The Beauty of All My Days Read online

  This had happened while I was abroad. When I came back to Dehra I would often pass that house on my bicycle, and one day I got down and wandered about the grounds. Nobody was living there. Some flowering shrubs had survived, but the garden had been taken over by lantana and the ‘purple mink’ that spreads so quickly. I peeped inside one or two rooms but they were empty—the furniture had all been removed. There was nothing to indicate that anyone had lived there. If I was looking for ghosts, I was disappointed. But there was a terrible sadness about the place. For a short time, two people had been happy there once—until they had been overtaken by events beyond their control. Accidents of history.

  Opposite the Dilaram Bazaar, Dehradun, 1958. My friend Narinder lived here. These are his little sisters and cousins. In his twenties Narinder took off for the UK, and now he and his sons own the largest wine store in the country. He is, of course, a teetotaller.

  Some winters, when it snowed in Mussoorie, we would walk up to the hill station by way of the old bridle-path, about 7 miles up the hill from Rajpur. It is 1956–57, a year after I’d returned from England. With me is Sudheer, who had a talent for getting into trouble. He met a violent end a few years later. I wrote about him in my story ‘Death of a Familiar’ (The Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories, Penguin Books, 1988).

  That house remained unoccupied for many years until finally it became a government office. Today, the corridors are busy with chaprasis dashing about with files or cups of tea for their superiors. No one has heard of the little tragedy that took place there some seventy years ago.

  People who had been left behind, voluntarily or otherwise, were more numerous in the hill stations of Mussoorie. A substantial population of Anglo-Indians had been reduced from a couple of thousand to less than a hundred. Beautiful homes and large estates had been sold for a song, or even given to old retainers, the owners sailing away to an overseas ‘home’ that they had never seen. A few schoolteachers and missionaries stayed on, as did a few helpless individuals who had no family or support.

  Like Dean Spread, a young man who had been abandoned as a child. He was feeble-minded, unable to manage a regular job. Instead, he emulated the kabaris, the itinerant collectors of old newspapers and unwanted household goods, thrown away or sold for a pittance. Dean Spread—in his late thirties when I first saw him—was a familiar sight, with his gunny sack over his shoulder, going from house to house in quest of saleable rubbish. When his bag was full he would walk down to Rajpur (a 7-mile descent) and hand over his spoils to one of the kabari shops in the town. He would sleep on the floor in the back room of one of these cluttered establishments, living on tea and cheap biscuits.

  Sometimes people would just give him stuff they did not want. I gave him old magazines and my empty rum bottles. He did not drink himself. The others in his trade were all Muslims and they would not have put up with him had he been an imbiber of liquor.

  He was often pursued and heckled by street children as he plodded along the paths around Mussoorie. Because he was fair, even blue-eyed, he stood out from the others who made a similar living. An angrez kabari! The boys would tease him, and he would make the mistake of shouting back at them and then they would pelt him with stones.

  ‘Mr Bond,’ he would complain to me, ‘these boys are abusing me and throwing stones. Can’t you do something?’

  With old school friend Raghu, on the banks of the Ganga at Rishikesh, 1958. Rishikesh was then just a village. I would visit the Sivananda Ashram, on the opposite bank. In those days pilgrims were still going on foot to Badrinath; the motor road ended here.

  ‘Just sit here until they’ve gone home,’ I would tell him. ‘And don’t return their abuse. Wait until it’s dark. Wear a hat!’

  My advice wasn’t of much help, although he did get hold of an old sola-topi (a pith helmet), now out of fashion but once an essential part of a British official’s equipment. While it did not save you from sunstroke, it provided some protection from missiles. The stones bounced off it nicely.

  Dean Spread was a familiar sight up to the late 1960s. I’m told he died in his small back-room after vomiting blood all night. The local padre gave him a pauper’s burial.

  * * *

  Then there was old Foster, a self-proclaimed descendant of Bonnie Prince Charlie of Scotland. I have told Foster’s story in a picaresque novel, Tales of Fosterganj—in reality, Barlowganj, a suburb of Mussoorie.

