A Town Called Dehra Read online

  During these intervals (two-minute breaks between the shorts and the main feature), the projectionist or his assistant would play a couple of gramophone records for the benefit of the audience. Unfortunately the management had only two or three records, and the audience had grown weary of listening to the same tunes at every show. I must have been forced to listen to Don’t Fence Me In about a hundred times, and felt thoroughly fenced in.

  At home I had a fair collection of gramophone records, passed on to me by relatives and neighbours who were leaving India at the time of Independence. I thought it would be a good idea to give some of them to the cinema’s management so that we could be provided with a little more variety during the intervals. So I made a selection of about twenty records—mostly danceband music of the period—and presented the selection to the manager, Mr Khanna.

  1942: Dressed up as a Cossack, emulating Nelson Eddy, singing star of the operetta Balalaika. In Granny’s garden, Dehra.

  Mr Khanna was delighted. And to show me his gratitude, he presented me with a Free Pass which enabled me to see all the pictures I wanted without having to buy a ticket! Could any ardent movie-goer have asked for more?

  This unexpected bonanza lasted for almost two years, with the result that during my school holidays I saw most of the films made during that period and could rattle off the names of stars, supporting casts and directors! I was particularly fond of musicals and, of course, films based on famous books. Dickens was a natural for the screen; and Mark Twain; and Daphne du Maurier and Somerset Maugham.

  Occassionally I brought the manager a change of records. Mr Khanna was not a very communicative man, but I think he liked me (he knew something about my circumstances) and with a smile and a wave of the hand he would indicate that the freedom of the hall was still mine.

  Eventually, school finished, I was packed off to England, where my picture-going days went into something of a decline. All my spare time went into my writing. And it was almost four years before I saw Dehra again. I found that the little cinema had been closed down and was about to be demolished.

  We move on, of course. There’s no point in hankering after distant pleasures and lost picture palaces. But there’s no harm in indulging in a little nostalgia. What is nostalgia, after all, but an attempt to preserve that which was good in the past?

  And last year I was reminded of that golden era of the silver screen. I was rummaging around in an old curio shop in one of Dehra’s bazaars when I came across a pile of old 75 rpm records, all looking a little the worse for wear. And on a couple of them I found my name scratched on the labels. Pennies from Heaven was the name of one of the songs. It had certainly saved me a few rupees. That, and the goodwill of Mr Khanna, the Odeon’s manager, all those years ago.

  I bought the records. Can’t play them now. No wind-up gramophone! But I keep them among my souvenirs as a reminder of the days when I danced alone across the silent, moonlit Parade Ground.

  In My Twenties: Writing and Living

  First Time I Saw

  My Novel in Print

  I am trying to recall that morning, over fifty years ago, when I saw my first novel in print. I was nineteen that year, and I had recently returned from England, where I had spent three years of drudgery in an office. I had done my writing in the evenings and at weekends, bombarding editors and publishers with my literary efforts. Eventually I had found a publisher. But on that sultry summer morning in Dehradun it wasn’t the book I was looking out for (that came later), it was something else.

  I was up a little earlier than usual, well before sunrise, well before my buxom landlady, Bibiji, called up to me to come down for my tea and paratha. It was going to be a special day and I wanted to tell the world about it. But when you’re nineteen the world isn’t really listening to you.

  I bathed at the tap, put on a clean (but unpressed) shirt, trousers that needed cleaning, shoes that needed polishing. I never cared much about appearances. But I did have a nice leather belt with studs! I tightened it to the last rung. I was a slim boy, just a little undernourished.

  On the streets the milkmen on their bicycles were making their rounds, reminding me of William Saroyan, who sold newspapers as a boy, and recounted his experiences in The Bicycle Rider in Beverley Hills. Stray dogs and cows were nosing at dustbins. A truck loaded with bananas was slowly making its way towards the mandi. In the distance there was the whistle of an approaching train.

