Our Trees Still Grow In Dehra Read online

  ‘Why, Granny?’

  ‘I don’t know, I suppose white horses are nervous, too. Anyway, they are always trying to topple me out. Not so fast, driver!’ she called out, as the tonga-man cracked his whip and the pony changed from a slow shuffle to a brisk trot.

  It took us about twenty-five minutes to reach my stepfather’s house which was in the Dalanwala area, not far from the dry bed of the seasonal Rispana river. My grandmother, seeing that I was in need of moral support, got down with me, while the tonga-driver carried my bedding roll and tin trunk on to the veranda. The front door was bolted from inside. We had to knock on it repeatedly and call out, before it was opened by a servant who did not look pleased at being disturbed. When he saw my grandmother he gave her a deferential salaam, then gazed at me with open curiosity.

  ‘Where’s the memsahib?’ asked grandmother.

  ‘Out,’ said the servant.

  ‘I can see that, but where have they gone?’

  ‘They went yesterday to Motichur, for shikar. They will be back this evening.’

  Grandmother looked upset, but motioned to the servant to bring in my things. ‘Weren’t they expecting the boy?’ she asked. ‘Yes,’ he said looking at me again. ‘But they said he would be arriving tomorrow.’

  ‘They’d forgotten the date,’ said Grandmother in a huff. ‘Anyway, you can unpack and have a wash and change your clothes.’

  Turning to the servant, she asked, ‘Is there any lunch?’

  ‘I will make lunch,’ he said. He was staring at me again, and I felt uneasy with his eyes on me. He was tall and swarthy, with oily, jet-black hair and a thick moustache. A heavy scar ran down his left cheek, giving him a rather sinister appearance. He wore a torn shirt and dirty pyjamas. His broad, heavy feet were wet. They left marks on the uncarpeted floor.

  A baby was crying in the next room, and presently a woman (who turned out to be the cook’s wife) appeared in the doorway, jogging the child in her arms.

  ‘They’ve left the baby behind, too,’ said Grandmother, becoming more and more irate. ‘He is your young brother. Only six months old.’ I hadn’t been told anything about a younger brother. The discovery that I had one came as something of a shock. I wasn’t prepared for a baby brother, least of all a baby half-brother. I examined the child without much enthusiasm. He looked healthy enough and he cried with gusto.

  ‘He’s a beautiful baby,’ said Grandmother. ‘Well, I’ve got work to do. The servants will look after you. You can come and see me in a day or two. You’ve grown since I last saw you. And you’re getting pimples.’

  This reference to my appearance did not displease me as Grandmother never indulged in praise. For her to have observed my pimples indicated that she was fond of me.

  The tonga-driver was waiting for her. ‘I suppose I’ll have to use the same tonga,’ she said. ‘Whenever I need a tonga, they disappear, except for the ones with white ponies …. When your mother gets back, tell her I want to see her. Shikar, indeed. An infant to look after, and they’ve gone shooting.’

  Grandmother settled herself in the tonga, nodded in response to the cook’s salaam, and took a tight grip of the armrests of her seat. The driver flourished his whip and the pony set off at the same listless, unhurried trot, while my grandmother, feeling quite certain that she was going to be hurtled to her doom by a wild white pony, set her teeth and clung tenaciously to the tonga seat. I was sorry to see her go.

  My mother and stepfather returned in the evening from their hunting trip with a pheasant which was duly handed over to the cook, whose name was Mangal Singh. My mother gave me a perfunctory kiss. I think she was pleased to see me, but I was accustomed to a more intimate caress from my father, and the strange reception I had received made me realize the extent of my loss. Boarding school life had been routine. Going home was something that I had always looked forward to. But going home had meant my father, and now he had vanished and I was left quite desolate.

