Our Trees Still Grow In Dehra Read online

  There were slim silverfish in the waters of the stream. At first we tried catching them with a line, but they usually took the bait and left the hook. Then we brought a bedsheet and stretched it across one end of the stream, but the fish wouldn’t come near it. Eventually Somi, without telling us, brought along a stick of dynamite, and Dal and I were startled out of a siesta by a flash across the water and a deafening explosion. Half the hillside tumbled into the pool, and Somi along with it; but we got him out, as well as a good supply of stunned fish which were too small for eating.

  The effects of the explosion gave Somi another idea, and that was to enlarge our pool by building a dam across one end. This he accomplished with Dal’s and my labour. But one afternoon, when it rained heavily, a torrent of water came rushing down the stream, bursting the dam and flooding the ravine; our clothes were all carried away by the current, and we had to wait for night to fall before creeping home through the darkest alleyways; for we used to bathe quite naked; it would have been unmanly to do otherwise.

  Our activities at the pool included wrestling and buffalo-riding. We wrestled on a strip of sand that ran beside the stream, and rode on a couple of buffaloes that sometimes came to drink and wallow in the more muddy parts of the stream. We would sit astride the buffaloes, and kick and yell and urge them forward, but on no occasion did we ever get them to move. At the most, they would roll over on their backs, taking us with them into a pool of slush.

  But the buffaloes were always comfortable to watch. Solid, earth-bound creatures, they liked warm days and cool, soft mud. There is nothing so satisfying to watch than buffaloes wallowing in mud, or ruminating over a mouthful of grass, absolutely oblivious to everything else. They watch us with sleepy, indifferent eyes, and tolerate the pecking of crows. Did they think all that time, or did they just enjoy the sensuousness of soft, wet mud, while we perspired under a summer sun …? No, thinking would have been too strenuous for those supine creatures; to get neck-deep in water is their only aim in life.

  It didn’t matter how muddy we got ourselves, because we had only to dive into the pool to get rid of the muck. In fact, mud-fighting was one of our favourite pastimes. It was like playing snowballs, only we used mud balls.

  If it was possible for Somi and Dal to get out of their houses undetected at night, we would come to the pool and bathe by moonlight, and at these times we would bathe silently and seriously, because there was something subduing about the stillness of the jungle at night.

  I don’t exactly remember how we broke up, but we hardly noticed it at the time. That was because we never really believed we were finally parting, or that we would not be seeing the pool again. After about a year, Somi passed his matriculation and entered the military academy. The last time I saw him, about twenty-five years ago, he was about to be commissioned, and sported a fierce and very military moustache. He remembered the pool in a sentimental, military way, but not as I remembered it.

  Shortly after Somi had matriculated, Dal and his family left town, and I did not see him again, until after I returned from England. Then he was in Air Force uniform, tall, slim, very handsome, completely unrecognizable as the chubby little boy who had played with me in the pool. Three weeks after this meeting I heard that he had been killed in an air crash. Sweet Dal … I feel you are close to me now … I want to remember you exactly as you were when first we met. Here is my diary for 1951*, when I was sixteen and you thirteen or fourteen:

  7 September: ‘Do you like elephants?’ Somi asked me.

  ‘Yes, when they are tame.’

  ‘That’s all right, then. Daljit!’ he called. ‘You can come up. Ruskin likes elephants.’

  Dal is not exactly an elephant. He is one of us.

  He is fat, oh yes he is fat, but it is his good nature that is so like an elephant’s. His fatness is not grotesque or awkward; it is a very pleasant plumpness, and nothing could suit him better. If Dal were thin he would be a failure.

  His eyes are bright and round, full of mischievousness and a sort of grumpy gaiety.

  And what of the pool?

  I looked for it, after an interval of more than nearly thirty years, but couldn’t find it. I found the ravine, and the bed of shingle, but there was no water. The stream had changed its course, just as we had changed ours.

