The Best of Ruskin Bond (21 page)

O
ne summer evening, as storm-clouds gathered over the purple mountains, a glossy black jungle-crow settled on the window-sill, looked at me with his head cocked to one side, and said, ‘You look worried today, chum. Anything I can do for you?’

I had been lolling in an easy chair near the window, looking pretty gloomy I suppose, for all was not well with life in general, when this Runyonesque character arrived and startled me out of my solitude.

‘I beg your pardon?’ I said politely. One must always be polite with strangers; nowadays some of them carry guns or knives.

‘Just asked if anything was wrong,’ said the crow. ‘You’re not your usual cheerful self.’

‘No, I’m not. But there’s nothing I can do about it. And it’s got nothing to do with you.’

‘You never can tell,’ said my visitor.

‘All right. And if it wasn’t that I’m feverish and probably in delirium, I’d swear that you were talking to me.’

‘Don’t swear. Just listen. I’ve been around. I’ve even been human. Chang-tzu had me for a disciple. Epictetus had me for a friend. Saul of Tersus and I made tents together. I’ve knocked about with Kashyapa, father of demons. . . .’

‘And now you’re a crow. I suppose it’s progress of a kind.’

‘It’s all because I went into politics the last time around. The result was this feathered reincarnation. But seriously, there’s nothing wrong with being a crow. We are a much-maligned tribe. Do you realize that no other bird has our intelligence, our resilience. . . . We can make a living almost anywhere—and that’s more than what you’ve been able to do of late!’

He had me there. I’d been struggling for some time, trying to make ends meet; but I wasn’t getting anywhere.

‘I’m doing my best,’ I said.

‘That’s your trouble,’ said Crow, moving nearer along the window-sill and looking me between the eyes. ‘You do your best. You try too hard! That’s fatal, friend. The secret of success lies in maximum achievement with minimum effort.’

‘But that’s ridiculous,’ I protested. ‘How am I to be a successful author if I don’t
write
?’

‘You misunderstand me. I am not recommending the idle life. Have you ever seen an idle crow? I bet you haven’t. A hard-working crow? Most unlikely. And yet we’ve always got one eye open, and that eye’s on the likeliest opportunity . . . ‘And sidling up to me, he filched the remains of my sandwich from my hand. ‘See that? Got what I wanted, didn’t I? And with a minimum of effort. It’s simply a question of being in the right place at the right time.’

I was not amused.

‘That’s all very well if your ambition is to pinch someone else’s lunch,’ I said. ‘But how does it apply to successful authorship? Do I pinch other people’s ideas?’

‘Most people do but that’s not the point. What I’m really advocating is pragmatism. The trouble with most people, and that includes writers, is that they want too much in the first place. A feast instead of a bite from a sandwich. And feasts are harder to come by and cost much more. So that’s your first mistake—to be wanting too much, too soon.

‘And the second mistake is to be pursuing things. What I’m saying, old chap, applies not only to authorship but to almost everything under the sun. Success is what you are pursuing, isn’t it? Success is what most of us are pursuing.

‘Now, I’m a successful crow, you must admit that. But I don’t pursue. I wait, I watch, I collect! My motto is the same as that of any Boy Scout—”Be prepared”!

‘I’m not a bird of prey.
You
are not a beast of prey. So it is not by pursuit that we succeed. Because if we became hunters, then we would automatically bring into being victims. And a victim’s chief object is to get away! And so it is with success. Pursue it too avidly and it will elude you.’

‘So what am I supposed to do? Write books and forget about them?’

‘Exactly. I don’t mean you have to tuck them away. Send them where you will—send them to the four corners of the earth—but don’t fret over them, don’t expect too much. That’s the third mistake—fretting. Because when you keep fretting about something you’ve done, you can’t give your mind to anything else.’

‘You’re right,’ I had to admit. ‘I do worry a lot. I’m the worrying kind.’

‘All wrong. What have you to worry about?’

‘Lots of little things.’

‘Anything big?’

‘Not at the moment.’

‘But you expect something terrible to happen? You expect the worst?’

‘Isn’t it prudent to expect the worst?’

‘Not in crow philosophy. We expect the best!’ And hopping onto the side-table, he dipped his beak in my beermug and took a long, thoughtful sip. ‘Always expecting the best! And I usually get it. By the way, if you can afford beer every day, you can’t be too badly off.’

‘I don’t have it every day.’

‘Almost every day. I’ve been watching you.’

‘Why this sudden interest in my welfare? Why not someone more deserving?’

‘Because I’ve taken a fancy to you,’ he said, cocking his head to one side. ‘You don’t trouble crows.’

‘I’ve never noticed them much.’

‘A pity. If you’d taken the trouble to study crows, you’d have learnt something from them. Survival. Independence. Freedom from stress.’ He took another sip of beer. ‘No writer worth his salt can afford to ignore us. We’re nature’s greatest survivors!’

With a disdainful flap of his wings he took off and headed for the Woodstock school kitchens. I looked at the label on my bottle of beer. It seemed quite genuine. But you never know, these days.

