Ruskin Bond's Book of Nature Read online

  I remembered some of the shepherd boys and girls.

  There was a boy who played a flute. Its rough, sweet, straightforward notes travelled clearly across the mountain air. He would greet me with a nod of his head, without taking the flute off from his lips. There was a girl who was nearly always cutting grass for fodder. She wore heavy bangles on her feet, and long silver earrings. She did not speak much either, but she always had a wide grin on her face when she met me on the path. She used to sing to herself, or to the sheep, to the grass, or to the sickle in her hand.

  And there was a boy who carried milk into town (a distance of about five miles), who would often fall into step with me, to hold a long conversation. He had never been away from the hills, or in a large city. He had never been in a train. I told him about the cities, and he told me about his village; how they make bread from maize, how fish were to be caught in the mountain streams, how the bears came to steal his father’s pumpkins. Whenever the pumpkins were ripe, he told me, the bears would come and carry them off.

  These things I remembered—these, and the smell of pine needles, the silver of oak leaves and the red of maple, the call of the Himalayan cuckoo, and the mist, like a wet face cloth, pressing against the hills.

  Odd, how some little incident, some snatch of conversation, comes back to one again and again, in the most unlikely places. Standing in the aisle of a crowded tube train on a Monday morning, years ago, in another country, my nose tucked into the back page of someone else’s newspaper, I suddenly had a vision of a bear making off with a ripe pumpkin.

  A bear and a pumpkin—and there, between Goodge Street and Tottenham Court Road stations, all the smells and sounds of the Himalayas came rushing back to me.

  Survivors

  I may not love weeds (in the same sense that I love flowers), but I do respect and admire them, basically, for their ability to flourish in the most unlikely and even hostile places, putting up with exhaust fumes, trampling feet, traffic, bulldozers, roadside tenements, grazing cattle and goats, giving one hope that not all the world’s plant life will be extinct by the end of this century.

  Monsoon Visitors

  A cicada starts up in the tree nearest to my window seat. What has he been doing all these weeks, and why does he choose this particular moment and this particular evening to play the fiddle so loudly? The cicadas are late this year, the monsoon has been late. But soon the forest will be ringing with the sound of the cicadas—an orchestra constantly tuning up but never quite getting into tune—and the sound of the birds will be pushed into the background.

  Outside the front door I found an elegant young praying mantis reclining on a leaf of the honeysuckle creeper. I say young because he hadn’t grown to his full size, and was that very tender pale green which is the colour of a young mantis. They are light brown to begin with, like dry twigs, but as they grow older and the monsoon foliage becomes greener, they too change, and by mid-August they are dark green.

  As though to make up for lost time, the monsoon rains are now here with a vengeance. It has been pouring all day, and already the roof is leaking. But nothing dampens Prem’s spirits. He is still singing love songs in the kitchen.

  After the Moonsoon

  Towards the end of the year, those few monsoon clouds that still linger over the Himalayas are no longer burdened with rain and are able to assume unusual shapes and patterns, chasing each other across the sky and disappearing in spectacular sunset formations.

  I have always found this to be the best time of the year in the hills. The sun-drenched hillsides are still an emerald green; the air is crisp, but winter’s bite is still a month or two away; and for those who still like to take to the open road on foot, there are springs, streams, and waterfalls tumbling over rocks that remain dry for most of the year. The lizard that basked on a sun-baked slab of granite last May is missing, but in his place the spotted forktail trips daintily among the boulders in a stream; and the strident sound of the cicadas is gradually replaced by the gentler trilling of the crickets and grasshoppers.

  Now, more than at any other time of the year, the wild flowers come into their own.

  The hillside is covered with flowers and ferns. Sprays of wild, ginger, tangles of clematis, flat clusters of yarrow and lady’s mantle. The datura grows everywhere with its graceful white balls and prickly fruits. And then, of course, there is the delicate commelina, a breathtaking sight. It always stops me in my tracks. I forget the world.

  But only for a moment. The blare of a truck’s horn reminds me that I am still lingering on the main road leading out of the hill station. A cloud of dust and a blast of diesel fumes are further indications that reality takes many different forms, assailing all my senses at once! Even my commelina seems to shrink from the onslaught. But as long as it is still there, I take heart and leave the highway for a lesser road.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to Ravi Singh and Meru Gokhale for their help and suggestions in making this selection from my published and new writings. My thanks also to Puja Prakash for the beautiful cover design.

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  First published in Viking by Penguin Books India 2004

  Published in Penguin Books 2008

  This edition published in Penguin Books 2016

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  Copyright © Ruskin Bond 2004

  Cover design by Ahlawat Gunjan

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-0-143-42668-4

  This digital edition published in 2016.

  e-ISBN: 978-8-184-75447-6

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