  One or two small tea shops had just opened, and I stopped at one of them for a cup of tea. As it was a special day, I decided to treat myself to an omelette. The shopkeeper placed a record on his new electric record player, and the strains of a popular film tune served to wake up all the neighbours—a song about a girl’s red dupatta being blown away by a gust of wind and then retrieved by a handsome but unemployed youth. I finished my omelette and set off down the road to the bazaar.

  It was a little too early for most of the shops to be open, but the news agency would be the first and that was where I was heading.

  And there it was: the National News Agency, with piles of fresh newspapers piled up at the entrance. The Leader of Allahabad, the Pioneer of Lucknow, the Tribune of Ambala, and the bigger national dailies. But where was the latest Illustrated Weekly of India? Was it late this week? I did not always get up at six in the morning to pick up the Weekly, but this week’s issue was a special one. It was my issue, my special bow to the readers of India and the whole wide beautiful wonderful world. My novel was to be published in England, but first it would be serialized in India!

  1952: Haripal reads my first short story ‘Untouchable’ in the Illustrated Weekly of India.

  Mr Gupta popped his head out of the half-open shop door and smiled at me.

  ‘What brings you here so early this morning?’

  ‘Has the Weekly arrived?’

  ‘Come in. It’s here. I can’t leave it on the pavement.’

  I produced a rupee. ‘Give me two copies.’

  ‘Something special in it? Did you win first prize in the crossword competition?’

  My hands were not exactly trembling as I opened the magazine, but my heart was in my mouth as I flipped through the pages of that revered journal—the one and only family magazine of the 1950s, the gateway to literary success—edited by a quirky Irishman, Shaun Mandy.

  And there it was: the first instalment of The Room on the Roof, that naïve, youthful novel on which I had toiled for a couple of years. It had lively, evocative illustrations by Mario, who wasn’t much older than me. And a picture of the young author, looking gauche and gaunt and far from intellectual.

  I waved the magazine in front of Mr Gupta. ‘My novel!’ I told him. ‘In this and the next five issues!’

  He wasn’t too impressed. ‘Well, I hope circulation won’t drop,’ he said. ‘And you should have sent them a better photograph.’

  Expansively, I bought a third copy.

  ‘Circulation is going up!’ said Mr Gupta with a smile.

  The bazaar was slowly coming to life. Spring was in the air, and there was a spring in my step as I sauntered down the road. I wanted to tell the world about my triumph, but was the world interested? I had no mentors in our sleepy little town. There was no one to whom I could go and confide: ‘Look what I’ve done. And it was all due to your encouragement, thanks!’ Because there hadn’t been anyone to encourage or help, not then nor in the receding past. The members of the local cricket team, to which I belonged, would certainly be interested, and one or two would exclaim: ‘Shabash! Now you can get us some new pads and a set of balls!’ And there were other friends who would demand a party at the chaat shop, which was fine, but would any of them read my book? Readers were not exactly thick on the ground, even in those pre-television, pre-computer days. But perhaps one or two would read it, out of loyalty.

  A cow stood in the middle of the road, blocking my way.

  ‘See here, friend cow,’ I said, displaying the magazine to the ruminating animal. �
�Here’s the first instalment of my novel. What do you think of it?’

  The cow looked at the magazine with definite interest. Those crisp new pages looked good to eat. She craned forward as if to accept my offer of breakfast, but I snatched the magazine away.

  ‘I’ll lend it to you another day,’ I said, and moved on.

  I got on quite well with cows, especially stray ones. There was one that blocked the steps up to my room, sheltering there at night or when it rained. The cow had become used to me scrambling over her to get to the steps; my comings and goings did not bother her. But she was resentful of people who tried to prod or push her out of the way. To the delight of the other tenants, she had taken a dislike to the munshi, the property owner’s rent collector, and often chased him away.

