Looking for Rusty’s trees in Dehra

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Looking for Rusty’s trees in Dehra

Monday, 12 November 2018 | lokesh Ohri

Just imagine having to leave home and starting a life in the Bazaars of Dehradun as a teenager. Now imagine doing all of this in the 1950s. Well, author Ruskin Bond did all this and more in the once quaint valley of Dehradun. Ruskin writes fondly about the Dehra of the 1950s and 1960s, the sleepy town with tongas or horse carriages running besides gurgling canals, a town “fond of gossip, but tolerant of human foibles”.

Ruskin Bond or Rusty, the nickname he uses in most of his tales for himself as a child, left his family and his home in splendid Dalanwala when he was only seventeen and started living in the Indian part of the town, the Paltan Bazaar, a precinct white sahibs would rarely venture into. Ruskin explored the city and its bylanes with his friends. He would eat chaat in the Chaat Wali Gali and lived in the Bazaars, considered so filthy by the Europeans that most thought the place was uninhabitable. He would have a lot of fun and no doubt has many fond memories of Dehra. He openly admits that had it not been for his early years in Dehradun, he would never have become a writer.

The city gives us an opportunity to retrace some of Ruskin’s memories and while we are at it, we also try to make some of ours, starting our journey at Gandhi Park. Our main attraction is not the park but the buildings on the other side of the road near Kwality Chowk. Ruskin talks fondly about his days in Dehra when he visited bookshops and grew up with Indian friends Somi and Daljeet, and watched English movies at the nearby Odeon Cinema, where a hotel now stands. He gained access to the snooty Hollywood-only cinema hall by lending his father’s music record collection to Mr Khanna, the manager of the cinema hall, who let him in and played his music on the gramophone, during the interval. Odeon was grateful because the cinema hall now had a variety of songs to entertain the audience during power cuts, quite common in those times. As a reward, he was given a lifetime free entry-pass.

Astley Hall, the up-market shopping district of Dehradun, was where Ruskin eventually settled and commenced his life as an author. Ruskin found work in a parchun ki dukan or grocery store, owned by a lady whose former husband happened to be Ruskin’s stepfather. Ruskin called her Bibiji and helped her in buying supplies for the store, ferrying them on a rickshaw from Arhat Bazaar. It was thanks to this work that he learnt the names and authentic smells of most Indian pulses and spices. Bibiji’s shop was situated at the site of a jewellery showroom that stands in the main Astley Hall Complex. Ruskin stayed as a tenant on the first floor of this shop, which was Bibiji’s residence. It was in this tiny room that he did most of his writing by candlelight. His early life in Dehra inspired his first book, A Room on the Roof, which won him the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.

Across the road, where a bank is now situated, was the Ideal Book Depot, a bookstore where Ruskin found opportunities to spend his meagre earnings on books. To the left, facing the park is the Punjab National Bank that in Ruskin’s time was the Royal Cafe that had very little in terms of royalty attached to it. The town’s wastrels would congregate here and Ruskin would end up lending his hard earned money to many of them.

Astley Hall, once home to Frederick Pahadi Wilson, is now a sprawling shopping complex, horribly disfigured by hotels and jewellery stores, even though a portion still reminds one of early British architecture. Walking in a narrow lane and then turning left from Astley Hall will take you to Hotel White House. Ruskin writes that he would go for an occasional beer to the White House where he met an interesting character named Colonel Wilkie, a permanent guest at the hotel. The Colonel’s wife had left him because of his drinking. He, on the other hand, claimed that it was he who left her, saying that he did this because she would move his furniture every day.

The Colonel also claimed to have a lot of injuries and he used to go around telling that the cause of the injuries was not the wars he had fought, but the strain he faced while he rearranged the furniture moved by his wife. Ruskin himself came and lived in the White House, as a guest. He recalls going to Delhi to find some work and then returning to find accommodation in the White House, an art-deco masterpiece that still stands old, beautiful and no doubt, white!

After Ruskin’s father passed away in his early childhood, an incident that affected the young boy deeply, he moved from his school in Shimla to Dehradun and began living with his mother who had married Hari Singh, who owned a car repair business. Hari soon went bankrupt because he would take up a car for repair, fix it well and drive it around in the dead of night when the real owner would be sound asleep. Once his scam was caught, he ran out of business. Rusty and Hari never got along and soon he decided to leave home.

Having completed his studies, Ruskin went to England for some time, but Dehradun pulled him back, like it pulls many of us. At a few metres’ distance on the Old Survey Road is Nany’s Bakery. Besides the bakery is a bustling colony where his grandparents once lived in a large bungalow. Across the bakery, where a Mall now stands, was an orchard where Ruskin went to pluck ripe litchis and mangoes and befriended the chief guard. Once friends, he shared with the writer, stories of wrestling success in his youth.

That was a time when many a prestigious wrestling bout was fought in the Parade Ground. At this crossing once lived Ruskin’s grandparents and the writer himself. Ruskin has many stories to share of the canal that flowed right across into the East Canal Road. Ruskin says of his beloved childhood town, “Dehra, I may stop loving you, but I shall never stop loving the days that I loved you.”

In fact, Ruskin chose to settle in Mussoorie because he wanted to see his beloved Doon Valley without having to encounter its present urban chaos.   

(The writer is an anthropologist, author, traveler & activist who also runs a public walking group called Been There, Doon That?)

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