Book excerpt: Uncles, Aunts & Elephants by Ruskin Bond

A Little Friend

When I first arrived in London I knew no one. I was eighteen and on my own, looking for a room, looking for a job. I spent a week in a students’ hostel, a noisy place full of foreign students talking in every tongue except English. Then I saw an ad for a room to let, for just a pound a week. I was on the dole, getting just three pounds a week, so I took the room without even looking at it. 

It turned out to be a tiny attic at the top of the building. Nothing above me but a low ceiling and a slanting tiled roof. There was a bed, a small dressing table, and a gas fire in the corner of the room. You had to shove several pennies into a slot before you could light the fire. It was November, very cold, and I kept running out of pennies. The toilet was about two floors below me. Above the potty was a notice which said ‘Do not throw your tea leaves in here.’ As I did not have anything to cook on, I had no tea leaves to deposit in the loo. I supposed that the other tenants (whom I rarely saw) were given to flushing away their tea leaves. 

My landlady was Jewish, and I did not see much of her either, except when the rent was due. She was a Polish refugee, and I think she’d had a hard time in Europe during the War. It was seldom that she emerged. There was no bath in the building. I had to use the public baths some way down Belsize Road. I took my meals, the cheapest I could get, at a snack bar near the underground station. Some evenings I would bring home a loaf of bread and a tin of sardines; this was luxury.

Was I lonely? You can bet I was . . . terribly lonely. I had no friends in that great city. Even the city looked lonely, all grey and fogbound. Every day I visited the employment exchange, and after two weeks I landed a job as a ledger clerk in a large grocery store. The pay was five pounds a week. 

I was rich! For once I could have a proper lunch instead of the usual beans on toast. I bought ham and cheese and celebrated with sandwiches and a bottle of cheap sherry. Soon there were crumbs all over the floor of my room. My landlady wouldn’t like that. I was about to get up to sweep them away when there was a squeak and a little mouse ran across the floor with a bit of cheese that it had found. He darted across the room and disappeared behind the dressing table. 

I decided not to clear away the crumbs; let the mouse have them. ‘Waste not, want not,’ as my grandmother. 

I did not see the mouse again, but after I’d put the light out and gone to bed, I could hear him scurrying about the room, collecting titbits. Now and then he emitted a little squeak, possibly of satisfaction. 

‘Well, at least I did not have to celebrate alone,’ I said to myself, ‘a mouse for company is better than no company at all'.

I was off to work early next morning, and in my absence the landlady had my room cleaned. I came back to find a note on the dressing table which said: ‘Please do not scatter food on the floor.’ 

She was right, of course. My room-mate deserved better than a scattering of crumbs. So I provided him with an empty soap dish, which I placed near the dressing table, and I filled it with an assortment of biscuit crumbs. But for some reason he wouldn’t go near the soap dish. I stayed up quite late, waiting for him to appear, and when he did, he explored all corners of the room and even approached my bed, but stayed well away from the soap dish. Perhaps he didn’t like the colour, a bright pink. I’ve been told by a scientist that mice are colour-blind and wouldn’t be able to distinguish a pink soap dish from a blue one. But I think the scientist got it wrong. Quite often, they do. 

I couldn’t tell if my mouse was a male or a female, but for some indefinable reason I felt that he was a bachelor, like me. Surely a female mouse would be living with her family. This one was very much a loner. 

I threw the soap dish away, and the following evening, on my way home from work, I bought a pretty little saucer, and this I placed near his residence, with a piece of cheese in the middle. He came to it almost instantly, nibbled at the cheese, approved of it, and carried the rest of it back to his hole behind the dressing table. A fussy mouse! 

No soap dish for him. He had to have a saucer with a Chinese willow-pattern design. 

After some time we become protective of our own. Summer came to London early in May, and finding the room stuffier than usual, I opened the small window that looked out upon a sea of rooftops, all similar to ours and to each other. But I could not leave it open for long. Suddenly I heard an agitated squeak from below my bed, and the mouse scurried across the room to the safety of the dressing table. Looking up, I saw a large tabby cat framed in the open window, looking in with a speculative air. I think he had seen, or sensed, that there was a free lunch in the offing if he was patient enough. 

‘No free lunches for cats,’ I said. I closed the window. 

On weekends I roamed the city, occasionally visiting suburban cinemas where the seats were cheap; but on weekdays I’d stay at home in the evenings, working on my novel, my romance of India, and occasionally reading aloud from my manuscript. 

The mouse wasn’t a very good listener, he was never long in one place, but he was now trusting enough to take a piece of cheese or bread from my fingers, and if I spent too much time on my book, he would remind me of his presence by giving several little squeaks—scolding me for not paying attention to his needs. 

Alas, the time came when I had to consider parting from the ‘Lone Ranger’, as I had come to call my fellow lodger. A slight increase in salary, and a cheque from BBC radio for a couple of stories, meant I could move to bigger and better lodgings in a more congenial area of London. My landlady was sorry to see me go, for, in spite of my untidy ways, I had been regular with the rent. And the little mouse—would he too be sorry to see me go? He would have to forage further afield for his meals. And the next tenant might prefer cats to mice! 

This was my worry, not his. Unlike humans, mice don’t worry about the future—their own or the world’s. 

The problem was partly resolved by the arrival of another tenant—not a human tenant, but another mouse, presumably a female, because she was a little smaller and a little prettier than my room-mate. Two or three days before I was to leave, I came home to find them chasing each other about the room with a great deal of squeaking and acrobatic play. Was this romance? 

I felt a twinge of envy. My little friend had found a companion, and I was still without one. But when the time came for me to leave, I made sure they were well supplied with an assortment of crackers and rusks— enough to last well over a month, provided our landlady did not find them first. 

I packed my battered, old suitcase and left that small attic behind. As we journey through life, old friends and new friends are often left behind, never to be met with again. There are times when we are on our own, lonely, in need of a friendly presence. Just someone to be there when we return to that empty, joyless room. And at such times, even a little mouse, can make a big difference. 

Excerpted with permission from Puffin Books.

Book: Uncles, Aunts & Elephants 
Author: Ruskin Bond
Publisher: Puffin Books
Price: Rs.299/-