A Town Called Dehra Read online

  One of these girls, a pretty little thing called Doreen, had fussed over me whenever my mother had taken me to the store below the Casino, where she worked. She must have been eighteen or nineteen. I couldn’t help noticing that she had lovely legs and full sensuous lips that I longed to kiss.

  One evening she invited me to accompany her to a dance up at the Casino, and my mother and stepfather making no objection, I escorted her into the restaurant-cum-ballroom where the local band was playing the latest Glenn Miller hits. The hall was full of tobacco smoke and beer fumes. Doreen gave me a glass of rum, which I downed without any hesitation. I then led her on to the dance floor, much to everyone’s delight. An eleven-year-old doing the foxtrot with one of the town beauties must have been a sight to behold. Unfortunately, the next dance went to one of the ‘Tommies’ (soldiers), and soon she was bestowing her favours on the entire contingent of Allied troops in the dance hall while I moodily played with a plate of fish fingers that had been placed in front of me.

  However, came the midnight hour—it was New Year’s Eve—and the lights went off, and while everyone sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’, Doreen gathered me in her perfumed arms and planted a long sweet kiss on my hungry lips.

  It was my first real kiss and I savour it still.

  I heard later that Doreen married one of her soldier boys and went to live in one of London’s working-class districts.

  The exodus of British and Anglo-Indian families was beginning even as the War ended. For some the choice was a hard one. They had no prospects in England, no relatives there. And they had no prospects in India unless they were very well qualified. For many Anglo-Indians and ‘poor whites’, assisted passages to England were the order of the day. By the time 1947, the year of Indian Independence, came around, most of these people had gone, to make some sort of living in the UK. The rush to Australia took place much later.

  I suppose I qualified as a ‘poor white’. But there were many whose circumstances were much worse than mine.

  Take Mrs Deeds and her seventeen-year-old son, Howard.

  I met them in the winter of ’45–’46, at which time my mother was managing the Green’s Hotel (it has long since vanished) just off Rajpur Road. My stepfather’s showroom and garage had closed down (for the second time) and he was once again living with his first wife, who now ran her own grocery store. My mother had taken a manager’s job, running the Green’s Hotel, which had seen better days. Her modest salary helped to keep us all going, although, fortunately, my school fees were being paid by the RAF, which also sent an allowance for my sister.

  The Green’s was a well-laid out bungalow-type hotel with about twenty rooms, but in those days it was rare for more than two or three of them to be occupied. The post-War slump had already hit Dehra. This lean period was to continue into the early fifties.

  My mother had allowed me to occupy one of the small single rooms at the back of the hotel for the duration of my holidays. Occupying the next room was Mrs Deeds, in her late thirties, and her teenager son, with all their possessions. God knows where they had come from, or why they had come to Dehra. They had no friends or relatives in the town. They were the flotsam of Empire, jettisoned by the very people who had brought them into existence. There were many such down-and-outs.

  A good-looking woman was Mrs Deeds, but an alcoholic. When she was hitting the bottle, her son ridiculed her, and they had the most terrible fights. He was a self-righteous youth who blamed his mother for the situation they were in—without support (for she had been deserted by her husband), without a home (for that had been sold for a song), and without any prospects (for there was no one to turn to). Her feeling of guilt was compounded by her son’s attacks on her, and as a result she hit the bottle with renewed vigour.

  When she was broke, she would cadge a drink from my mother. When he was broke, he would borrow the odd rupee from me.

  She could not pay her bills at Green’s and had to leave. They took up residence in the second-class waiting room at the railway station. An indulgent stationmaster allowed them to stay there for several weeks; then they moved into a cheap, seedy little hotel outside the station.

  Mrs Deeds, like Mr Micawber, was always expecting a ‘remittance’ from the man who’d bought her property in Nainital but had yet to pay the main amount. She’d sold her wedding ring and gold watch to pay for drink and the rent. Howard loafed around, talking big. When they got to England or Australia or wherever they were going, he’d find a job to his liking. It did not occur to him to look for one in Dehra.

