Rain In the Mountains Read online

  A small pool in the rocks outside my cottage in the Mussoorie hills, provides me endless delight. Water beetles paddle the surface, while tiny fish lurk in the shallows. Sometimes a spotted fork-tail comes to drink, hopping delicately from rock to rock. And once I saw a barking deer, head lowered at the edge of the pool. I stood very still, anxious that it should drink its fill. It did, and then, looking up, saw me and leapt across the ravine to disappear into the forest.

  In summer the pool is almost dry. Even this morning, there was just enough water for the fish and tadpoles to survive. But as I write, there is a pattering on the tin roof of the cottage, and I look out to see the raindrops pitting the surface of the pool.

  Tomorrow the spotted fork-tail will be back. Perhaps the barking deer will return. I open the window wide and allow the fragrance of the rain and freshened earth to waft into my room.

  Rain

  After weeks of heat and dust

  How welcome is the rain.

  It washes the leaves,

  Gives new life to grass,

  Draws out the scent of the earth.

  It rattles on the roof,

  Gurgles along the drainpipe

  Collects in a puddle in the middle of the lawn—

  The birds come to bathe.

  When the sun comes out

  A lizard crawls up from a crack in a rock.

  ‘Small brown lizard

  Basking in the sun

  You too have your life to live

  Your race to run.’

  At night we look through the branches

  of the cherry tree.

  The sky is rain-washed, star-bright.

  Sounds I Like to Hear

  ALL NIGHT THE rain has been drumming on the corrugated tin roof. There has been no storm, no thunder just the steady swish of a tropical downpour. It helps one to lie awake; at the same time, it doesn’t keep one from sleeping.

  It is a good sound to read by—the rain outside, the quiet within—and, although tin roofs are given to springing unaccountable leaks, there is in general a feeling of being untouched by, and yet in touch with, the rain.

  Gentle rain on a tin roof is one of my favourite sounds. And early in the morning, when the rain has stopped, there are other sounds I like to hear—a crow shaking the raindrops from his feathers and cawing rather disconsolately; babblers and bulbuls bustling in and out of bushes and long grass in search of worms and insects; the sweet, ascending trill of the Himalayan whistling-thrush; dogs rushing through damp undergrowth.

  A cherry tree, bowed down by the heavy rain, suddenly rights itself, flinging pellets of water in my face.

  Some of the best sounds are made by water. The water of a mountain stream, always in a hurry, bubbling over rocks and chattering, ‘I’m late, I’m late!’ like the White Rabbit, tumbling over itself in its anxiety to reach the bottom of the hill, the sound of the sea, especially when it is far away—or when you hear it by putting a sea shell to your ear. The sound made by dry and thirsty earth, as it sucks at a sprinkling of water. Or the sound of a child drinking thirstily the water running down his chin and throat.

  Water gushing out of the pans of an old well outside a village while a camel moves silently round the well. Bullock-cart wheels creaking over rough country roads. The clip-clop of a pony carriage, and the tinkle of its bell, and the singsong call of its driver . . . .

  Bells in the hills. A schoolbell ringing, and children’s voices drifting through an open window. A temple-bell, heard faintly from across the valley. Heavy silver ankle-bells on the feet of sturdy hill women. Sheep bells heard high up on the mountainside.

  Do falling petals make a sound? Just the tiniest and softest of sounds, like the drift of falling snow. Of course big flowers, like dahlias, drop their petals with a very definite flop. These are showoffs, like the hawk-moth who comes flapping into the rooms at night instead of emulating the butterfly dipping lazily on the afternoon breeze.

  *

  One must return to the birds for favourite sounds, and the birds of the plains differ from the birds of the hills. On a cold winter morning in the plains of northern India, if you walk some way into the jungle you will hear the familiar call of the black partridge: Bhagwan teri qudrat it seems to cry, which means: ‘Oh God! Great is thy might.’

