Writing for my life

By Ruskin Bond

MONEY talks — and it’s usually saying goodbye. Most of mine had gone in paying for my passage back to India, and when I arrived in my home town of Dehra Dun I had about Rs 800 to show for my three years abroad. It didn’t help to find that my step-father was now bankrupt, and that he and my mother were planning to start a new life in Delhi, free of the encumbrance of a non-functioning motor workshop and unmanageable income tax arrears. If they were hoping that I would return from England with my fortune made, they must have been disappointed. That £ 50 advance fromAndre Deutsch had melted away, and the book had yet to be published. I’d have to write and sell some short stories and articles, and soon, if I was to survive in the India of 1955.

Within a couple of months of my return, my mother and step-father, school-going brother and half-brothers, handicapped sister, along with my mother’s dogs (about six of them) had left for Delhi. I did not accompany them. I had not returned to India in order to live in Delhi. And while I have nothing against dogs, I find it difficult to share a small flat with a number of yapping Poms, Pekes and Dachshunds.

I wanted to be near old friends; I wanted new friends. I wanted the familiar lanes of Dehra Dun, its trees and gardens. I wanted the proximity of the hills and rivers. And above all, I wanted the freedom of being my very own person.

Bibiji, my stepfather’s first wife, offered me a room and balcony above her small provision store in Astley Hall. I got on well with Bibiji, a well-built woman from Amritsar who flung sacks of flour around as though they were shuttlecocks. I could see that she had probably been a little too much for my diminutive step-father. She ran the small store by herself, paying the rent out of her meagre profits. She was understandably bitter about my step-father’s second marriage, and did not have a good word for him or for my mother. Having me stay on the premises and pay her a monthly rent gave her a victory of sorts.

Apart from the room, Bibiji gave me breakfast — mooli or allu pranthas with my favourite shalgam (turnip) pickle. I was never any good as a cook and I took my lunch and dinner in assorted small restaurants and dhabas, ruining my digestion in the process. But these eating places were quite cheap, and for Rs 5 I could have a decent non-vegetarian meal. And if I stuck to the basics — dal and rice and a vegetable curry — I could eat in Rs 3.

Bibiji lived in the back of her shop and seldom came up to my room. As she hadn’t been in a position to pay the electricity bill for a couple of years, the connection had been cut and I was without electric light. Not that I particularly cared. I lit candles for a few days; but finding that I could not write or read by candlelight without getting a headache, I bought a kerosene lantern and set it up on my desk.

My ‘desk’ was really a large dining-table on which I spread out my notebooks, papers and typewriter. A couple of smooth-rounded stones from the Rispana river-bed acted as paperweights. There was a framed photograph of my father — it’s still on my desk today, 40 years on — and one of Vu-Phuong, the Vietnamese girl to whom I had proposed marriage when I was in London, and from whom I hoped to hear some day. As the months went by and I received no news from her (or of her), the photo moved from its frame into my album and remained there as a memory of a distant dream.

It would have been nice to see Raj again, the Punjabi girl with whom I used to play badminton the year before I left for England. A fine, athletic girl, she used to beat me 15-0, 15-1 (the last point in my favour being an act of mercy on her part), and I used to put up with these walkovers just so that I could be with her. The things we do for love! But now her father, like my step-father, had lost his money in ill-conceived business ventures and had left Dehra Dun with his family.

In the 1950s Dehra Dun was going through a slump; it would recover only a decade or so later.

Reading and writing by lamplight must have aggravated my already weak eyesight, because I had to start wearing glasses by the time my 21st birthday came around. They did nothing to improve my appearance; but passers-by who had previously been but a blur from my balcony lookout were now more clearly defined, and I wasted a good deal of time gazing at college girls walking or cycling past Astley Hall.

I’d be lying if I said I burnt the midnight oil in my strivings to make a living as a freelance writer. If I could manage 1,000 words in a day, I was satisfied.And this could be accomplished in a couple of hours. Afterwards I’d drop in at the Indiana for a cup of coffee. Evenings I’d walk to the clock tower for tikkis or kababs with my friends. The lamp was lit much later, and then I’d jot down stray thoughts and ideas, or write a letter.

Then, as now, I wrote in long hand, and as I wasn’t a bad typist, I typed up my own fair copy, making minor revisions as I went along. My more ambitious stories went to The Illustrated Weekly of India, then edited by C.R. Mandy, an amiable Irishman who had made the magazine a happy blend of the literary and the artistic, along with some popular entertainment highlighted by a page devoted to pictures of newly-weds; so serious and apprehensive did the young brides and bridegrooms look, that this page was considered even funnier than the jokes column. In 1956, The Weekly serialised my first novel, The Room on the Roof followed a year later by its sequel, Vagrants in the Valley. The Room had been written in England, out of my homesickness and longing for India. Vagrants was written in Dehra Dun after my return, and lacked some of the youthful optimism of my first book; but it had more of my sensuality. And Dehra Dun was a sensual sort of place, the summers steamy and sub-tropical. One of my few regrets in life is that I have never really lived in a steamy, jungle sort of place such as the Malaysian archipelago as described by Conrad in An Outcast of the Islands or Tomlinson in The Sea and the Jungle. No doubt it’s the literary landscape of such regions that appeals to me. Living in those remote outposts may not have been much fun.

The Weekly paid about a Rs 100 for a story. A few of these stories — those that ran to about 15 minutes of reading time — were also submitted to the BBC in London, where they were broadcast in the home service short story slot. Others went to the Elizabethan an excellent magazine for older children.

I wrote short articles too — on a variety of subjects, ranging from ghosts to buffaloes — and some of these were published in The Sunday Statesman, The Hindu and The Tribune. I was also quite adept at finding new, offbeat markets for my work. Sainik Samachar (the Armed Forces weekly) provided a home for some of my stories. I never met anyone who read Sainik Samachar, and I doubt if the Defence Ministry even knew that they were its publishers; but they paid me Rs 25 for thousand words, and that was good enough for me. About five years later, when I was living in Delhi, I located its office in a dingy corner of a government building, and met its editor, an elderly defeated individual who put the magazine together entirely on his own. Mountains of back issues climbed towards the ceiling. The editor confessed that no one read the paper, but that it gave him a salary and in a year’s time he would be eligible for a pension. He died before he could start enjoying the pension, and the magazine seemed to go into limbo.

Then there was The Leader, a newspaper published from Allahabad. It did not want fiction or literary pieces, but it was willing to publish articles on the entertainment industry. So I sent them a regular "Letter from Hollywood". This was easy. I was still subscribing to my favourite film magazine, Picturegoer, published from London (and now, alas, no more) and all I had to do was cull some of the information about exciting new stars and their films, and string this together into a fresh and readable piece. It was used fortnightly and brought me Rs 30. This was Grub Street with a vengeance, but I did not remain a Hollywood correspondent for long. My London publisher, Andre Deutsch, informed me that he had sold the German rights in my first novel, The Room on the Roof. It turned out to be a tidy sum, and enabled me to write a short novel and a few carefully crafted stories. Some of them are still around today.

Extracted from The Lamp is Lit