Rusty Comes Home

Ruskin Bond

Description

Rusty Comes Home chronicles Rusty''s exploits after his return from London, as he explores Delhi, Dehra and the small, dusty town of Shahganj before settling down in Mussoorie, making his living as a writer, revelling in his beloved hills. This collection contains some captivating stories about Rusty''s friends and fleeting acquaintances, about human nature and the supernatural. He meets a motley bunch of people including Suresh, a disabled child with whom Rusty strikes up a close bond, Uncle Bill, who makes it his habit to poison people with arsenic, and the incredible Jimmy, a jinn who can extend his arms at will to infinite lengths.Full of charming and idiosyncratic characters, these stories of love, loss and adventure will appeal to readers of all ages.

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd
• Date de parution: 25 août 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184750607
• Langue: English

Extrait

Ruskin Bond

Rusty Comes Home
Illustrations by Archana Sreenivasan
PUFFIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
By the Same Author
All You Need Is Paper
Summertime in Old New Delhi
Bhabiji s House
The Crooked Tree
The Haunted Bicycle
The Story of Madhu
Most Beautiful
The Night Train at Deoli
He Said It with Arsenic
Binya Passes By
The Good Old Days
The Trouble with Jinns
Listen to the Wind
The Last Time I Saw Delhi
From Small Beginnings
Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright
When You Can t Climb Trees Any More
As Time Goes By
Upon an Old Wall Dreaming
Author s Note
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PUFFIN BOOKS
RUSTY COMES HOME
Ruskin Bond s first novel, The Room on the Roof , written when he was seventeen, received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written a number of novellas (including Vagrants in the Valley, A Flight of Pigeons and Mr Oliver s Diary ) essays, poems and children s books, many of which have been published in Puffin Books. He has also written over 500 short stories and articles that have appeared in magazines and anthologies. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993, the Padma Shri in 1999 and the Padma Bhushan in 2014.
Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, and grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun, New Delhi and Simla. As a young man, he spent four years in the Channel Islands and London. He returned to India in 1955. He now lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his adopted family.
Also in Puffin by Ruskin Bond
Puffin Classics: The Room on the Roof
The Room of Many Colours: Ruskin Bond s Treasury of Stories for Children
Panther s Moon and Other Stories
The Hidden Pool
The Parrot Who Wouldn t Talk and Other Stories
Mr Oliver s Diary
Escape from Java and Other Tales of Danger
Crazy Times with Uncle Ken
Rusty the Boy from the Hills
Rusty Runs Away
Rusty and the Leopard
Rusty Goes to London
Rusty Comes Home
The Puffin Book of Classic School Stories
The Puffin Good Reading Guide for Children
The Kashmiri Storyteller
Hip-Hop Nature Boy and Other Poems
The Adventures of Rusty: Collected Stories
The Cherry Tree
Getting Granny s Glasses
The Eyes of the Eagle
Thick as Thieves: Tales of Friendship
Uncles, Aunts and Elephants: Tales from Your Favourite Storyteller
All You Need Is Paper
AS I WRITE this, a bright yellow butterfly flits in through the open window and settles on my writing pad. I pause for a moment, wait for the butterfly to make its way across the page and on to a slim copy of Tagore s Crescent Moon which I was reading again last night. I have entered a period of my life when I enjoy returning to old favourites, old classics. Just as there are exciting new authors being brought to our attention every day, so there are exciting old authors who are yet to be discovered. Life is too short to take in all of them. It s the beauty of language that draws me back, time and again, to the heart-stopping prose of Conrad in Heart of Darkness and Youth ; the lyrical intensity of Emily Br nte in Wuthering Heights ; the wonderful abandon of Sterne; the precision of Wilde; the broad humour of Dickens and Wells and the rolling, orchestrated prose of T.E. Lawrence in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom .
But to return to the butterfly. It takes me back to the little flat in Dehra, where my adventure of being a writer really got under way.
I had grown used to living on my own in small rooms furnished with other people s spare beds, tables and chairs. I had grown used to the print of Constable s Blue Boy on the wall, even though I had never cared for the look of that boy. But those London bedsitters had been di erent. Whether in Hampstead, Belsize Park, Swiss Cottage or Tooting, they had been uniformly lonely. One seldom encountered any other lodgers, except when they came to complain that my radio was too loud; and the landlady was seen only when the rent fell due. If you wanted company, you went out into the night. If you wanted a meal, you walked down the street to the nearest restaurant or snack bar. If you wanted to kill time, you sat in a cinema. If you wanted a bath, you went round to the nearest public bathing rooms where, for 2s.6d., you were given a small cake of soap, a clean towel, and a tub of piping hot water. The tub took me back to my childhood days with my father in Jamnagar, where I would be soaped and scrubbed by a fond ayah; but there was no fond ayah in London. And rooms with attached baths were rare-and expensive . . .