T
here has always been a mild sort of controversy as to whether the true Ganga (in its upper reaches) is the Alaknanda or the Bhagirathi. Of course the two rivers meet at Deoprayag and then both are Ganga. But there are some who assert that geographically the Alaknanda is the true Ganga, while others say that tradition should be the criterion, and traditionally the Bhagirathi is the Ganga.

I put the question to my friend Dr Sudhakar Misra, from whom words of wisdom sometimes flow; and, true to form, he answered: ‘The Alaknanda is the Ganga, but the Bhagirathi is Gangaji.’

One sees what he means. The Bhagirathi is beautiful, almost caressingly so, and people have responded to it with love and respect, ever since Shiva released the waters of the goddess from his tangled locks and she sped plains-wards in the tracks of Prince Bhagirath’s chariot.

He held the river on his head,
And kept her wandering, where,
Dense as Himalayas woods were spread,
The tangles of his hair.

Revered by Hindus, and loved by all, the goddess Ganga weaves her spell over all who come to her. Moreover, she issues from the very heart of the Himalayas. Visiting Gangotri in 1820, the writer and traveller Baillie Fraser noted: ‘We are now in the centre of the Himalayas, the loftiest and perhaps the most rugged range of mountains in the world.’

Perhaps it is this realization that one is at the Very centre and heart of things, that gives one an almost primeval sense of belonging to these mountains and to this river valley in particular. For me, and for many who have been in the mountains, the Bhagirathi is the most beautiful of the four main river valleys of Garhwal. It will remain so provided we do not pollute its waters and strip it of its virgin forests.

The Bhagirathi seems to have everything—people of a gentle disposition, deep glens and forests, the ultra vision of an open valley graced with tiers of cultivation leading up by degrees to the peaks and glaciers at its head.

From some twenty miles above Tehri, as far as Bhatwari, a distance of about fifty-five miles along the valley, there are extensive forests of pine. It covers the mountains on both sides of the river and its affluents, filling the ravines and plateaus up to a height of about 5,000 feet. Above Bhatwari, forests of box, yew and cypress commence, and if we leave the valley and take the roads to Nachiketa Tal or Dodi Tal—little lakes at around 9,000 feet above sea level—we pass through dense forests of oak and chestnut. From Gangnani to Gangotri the deodar is the principal tree. The excelsa pine also extends eight miles up the valley above Gangotri, and birch is found in patches to within half a mile of the glacier.

On the right bank of the river, above Sukhi, the forest is nearly pure deodar, but on the left bank, with a northern aspect, there is a mixture of silver-fir, spruce and birch. The valley of the Jad-ganga is also full of deodar, and towards its head the valuable pencil-cedar is found. The only other area of Garhwal where the deodar is equally extensive is the Jaunsar-Bawar tract to the west.

It was the valuable timber of the deodar that attracted the adventurer Frederick ‘Pahari’ Wilson to the valley in the 1850’s. He leased the forests from the Raja of Tehri in 1859, and in a few years, he had made a fortune.

The old forest rest-houses at Dharasu, Bhatwari and Harsil were all built by Wilson as staging-posts, for the only roads were narrow tracks linking one village to another. Wilson married a local girl, Gulabi, from the village of Mukhba, and the portraits of Mr and Mrs Wilson (early examples of the photographer’s art) still hang in these sturdy little bungalows. At any rate, I found their pictures at Bhatwari. Harsil is now out of bounds to civilians, and I believe part of the old house was destroyed in a fire a few years ago.
^*

Amongst other things, Wilson introduced the apple into this area, and ‘Wilson apples’—large, red and juicy—are sold to travellers and pilgrims on their way to Gangotri. This fascinating man also acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of the wildlife of the region, and his articles, which appeared in
Indian
Sporting
Life
in the 1860’s, were later plundered by so-called wildlife experts for their own writings.

Bridge-building was another of Wilson’s ventures. These bridges were meant to facilitate travel to Harsil and the shrine at Gangotri. The most famous of them was a 350-foot suspension bridge over the Jad-ganga at Bhaironghat, over 1,200 feet above the young Bhagirathi where it thunders through a deep defile. This rippling contraption of a bridge was at first a source of terror to travellers, and only a few ventured across it. To reassure people, Wilson would often mount his horse and gallop to and fro across the bridge. It has long since collapsed but local people will tell you that the hoofbeats of Wilson’s horse can still be heard on full moon nights! The supports of the old bridge were complete tree-trunks, and they can still be seen to one side of the new motor-bridge put up by engineers of the Northern Railway.

Wilson’s life is fit subject for a romance; but even if one were never written, his legend would live on, as it has done for over a hundred years. There has never been any attempt to commemorate him, but people in the valley still speak of him in awe and admiration, as though he had lived only yesterday. Some men leave a trail of legend behind them, because they give their spirit to the place where they have lived, and remain forever a part of the rocks and mountain streams.