  Foster was, in fact, related to the Skinners, a family of some standing in the days of the Raj, and he owned a spur of land running down to Mossy Falls. But years of dissipation had led to his physical and financial decline, and bouts of heavy drinking often left him in a stupor. He lived with his half-sister, also a heavy drinker, and it was said that theirs was an incestuous relationship. As time went by they sold off most of their land, and then the corrugated iron roof of their house, and much of the furniture. They ended up living in the outhouse, formerly a stable.

  In the 1960s some of the more fortunate Anglo-Indians and Indian Christians formed a Benevolent Society to help those of their fellows who were in distress. The Fosters’ need for money was often put forward and just as often rejected. ‘They’ll only drink it away,’ was the general consensus. So the Fosters distilled their own liquor and the hills resounded to nights of merriment.

  When times were really bad, Foster would do the rounds, selling gladioli bulbs. I bought a few from him and put them down in Maplewood’s small garden. But when they came up they turned out to be onions.

  Sir Edmund was also duped into buying onions instead of gladioli.

  My acquaintance with Sir Edmund was renewed in the summer of 1969, when he rented the big house next to my cottage. He was eighty-six then but still mobile, except on steep slopes when his Gurkha manservant had to push him up from behind. It was quite a sight watching Sir Edmund, a huge bulky man who had once played rugby for England (or so he told me), being propelled up the steep road known as Palpitation Hill (just below the Wynberg school flat), with this tiny Gurkha shoving him along like a village boy behind a buffalo.

  Sir Edmund was taking a holiday from his farm. Not that much happened on the farm, but it was hot down in the valley and he needed a change.

  He would drop in on me occasionally to discuss some story or article of mine he’d read in Blackwood’s, a venerable literary and political journal to which he subscribed. As usual, he found something to criticize. ‘There are no tigers left in the valley,’ he would say. ‘Why have you got a tiger prowling around the Mohand Pass—that’s not far from my farm.’ ‘It must have heard of you and your hospitality,’ I would reply. And so the banter would continue.

  In fact, Sir Edmund was not known for his hospitality. He never entertained or invited anyone over to his farm or to his Mussoorie residence, although he was quite willing to accept invitations to other people’s parties—provided he could get up Palpitation Hill!

  But one day, he surprised me by asking me over for a drink.

  We sat beneath a shady horse-chestnut tree, and imbibed two or three whiskies with soda.

  Then he showed me his poems.

  ‘I didn’t know you wrote poetry,’ I remarked.

  ‘My secret vice,’ he said.

  He had filled a small notebook with his poems, written over a period of several years. They were quite good actually, rather like John Betjeman’s verse, personal but observant too.

  ‘You should publish them,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, they’re nothing special. But I enjoyed writing them, that’s the main thing.’

  Yes, that was the main thing—enjoying one’s work, making a poem out of one’s life. And if others enjoyed it too, that was even better. But some things remain private, to be shared only with the Great Librarian.

  One day Sir Edmund’s little Gurkha came running up to my front door, asking me to come over because Gibson Sahib had suddenly fallen ill. I hurried across to his sitting room, where I found him stretched out in an armchair, purple in the fa
ce, his legs and arms twitching; he appeared to be unconscious.

  ‘I think he’s had a stroke,’ I said. ‘We must get him to the hospital.’ And I ran up to the school office and asked for help.

  In those days the Wynberg-Allen van was the only vehicle in our area, and it was put at our disposal. We managed to convey Sir Edmund to the Landour Community Hospital, but he did not recover consciousness. The next day he was cremated (according to his wishes) on his estate outside Dehra. A private cremation was illegal and it brought the local magistrate to the scene. But there was nothing he could do about it; the cremation was over; as usual, Sir Edmund had his way.

  * * *

  Another ‘leftover’, but a survivor nonetheless, was Arthur Fisher, discarded by the Fisher family when they left the country. These ‘left behinds’ were usually uneducated or feeble-minded young men, who had no family or anyone to give them a helping hand. The British never did bother very much about their illegitimate offspring.

