The Cherry Tree

Before anything else, settle what kind of writing this is, because a lot of answers depend on it. This chapter is a short story written in prose. It is not a poem, not a play and not a biography. It runs in ordinary paragraphs, it has a beginning, a middle and an end, and it follows a made-up boy through a stretch of his childhood rather than setting out the life of a real person.

The writer is Ruskin Bond, whose name is printed at the close of the story. That is the spelling to use in any answer: Ruskin Bond, two words, no extra initials. Bond is one of the best known writers in English for young readers in India, and a great deal of his work is set in the hill country of the lower Himalayas, which is exactly where this story takes place.

The story is told by a third-person narrator — an outside voice that says he and him, never I. This is worth holding on to, because it is easy to mix up the narrator with Rakesh. Rakesh is the boy the story is about; the narrator is the voice telling us about him. Some of the sharpest lines in the story belong to the narrator, not to any character. When we are told that the tree had no intention of dying, that is the narrator being lightly funny, not grandfather speaking. When grandfather is described as being older than some of the oak trees, again that is the narrator's joke, not something grandfather says about himself. Keep the two apart and your answers become much more accurate.

The setting is doing real work here, so do not skip past it. Rakesh lives with his grandfather in a small cottage on the outskirts of the hill town of Mussoorie, right at the point where the town stops and the forest begins. The narrator tells us plainly that this is hard country for growing things: stony soil, and dry cold winds that stunt most plants, so fruit trees are rare here. Only the better sheltered slopes carry oak and deodar forest. Rakesh's own parents live fifty miles away in a small village, farming maize, rice and barley on the narrow terraced fields cut into the mountain's lower slopes.

Notice what that description sets up. If fruit trees grew easily here, a boy planting a cherry seed would be an ordinary thing and there would be no story. Because the land resists, everything the tree later achieves counts for more. The cherries Rakesh is eating at the start have themselves travelled all the way from the Kashmir Valley — they are not local. So the story begins with a fruit that does not belong to this hillside, and ends with that fruit growing on it.

Finally, note the time scale. This is not a story of one afternoon. It opens when Rakesh is six and carries on past his ninth birthday, and it measures that stretch in seasons rather than dates — winter winds, the return of spring, the monsoon, an early snowfall, February. In the book the story is printed in two halves with a discussion break between them, and the break falls neatly at the point where the young tree has just been stripped by a goat and its future is genuinely in doubt.

The story opens with a very small event. Rakesh, aged six, is walking home from school through the Mussoorie bazaar, eating cherries. The narrator describes them carefully: a little sweet, a little sour, small and bright red, and brought all the way from the Kashmir Valley. He has paid fifty paise for the bunch. The walk takes him about half an hour, and by the time he reaches the cottage only three cherries are left — which tells you, without the narrator saying so, exactly how a hungry six-year-old walks home.

He offers one to his grandfather, who takes a single cherry; Rakesh promptly eats the other two. Then comes the detail that starts everything. He keeps the last seed in his mouth for a while, turning it over and over on his tongue until every bit of tang has gone, and then lays it on his palm and studies it. That is a child holding on to the last bit of a treat, and it is also, without him knowing it, a child paying attention to a seed.

The conversation that follows is the hinge of the whole chapter. Rakesh asks whether cherry seeds are lucky. Grandfather agrees at once that they are. Rakesh, delighted, says he will keep it. And grandfather answers with the line the rest of the story exists to prove: "Nothing is lucky if you put it away" — luck, he says, has to be put to some use. When Rakesh asks what anyone can possibly do with a seed, grandfather gives the shortest instruction in the story: "Plant it."

Read that exchange slowly, because it is the story's idea in miniature. Grandfather does not argue that luck is nonsense. He does not lecture the boy about superstition. He accepts the idea of a lucky seed and then quietly redefines what luck is. A charm hidden in a pocket does nothing at all. The same object, put into the ground and given a few years, becomes a tree that feeds birds and shades an old man. Luck, in grandfather's version, is not something that happens to you; it is something you do something with. That single sentence is the reason this story belongs in a unit about the environment rather than in a unit about magic.

