The Best of Ruskin Bond (25 page)

T
he sun beats down on the sweltering city of Old Delhi. Not a breath of air stirs in the narrow, winding streets. This old walled city, now over three hundred years old, has no open spaces, no fountains, no sidewalks, no shady avenues. During the reign of Emperor Shah Jahan, a canal ran down the centre of the main thoroughfare, Chandni Chowk (Street of the Silversmiths); but the canal has long since been covered over, and the Jamuna river, from which the water was channelled, lies beyond the Emperor’s fort, the Red Fort of Delhi, where the Prime Minister speaks to the multitude every year on Independence Day.

It is not water that I seek most, but shelter from the heat and glare of the overhead sun. I have chosen what is quite possibly the hottest day in May, the temperature over 105° Fahrenheit, to go walking in search of—what? A story, perhaps an adventure. Or that is what I set out to do. The heat of the day has willed otherwise. I may be ready for an adventure, but no one else is interested. I am the only one walking the streets from choice.

Shopkeepers nod drowsily beneath whirring ceiling-fans. The pavement barber has taken his customer into the shelter of an awning. A fortune-teller has decided that there is nothing to predict and has fallen asleep under the same awning. A vegetable-seller sprinkles water on his vegetables in a dispirited fashion. Those cauliflowers were fresh an hour ago, they look old already. Even the flies are drowsy. Instead of buzzing feverishly from place to place, they stagger about on tired legs.

It is the pigeons who have found all the coolest places. These birds have made the old city their own. New Delhi is for the crows who like to have a tree to sleep in, even if they take their meals from out of kitchens and verandas. But the pigeons prefer buildings, and the older the buildings the better. They are familiar with every cool alcove or shady recess in the crumbling walls of neglected mosques and mansions.

A fat, supercilious pigeon watches me from the window ledge above a jeweller’s shop. The pigeon’s forebears settled here long before the British thought of taking Delhi. Conquerors have come and gone. Nadir Shah the Persian, Madhav Rao the Maratha, Ghulam Kadir the Rohilla, and generations of goldsmiths and silversmiths. Hindus and Muslims have made and lost fortunes in the city, but nothing has disturbed the tranquil life of these pigeons. Their gentle cooing can always be heard when there is a lull in the jagged symphony of traffic noise. How do they manage to sound so cool?

But here’s welcome relief for humans; a shady corner in Lal Kuan Bazaar (Street of the Red Well), where an old man provides drinking water to thirsty wayfarers such as myself. His water is stored in a surahi, an earthenware jug which keeps the water sweet and cool. I bend down, cup my hands, and receive the sparkling liquid as my benefactor tilts the surahi towards me.

Lal Kuan. The Red Well. Of course it is no longer here. But the street still bears its name. And I like to think that here, in the middle of the street, where a bullock has gone to sleep forcing the cyclists to make a detour, there was once a well made of dark red brick, where the water bubbled forth all day.

Imprisoned beneath the soil, held down by the crowded commercial houses of this old quarter, the water must still be there; it gives nourishment to an old peepul tree that grows beside a temple.

It is the only tree in the street. It juts out from the temple wall growing straight and tall, dwarfing the two-storey houses. One of its roots, breaking through the ground, has curled up to provide a smooth, well-worn seat.

And it is cool here, beneath the peepul. Even when there is no breeze, the slender heart-shaped leaves revolve prettily, creating their own currents of air. No wonder the sages of old found it a good tree to sit beneath. No wonder they called it sacred.

On the other side of the road, a tall iron doorway is set in a high wall. Doors like this were only built in the previous century, when a wealthy merchant’s house had to be a miniature fortress as well as a residence. I cannot see over the wall and I would like to know what lies behind the door. Perhaps a side-street, perhaps a market, perhaps a garden, perhaps.

The door opens, not easily, because it has been left closed for a long time, but slowly and with much complaint. And beyond the door there is only an empty courtyard, covered with nibble, the ruins of an old house. I am about to turn away when I hear a deep tremendous murmur.

It is the cooing of many pigeons.

But where are they?

I advance further into the ruin, and there, opening out in front of me, ready to receive me as the rabbit hole was ready to receive Alice, is an old, disused well.

I peer down into its murky depths. It is dark, very dark, down there; but that is where the pigeons live, in the walls of this lost, long-forgotten well shut away from the rest of the city.

I cannot see any water. So I drop a pebble over the side. It strikes the wall, and then, with a soft plop, touches water. At that instant there is a rush of air and a tremendous beating of wings, and a flock of pigeons, thirty or forty of them, fly out of the well, streak upwards, circle the building, and then falling into formation, wheel overhead, the sun gleaming white on their underwings.

I have discovered their secret. Now I know why they always look so cool, so refreshed, while we who walk the streets of Old Delhi do so with parched mouths and drooping limbs.

The pigeons are the only ones who still know about the Red Well.

I boarded the big ship bound for the West,
The clean white liner.
In the noon-day heat
Coolies thronged the sun-drenched pier.
Yet I saw only
The village I had left,
And a boat at rest
On the river’s shallow water
In the shade of the flowering
Long red-fingered poinsettia.
I saw not the big waves
But the ripple of running
Water in the reeds.