  Late one evening, after Mrs Deeds had been drinking at a small liquor shop near the clock tower, she set out to cross the maidan to see someone at the club who had promised her some help. She was set upon by a gang of three or four young men who beat her badly and then raped her. Although she cried out for help, no one came to her assistance. The maidan had always been a safe place; but times were changing.

  My mother went to see her and gave her what help she could. Then the remittance (or part of it) arrived, and Mrs Deeds and her son went their way and presumably started a new life abroad.

  I went to see Miss Kellner.

  There she was, hunched up in her garden chair, making the most of her restricted life—broken nose, twisted hands, shattered feet—scribbling little notes to her friends and then inviting me to a game of Snap.

  No one was going to rape Miss Kellner.

  Or, for that matter, Mrs Kennedy, another piece of human flotsam, now in her sixties and engaged by my mother to look after Ellen.

  Mrs Kennedy was a widow, Irish as her name suggests. Unlike Mrs Deeds, she had fond memories of her husband, who had died when quite a young man. He was a beautiful singer, according to Mrs Kennedy; sang everything from opera to Irish ballads. She gave me her own rendering of ‘Danny Boy’ in a warbling contralto but lost the melody half-way through and ended on a cracked note.

  ‘Did you sing duets?’ I asked.

  ‘No, he preferred singing alone.’

  I wasn’t surprised but refrained from saying so.

  ‘He was a tenor—sang like John McCormack,’ she told me.

  Personally, I preferred a robust baritone like Nelson Eddy or Laurence Tibbett, but to please her I went through an album of old records and found one of McCormack singing ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’. We discovered a small wind-up gramophone in one of the hotel rooms, and she took it to her room and played the record over and over again.

  She was tall and angular and I don’t think she could ever have been good-looking, but I enjoyed listening to her. Older people have always found me a patient and sympathetic listener. Sometimes they are inclined to ramble on, but if you listen carefully, you will often find that they have some interesting tales to tell.

  But my sister Ellen took a strong dislike to Mrs Kennedy, as indeed she did to anyone who was put in charge of her. A backward child with defects of vision and the first signs of epilepsy, she had very strong likes and dislikes. For instance, she hated bananas, and if Mrs Kennedy tried to reason with her by saying, ‘Bananas are good for you, dear,’ bananas would fly about the room and everyone present would have to duck for cover.

  Anything that was ‘Good for her’ was immediately resented and cast aside. Ellen longed to be a bad girl, but she was to retain for all her life the mind of a six-year-old.

  ‘Brain cutlets,’ I informed her one day as this delicacy arrived on the dining table. ‘Bad for you. You’re not supposed to eat them.’

  She immediately devoured three brain cutlets and asked for more. To this day she loves brain cutlets, under the impression that they will make her very wicked.

  Mrs Kennedy, however, decided to leave us the day she received a grapefruit in her eye. Ellen did not see straight, and on this occasion she was really aiming at me (I had been teasing her); but the grapefruit, thrown with considerable force, struck Mrs Kennedy instead.

  She went to work as a dormitory matron in a local convent school, and
as a parting present I gave her the John McCormack record.

  The Last Tonga Ride

  It was a warm spring day in Dehradun, and the walls of the bungalow were aflame with flowering bougainvillaea. The papayas were ripening. The scent of sweetpeas drifted across the garden. Grandmother sat in an easy chair in a shady corner of the veranda, her knitting needles clicking away, her head nodding now and then. She was knitting a pullover for my father. ‘Delhi has cold winters,’ she had said; and although the winter was still eight months away, she had set to work on getting our woollens ready.

  In the Kathiawar states, touched by the warm waters of the Arabian Sea, it had never been cold but Dehra lies at the foot of the first range of the Himalayas.

  Grandmother’s hair was white, her eyes were not very strong but her fingers moved quickly with the needles and the needles kept clicking all morning.

  When Grandmother wasn’t looking, I picked geranium leaves, crushed them between my fingers and pressed them to my nose.

  I had been in Dehra with my grandmother for almost a month and I had not seen my father during this time. We had never before been separated for so long. He wrote to me every week, and sent me books and picture postcards; and I would walk to the end of the road to meet the postman as early as possible, to see if there was any mail for us.