What happens next is quietly funny and very true to life. Rakesh, full of purpose, finds a space and starts digging up a flowerbed — and grandfather stops him, because he has sown mustard in that bed. He redirects the boy to a shady corner where the seed will not be disturbed. This is a small moment, but it shows grandfather's practical knowledge: he knows what is already growing where, and he knows a young plant needs a spot where nothing will trample it. Good advice is not only about what to do; it is about where.

In that corner the earth is soft and yielding, so no digging is needed at all. He pushes the seed in with his thumb and it disappears under the surface. The whole act of planting takes a few seconds.

And then the line that stops this from being a moral tale about a devoted little gardener: Rakesh has his lunch, runs off to play cricket with his friends, and forgets all about the cherry seed. Bond refuses to make him a small saint. He is six. He does the right thing in about ten seconds and then goes to play. That honesty is also good storytelling, because the forgetting is what makes the discovery later feel like a surprise rather than a scheduled reward.

Between the planting and the first shoot, the story does something lovely: it lets a whole winter pass, and it uses that winter to show us the household. A cold wind comes down off the snows, whistling through the deodars, and the garden goes dry and bare. In the evenings the two of them sit over a charcoal fire while grandfather tells stories — of people who turned into animals, of ghosts living in trees, of beans that jumped and stones that wept. In return, Rakesh reads him the newspaper, because grandfather's eyesight is rather weak. Rakesh finds the newspaper very dull, especially after the stories, but grandfather wants all the news.

That exchange is worth a whole paragraph in an answer about their relationship. It is not a one-way arrangement in which an old man instructs a boy. Each gives the other something the other cannot manage alone: grandfather supplies imagination, Rakesh supplies eyes. Neither of them makes a speech about it.

Spring arrives, and notice how the story announces it — not by a date, but by wild duck flying north again to Siberia. Early in the morning, when Rakesh gets up to chop wood and light a fire, he sees the V-shaped formation streaming northward and hears the birds' calls carrying clearly through the thin mountain air. All through this story, time is told by nature.

Then the discovery. One morning in the garden Rakesh bends to pick up what he takes for a small twig, and is startled to find that it is firmly rooted in the ground. After a moment's staring he runs to fetch grandfather, calling him Dada and shouting that the cherry tree has come up. Grandfather's reply is the best joke in this part of the story: he asks what cherry tree, because he has forgotten about it too. Both of them had let it go.

The tiny tree is about four inches high. Rakesh goes down on his haunches; grandfather bends almost double to peer at it. Grandfather says it should be watered now and then — and Rakesh immediately runs indoors and comes back with a whole bucket, which produces grandfather's warning not to drown it. Rakesh gives it a sprinkling instead and then circles it with pebbles. Asked what the pebbles are for, he answers "For privacy". It is a child's logic and it is completely revealing: he is already treating the tree as somebody rather than something, a small living creature entitled to be left alone.

Next comes an observation that anyone who has ever grown anything will recognise. Rakesh looks at the tree every single morning, and it never seems to be growing very fast. So he stops looking at it properly and only glances at it quickly, out of the corner of his eye. After a week or two, when he finally allows himself a proper look, it has grown at least an inch. Growth is invisible while you watch it. That is a fact about plants and, in this story, about boys too.

The monsoon comes early that year. Rakesh plods to and from school in a raincoat and chappals. Ferns push out of tree trunks, odd-looking lilies appear in the long grass, the trees drip even on days when it is not raining, and mist comes curling up the valley. In all this wet the cherry tree grows quickly.

And then the first real blow. When the tree is about two feet high, a goat gets into the garden and eats all its leaves, leaving only the main stem and two thin branches. Rakesh is upset. Grandfather's response is simple and steadying: never mind, it will grow again, "cherry trees are tough". Hold on to that phrase — the rest of the story is spent testing it.

The second half of the story opens with the tree recovering. Towards the end of the rainy season new leaves appear. And then the worst thing that happens to it in the whole story happens by pure carelessness.

A woman comes scrambling down the hillside to cut grass, her scythe swishing through the heavy monsoon growth. The narrator's wording is exact and worth quoting: "She did not try to avoid the tree". A single sweep of the blade leaves it in two pieces. She is not cruel and she has nothing against the tree; she simply does not bother to look. That is a quiet, serious point in a story about the environment — most damage to growing things is not done out of hatred, it is done by people not paying attention.