  I turned away in disappointment, and with a dull ache in my heart. It was cruel of the pool to disappear; it was the cruelty of time. But I hadn’t gone far when I heard the sound of rushing water, and the shouting of children; and pushing my way through jungle, I found another stream and another pool, and about half-a-dozen children splashing about in the water.

  They did not see me, and I kept in the shadow of the trees and watched them play. But I didn’t really see them. I was seeing Somi and Daljeet and the lazy old buffaloes, and I stood there for almost an hour, a disembodied spirit, romping again in the shallows of our secret pool. Nothing had really changed. Time is like that.

  From Small Beginnings

  ‘And the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages, the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, that man will at the last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die.’

  —Rudyard Kipling

  On the first clear September day, towards the end of the rains, I visited the pine-knoll, my place of peace and power.

  It was months since I’d last been there. Trips to the plains, a crisis in my affairs, involvements with other people and their troubles, and an entire monsoon, had come between me and the grassy, pine-topped slope facing the Hill of Fairies (Pari Tibba to the locals). Now I tramped through late monsoon foliage—tall ferns, bushes festooned with flowering convolvulus—crossed the stream by way of its little bridge of stones—and climbed the steep hill to the pine slope.

  When the trees saw me, they made as if to turn in my direction. A puff of wind came across the valley from the distant snows. A long-tailed blue magpie took alarm and flew noisily out of an oak tree. The cicadas were suddenly silent. But the trees remembered me. They bowed gently in the breeze and beckoned me nearer, welcoming me home. Three pines, a straggling oak, and a wild cherry. I went among them, acknowledged their welcome with a touch of my hand against their trunks—the cherry’s smooth and polished; the pine’s patterned and whorled; the oak’s rough, gnarled, full of experience. He’d been there longest, and the wind had bent his upper branches and twisted a few, so that he looked shaggy and undistinguished. But, like the philosopher who is careless about his dress and appearance, the oak has secrets, a hidden wisdom. He has learnt the art of survival!

  While the oak and the pines are older than me and have been here many years, the cherry tree is exactly seven years old. I know, because I planted it.

  One day I had this cherry seed in my hand, and on an impulse I thrust it into the soft earth, and then went away and forgot all about it. A few months later I found a tiny cherry tree in the long grass. I did not expect it to survive. But the following year it was two feet tall. And then some goats ate its leaves, and a grass cutter’s scythe injured the stem, and I was sure it would wither away. But it renewed itself, sprang up even faster; and within three years it was a healthy, growing tree, about five feet tall.

  I left the hills for two years—forced by circumstances to make a living in Delhi—but this time I did not forget the cherry tree. I thought about it fairly often, sent telepathic messages of encouragement in its direction. And when, a couple of years ago, I returned in the autumn, my heart did a somersault when I found my tree sprinkled with pale pink blossom. (The Himalayan cherry flowers in November.) And later, when the fruit was ripe, the tree was visited by finches, tits, bulbuls and other small birds, all come to feast on the sour, red cherries.

  Last summer I spent a night on the pine-knoll, sleeping on the grass beneath the cherry tree. I lay awake for hours, listening to the chatter of the stream and
the occasional tonk-tonk of a nightjar; and watching, through the branches overhead, the stars turning in the sky; and I felt the power of the sky and earth, and the power of a small cherry seed ….

  And so, when the rains are over, this is where I come, that I might feel the peace and power of this place. It’s a big world and momentous events are taking place all the time. But this is where I have seen it happens.

  This is where I will write my stories. I can see everything from here—my cottage across the valley; behind and above me, the town and the bazaar, straddling the ridge; to the left, the high mountains and the twisting road to the source of the great river; below me, the little stream and the path to the village; ahead, the Hill of Fairies, the fields beyond; the wide valley below, and then another range of hills and then the distant plains. I can even see Prem Singh 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 stands. A man may have a hundred disguises, but in the end it is his posture that gives him away. Like my grandfather, who was a master of disguise and successfully roamed the bazaars as fruit-vendor or basket-maker; but we could always recognize him because of his pronounced slouch.