  I suppose if one is present when a loved one dies, or sees him dead and laid out and later buried, one is convinced of the finality of the thing and finds it easier to adapt to the changed circumstances. But when you hear of a death, a father’s death, and have only the faintest idea of the manner of his dying, it is rather a lot for the imagination to cope with—especially when the imagination is a small boy’s. There being no tangible evidence of my father’s death, it was, for me, not a death but a vanishing. And although this enabled me to remember him as a living, smiling, breathing person, it meant that I was not wholly reconciled to his death, and subconsciously expected him to turn up (as he often did, when I most needed him) and deliver me from an unpleasant situation.

  My stepfather barely noticed me. The first thing he did on coming into the house was to pour himself a whisky and soda. My mother, after inspecting the baby, did likewise. I was left to unpack and settle in my room.

  I was fortunate in having my own room. I was as desirous of my own privacy as much as my mother and stepfather were desirous of theirs. My stepfather, a local businessman, was ready to put up with me provided I did not get in the way. And, in a different way, I was ready to put up with him, provided he left me alone. I was even willing that my mother should leave me alone.

  There was a big window to my room, and I opened it to the evening breeze, and gazed out on to the garden, a rather unkempt place where marigolds and a sort of wild blue everlasting grew rampant among the litchi trees.

  What’s Your Dream?

  An old man, a beggar man, bent double, with a flowing white beard and piercing grey eyes, stopped on the road on the other side of the garden wall and looked up at me, where I perched on the branch of a litchi tree.

  ‘What’s your dream?’ he asked.

  It was a startling question coming from that raggedy old man on the street; even more startling that it should have been made in English. English-speaking beggars were a rarity in those days.

  ‘What’s your dream?’ he repeated.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I had a dream last night.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. You know it isn’t what I mean. I can see you’re a dreamer. It’s not the litchi season, but you sit in that tree all afternoon, dreaming.’

  ‘I just like sitting here,’ I said. I refused to admit that I was a dreamer. Other boys didn’t dream, they had catapults.

  ‘A dream, my boy, is what you want most in life. Isn’t there something that you want more than anything else?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said promptly. ‘A room of my own.’

  ‘Ah! A room of your own, a tree of your own, it’s the same thing. Not many people can have their own rooms, you know. Not in a land as crowded as ours.’

  ‘Just a small room.’

  ‘And what kind of room do you live in at present?’

  ‘It’s a big room, but I have to share it with my brothers and sisters and even my aunt when she visits.’

  ‘I see. What you really want is freedom. Your own tree, your own room, your own small place in the sun.’

  ‘Yes, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s all? That’s everything! When you have all that, you’ll have found your dream.’

  ‘Tell me how to find it!’

  ‘There’s no magic formula, my friend. If I was a godman, would I be wasting my time here with you? You must work for your dream, and move towards it all the time, and discard all those things that come in the way of finding it, and then, if you don’t expect too much too quickly, you’ll find your freedom, your room of your own. The difficult time comes afterwards.’

  ‘Afterwards?’

  ‘Yes, because it’s so easy to lose it all, to let someone take it away from you. Or you become greedy, or careless and start taking everything for granted, and—Poof!—suddenly the dream has gone, vanished!’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ I asked

  ‘Because I had my dream and lost it.’

  ‘Did you lose everything?’

  ‘Y
es, just look at me now, my friend. Do I look like a king or a godman? I had everything I wanted, but then I wanted more and more …. You get your room, and then you want a building, and when you have your building you want your own territory, and when you have your own territory you want your own kingdom—and all the time it’s getting harder to keep everything. And when you lose it—in the end, all kingdoms are lost—you don’t even have your room any more.’

  ‘Did you have a kingdom?’

  ‘Something like that …. Follow your own dream, boy, but don’t take other people’s dreams, don’t stand in anyone’s way, don’t take from another man his room or his faith or his song.’ And he turned and shuffled away, intoning the following verse, which I have never heard elsewhere, so it must have been his own.

  Live long, my friend, be wise and strong,

  But do not take from any man his song.

  I remained in the litchi tree, pondering his wisdom and wondering how a man so wise could be so poor. Perhaps he became wise afterwards. Anyway, he was free, and I was free, and I went back to the house and demanded (and got) a room of my own. Freedom, I was beginning to realize, is something you have to insist upon.

  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.

  ‘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!’