Grandfather goes after her and scolds her, but the narrator adds flatly that the damage could not be repaired. Rakesh says that maybe it will die now. Grandfather, honest as always, says only maybe. He does not offer false comfort. And then the narrator delivers the line that turns the story: the cherry tree had no intention of dying. Bond gives the tree a will of its own for one sentence, and it is enough.

By the time summer comes round again the tree has put out several new shoots covered in tender green leaves. And in the same breath we are told that Rakesh has grown too. He is eight, sturdy, with curly black hair and very dark eyes that grandfather calls blackberry eyes. This pairing is deliberate and it happens again and again: whenever the story measures the tree, it measures the boy.

That monsoon Rakesh goes back to the village to help his parents with the planting, ploughing and sowing. This is an important detail for understanding him. He is not a town child playing at gardening; he comes from a farming family and does real field work. He returns at the end of the rains thinner but stronger, to find the tree has grown another foot and now reaches his chest.

Then a beautiful small line: even when it is raining, Rakesh sometimes waters the tree anyway. The narrator explains why — he wants it to know that he is there. There is no practical reason to water a tree in the rain. He is keeping it company.

The tree now begins to attract visitors, and how Rakesh treats them tells you what kind of person he is becoming. First a bright green praying-mantis perches on a branch and peers at him with bulging eyes; Rakesh lets it stay, and the narrator calls it the cherry tree's first visitor. It is doing no harm, so it is welcome. The next visitor is a hairy caterpillar, which sets about eating the leaves. Rakesh takes it off the tree at once — but he does not kill it. He drops it on a heap of dry leaves and tells it, "Come back when you're a butterfly". He protects his tree without taking a life, and he already knows that the pest and the butterfly are the same creature at different stages.

Winter comes early that year. The cherry tree is bent low under the weight of snow, and field-mice move into the roof of the cottage for shelter — a small detail that tells you how hard the cold is outside. The road from the valley is blocked, so for several days no newspaper arrives, and this makes grandfather quite grumpy; the narrator adds, with a straight face, that his stories began to have unhappy endings. It is a genuinely funny line, and it also quietly reminds us that the old man's mood leaks into what he creates.

In February it is Rakesh's birthday. He turns nine, and the story tells us the tree is four and almost as tall as he is. Then, on a morning when the sun comes out, grandfather steps out into the garden so that a little warmth can "get into my bones", as he puts it. He halts in front of the cherry tree, looks at it hard for a few moments, and then shouts for Rakesh to come quickly, before it falls. What he has spotted, at the end of a branch, is a single pale pink blossom — and the two of them stand and stare at it as though a miracle has been performed in the garden.

From the first blossom onwards the story stops being about survival and becomes about abundance. The following year there are more blossoms. And then, suddenly, the tree is taller than Rakesh — even though, as the narrator points out, it is less than half his age. Soon after that it is taller than grandfather, who the narrator says was older than some of the oak trees. In two sentences Bond lines up three different life spans in one small garden: a growing boy, a young tree less than half his age, and an old man measured against oaks. Nothing is explained; the comparison does all the work.

Rakesh has grown too. By now he is as good as most boys at running, jumping and climbing trees, and he has turned into a keen reader — yet he still likes listening to grandfather's tales. That last detail matters. He is growing up without growing away.

The tree is now part of the life around it. Bees arrive to feed on the nectar. Tiny birds peck at the flowers and knock them off the branches. Yet the tree goes on blossoming all through the spring, and the narrator sums it up in four quiet words: there were always more blossoms than birds. That is the story's whole attitude to nature in one line — a healthy living thing produces more than is taken from it, and there is no need to panic about sharing.

That summer the first small cherries appear. Rakesh tastes one and spits it out: "It's too sour". Grandfather's answer is completely in character — they will be better next year. Even the fruit, the thing the whole story has been heading towards, does not arrive perfect on the first attempt. Patience is asked for one more time.

The birds do not mind at all. The bigger ones especially — bulbuls and scarlet minivets — flit through the foliage, feasting on the cherries. The seed Rakesh pressed into the soil with his thumb is now feeding other creatures. It has stopped being his private project and become part of the hillside.

