Free The Best of Ruskin Bond by Ruskin Bond Page B

unwell in the picture. He appears to have been quite swarthy. No wonder he was so successful in dressing up ‘native’ style and passing himself off as a street-vendor. My mother tells me he even took my grandmother in on one occasion, and sold her a basketful of bad oranges. His character was in strong contrast to my grandmother’s rather forbidding personality and Victorian sense of propriety; but they made a good match.
    But here’s the picture, and I am taking it to show my mother who lies in the Lady Hardinge Hospital, awaiting the removal of her left breast.
    It is early August and the day is hot and sultry. It rained during the night, but now the sun is out and the sweat oozes through my shirt as I sit in the back of a stuffy little taxi taking me through the suburbs of Greater New Delhi.
    On either side of the road are the houses of well-to-do Punjabis, who came to Delhi as refugees in 1947 and now make up more than half the capital’s population. Industrious, flashy, go-ahead people. Thirty years ago, fields extended on either side of this road, as far as the eye could see. The Ridge, an outcrop of the Aravallis, was scrub jungle, in which the black buck roamed. Feroz Shah’s fourteenth century hunting lodge stood here in splendid isolation. It is still here, hidden by petrol pumps and lost within the sounds of buses, cars, trucks and scooter-rickshaws. The peacock has fled the forest, the black buck is extinct. Only the jackal remains. When, a thousand years from now, the last human has left this contaminated planet for some other star, the jackal and the crow will remain, to survive for years on all the refuse we leave behind.
    It is difficult to find the right entrance to the hospital, because for about a mile along the Panchkuin Road the pavement has been obliterated by tea-shops, furniture shops, and piles of accumulated junk. A public hydrant stands near the gate, and dirty water runs across the road.
    I find my mother in a small ward. It is a cool, dark room, and a ceiling fan whirrs pleasantly overhead. A nurse, a dark pretty girl from the South, is attending to my mother. She says, ‘In a minute,’ and proceeds to make an entry on a chart.
    My mother gives me a wan smile and beckons me to come nearer. Her cheeks are slightly flushed, due possibly to fever; otherwise she looks her normal self. I find it hard to believe that the operation she will have tomorrow will only give her, at the most, another year’s lease on life.
    I sit at the foot of her bed. This is my third visit, since I flew back from Jersey, using up all my savings in the process; and I will leave after the operation, not to fly away again, but to return to the hills which have always called me back.
    ‘How do you feel?’ I ask.
    ‘All right. They say they will operate in the morning. They’ve stopped my smoking.’
    ‘Can you drink? Your rum, I mean?’
    ‘No. Not until a few days after the operation.’
    She has a fair amount of grey in her hair, natural enough at fifty-four. Otherwise she hasn’t changed much; the same small chin and mouth, lively brown eyes. Her father’s face, not her mother’s.
    The nurse has left us. I produce the photograph and hand it to my mother.
    ‘The negative was lying with me all these years. I had it printed yesterday.’
    ‘I can’t see without my glasses.’
    The glasses are lying on the locker near her bed. I hand them to her. She puts them on and studies the photograph.
    ‘Your grandmother was always very fond of you.’
    ‘It was hard to tell. She wasn’t a soft woman.’
    ‘It was her money that got you to Jersey, when you finished school. It wasn’t much, just enough for the ticket.’
    ‘I didn’t know that.’
    ‘The only person who ever left you anything. I’m afraid I’ve nothing to leave you, either.’
    ‘You know very well that I’ve never cared a damn about money. My father taught me to write. That was inheritance enough.’
    ‘And what did I teach