  The cry rises from the bushes in all directions; but an hour later not a bird is to be seen or heard and the jungle is so very still that the silence seems to shout at you.

  There are sounds that come from a distance, beautiful because they are far away, voices on the wind—they ‘walketh upon the wings of the wind’. The cries of fishermen out on the river. Drums beating rhythmically in a distant village. The croaking of frogs from the rainwater pond behind the house. I mean frogs at a distance. A frog croaking beneath one’s window is as welcome as a motor horn.

  But some people like motor horns. I know a taxi-driver who never misses an opportunity to use his horn. It was made to his own specifications, and it gives out a resonant bugle-call. He never tires of using it. Cyclists and pedestrians always scatter at his approach. Other cars veer off the road. He is proud of his horn. He loves its strident sound—which only goes to show that some men’s sounds are other men’s noises!

  Homely sounds, though we don’t often think about them, are the ones we miss most when they are gone. A kettle on the boil. A door that creaks on its hinges. Old sofa springs. Familiar voices lighting up the dark. Ducks quacking in the rain.

  And so we return to the rain, with which my favourite sounds began.

  I have sat 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 sweet repeated trill, which I have never been able to trace to its source. Perhaps it is a little tree frog. Or it may be a small green cricket. I shall never know.

  I am 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 and touch and hear, it is good to be left with one small mystery, a mystery sweet and satisfying and entirely my own.

  Listen!

  Listen to the night wind in the trees,

  Listen to the summer grass singing;

  Listen to the time that’s tripping by,

  And the dawn dew falling.

  Listen to the moon as it climbs the sky,

  Listen to the pebbles humming;

  Listen to the mist in the trembling leaves,

  And the silence calling.

  Dragon in the Tunnel

  THE FIRST TIME I saw a train, I was standing on a wooded slope outside a tunnel, not far from Kalka. Suddenly, with a shrill whistle and great burst of steam, a green and black engine came snorting out of the blackness.

  I turned and ran to my father. ‘A dragon!’ I shouted. ‘There’s a dragon coming out of its cave!’

  Since then, steam engines and dragons have always inspired the same sort of feelings in me—wonder and awe and delight. I would like to see a real dragon one day, green and gold and—because I have always preferred the ‘reluctant’ sort— rather shy and gentle; but until that day comes, I shall be content with steam engines.

  In India the steam engine is still very much with us. In 1855 the East India Railway was opened between Calcutta and Raniganj, a distance of 122 miles. By the turn of the century, India had one of the most extensive railway systems in the world. Today, the hundreds of trains that criss-cross the sub- continent, panting over the desert and plain, through hill and forest, are still pulled by these snorting monsters who belch smoke by day and scatter red stars in the night.

  Even now, when I see a train coming round the bend of a hill, on crossing a bridge, or cutting across a wide flat plain, I feel the same sort of innocent wonder that I felt as a boy. Where are all these people going to, and where have they come from, and what are they really like? When children wave to me from carriage windows I wave back to them. It is a habit I have
never lost. And sometimes I am in a train, waving, and the children from the nearby villages come running out of their mud huts to wave back to me—well, not to me exactly, it is really the train they are waving to . . . .

  Small wayside stations have always fascinated me. Manned sometimes by just one or two railway employees, and often situated in the middle of a damp subtropical forest, or clinging to the mountainside on the way to Simla or Darjeeling, these little stations are, for me, outposts of romance, lonely symbols of the pioneering spirit that led men to lay tracks into the remote corners of the earth.

  I remember such a stop on a line that went through the Terai forests near the foothills of the Himalayas. At about ten at night, the khilasi, or station watchman, lit his kerosene lamp and started walking up the tracks into the jungle.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

  ‘To see if the tunnel is clear,’ he said. ‘The Overland Mail comes in twenty minutes.’