  We heard the jingle of tonga-bells at the gate, and a familiar horse-buggy came rattling up the drive.

  ‘I’ll see who’s come,’ I said, and ran down the veranda steps and across the garden.

  It was Bansi Lal in his tonga. There were many tongas and tonga-drivers in Dehra but Bansi was my favourite driver. He was young and handsome and he always wore a clean white shirt and pyjamas. His pony, too, was bigger and faster than the other tonga ponies.

  Bansi didn’t have a passenger, so I asked him, ‘What have you come for, Bansi?’

  ‘Your grandmother sent for me, dost.’ He did not call me ‘chota sahib’ or ‘baba’, but ‘dost’ and this made me feel much more important. Not every small boy could boast of a tonga-driver for his friend!

  ‘Where are you going, Granny?’ I asked, after I had run back to the veranda.

  ‘I’m going to the bank.’

  ‘Can I come too?’

  ‘Whatever for? What will you do in the bank?’

  ‘Oh, I won’t come inside, I’ll sit in the tonga with Bansi.’

  ‘Come along, then.’

  We helped Grandmother into the back seat of the tonga, and then I joined Bansi in the driver’s seat. He said something to his pony, and the pony set off at a brisk trot, out of the gate and down the road.

  ‘Now, not too fast, Bansi,’ said Grandmother, who didn’t like anything that went too fast— tonga, motor car, train, or bullock-cart.

  ‘Fast?’ said Bansi. ‘Have no fear, Memsahib. This pony has never gone fast in its life. Even if a bomb went off behind us, we could go no faster. I have another pony, which I use for racing when customers are in a hurry. This pony is reserved for you, Memsahib.’

  There was no other pony, but Grandmother did not know this, and was mollified by the assurance that she was riding in the slowest tonga in Dehra.

  A ten-minute ride brought us to the bazaar. Grandmother’s bank, the Allahabad Bank, stood near the clock tower. She was gone for about half-an-hour and during this period Bansi and I sauntered about in front of the shops. The pony had been left with some green stuff to munch.

  ‘Do you have any money on you?’ asked Bansi.

  ‘Four annas,’ I said.

  ‘Just enough for two cups of tea,’ said Bansi, putting his arm round my shoulders and guiding me towards a tea stall. The money passed from my palm to his.

  ‘You can have tea, if you like,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a lemonade.’

  ‘So be it, friend. A tea and a lemonade, and be quick about it,’ said Bansi to the boy in the teashop and presently the drinks were set before us and Bansi was making a sound rather like his pony when it drank, while I burped my way through some green, gaseous stuff that tasted more like soap than lemonade.

  When Grandmother came out of the bank, she looked pensive, and did not talk much during the ride back to the house except to tell me to behave myself when I leant over to pat the pony on its rump. After paying off Bansi, she marched straight indoors.

  1936: Ruskin Bond, third from left, with Ayah, on the wall behind Granny’s house, Dehradun.

  ‘When will you come again?’ I asked Bansi.

  ‘When my services are required, dost. I have to make a living, you know. But I tell you what, since we are friends, the next time I am passing this way after leaving a fare, I will jingle my bells at the gate and if you are free and would like a ride—a fast ride!—you can join me. It won’t cost you anything. Just bring some money for a cup of tea.’

  ‘All right—since we are friends,’ I said.

  ‘Since we are friends.’

  And touching the pony very lightly with the handle of his whip, he sent the tonga rattling up the drive and out of the gate. I could hear Bansi singing as the pony cantered down the road.

  Ayah was waiting for me in the bedroom, her hands resting on her broad hips—sure sign of an approaching storm.

  ‘So you went off to the bazaar without telling me,’ she said. (It wasn’t enough that I had Grandmother’s permission!) ‘And all the time I’ve been waiting to give you your bath.’

  ‘It’s too late now, isn’t it?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘No, it isn’t. There’s still an hour left for lunch. Off with your clothes!’

  While I undressed, Ayah berated me for keeping the company of tonga-drivers like Bansi. I think she was a little jealous.

