The Parrot Who Wouldn't Talk & Other Stories by Ruskin Bond

Author:Ruskin Bond [Bond, Ruskin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184750591
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

At Sea with Uncle Ken

With Uncle Ken, you had always to expect the unexpected. Even in the most normal circumstances, something unusual would happen to him and to those around him. He was a catalyst for confusion.

My mother should have known better than to ask him to accompany me to England, the year after I’d finished school. She felt that a boy of sixteen was a little too young to make the voyage on his own. I might get lost or lose my money or fall overboard or catch some dreadful disease. She should have realized that Uncle Ken, her brother (well spoilt by my mother and her sisters), was more likely to do all these things.

Anyway, he was put in charge of me and instructed to deliver me safely to my aunt in England, after which he could either stay there or return to India, whichever he preferred. Granny had paid for his ticket, so in effect he was getting a free holiday, which included a voyage on a posh P & O liner.

Our train journey to Bombay passed off without incident, although Uncle Ken did manage to misplace his spectacles, getting down at the station wearing someone else’s. This left him a little short-sighted, which might have accounted for his mistaking the stationmaster for a porter and instructing him to look after our luggage.

We had two days in Bombay before boarding the S.S. Strathnaver, and Uncle Ken vowed that we would enjoy ourselves. However, he was a little constrained by his budget and took me to a rather seedy hotel on Lamington Road, where we had to share a toilet with over twenty other people.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘We won’t spend much time in this dump.’ So he took me to Marine Drive and the Gateway of India, and then to an Irani restaurant in Colaba where we enjoyed a super dinner of curried prawns and scented rice. I don’t know if it was the curry, the prawns, or the scent, but Uncle Ken was up all night, running back and forth to that toilet, so that no one else had a chance to use it. Several dispirited travellers simply opened the windows and ejected into space, cursing Uncle Ken all the while.

He had recovered by morning and proposed a trip to the Elephanta Caves. After a breakfast of fish pickle, a Malabari chilli chutney and sweet Gujarati puris, we got into a launch, accompanied by several other tourists, and set off on our short cruise. The sea was rather choppy, and we hadn’t gone far before Uncle Ken decided to share his breakfast with the fishes of the sea. He was as green as a seaweed by the time we went ashore. Uncle Ken collapsed on the sand and refused to move, so we didn’t see much of the caves. I brought him some coconut water and he revived a bit and suggested we go on a fast until it was time to board our ship.

We were

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