The Beauty of All My Days Read online

  Pensive author at Maplewood Lodge, Mussoorie, circa 1969, when Panther’s Moon, one of my first children’s books, was published. We did have a panther in the area, and it carried off one of our dogs. But the event in the story took place in a nearby village. Panthers (leopards) still roam these hills.

  I have always liked Christina Rossetti’s poems, especially the one that goes:

  Hurt no living thing;

  Ladybird, nor butterfly,

  Nor moth with dusty wing,

  Nor cricket chirping cheerily,

  Nor grasshopper so light of leap,

  Nor dancing gnat, nor beetle fat,

  Nor harmless worms that creep.

  I won’t kill an insect if I can help it. Maybe I should have been a Jain monk, although I doubt if I’d be hardy enough to withstand an icy wind travelling up my bare legs.

  My patience with insects, even the least charming ones, was put to the test the other day.

  Buzz . . . zzz . . . zzz.

  A fat bluebottle fly had got into the room, and was buzzing against the windowpane, trying to get out. Like a good scout I opened the window and it flew out.

  Barely a minute later it was back again. Buzz, buzz, buzz! Once more to the breach dashed this knight of old. Opened the window and out it went.

  Back to my desk. Buzz, buzz, buzz! How the devil did it get in again! Anyway, I’ve had enough. Man must show his mastery over Nature. I pick up a folded newspaper and slam down on the fly, nearly breaking the window glass in the process. End of bluebottle fly. Man has complete control over the universe. Back to my desk.

  Buzz, buzz, buzz!

  Now there are two bluebottle flies on the windowpane. Looking for their late-lamented friend, no doubt. I give up the battle and move to another room.

  Some years ago I wrote: When all the wars are done, a butterfly will still be beautiful.

  To which I now add: When all the wars are done, the bluebottle flies will have won.

  Have I grown cynical in my old age?

  No, I am still the champion of ladybirds and crickets, and if bluebottle flies are in the ascendant these days it is because we won’t stop pouring our filth and garbage on to the streets and into our sacred streams, seas and rivers.

  Pari Tibba, a forest reserve, was uninhabited until a couple of years ago. Then the tourist department set up a tourist camp on the summit. A forest fire frightened everyone away, and as I write the paris (fairies) have the hill to themselves again.

  In the old days it was called Burnt Hill because it was frequently struck by lightning. It was the first range that stood in the way of the advancing south-west monsoon. Early settlers gave up trying to build on Pari Tibba, the storms were so violent. And there was the legend of two runaway lovers who were stranded in one of the ruins and killed by a bolt of lightning.

  In my walking days I would sometimes visit Pari Tibba, taking a pen and notebook with me, putting down my random reflections and the occasional poem. It was a good place to be on one’s own. I did not see any fairies, but on one occasion, caught in a summer storm, I took shelter in a small cave. The rain was intense and it was quite dark inside the cave. There were frequent flashes of sheet lightning, and during one of them I saw a girl standing at a little distance from me. From her dress and appearance, I thought she was a village girl. But there was no village nearby. I spoke to her, asking if she had lost her way, or if she was looking for a cow or sheep that might have strayed, but she made no answer. There was a peal of thunder and another flash of lightning, and when I looked again, she was gone.

  During my New Delhi years (1959–64) I would often relax on the grounds of the Jantar Mantar near Connaught Place. In those days it wasn’t the popular hub for political rallies.

  ‘Some call it laziness . . . I call it deep thought.’ I think it was Garfield the cat who said that. Anyway, here I am in New Delhi, circa 1960, searching for inspiration. I had to move to the hills to find it.

  Had I frightened her away, or had a girl really been standing there? And if not real, had she been a vision, or a revenant, or just a figment of my imagination? I shall never know.

  My walking days are over, and I won’t be visiting Pari Tibba again. But I see the hill every day from my window, and at dusk I see little green fairy lights twinkling on its slopes. My imagination again!

  A WRITER AND HIS ROOM

  A natural writer, one born with the gift, should be able to write anywhere—in a city slum, or a dingy attic room, or a noisy railway station, or the deck of a rolling ship—but it certainly helps to have a room of one’s own, a private corner, with a desk for one’s papers, a bed or settee on which to lie or dream, and a window to enable one to look upon the world from time to time.