  ‘He is a rogue, that man. He drinks, gambles and smokes opium. He has T.B. and other terrible diseases. So don’t you be too friendly with him, understand, baba?’

  I nodded my head sagely but said nothing. I thought Ayah was exaggerating, as she always did about people, and besides, I had no intention of giving up free tonga rides.

  As my father had told me, Dehra was a good place for trees, and Grandmother’s house was surrounded by several kinds—peepul, neem, mango, jackfruit, papaya, and an ancient banyan tree. Some of the trees had been planted by my father and grandfather.

  ‘How old is the jackfruit tree?’ I asked grandmother.

  ‘Now let me see,’ said Grandmother, looking very thoughtful. ‘I should remember the jackfruit tree. Oh yes, your grandfather put it down in 1927. It was during the rainy season. I remember, because it was your father’s birthday and we celebrated it by planting a tree. 14 July 1927. Long before you were born!’

  The banyan tree grew behind the house. Its spreading branches, which hung to the ground and took root again, formed a number of twisting passageways in which I liked to wander. The tree was older than the house, older than my grandparents, as old as Dehra. I could hide myself in its branches behind thick, green leaves and spy on the world below.

  It was an enormous tree, about sixty feet high, and the first time I saw it I trembled with excitement because I had never seen such a marvellous tree before. I approached it slowly, even cautiously, as I wasn’t sure the tree wanted my friendship. It looked as though it had many secrets. There were sounds and movement in the branches but I couldn’t see who or what made the sounds.

  The tree made the first move, the first overture of friendship. It allowed a leaf to fall.

  The leaf brushed against my face as it floated down, but before it could reach the ground I caught and held it. I studied the leaf, running my fingers over its smooth, glossy texture. Then I put out my hand and touched the rough bark of the tree and this felt good to me. So I removed my shoes and socks as people do when they enter a holy place; and finding first a foothold and then a handhold on that broad trunk, I pulled myself up with the help of the tree’s aerial roots.

  As I climbed, it seemed as though someone was helping me; invisible hands, the hands of the spirit in the tree, touched
me and helped me climb.

  But although the tree wanted me, there were others who were disturbed and alarmed by my arrival. A pair of parrots suddenly shot out of a hole in the trunk and, with shrill cries, flew across the garden—flashes of green and red and gold. A squirrel looked out from behind a branch, saw me, and went scurrying away to inform his friends and relatives.

  I climbed higher, looked up, and saw a red beak poised above my head. I shrank away, but the hornbill made no attempt to attack me. He was relaxing in his home, which was a great hole in the tree trunk. Only the bird’s head and great beak were showing. He looked at me in rather a bored way, drowsily opening and shutting his eyes.

  ‘So many creatures live here,’ I said to myself. ‘I hope none of them are dangerous!’

  At that moment the hornbill lunged at a passing cricket. Bill and tree trunk met with a loud and resonant ‘Tonk!’

  I was so startled that I nearly fell out of the tree. But it was a difficult tree to fall out of! It was full of places where one could sit or even lie down. So I moved away from the hornbill, crawled along a branch which had sent out supports, and so moved quite a distance from the main body of the tree. I left its cold, dark depths for an area penetrated by shafts of sunlight.

  No one could see me. I lay flat on the broad branch hidden by a screen of leaves. People passed by on the road below. A sahib in a sun-helmet. His memsahib twirling a coloured silk sun-umbrella. Obviously she did not want to get too brown and be mistaken for a country-born person. Behind them, a pram wheeled along by a nanny.

  Then there were a number of Indians; some in white dhotis, some in western clothes, some in loincloths. Some with baskets on their heads. Others with coolies to carry their baskets for them.

  A cloud of dust, the blare of a horn, and down the road, like an out-of-condition dragon, came the latest Morris touring car. Then cyclists. Then a man with a basket of papayas balanced on his head. Following him, a man with a performing monkey. This man rattled a little hand-drum, and children followed man and monkey along the road. They stopped in the shade of a mango tree on the other side of the road. The little red monkey wore a frilled dress and a baby’s bonnet. It danced for the children, while the man sang and played his drum.