her husband’s and took it away. I hope it fits him. He is somewhat flabby and pear-shaped.

  Even though I’m almost forty, I think I’m in better condition than HM and most other members of the staff. A little too lean, perhaps. And I do need my wig. [Reminder: get a spare wig, can’t use the green one any more.]