We came to London, lost in November mist:
In an ash-grey dawn at Tilbury dock
I longed for the warmth of a kiss
Of sunlight.

In the busy streets
Were cavalcades of people
Hurrying in a heat of hope.
But I saw only

The wheat-field, the tea-slope . . .
A cow at rest.
And longed for the soft, shoeless tread
Of a village boy . . .

Your face streamed April rain,
As you climbed the steep hill,
Calling the white cow home.
You seemed very tiny
On the windswept mountainside;
A twist of hair lay
Strung across your forehead
And your torn blue skirt
Clung to your tender thighs.
You smiled through the blind white rain
And gave me the salt kiss of your lips,
Salt mingled with raindrop and mint,
And left me there, where I had come to fetch you—
So gallant in the blistering rain!
And you ran home laughing;
But it was worth the drenching.

Your feet, laved with dew,
Stood firm on the quickening grass.
There was a butterfly between us:
Red and gold its wings
And heavy with dew.
It could not move because of the weight of moisture.
And as your foot came nearer
And I saw that you would crush it,
I said: ‘Stay. It has only a few days
In the sun, and we have many.’
‘And if I spare it,’ you said, laughing,
‘What will you do for me, what will you pay?’

‘Why, anything you say.’

‘And will you kiss my foot?’

‘Both feet,’ I said; and did so happily.
For they were no less than the wings of butterflies.

All night our love
Stole sleep from dusty eyes.
What dreams were lost, I’ll never know.
It seemed the world’s last night had come
And there would never be a dawn.

Your touch soon swept the panting dark away—
Some suns are brighter by night than day!

Your eyes, glad and wondering,
Dwelt in mine,
And all that stood between us
Was a blade of grass
Shivering slightly
In the breath from our lips.

But grass will bend.

We turn and kiss,
And the world swings round,
The sky spins, the trees go hush
Hush, the mountain sings—
Though we must leave this place,
We’ve trapped forever
In the trembling air
The last sweet phantom kiss.

I know you’ll come when the cherries
Are ripe;
But it is still November
And I must wait
For the green fruit to blush
At your approach.
And meanwhile the tree is visited
By robber bands, masked mynas
And yellow birds with beaks like daggers,
Determined not to leave one cherry
Whole for lovers.
But still I wait, hoping one day
You’ll come to stain your lips
With cherry-juice, and climb my tree;
Bright goddess in dark green temple,
Thrusting your tongue at me.

Slender waisted, bright as a song,
Dark as the whistling-thrush at dawn,
Swift as the running days of November,
Lost like a dream too sweet to remember.

Remember the long ago when we lay together
In a pain of tenderness and counted
Our dreams: long summer afternoons
When the whistling-thrush released
A deep sweet secret on the trembling air;
Blackbird on the wing, bird of the forest shadows,
Black rose in the long ago summer,
This was your song:
It isn’t time that’s passing by,
It is you and I.

Are you listening to me, boy?
I am only your kitemaker,
My poems are flimsy things
Torn by the wind, caught in mango trees,
Gay sport for boys and dreamers.
My silent songs. But once I fashioned
A kite like a violin,
She sang most mournfully, like the wind
In tall deodars.

Are you listening? Remember
The Dragon Kite I made one summer?
No, you are too young. A great
Kite, with small mirrors to catch the sun
And eyes and a tongue, and gold
Trappings and a trailing silver tail.
A kite for the gods to ride!
And it rose most sweetly, but the wind
Came up from nowhere,

A wind in waiting for us,
My twine snapped and the wind took the kite,
Took it over the flat roofs
And the waving trees and the river
And the blue hills for ever.
No one knew where it fell. Boy, are you
Listening? All my kites
Are torn, but for you I’ll make a bright
New poem to fly.

Eight years have passed
Since I placed my cherry seed in the grass.
‘Must have a tree of my own,’ I said—
And watered it once and went to bed
And forgot; but cherries have a way of growing
Though no one’s caring very much or knowing,
And suddenly that summer, near the end of May,
I found a tree had come to stay.
It was very small, a five months’ child,
Lost in the tall grass running wild.
Goats ate the leaves, grasscutter’s scythe
Split it apart, and a monsoon blight
Shrivelled the slender stem . . . Even so,
Next spring I watched three new shoots grow,
The young tree struggle, upwards thrust
Its arms in a fresh fierce lust
For light and air and sun.

I could only wait, as one
Who watches, wondering, while Time and the rain
Made a miracle from green growing pain . . .
I went away next year—
Spent a season in Kashmir—
Came back thinner, rather poor,
But richer by a cherry tree at my door.
Six feet high, my own dark cherry,
And—I could scarcely believe it—a berry,
Ripened and jewelled in the sun,
Hung from a branch—just one!
And next year there were blossoms, small
Pink, fragile, quick to fall
At the merest breath, the sleepiest breeze . . .

I lay on the grass, at ease,
Looked up through leaves, at the blue
Blind sky, at the finches as they flew
And flitted through the dappled green,
While bees in an ecstasy drank
Of nectar from each bloom, and the sun sank
Swiftly, and the stars turned in the sky,
And moon-moths and singing crickets and I—
Yes, I!—praised night and stars and trees:
A small, tall cherry grown by me.