  The world outside is just as important as the world inside, and the two in harmony bring out the best in a writer’s creative spirit.

  My first real writing room was that tiny room on the roof, a barsati on top of a rambling old building in Dehradun, which had once been the Gresham Hotel and later the Station Canteen and was now occupied by various tenants, among them my mother and stepfather and my three small brothers and sister, not forgetting an Alsatian and a dachshund. I’d come down from school, having just given my final school-leaving exams (called the Senior Cambridge in those days), and I had several idle months before me. It was intended that I should go to England by the end of the year. I was going to be a writer, I knew that, of course (I had all the overconfidence of a sixteen-year-old), so why not make a start? And why not be professional about it?

  1979–80. We spent two summers at Prospect Point, just about the highest house in Landour. Rakesh was then six, going to school in Mussoorie, and I’d walk down to the town with him every morning. I’d have breakfast before setting out, and another on my return! And that was a fragrant honeysuckle creeping up to the window.

  There was an old Remington typewriter in my stepfather’s automobile showroom, and nobody seemed to be using it, so I brought it home, or rather carried it up to the barsati, which was at my disposal.

  This barsati became my citadel; I slept in it, wrote in it, even entertained my few friends in it. It opened on to the roof, and sometimes I was visited by crows and mynas and bats and cats, but they didn’t stop me from pounding out little stories and articles on that typewriter and sending them off to magazines throughout the country. Most of them came back to me with editorial regrets. Fair enough. It was juvenile stuff. Still, some of it went into a little pocket-sized magazine called My Magazine of India, published from Madras (now Chennai). They sent me a five-rupee money order for each story published. Well, with five rupees I could see three films, or buy two paperbacks, or treat myself to a bottle of beer, so it wasn’t to be scoffed at.

  And then I sold a story to The Illustrated Weekly of India, the country’s premier English magazine, edited by C.R. Mandy. It was a trifle, a school story or skit called ‘My Calling’, but it brought me fifty rupees, a princely fee in those far-off days (August 1951). I gave a party for my friends—Somi, Chottu, Haripal, Kishen, Ranbir and Co.—and declared myself to be a fully established writer, although it would be several months before I sold another story!

  At the same time, I was keeping a journal, an almost daily account of my activities and excursions with the above-mentioned friends; this I was writing by hand, using school exercise books for the purpose. My friends went into it—Somi, a Sikh boy of fourteen, and his brothers; Kishen, who lived in the same building with his beautiful mother and alcoholic father; Ranbir, another next-door boy; and various other friends, neighbours and families. I had not intended that this journal should became a book, but I felt it was important for a writer to keep a journal—and I had already read Somerset Maugham’s A Writer’s Notebook, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, and the diaries of Samuel Pepys, so I knew the importance of a journal or diary from a literary point of view, but I also wanted to keep one in order to preserve the memory of my friends. I knew I would be going away soon and migh
t never see them again . . .

  And that, of course, is what happened. The train took me to Bombay (now Mumbai), as described elsewhere in this memoir; a ship took me to England and the Channel Islands. And there, on the island of Jersey, at my aunt’s house, I found myself in another attic room, with another borrowed typewriter, making a tremendous effort to get published while working by day, at first in a grocery store and then in the office of the Public Health Department.

  And how I missed India and my friends and the hills and forests around Dehra, where I had found love and companionship. But of course, I had those diaries with me!

  I typed them out, filling out along the way, and found I had a book-length manuscript. Unashamedly I submitted it to a publisher. It came back. I sent it to another publisher. It came back. The third publisher (Diana Athill of André Deutsch) wrote back saying it was wonderful and why not turn it into a novel?

  I gave up my job in Jersey—a secure government job—and went to London, the mecca for all aspiring writers.

  There were many rooms in London—somehow I was never long in one place—and only one of them had a window, which looked out upon a small cemetery. I did not mind the cemetery. I had, after all, grown up on the stories of M.R. James and Walter de la Mare. But the landlady did not allow visitors, and I had student friends from India, Vietnam and Thailand, and did not want to discourage them from coming to see me. So I moved to Belsize Avenue, where there was an absentee landlord. I made friends with some West Indians—Jamaicans, who loved to sing and dance and drink buckets of rum—but as I wasn’t doing much writing there I moved again, to Haverstock Hill, where a kind Jewish landlady gave me breakfast along with the room, and there I finished my novel which I called The Room on the Roof, after my barsati in Dehradun.