  Prem Singh doesn’t slouch, but he has this habit of looking up at the sky (regardless of whether it’s cloudy or clear), and at the moment he’s looking at the sky.

  Eight years with Prem. He was just a sixteen-year-old boy when I first saw him, and now he has a wife and child.

  I had been in the cottage for just over a year …. He stood on the landing outside the kitchen door. A tall boy, dark, with good teeth and brown, deep-set eyes; dressed smartly in white drill—his only change of clothes. Looking for a job. I liked the look of him. But—

  ‘I already have someone working for me,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, sir. He is my uncle.’

  In the hills, everyone is a brother or uncle.

  ‘You don’t want me to dismiss your uncle?’

  ‘No, sir. But he says you can find a job for me.’

  ‘I’ll try. I’ll make enquiries. Have you just come from your village?’

  ‘Yes. Yesterday I walked ten miles to Pauri. There I got a bus.’

  ‘Sit down. Your uncle will make some tea.’

  He sat down on the steps, removed his white keds, wriggled his toes. His feet were both long and broad; large feet, but not ugly. He was unusually clean for a hill boy. And taller than most.

  ‘Do you smoke?’ I asked.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘It is true,’ said his uncle, ‘he does not smoke. All my nephews smoke, but this one, he is a little peculiar, he does not smoke—neither beedi nor hookah.’

  ‘Do you drink?’

  ‘It makes me vomit.’

  ‘Do you take bhang?’

  ‘No, sahib.’

  ‘You have no vices. It’s unnatural.’

  ‘He is unnatural, sahib,’ said his uncle.

  ‘Does he chase girls?’

  ‘They chase him, sahib.’

  ‘So he left the village and came looking for a job.’ I looked at him. He grinned, then looked away, began rubbing his feet.

  ‘Your name is?’

  ‘Prem Singh.’

  ‘All right, Prem, I will try to do something for you.’

  I did not see him for a couple of weeks. I forgot about finding him a job. But when I met him again, on the road to the bazaar, he told me that he had got a temporary job in the Survey, looking after the surveyor’s tents.

  ‘Next week we will be going to Rajasthan,’ he said.

  ‘It will be very hot. Have you been in the desert before?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘It is not like the hills. And it is far from home.’

  ‘I know. But I have no choice in the matter. I have to collect some money in order to get married.’

  In his region there was a bride price, usually of two thousand rupees.

  ‘Do you have to get married so soon?’

  ‘I have only one brother and he is still very young. My mother is not well. She needs a daughter-in-law to help her in the fields and with the cows and in the house. We are a small family, so the work is greater.’

  Every family has its few terraced fields, narrow and stony, usually perched on a hillside above a stream or river. They grow rice, barley, maize, potatoes—just enough to live on. Even if they produced sufficient for marketing, the absence of roads makes it difficult to get the produce to the market towns. There is no money to be earned in the villages, and money is needed for clothes, soap, medicines, and recovering the family jewellery from the money-lenders. So the young men leave their villages to find work, and to find work they must go to the plains. The lucky ones get into the Army. Others enter domestic service or take jobs in garages, hotels, wayside teashops, schools ….

  In Mussoorie the main attraction is the large number of schools, which employ cooks and bearers. But the schools were full when Prem arrived. He’d been to the recruiting centre at Roorkee, hoping to get into the Army; but they found a deformity in his right foot, the result of a bone broken when a landslip carried him away one dark monsoon night; he was lucky, he said, that it was only his foot and not his head that had been broken.