  Arthur Fisher was lucky to be given a home by the Garlah sisters, two Anglo-Indian spinsters, former schoolteachers who ran a small boarding-house. Arthur slept in the outhouse and ran errands for them. He couldn’t write much more than his name, but he was good with his hands and would often help the local undertaker turn out a cheap plywood coffin at short notice.

  Unlike Spread, he was quite popular with the street children and would play marbles with them or show them how to spin a top—innocent pastimes that have been killed off by cell-phone pornography. He was a man of a friendly disposition, who got on well with the shopkeepers in the bazaar, always ready for a little gossip or friendly banter.

  He was also a part-time projectionist at the Picture Palace (one of the country’s old cinema halls), and if the reels were shown in the wrong order you could be sure that Arthur had mixed them up. This was all right with a Hitchcock film, as it only enhanced the mystery,* but it was a little disconcerting to see all the Vikings slaughtered in one reel and then up and fighting in the next. But films often arrived in Mussoorie badly cut and incomplete, so this wasn’t always Arthur’s fault.

  A week or two before Christmas, Arthur would turn up at my place laden with holly. He knew I liked to decorate my rooms with holly. I am not a religious person, but the children in my adopted family—Rakesh, Mukesh and Dolly, then still at school—liked the idea of celebrating Christmas (as indeed do many Hindu children), and to please them I would hang holly branches everywhere and we would have a party.

  Arthur would be well-rewarded for bringing me the holly, all scarlet with its shining berries, and he did this on a regular basis during those early years in Ivy Cottage. And only he knew where the holly was to be found!

  Holly trees or bushes are rare around Mussoorie, but Arthur knew of a spot behind the Camel’s Back Road, a sharp escarpment, where holly bushes grew in fairly large numbers. This was, however, inaccessible to anyone except mountain goats and Arthur (who was quite at home on a steep cliff-side), so he had the space to himself—and all the holly that went with it.

  He was still bringing me holly when he was in his sixties—agile to the end—and when he died he took his secret with him. The secret of where the holly grew . . . for I haven’t seen any holly for years.

  * * *

  There were many Fishers and Spreads ‘left behind’ across the country, left to fend for themselves, for there was no godfather or fairy godmother on hand to support them. And they come to mind while I am writing this memoir because they remind me of how close I came to being one of them. I was lucky in that I had a small talent, a talent with words, and that I had the ability to put this talent to good use . . .

  With, of course, a little help from the Great Librarian.

  MY PLACE OF POWER

  In the summer of 1963, when I came to live in Mussoorie, there were just half a dozen private vehicles in the town and two or three taxis. Most visitors came up the hill by bus. It took about seven to eight hours from Delhi. Today, in spite of fast cars and wider roads, it takes much longer. The traffic is dense, choking the highways, and political or religious events often clutter up the approaches to wayside towns and villages.

  As I write, there is a traffic jam on the approach to Landour, once a sleepy little cantonment where tourists seldom ventured. Today it is a prime destination, a place where you can ‘get away from it all’—except that it is now a tourist hub, and sometimes I have to get away from Landour and lose myself in the anonymity of a large city.

  The end of a very long walk. Amitabh Banerjee and I trekked from Mussoorie to Tehri, spending a night in a wayside teashop, and then took a bus to Rishikesh. Four of us set out from Mussoorie, but only two completed the trek.

  There are hundreds of taxis in Mussoorie, but on weekends there are far more private cars, and the hordes pour in from Delhi, Haryana and almost any place that’s within a day’s driving distance. The town has become one vast parking lot. Hotels of every description straddle the steep hillside. If you drive up at night, the lights of the hill station are strung out like a necklace of twinkling stars, looking like the Titanic on its last glamorous night before going down.

  Mussoorie had its last glamorous night in the early 1960s, when Hakman’s and the Savoy still held the occasional beauty contest. The last Miss Mussoorie is in her seventies now, and I have promised not to divulge her name. Some of us prefer to age in private rather than in the public eye.