  This third and final draft had been written at night, after my return from the office where I was working as an accounts clerk.

  I had friends now, but I still missed India. I missed the fragrance, the smells, the colours. I missed the texture of the earth, the soil and its various shades. I missed its smell after the rain. I missed the grass coming up, and the crested hoopoe on the lawn, leisurely snapping up insects. I missed the early-morning grass, drenched with dew, as I trod upon it. I missed the scent of jasmine, the fragrance of mango blossoms, of neem pods bursting underfoot, of cow-dung smoke, buffaloes slumbering in village ponds, boys chewing sugar cane, farmers tilling their fields with long wooden ploughs, girls with lips stained with jamun juice, steam engines shunting, railway platforms, railway bookstalls with timetables and astrological magazines, aloo-puri on leaf platters, the sun going down, babblers making a racket in the banyan tree, twilight and dusk and the jackals howling in the night, the sun coming up, parrots flashing by as if by magic, an inquiring squirrel pausing on my windowsill, Somi going by on his bicycle, his mother putting the jar of kanji (carrot water) in the sun, Ranbir flying a kite, pigeons making love in my skylight, a cricket match taking place on the maidan, being invited to play, getting run out, everyone visiting the chaat shop, cycling out of town, the elephants taking a bath, a roll of thunder, the monsoon breaking, my roof leaking, children dancing in the rain, Ranbir’s sister singing about a red dupatta flying in the wind, frogs warbling, peepul leaves dancing in the breeze.

  This was 1964, my first year as a Mussoorie resident. The desk was not as cluttered as it is today. I am using an Olympia portable typewriter, which I’d just bought. It served me well over the years, and I still use it for my tax returns; but my stories are now written by hand.

  All this and more I remember and long for . . .

  And what do I do about it?

  I go down to Kew Gardens, south of London, and bask in the tropical warmth of the huge hothouses in which they grow plants and shrubs from Asia and Africa. I can be practical at times!

  And what did I like about London? The theatres and the specialist cinemas—the Everyman in Hampstead, where I saw old films, and the Academy in Leicester Square, where I saw French and continental films. And Foyles Bookshop, where I could browse and pick up unusual books. But none of this was home.

  And so, when finally I received a £50 advance for my novel, I bought a passage on the M.S. Batory, a cheap Polish liner (£40 for the voyage), and sailed for Bombay.

  * * *

  It was 1955, and I was back in Dehra, and in a different kind of room. It consisted of a large bedroom—big enough to take a dining table (which I converted into a desk), and a spacious double bed in which I could toss and turn without falling off (which was what happened in narrow beds)—and adjoining it was a balcony looking down on a small plaza walled off from a busy main road. It was a two-storey building lined with shops, the flats above them being used as residences. The entire complex was (and still is) called Astley Hall, which must have been the name of the mansion that had stood there once in colonial times. Many English names have disappeared from the subcontinent, either forcibly removed or simply forgotten, but somehow ‘Astley Hall’ has stuck to this block, just as ‘Connaught Place’ in New Delhi has resisted change.

  Dehra’s Astley Hall, the original house or mansion, had probably come up shortly after the Doon Valley had passed into British hands; it was probably the home of an early English resident who had fond memories of Astley Park and Astley Hall in Chorley, Lancashire; it would, of course, have looked quite different from the present commercial complex. Only the name remains . . .

  I spent an eventful two years in my Astley Hall abode. Jobless and cashless, the only way I could earn some money was by bombarding all the magazine and Sunday papers in the land with my stories and articles. The Illustrated Weekly was my great standby, but I wrote stories for a variety of publishers ranging from Sainik Samachar (the defence forces’ weekly) to Sport and Pastime (published by The Hindu) to Baburao Patel’s Mother India (a film magazine) and for newspapers as diverse as the Statesman of Calcutta, the Tribune of Ambala, and the Leader of Allahabad. And in between I sent stories to the BBC’s Home Service, which broadcast a regular short-story programme. Those were, of course, radio days, television still being in its infancy.