  He came to the house to inform his uncle about the job and to say goodbye. I thought: another nice person I probably won’t see again; another ship passing in the night, the friendly twinkle of its lights soon vanishing in the darkness. I said ‘Come again’, held his smile with mine so that I could remember him better, and returned to my study and my typewriter. The typewriter is the repository of a writer’s loneliness. It stares unsympathetically back at him every day, doing its best to be discouraging. Maybe I’ll go back to the old-fashioned quill pen and a marble ink-stand; then I can feel like a real writer, Balzac or Dickens, scratching away into the endless reaches of the night …. Of course, the days and nights are seemingly shorter than they need to be! They must be, otherwise why do we hurry so much and achieve so little, by the standards of the past ….

  Prem goes, disappears into the vast faceless cities of the plains, and a year slips by, or rather I do, and then here he is again, thinner and darker and still smiling and still looking for a job. I should have known that hill men don’t disappear for ever. The spirit-haunted rocks don’t let their people wander too far, lest they lose them forever.

  I was able to get him a job in the school. The Headmaster’s wife needed a cook. I wasn’t sure if Prem could cook very well but I sent him along and they said they’d give him a trial. Three days later the Headmaster’s wife met me on the road and started gushing all over me. She was the type who gushes.

  ‘We’re so grateful to you! Thank you for sending me that lovely boy. He’s so polite. And he cooks very well. A little too hot for my husband, but otherwise delicious—just delicious! He’s a real treasure—a lovely boy.’ And she gave me an arch look—the famous look which she used to captivate all the good-looking young prefects who became prefects, it was said, only if she approved of them.

  I wasn’t sure if she didn’t want something more than a cook, and I only hoped that Prem would give every satisfaction.

  He looked cheerful enough when he came to see me on his off-day.

  ‘How are you getting on?’ I asked.

  ‘Lovely,’ he said, using his mistress’s favourite expression.

  ‘What do you mean—lovely? Do they like your work?’

  ‘The memsahib likes it. She strokes me on the cheek whenever she enters the kitchen. The sahib says nothing. He takes medicine after every meal.’

  ‘Did he always take medicine—or only now that you’re doing the cooking?’

  ‘I am not sure. I think he has always been sick.’

  He was sleeping in the Headmaster’s veranda and getting sixty rupees a month. A cook in Delhi got a hundred and sixty. And a cook in Paris or New York got ten times as much. I did not say as much to Prem. He might ask me to get him a job
in New York. And that would be the last I saw of him! He, as a cook, might well get a job making curries off Broadway; I, as a writer, wouldn’t get to first base. And only my Uncle Ken knew the secret of how to make a living without actually doing any work. But then, of course, he had four sisters. And each of them was married to a fairly prosperous husband. So Uncle Ken divided up his year among them. Three months with Aunt Ruby in Nainital. Three months with Aunt Susie in Kashmir. Three months with my mother (not quite so affluent) in Jamnagar. And three months in the Vet Hospital in Bareilly, where Aunt Mabel ran the hospital for her veterinary husband. In this way he never overstayed his welcome. A sister can look after a brother for just three months at a time and no more. Uncle K had it worked out to perfection.

  But I had no sisters, and I couldn’t live forever on the royalties of a single novel. So I had to write others. So I came to the hills.

  The hill men go to the plains to make a living. I had to come to the hills to try and make mine.

  ‘Prem,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you work for me.’

  ‘And what about my uncle?’

  ‘He seems ready to desert me any day. His grandfather is ill, he says, and he wants to go home.’

  ‘His grandfather died last year.’

  ‘That’s what I mean—he’s getting restless. And I don’t mind if he goes. These days he seems to be suffering from a form of sleeping sickness. I have to get up first and make his tea ….’

  Sitting here under the cherry tree, whose leaves are just beginning to turn yellow, I rest my chin on my knees and gaze across the valley to where Prem moves about in the garden. Looking back over the seven years he has been with me, I recall some of the nicest things about him. They come to me in no particular order—just pieces of cinema—coloured slides slipping across the screen of memory ….

  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 when I was arrested*, and waiting outside until I reappeared—his smile, when I found him in Delhi—his large, irrepressible laughter, most in evidence when he was seeing an old Laurel and Hardy movie.