  I really don’t recall how the rest of that day passed, except that late evening, when the celebrations with friends were over, I found myself alone in my little room, trimming my kerosene lamp. It was too early to sleep, and I’d done enough walking that day. So I pulled out my writing pad and began a new story. I knew even then that the first wasn’t going to be enough. Sheherazade had to keep telling stories in order to put off her execution. I would have to keep writing them in order to keep that munshi at bay and put off my eviction.

  Living Without Money

  When I was in my twenties, there were a number of us who lived without electric light—not because there was no electricity, but because no one had paid their bills.

  Dehra was going through a slump in those days, and there wasn’t much work for anyone— least of all for my neighbour, Suresh Mathur, income-tax lawyer, who was broke for two reasons. To begin with, clients were a rarity, as those with taxable incomes were few and far between; apart from that, when he did get work, he was slow and half-hearted about getting it done. This was because he seldom got up before eleven in the morning, and by the time he took a bus down from Rajpur and reached his own small office, or the Income Tax Office a little further on, it was lunchtime and all the tax officials were out. Suresh would then repair to the Royal Café for a beer or two (often at my expense) and this would stretch into a gin and tonic, after which he would stagger up to his first-floor office and collapse on the sofa for an afternoon nap. He would wake up at six, after the income-tax office had closed.

  I occupied two rooms next to his office, and we were on friendly terms, sharing an enthusiasm for the humorous works of P.G. Wodehouse. I think he modelled himself on Bertie Wooster, for he would often turn up wearing mauve, or yellow socks or a pink shirt and a bright green tie—enough to make anyone in his company feel quite liverish. But unlike Bertie Wooster, he did not have a Jeeves to look after him and get him out of various scrapes with creditors, bookmakers or clients who felt he’d let them down. I was a bit wary of Suresh, as he was in the habit of borrowing lavishly from all his friends, conveniently forgetting to return the amounts. I wasn’t well off and could ill afford the company of a spendthrift friend.

  Looking back, I am amazed at the number of people who were quite broke. There was William Matheson, a Swiss journalist, whose remittances from Zurich never seemed to turn up; my landlady, whose husband had deserted her two years previously; Mr Madan, who dealt in second-hand cars which no one wanted; the owner of the corner restaurant, who sat in solitary splendour surrounded by empty tables; and the proprietor of the Ideal Book Depot, who was selling off his stock of books so he could convert his depot into a department store. We complain that few people buy or read books today, but I can assure you that there were even fewer customers in the fifties and sixties. It seemed only doctors, dentists and the proprietors of English schools were making money.

  Suresh had an advantage over the rest of us—he owned an old bungalow, inherited from his father, up at Rajpur in the foothills, where he lived alone with an old manservant. And owning property gave him some standing with his creditors. The grounds boasted of a mango and lichi orchard, and these he gave out on contract every year. The proceeds helped him to pay his office rent in town, with a little left over to give small amounts on account to the owner of the Royal Café.

  If a lawyer could be hard up, what chance had a journalist? And yet William Matheson had everything going for him when he came out to India as an assistant to Von Hesseltein, a correspondent for some of the German papers. Von Hesseltein passed on some of his assignments to William, and for a time all went well. William lived with Von Hesseltein and his family, and was also friendly with Suresh, often paying for the drinks at the Royal Café. Then William committed the folly (if not the sin) of sleeping with Von Hesseltein’s wife. He justified this indiscretion by telling us that Von Hesseltein was sleeping with the malai-wala, a strapping young man in his twenties who was a great advertisement for the invigorating qualities of malai. William obviously felt that Von Hesseltein’s wife was getting a raw deal. But Von Hesseltein was not the understanding sort. He threw William out of the house and stopped giving him work.

  William hired an old typewriter and set himself up as a correspondent in his own right, living and working from a room in the Doon Guest House. He bombarded the Swiss and German papers with his articles, but there were very few takers. No one then was really interested in India’s five-year plans, or Corbusier’s Chandigarh, or the Bhakra-Nangal Dam. Book publishing in India was confined to textbooks, otherwise William might have published a vivid account of his experiences in the French Foreign Legion. After two or three rums at the Royal Café he would regale us with tales of his exploits in the Legion before and after the siege of Dien-Bien-Phu. Some of his stories had the ring of truth, others (particularly his sexual exploits) were obviously tall tales; but nevertheless I was happy to pay for the beer or coffee in order to hear him spin them out.