  I accompanied him a furlong or two along the track, through a deep cutting which led to the tunnel. Every night, the khilasi walked through the dark tunnel, and then stood outside to wave his lamp to the oncoming train as a signal that the track was clear. If the engine driver did not see the lamp he stopped the train. It always slowed down near the cutting.

  Having inspected the tunnel, we stood outside, waiting for the train. It seemed a long time coming. There was no moon, and the dense forest seemed to be trying to crowd us into the narrow cutting. The sounds of the forest came to us—the belling of a sambhur deer and the cry of a jackal told us that perhaps a tiger or a leopard was on the prowl. There were strange, nocturnal bird sounds; and then silence.

  The khilasi stood outside the tunnel, trimming his lamp, listening to the faint sounds of the jungle—sounds which only he could identify and understand. Something made him stand very still for a few moments, peering into the darkness, and I knew that everything was not as it should be.

  ‘There is something in the tunnel,’ he said.

  I could hear nothing at first, but then there came a regular sawing sound, just like the sound made by someone sawing through the branch of a tree.

  ‘Baghera!’ whispered the khilasi. He had said enough to enable me to recognize the sound—the sawing of a leopard trying to find its mate. ‘The train will be coming soon. We must drive the animal out, or it will be run over!’

  He must have sensed my surprise, because he said, ‘Do not be afraid . . . . I know this leopard well. We have seen each other many times. He has a weakness for stray dogs and goats, but he will not harm us.’ He gave me his small handaxe to hold and, raising his lamp high, started walking into the tunnel, shouting at the top of his voice to try and scare away the animal. I followed close behind him.

  We had gone about twenty yards into the tunnel when the light from the lamp fell on the leopard, which was crouching between the tracks, only about twenty feet away from us. It bared its teeth in a snarl and went down on its stomach, tail twisting. I thought it was going to spring. The khilasi and I both shouted together. Our voices rang and echoed through the tunnel. And the leopard, uncertain as to how many humans were in there with him, turned swiftly and disappeared into the darkness ahead.

  The khilasi and I walked on till the end of the tunnel without seeing the leopard again. As we returned to the entrance of the tunnel the rails began to hum and we knew the train was coming.

  I put my hand to one of the rails and felt its tremor. And then the engine came round the bend, hissing at us, scattering sparks into the darkness, defying the jungle as it roared through the steep sides of the cutting. It charged straight at the tunnel and into it, thundering past us like the beautiful dragon of my dreams.

  And when it had gone, the silence returned and the forest breathed again. Only the rails still trembled with the passing of the train.

  As a Boy

  As a boy I stood on the edge of the railway-cutting,

  Outside the dark tunnel, my hands touching

  The hot rails, waiting for them to tremble

  At the coming of the noonday train.

  The whistle of the engine hung on the forest’s silence.

  Then out of the tunnel, a green-gold dragon

  Came plunging, thundering past—

  Out of the tunnel, out of the dark.

  And the train rolled on, every day

  Hundreds of people coming or going or running away—

  Goodbye, goodbye !

  I haven’t seen you again, bright boy at the carriage window,

  Waving to me, calling,

  But I’ve loved you all these years and looked for you

  everywhere,

  In cities and villages, beside the sea,

  In the mountains, in crowds at distant places;

  Returning always to the forest’s silence,

  To watch the windows of some passing train . . . .

  Hill of the Fairies

  FAIRY HILL, OR Pari Tibba as the paharis call it, is a lonely uninhabited mountain lying to the east of Mussoorie, at a height of about 6,000 feet. I have visited it occasionally, scrambling up its rocky slopes where the only paths are the narrow tracks made by goats and the small hill cattle. Rhododendrons and a few stunted oaks are the only trees on the hillsides, but at the summit is a small, grassy plateau ringed by pine trees.

  It may have been on this plateau that the early settlers tried building their houses. All their attempts met with failure. The area seemed to attract the worst of any thunderstorm, and several dwellings were struck by lightning and burnt to the ground. People then confined themselves to the adjacent Landour hill, where a flourishing hill-station soon grew up.