  Payments in India seldom exceeded fifty rupees for a story or article, but I managed to earn around three or four hundred rupees a month, which was sufficient for my modest needs—books, the occasional films and meals in a variety of small restaurants and dhabas. These random meals did, of course, play havoc with my digestion, and a bottle of Eno’s Fruit Salts or soda–mint tablets was always on my table.

  In 1958 I spent a year in Rajouri Garden, a refugee colony on the outskirts of Delhi. The busy Najafgarh Road passed by, and on the other side of the road there were wheat fields, camels and village wells. All that has long gone.

  Various characters enlivened my days, and sometimes my nights, and I have written about some of them elsewhere.* I had a bunch of young Sikh friends who lived in the Dilaram Bazaar. I was also friendly with William Matheson, a senior Swiss-German journalist who was stranded in India because the news agency for which he worked had gone out of business. He was broke. And there was my neighbour Suresh Mathur, an income-tax lawyer who had no clients; he was usually to be found in one of the local bars. Like William, he would occasionally reach out to me for a small loan. And my landlady, Bibiji, hadn’t paid the electricity bill for over three years, with the result that I was without any light in my room. But I bought a kerosene lamp, and this served me quite well. After all, hadn’t my heroes, the great writers of the past, written by candlelight or lamplight? Often ruining their eyesight in the process.

  Well, I was now twenty-two, and I had yet to wear glasses. You didn’t see kids wearing glasses in those days. (Now, every second boy or girl is equipped with spectacles, often with very strong lenses.) However, I was beginning to notice that people were recognizing me before I could recognize them, so I had my eyesight checked and ended up wearing specs. I found they improved my appearance (according to my friends) and made me look more like a writer.

  Dorot
hy Parker once wrote: ‘Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.’ To which I might add: ‘But girls do make passes at men who wear glasses!’ Kamla, the girl next door, was certainly taking an interest in me; but when I got to know her, I discovered that what she really wanted was my help with her English grammar and composition.

  I guess I was never really a ladies’ man. I was too immersed in my writing to bother much with my clothes or appearance. Two pairs of trousers and three shirts were the limit of my wardrobe.

  Summertime, it was hot in my bedroom. No light meant there was no fan. I kept the doors and windows open, even at night, to get the benefit of the occasional breeze—especially the dawn breeze, which was cool and caressing. A laburnum tree grew in the plaza, and at daybreak birdsong filled the air—as it did at sunset, when all the myna birds took over. Mynas were everywhere, having laid claim to my balcony and small veranda. They would scatter only when my neighbour’s cat paid me a visit. A pretty grey cat with green eyes. Sometimes I treated myself to a tin of sardines—no doubt it made a change from the oily dishes that the local dhaba served up—and if the cat was around I’d give it a sardine. It came to expect those sardines on a regular basis—it made a change from bread and milk—and soon I was spending more on sardines than on eggs and bread.

  I was never much of a cook, but I could boil, or partly boil, an egg, or fry it sunny side up, or make a squishy omelette if I tried. But for regular meals I depended on those dhabas and cheap restaurants near the cinemas, and sometimes my landlady would treat me to parathas and shalgam (turnip) pickle.

  I hadn’t been looking after myself, and I was losing weight and suffering from bouts of diarrhoea. Then one morning I found that my urine was quite milky. This got me worried; I told my friends about it, and they took me to see Dr Khazan Singh, their neighbourhood doctor in the Dilaram Bazaar. He was ex-AMC (Army Medical Corps), not a fully qualified doctor but licensed to treat sailors, soldiers, tonga drivers and struggling writers. An affable person, he first told me about his experience with soldiers in North Africa, sailors in Hong Kong and camel drivers in Rajputana, and filled a beaker with a generous sample of my urine. ‘Very cloudy,’ he said. He then heated the sample over a small stove. It grew even cloudier. ‘Any irritation?’ he added. ‘Only when I pee,’ I said. ‘Have you been a naughty boy?’ I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I denied it anyway. ‘You have been eating too many eggs,’ he said. This was a brilliant deduction, worthy of Poirot. ‘No more eggs,’ he told me. ‘And pickle?’ ‘Yes, I’m fond of pickle,’ I confessed. ‘No more pickle, then.’ This wasn’t leaving me with much, and I thought it better not to mention the sardines in case those too were forbidden and then the cat would have something to say.