  I was living off my own literary endeavours, selling stories and articles to the Indian papers (about half a dozen scattered throughout the country), with the occasional sale of a story to the BBC or Young Elizabethan, a children’s magazine published in the UK. In those days there was a greater market for essays and short fiction, so my early stories found a home more easily then than they do today.

  Ruskin Bond in 1956, the year The Room on the Roof was published.

  [Taken at the Ramneek Studio, adjoining the Odeon Cinema; both studio and cinema have gone.]

  Those were glorious days for Ruskin Bond, unknown freelance writer. I was realizing my dream of living by my pen, and I was doing it from a small town in north India, having turned my back on both London and New Delhi. I had no ambitions to be a great writer, or even a famous one, or even a rich one. All I wanted to do was write. And I wanted a few readers and the occasional cheque so that I could carry on living my dream.

  The cheques came along in their own desultory way—fifty rupees from the Weekly, or thirty-five from the Statesman or the same from Sport and Pastime, and so on—just enough to get by and to be the envy of Suresh Mathur, William Matheson and a few others, professional people who felt that I had no business earning more than they did. Suresh even declared that I should have been paying tax, and offered to represent me, his other clients having gone elsewhere.

  Colonel Wilkie did not earn anything either. He lived on a small pension in a corner room of the White House Hotel. His wife had left him some years before, presumably because of his drinking, but he claimed to have left her because of her obsession with moving the furniture: it seems she was always shifting things about, changing rooms, throwing out perfectly sound tables and chairs and replacing them with fancy stuff picked up here and there. If he took a liking to a particular easy chair and showed signs of settling down in it, it would disappear the next day to be replaced by something horribly ugly and uncomfortable.

  ‘It was a form of mental torture,’ said Colonel Wilkie, confiding in me over a glass of beer on the White House veranda. ‘The sitting room was cluttered with all sorts of ornamental junk and flimsy side tables, and I was constantly falling over the damn things. It was like a minefield! And th
e mines were never in the same place. You’ve noticed that I walk with a limp?’

  ‘First World War?’ I ventured. ‘Wounded at Ypres? Or was it Flanders?’

  ‘Nothing of the sort,’ snorted the Colonel. ‘I did get one or two flesh wounds but they were nothing as compared to the damage inflicted on me by those damned shifting tables and chairs. Fell over a coffee table and dislocated my shoulder. Then broke an ankle negotiating a stool that was in the wrong place. Bookshelf fell on me. Tripped on a rolled-up carpet. Hit by a curtain rod. Would you have put up with it?’

  ‘No,’ I had to admit.

  ‘Had to leave her, of course. She went off to England. Send her an allowance. Half my pension! All spent on furniture!’

  The Colonel told me that the final straw had come when his favourite spring bed had suddenly been replaced by a bed made up of hard wooden slats. It was sheer torture trying to sleep on it, and he had left his house and moved into the White House Hotel as a permanent guest.

  Now he had gone to the other extreme and wouldn’t allow anyone to touch or tidy up anything in his room. There were beer-stains on the tablecloth, cobwebs on his family pictures, dust on his books, empty medicine bottles on his dressing table and mice nesting in his old, discarded boots.

  I didn’t see much of the room because we usually sat out on the veranda, waited upon by one of the hotel bearers, who came over with bottles of beer that I dutifully paid for, the Colonel having exhausted his credit. I suppose he was in his late sixties then. He never went anywhere, not even for a walk in the compound. He blamed this inactivity on his gout, but it was really inertia and an unwillingness to leave the precincts of the bar, where he could cadge the occasional drink from a sympathetic guest.