  Why Pari Tibba should be struck so often by lightning has always been something of a mystery to me. Its soil and rock seem no different from the soil or rock of any other mountain in the vicinity. Perhaps a geologist can explain the phenomenon; or perhaps it has something to do with the fairies.

  ‘Why do they call it the Hill of the Fairies?’ I asked an old resident, a retired schoolteacher. ‘Is the place haunted?’

  ‘So they say,’ he said.

  ‘Who say?’

  ‘Oh, people who have heard it’s haunted. Some years after the site was abandoned by the settlers, two young runaway lovers took shelter for the night in one of the ruins. There was a bad storm and they were struck by lightning. Their charred bodies were found a few days later. They came from different communities and were buried far from each other, but their spirits hold a tryst every night under the pine trees. You might see them if you’re on Pari Tibba after sunset.’

  There are no ruins on Pari Tibba, and I can only presume that the building materials were taken away for use elsewhere. And I did not stay on the hill till after sunset. Had I tried climbing downhill in the dark, I would probably have ended up as the third ghost on the mountain. The lovers might have resented my intrusion; or, who knows, they might have welcomed a change. After a hundred years together on a wind- swept mountain-top, even the most ardent of lovers must tire of each other.

  Who could have been seeing ghosts on Pari Tibba after sunset? The nearest resident is a woodcutter who makes charcoal at the bottom of the hill. Terraced fields and a small village straddle the next hill. But the only inhabitants of Pari Tibba are the langurs. They feed on oak leaves and rhododendron buds. The rhododendrons contain an intoxicating nectar, and after dining—or wining—to excess, the young monkeys tumble about on the grass in high spirits.

  The black bulbuls also feed on the nectar of the rhododendron flower, and perhaps this accounts for the cheekiness of these birds. They are aggressive, disreputable little creatures, who go about in rowdy gangs. The song of most bulbuls consists of several pleasant tinkling notes; but that of the Himalayan black bulbul is as musical as the bray of an ass. Men of science, in their wisdom, have given this bird the sibilant name of Hypsipetes psaroides. But the hillmen, in their greater wisdom, call the species the ban bakra, which means the ‘jungle goat’.<
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  Perhaps the flowers have something to do with the fairy legend. In April and May, Pari Tibba is covered with the dazzling yellow flowers of St. John’s Wort (wort meaning herb). The paharis call the flower a wild rose, and it does resemble one. In Ireland it is called the Rose of Sharon.

  In Europe this flower is reputed to possess certain magical and curative properties. It is believed to drive away all evil and protect you from witches. But do not tread on St. John’s Wort after sunset, lest a fairy horseman come and carry you off, landing you almost anywhere.

  By day, St. John’s Wort is kindly. Are you insane? Then drink the sap from the leaves of the plant, and you will be cured. Are you hurt? Take the juice and apply it to your wound—and if at first this doesn’t help, just keep applying juice until you stop bleeding, or breathing. Are you bald? Then rise early and bathe your head with the dew from St. John’s Wort, and your hair will grow again—if you don’t catch pneumonia.

  Can St. John’s Wort be connected with the fairy legend of Pari Tibba? It is said that most flowers, when they die, become fairies. This might be especially true of St. John’s Wort.

  There is yet another legend connected with the mountain. A shepherd-boy, playing on his flute, discovered a beautiful silver snake basking on a rock. The snake spoke to the boy, saying, ‘I was a princess once, but a jealous witch cast a spell over me and turned me into a snake. This spell can only be broken if someone who is pure in heart kisses me thrice. Many years have passed, and I have not been able to find one who is pure in heart.’ Then the shepherd-boy took the snake in his arms, and he put his lips to its mouth, and at the third kiss he discovered that he was holding a beautiful princess in his arms. What happened afterwards is anybody’s guess.