In the old days, only the staunchest of pilgrims visited the shrines of Gangotri and Jamnotri. The roads were rocky and dangerous, winding along in some places, ascending and descending the faces of deep precipices and ravines, at times leading along banks of loose earth where landslides had swept the original path away. There are still no large towns above Uttarkashi, and this absence of large centres of population may be one reason why the forests are better preserved than, say, those in the Alaknanda valley, or further downstream.

Gangotri is situated at just a little over 10,300 feet and on the right bank of the river is the Gangotri temple. It is a small neat building without too much ornamentation, built by Amar Singh Thapa, a Nepali general, early in the Nineteenth Century. It was renovated by the Maharaja of Jaipur in the 1920’s. The rock on which it stands is called Bhagirath Shila and is said to be the place where Prince Bhagirath did penance in order that Ganga be brought down from her abode of eternal snow.

Here the rocks are carved and polished by ice and water, so smooth that in places they look like rolls of silk. The fast-flowing waters of this mountain torrent look very different from the huge sluggish river that finally empties its waters into the Bay of Bengal 1,500 miles away.

The river emerges from beneath a great glacier, thickly studded with enormous loose rocks and earth. The glacier is about a mile in width and extends upwards for many miles. The chasm in the glacier, through which the stream rushes into the light of day, is named Gaumukh, the cow’s mouth, and is held in deepest reverence by Hindus. The regions of eternal frost in the vicinity were the scenes of many of their most sacred mysteries.

The Ganga enters the world no puny stream, but bursts from its icy womb a river thirty or forty yards in breadth. At Gauri Kund (below the Gangotri temple) it falls over a rock of considerable height, and continues tumbling over a succession of small cascades until it enters the Bhaironghati gorge.

A night spent beside the river, within sound of the fall, is an eerie experience. After some time it begins to sound, not like one fall but a hundred, and this sound permeates both one’s dreams and walking hours. Rising early to greet the dawn proved rather pointless at Gangotri, for the surrounding peaks did not let the sun in till after 9 a.m. Everyone rushes about to keep warm, exclaiming delightedly at what they call
gulabi
thand,
—literally,
rosy
cold.
Guaranteed to turn the cheeks a rosy pink! A charming expression, but I prefer a rosy sunburn—and remained beneath a heavy quilt until the sun came up to throw its golden shafts across the river.

This is mid-October, and after Diwali the shrine and the small township will close for the winter, the pandits retreating to the relative warmth of Mukhba. Soon snow will cover everything, and even the hardy purple-plumaged whistling thrushes, lovers of deep shade, will move further down the valley. And down below the forest-line, the Garhwali farmers go about harvesting their ripening paddy, as they have done for centuries; their terraced fields form patterns of yellow, green and gold above the deep green of the river.

Yes, the Bhagirathi is a green river. Although deep and swift, it does not lose its serenity. At no place does it look hurried or confused—unlike the turbulent Alaknanda, fretting and frothing as it goes crashing down its boulder-strewn bed. The Alaknanda gives one a feeling of being trapped, because the river itself is trapped . The Bhagirathi is free-flowing, easy. At all times and places it seems to find its true level.

Uttarkashi, though a large and growing town, is as yet uncrowded. The seediness of over-populated towns like Rishikesh and Dehradun is not yet evident here. One can take a leisurely walk through its long (and well-supplied) bazaar, without being jostled by crowds or knocked over by three-wheelers. Here, too, the river is always with you, and you must live in harmony with its sound, as it goes rushing and humming along its shingly bed.

Uttarkashi is not without its own religious and historical importance, although all traces of its ancient capital called Barahat appear to have vanished. There are four important temples here, and on the occasion of Makar Sankranti, early in January, a week long fair is held, when thousands from the surrounding areas throng the roads to the town. To the beating of drums and blowing of trumpets, the Gods and Goddesses are brought to the fair in gaily decorated palanquins. The surrounding villages wear a deserted look that day as everyone flocks to the temples and bathing-ghats and to the entertainment of the fair itself.

We have to move far downstream to reach another large centre of population, the town of Tehri, and this is a very different place from Uttarkashi. Tehri has all the characteristics of a small town in the plains—crowds, noise, traffic congestion, dust and refuse, scrufty dhabas—with this difference, that here it is all ephemeral, for Tehri is destined to be submerged by the waters of the Bhagirathi when the Tehri dam is finally completed.

The rulers of Garhwal were often changing their capitals, and when, after the Gurkha Wars (1811-15) the former capital of Shrinagar became part of British Garhwal, Raja Sundershan Shah established his new capital at Tehri. It is said that when he reached this spot, his horse refused to go any further. This was enough for the king, it seems; or so the story goes.

Perhaps Prince Bhagirath’s chariot will come to a halt here too, when the dam is built. The 246-metre high earthen dam, with forty-two square miles of reservoir capacity, will submerge the town and about thirty villages.

As we leave the town and cross the narrow bridge over the river, a mighty blast from above sends rocks hurtling down the defile, just to remind us that work is in progress.

Unlike the Raja’s horse, I have no wish to be stopped in my tracks at Tehri. There are livelier places upstream.