  But Mussoorie had a different clientele in those days. There was a big gap between the haves and the have-nots. The haves stayed at the Savoy even though it was still without flush latrines; lesser beings stayed in the smaller hotels where you paid extra if you needed a blanket. The middle class was only just beginning to make itself seen and felt. Today, a prosperous middle-class has taken over this and other hill stations; hence the traffic jams and the ice-cream wrappers littering the Mall.

  Building of various shapes and designs now cling to an overflowing hillside, and if you look between or behind them you might be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the next range, Nag Tibba and the Nanda Devi range, or a snow-capped peak beyond the dust haze.

  If you go up the hill to Landour on a clear day you might well be blessed with a view of the eternal snows; but very often they are obscured by the summer smog or monsoon clouds. One misty morning I encountered a group of tourists from the Punjab berating their guide for bringing them all way to Landour’s summit where all they could see was the local cemetery!

  The cemetery does have the best view. Unfortunately, its inhabitants are not in the best position to appreciate it.

  * * *

  So what brought me to Mussoorie over fifty years ago? I certainly wasn’t in quest of beauty queens or ballroom dancing or a romantic liaison with a faded princess. As always, I was looking for my own space. I was looking for an enchanted cottage. I was looking for a world long gone. And I was looking for myself.

  And to a certain extent I found all these things.

  The cottage was found without much difficulty. Mussoorie was going through a slump. Its colonial clientele had gone, and India’s burgeoning middle-class had yet to take over. Houses were going cheap. You could buy one for ten or fifteen thousand rupees. And although I did not have enough for a house, I could rent one. My landlady, a retired art teacher, was happy to let me have Maplewood Lodge for an annual rent of four hundred and fifty rupees. This was perfect for a thirty-year-old writer who had thrown up a decent job in Delhi and was determined to live off the income from his writing. There was no other income; never had been, never would be.

  This was a bid for freedom and my own space. But this freedom could only be achieved if I sat before my typewriter for two or three hours every day and conjured up stories that I could sell—somewhere, somehow . . . Not easy, because I wasn’t a formula writer or a journalist; I couldn’t write spy thrillers or science fiction or tales of intrepid empire-builders or revolutionaries. I could write about people, ordinary people, sometimes extraordinary people,
and I had a certain empathy for the natural world, for trees and plants and wild creatures and the poetry of life. And I knew that if I stuck to what I was good at doing, I might just surprise myself and my doubting friends, and produce something meaningful.

  What was life all about anyway? At times it seems quite pointless. We don’t ask to be born; and no sooner are we born than the shadow of death looms over us, ready to snatch us away quite arbitrarily. The most powerful of men strut across their domains as though they are gods, or favourites of the gods, and then vanish like fallen leaves. At least dead leaves serve a purpose; they enrich the soil, mankind pollutes it.

  Although Maplewood was over a hundred years old—part of it tilting towards a gully and threatening to subside into it—it was the first time in my life that I had an entire house to myself rather than just a room in someone else’s home.

  As a boy I’d insisted on my own space, my own room, or a disused tunnel, but these were always tiny bits of territory given to me on a short-term basis. The room on the roof, just a barsati, had been a citadel of sorts. In Jersey I had shared a bedroom with one of my cousins. In London I had gone through a series of bedsitters—Glenmore Road, Haverstock Hill, Belsize Avenue, Swiss Cottage, Tooting—most of them claustrophobic and depressing. Only one of them had a window with an extensive view, and the view was of a cemetery. Back in Dehra, I had the luxury of two rooms—without lights or a fan. In Delhi, there was a room in Rajouri Garden; a year later, another room in South Patel Nagar; then a year in East Patel Nagar. These refugee colonies, springing up from the wilderness around Delhi, often unfriendly and uninspiring, had a stultifying effect on my psyche. I longed for the shade and shelter of small towns, old towns, where trees still flourished and streams ran clear and limpid. I fled from Delhi as from a pestilence.