The Best of Ruskin Bond Part 19

Before long he was delving into my pockets and helping himself to whatever he could find. He was a very young squirrel, and his friends and relatives probably thought him headstrong and foolish for trusting a human.

In the spring, when the banyan tree was full of small red figs, birds of all kinds would flock into its branches, the red-bottomed bulbul, cheerful and greedy; gossiping rosy-pastors; and parrots and crows, squabbling with each other all the time. During the fig season, the banyan tree was the noisiest place on the road.

Halfway up the tree I had built a small platform on which I would often spend the afternoons when it wasn't too hot. I could read there, propping myself up against the bole of the tree with cushions taken from the drawing room. Treasure Island, Huck Finn, the Mowgli Stories, and the novels of Edgar Wallace, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Louisa May Alcott made up my bag of very mixed reading.

When I didn't want to read, I could look down through the banyan leaves at the world below, at Grandmother hanging up or taking down the washing, at the cook quarrelling with a fruit vendor or at Grandfather grumbling at the hardy Indian marigolds which insisted on springing up all over his very English garden. Usually nothing very exciting happened while I was in the banyan tree, but on one particular afternoon I had enough excitement to last me through the summer.

That was the time I saw a mongoose and a cobra fight to death in the garden, while I sat directly above them in the banyan tree.

It was an April afternoon. And the warm breezes of approaching summer had sent everyone, including Grandfather, indoors. I was feeling drowsy myself and was wondering if I should go to the pond behind the house for a swim, when I saw a huge black cobra gliding out of a clump of cactus and making for some cooler part of the garden. At the same time a mongoose (whom I had often seen) emerged from the bushes and went straight for the cobra.

In a clearing beneath the tree, in bright sunshine, they came face to face.

The cobra knew only too well that the grey mongoose, three feet long, was a superb fighter, clever and aggressive. But the cobra was a skilful and experienced fighter too. He could move swiftly and strike with the speed of light, and the sacs behind his long, sharp fangs were full of deadly venom.

It was to be a battle of champions.

Hissing defiance, his forked tongue darting in and out, the cobra raised three of his six feet off the ground, and spread his broad, spectacled hood. The mongoose bushed his tail. The long hair on his spine stood up (in the past, the very thickness of his hair had saved him from bites that would have been fatal to others).

Though the combatants were unaware of my presence in the banyan tree, they soon became aware of the arrival of two other spectators. One was a myna, and the other a jungle crow (not the wily urban crow). They had seen these preparations for battle, and had settled on the cactus to watch the outcome. Had they been content only to watch, all would have been well with both of them.

The cobra stood on the defensive, swaying slowly from side to side, trying to mesmerize the mongoose into marking a false move. But the mongoose knew the power of his opponent's gla.s.sy, unwinking eyes, and refused to meet them. Instead he fixed his gaze at a point just below the cobra's hood, and opened the attack.

Moving forward quickly until he was just within the cobra's reach, he made a feint to one side. Immediately the cobra struck. His great hood came down so swiftly that I thought nothing could save the mongoose. But the little fellow jumped neatly to one side, and darted in as swiftly as the cobra, biting the snake on the back and darting away again out of reach.

The moment the cobra struck, the crow and the myna hurled themselves at him, only to collide heavily in mid-air. Shrieking at each other, they returned to the cactus plant.

A few drops of blood glistened on the cobra's back.

The cobra struck again and missed. Again the mongoose sprang aside, jumped in and bit. Again the birds dived at the snake, b.u.mped into each other instead, and returned shrieking to the safety of the cactus.

The third round followed the same course as the first but with one dramatic difference. The crow and the myna, still determined to take part in the proceedings, dived at the cobra, but this time they missed each other as well as their mark. The myna flew on and reached its perch, but the crow tried to pull up in mid-air and turn back. In the second that it took him to do this, the cobra whipped his head back and struck with great force, his snout thudding against the crow's body.

I saw the bird flung nearly twenty feet across the garden, where, after fluttering about for a while, it lay still. The myna remained on the cactus plant, and when the snake and the mongoose returned to the fray, it very wisely refrained from interfering again!

The cobra was weakening, and the mongoose, walking fearlessly up to it, raised himself on his short legs, and with a lightning snap had the big snake by the snout. The cobra writhed and lashed about in a frightening manner, and even coiled itself about the mongoose, but all to no avail. The little fellow hung grimly on, until the snake had ceased to struggle. He then smelt along its quivering length, and gripping it round the hood, dragged it into the bushes.

The myna dropped cautiously to the ground, hopped about, peered into the bushes from a safe distance, and then, with a shrill cry of congratulation, flew away.

When I had also made a cautious descent from the tree and returned to the house, I told Grandfather of the fight I had seen. He was pleased that the mongoose had won. He had encouraged it to live in the garden, to keep away the snakes, and fed it regularly with sc.r.a.ps from the kitchen. He had never tried taming it, because a wild mongoose was more useful than a domesticated one.

