Notes From a Small Room by Ruskin Bond

Author:Ruskin Bond [Bond, Ruskin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184754421
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

A Postage Stamp

I was leafing through an old book, a childhood gift, when a postage stamp slipped out from the pages and on to my hand. Ceylon, 25 c, depicting the Temple of the Tooth, and with King George VI of England peering out at me from the top-right-hand corner. It must have been issued around 1940, at the commencement of World War II. My father had joined the RAF, but whenever he found time he immersed himself in his stamp collection.

How well I remember those stamps albums. There was a trunk full of them. He specialized in Empire stamps, and had some rare issues from Ceylon, India, Burma, Newfoundland, and the islands of the Pacific and the West Indies. He did have a valuable collection, and he said it would be mine some day. While I was with him in Delhi (I was nine at the time) I would help him with the sorting and checking against the catalogue, but he liked to do the mounting himself—very neatly, in specially prepared albums purchased from abroad. His Stanley Gibbons catalogue was like a Bible, constantly referred to for information, values, and help in completing sets. I was encouraged to collect too, and I had my own small album, most of it filled with stamps from Greece. I don’t know why I chose Greece—I was probably attracted by the Greek gods and heroes depicted on the stamps—and my father seemed to have an unending supply of Greek stamps which he did not want.

Sometimes he bought stamps, occasionally he sold a few, but the entire collection accompanied him to Calcutta when he was transferred from Delhi in 1943-44. I was placed in a Simla boarding-school. In his last letter to me, written in September of that year, he said that he was looking forward to doing ‘stamp work’ with me during the winter holidays. But I did not see him again. He died of hepatitis in the British Military hospital. His brother and old mother survived him, and I suppose they disposed of the stamp collection. This rather discouraged me from becoming a collector, but I’ll keep this old Ceylon stamp that fell out of a book. It may not have been his; it may not have been mine; but it belongs to that time, and opens the floodgates of memory.

Today, the 29th of July, was my father’s birthday (as it is also Siddharth’s), and I feel very close to him today, recalling his companionship, giving me all his time when he was free from his duties, introducing me to books, music, films. I have recorded all this elsewhere, but memories were revived, first by the discovery of the old postage stamp, and then by a phone call from Arghia Mukherjee, my friend in Kolkata, who kindly visited my father’s grave in the Bhowanipore cemetery—having taken the day off from teaching! He cycled from his home in Howrah to Bhowanipore, a half-hour ride across the Hooghly bridge, getting soaked in the process.

The

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