In contrast, my room in Astley Hall was the very opposite of lonely. There was the front balcony, from which I could watch the activity along the main road and the shops immediately below me. I could also look into the heart of a large peepal tree, which provided shelter to various birds, squirrels and other small creatures. There were flats on either side of mine, served by a common stairway-and blocked, at night, by a sleeping cow, over whom one had to climb, for it would move for no one. And there were quarters at the back, occupied by servants families or low-income tenants.
I suppose my most colourful neighbour was Mrs Singh, an attractive woman in her thirties, who smoked a hookah. She came from a village near Mainpuri. Her husband was a sub-inspector in the police. They had one son, Sumit, a lollipop-sucking brat without any charm. Mrs Singh often regaled me with tales of the supernatural from her village, and I did not hesitate to work some of them into my own stories.
Mrs Singh once told me of the night she had seen the ghost of her husband s first wife. The ghost had lifted Sumit, then a few months old, out of his cradle, rocked the baby in her arms for a little while, and announced that she was glad the child was a boy-a sentiment not shared by those who knew the eleven-year-old.
Mrs Singh taught me several mantras, which I was to recite whenever I felt threatened by ghosts or malignant spirits. If I was working at my desk, and saw Sumit approaching, I would recite one of these mantras under my breath. They may have worked on ghosts and demons, but had no e ect on Sumit.
None of my friends were in Dehra at this point. Sitaram had moved to Simla, and earned his living as a waiter in a hotel there. Somi s family had moved to Calcutta, and Ranbir s to Bombay. Dehra, then, was not a place for young men in search of a career. As soon as they finished school or college, they usually took wing. The town was a sleepy hollow, a great place in which to be educated, but a poor place to gain employment.
But there were others to take their place-teenagers struggling to do their Matric or Intermediate, or young men at college, aspiring for their Arts or Science degrees. College was a bit of a dead end. But those who had their schooling in Dehra, and then moved on, usually did well for themselves.
Take just two from Dilaram Bazaar. Gurbachan was an average student, but after doing his Intermediate he went to stay with an uncle in Hong Kong. Ten years later, he was a superintendent in the Income Tax Department. And then there was Narinder, always having to take tuitions to scrape through his exams. But he spoke English quite well, and he had a flair for business. Today, he owns the largest wholesale wine business in the UK. And as he doesn t drink himself, it s profit all the way.
These boys, and others like them, came from middle-class families. It was impossible, then, to foresee what life held in store for them. And it wasn t always happy endings. Sudheer, my friend from earlier days, went on to become the assistant manager of a tea estate in Jalpaiguri, and was killed by the tea-garden labourers. Kishen, as a boy, was not the stu that heroes are made of but at twenty-seven he died while trying to save a child from drowning.
My own future was a little easier to predict. In a sense, I had already arrived. At twenty-four I was a published author, although not many people had heard of me! And although I wasn t making much money then, and probably never would, it was the general consensus among my friends that I was an impractical sort of fellow and that I would be wise to stick to the only thing that I could do fairly well-putting pen to paper.
I couldn t drive a car. I fell o bicycles. I couldn t repair an electrical fault. My e orts to buy vegetables in the mandi were the cause of great merriment. And my attempts at making a curry sent everyone into paroxysms of laughter. It s true that I added a tablespoon of sugar to the aalu-gobi that I attempted to cook. I thought it improved the flavour. Gujaratis would have approved. But it had no takers in Dehra apart from myself.
On the plus side, I could type draft job applications for all and sundry, help lovesick students write passionate letters to girls, make my own bed (something I d learnt at boarding school), walk great distances, and pay for the chaat and tikkis we consumed near the clock tower. I held the tikki -eating record, having on one occasion put away no less than thirty of these delicious potato patties. Naturally, acute indigestion followed, and it was months before I could face another tikki .
Here I must record my first and last foray into the world of commerce.
On my landlady Bibiji s insistence that I could make more money from selling vegetables than from selling stories, I thought-why not do just that, sell vegetables? Bibiji said I could sell the vegetables outside her shop, provided I gave her a ten per cent commission. As this was the same commission that a literary agent took, it seemed fair enough.
It only remained for me to get up at five in the morning and march o to the sabzi mandi , there to spend a hard-earned two hundred rupees in stocking up with cauliflowers, carrots and other cold-weather vegetables.
With some help from Mrs Singh s son, Sumit, these were neatly displayed outside Bibiji s shop, and on that first day we even had a couple of customers. But housewives do no