From the banyan tree I often saw the mongoose patrolling the four corners of the garden, and once I saw him with an egg in his mouth and knew he had been in the poultry house; but he hadn't harmed the birds, and I knew Grandmother would forgive him for stealing as long as he kept the snakes away from the house.

The banyan tree was also the setting for what we were to call the Strange Case of the Grey Squirrel and the White Rat.

The white rat was Grandfather's-he had bought it from the bazaar for four annas-but I would often take it with me into the banyan tree, where it soon struck up a friendship with one of the squirrels. They would go off together on little excursions among the roots and branches of the old tree.

Then the squirrel started building a nest. At first she tried building it in my pockets, and when I went indoors and changed my clothes I would find straw and gra.s.s falling out. Then one day Grandmother's knitting was missing. We hunted for it everywhere but without success.

Next day I saw something glinting in the hole in the banyan tree and, going up to investigate, saw that it was the end of Grandmother's steel knitting-needle. On looking further, I discovered that the hole was crammed with knitting. And amongst the wool were three baby squirrels-all of them white!

Grandfather had never seen white squirrels before, and we gazed at them in wonder. We were puzzled for some time, but when I mentioned the white rat's frequent visits to the tree, Grandfather told me that the rat must be the father. Rats and squirrels were related to each other, he said, and so it was quite possible for them to have offspring-in this case, white squirrels!

From My Notebook.

To know one's limitations and to do good work within them: more is achieved that way than by overreaching oneself. It is no use trying to write a masterpiece every year if you are so made as to write only one in ten years! In between, there are other good things that can be written-smaller things, but satisfying in their own way.

Any day now, I shall have to shut up shop and join the ranks of salaried clerks or teachers. Any day now, I shall find that I no longer make a living as a freelance. Any day now. . . .

I've had this dread for the past five years, but somehow, just when the going gets really rough and my bank balance touches rock-bottom, something does in fact turn up (Micawber would have envied me), and I can go on writing, not always in the way I Want to-because, if cheques are to be received, deadlines and editorial preferences must be met-but pretty much as I want to.

Any day now. . . .

Cyril Connolly, in a BBC interview, said: 'A good writer rises above everything and it's an alibi to say: "I can't write, I haven't got a room of my own. . ." or "I can't write, I haven't got a private income. . ." or "I can't write, I'm a journalist", and so on. These are all alibis. But I have seen in my contemporaries a great many who could have been much better if it hadn't been for two or three things: social climbing, drink, and unhappy love affairs due to flaws in themselves which made their love affairs go on for too long or become too unhappy.'

Graham Greene has said that, for the novelist taking his first clean sheet of paper, there is a 'correct' moment of experience at which to begin. For the writer for children this moment is often a moment of arrival. . . . Authors are now aware of the need to catch the child's interest and not frighten him off. The dreary beginning is a thing of the past, and for an example of it we have to turn back to something like Children of the New Forest. But modern writers can put the reader off in other ways. It is easy for them to lose half their potential readers on the first page. Rosemary Sutcliffe, a beautiful writer for children, unfortunately begins The Hound of Ulster with a catalogue of unfamiliar proper names. Now there can be no doubt that the Bible is one of the world's most beautiful books, and we usually skip the parts which go: 'And Jokshan begat Sheba, and Sheba begat Dedan', etc. But children don't like skipping. If they come up against something like this, they will leave the book altogether.

Down near the stream* I found wood-sorrel-tiny yellow flowers set among bunches of heart-shaped leaflets which are a beautiful pale green. The leaves are sweet and sour, and Anil likes to eat them. They seem to do him no harm. Then why should they cause diarrhoea in cows?

'All flesh is gra.s.s, is not only metaphorically, but literally, true; for all those creatures we behold, are but the herbs of the field, digested into flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in ourselves.' (Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici) In a letter, P. L. Travers, (the author of Mary Poppins) says: 'I don't write for children. . . . Perhaps I write because a book wants to write itself in me . . . Then afterwards, if there are children and grown-ups who like it, I feel I am very lucky.

'To explain about writing, let me tell you what I saw one day, in the country . . .

'I was out very early on a summer morning and there suddenly at the edge of a clearing was a fox dancing, all by himself, up and down on his hind legs, bending like a rainbow, swinging his brush in the sun. There was no vixen near, the birds were not interested, n.o.body in the world cared. He was doing it for his own pleasure. Perhaps writers such as I are really foxes, dancing their own particular dance without any thought of a watching eye.'

This reminds me of my friend Pitambar, who was found one night dancing in the middle of the road.

'Why are you dancing in the road?' I asked.

'Because I am happy,' he said.

'And why are you so happy?'

He looked at me as if I were a moron.

'Because I am dancing on the road,' he said.

Thus Spoke Crow.

One 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 c.o.c.ked 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, c.o.c.king 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.

ON THE ROAD.

Travel Writings.