Then comes the ending, and it is worth walking through slowly, because this is where everything the story has been building finally comes together. On an afternoon so warm and sunny that even the bees look sleepy, Rakesh cannot find grandfather in any of his usual places. He looks out of the bedroom window and sees him reclining on a cane chair under the cherry tree. Grandfather explains that the shade there is exactly right and that he enjoys looking up at the leaves. Rakesh agrees that they are pretty, and says they are always ready to dance whenever a breeze gets up.

Look at what has happened in that little scene. The tree that once had to be shielded with pebbles is now the thing that shelters the oldest person in the house. Care given years ago has come back as shade.

After grandfather goes indoors, Rakesh takes his own place on the grass under the tree. He looks up through the leaves at a huge blue sky, and when he rolls onto his side the mountains are there, striding away into cloud. He is still lying there when the evening shadows spread across the garden. Grandfather comes back out, sits down beside him, and neither of them says anything at all until the stars are out and a nightjar starts calling. Down in the forest the crickets and cicadas tune up, and all at once the trees are loud with insects. Bond closes the story with sound and touch rather than with talk.

Then Rakesh asks his question: there are so many trees in the forest, so what is special about this one, and why do they like it so much? Grandfather's answer is four words long — "We planted it ourselves" — and that, he says, is why it is special. Notice the word we. He does not say you planted it, even though Rakesh did the planting. He shares it.

Rakesh's reply is the last thing in the story. He says it was just one small seed, touches the smooth bark of the tree he has grown, runs his hand along the trunk, puts his finger to the tip of a leaf, and whispers: "Is this what it feels to be God?"

Be careful how you explain this line, because it is easy to get wrong. Rakesh is not boasting and he is not claiming to be anything. Three things about the way it is written keep it humble. He whispers it. He begins with "I wonder", so it is a thought, not a statement. And it is phrased as a question, which he does not answer. What he is feeling is the astonishment of having taken part in making something alive — of having pressed one small seed into soft earth with his thumb and ending up, years later, lying under a tree full of leaves, birds and blossom that would not exist otherwise. The story closes on wonder, and hands the question to the reader.

Only two characters really matter in this story, and both are drawn almost entirely through small actions rather than through description. That is the thing to notice if you are asked to write about either of them: Bond almost never tells you what they are like, he shows you what they do.

Rakesh is six when the story begins and past nine when it ends. Physically we are told very little — at eight he is a sturdy boy, with curly black hair and dark eyes. His family background is given briefly and usefully: his parents farm maize, rice and barley on narrow terraced fields in a village fifty miles away, and because that village has no school, they sent him to live with his grandfather as soon as he was of school-going age. He is not separated from his family out of unhappiness; he is there because his parents want him educated, and he goes back in the monsoon to help with the planting and ploughing.

His character comes out in a chain of small choices. He is curious — his first response to a seed is to ask a question about it. He is ordinary in a way that makes him believable: he plants the seed and then immediately runs off to play cricket and forgets it. He is tender — he rings the seedling with pebbles and calls it privacy, and he waters the tree in the rain simply so it knows he is there. He is merciful — the caterpillar eating his leaves is carried away rather than killed. He is honest — he spits out the first cherry and says exactly what he thinks of it. And he is capable of wonder, which is where the story leaves him.

Grandfather is never given a name; Rakesh calls him Dada. He is old enough that bending down to look at a seedling means bending almost double, his eyesight is weak enough that the newspaper has to be read to him, and he goes out into the sun deliberately to warm his bones. Against that, he is anything but a helpless old man.

He is practical: he knows mustard is already sown in that bed, he knows a young plant needs an undisturbed corner, and he knows a bucket of water will drown a four-inch seedling. He is honest rather than comforting: when Rakesh fears the cut tree will die, he does not promise that it will live, he only says maybe. He is protective — he goes after the woman with the scythe and scolds her, even though he knows it changes nothing. He is a storyteller, with a stock of tales about people who turned into animals and ghosts who lived in trees. He is human enough to sulk when the road is blocked and his newspaper does not arrive. And he is the one who supplies the story's central idea, in one sentence, without ever calling it a lesson.

The relationship between them is the quiet centre of the chapter, and it has three features worth naming in an answer. First, it is an exchange, not a lecture: grandfather gives stories, Rakesh gives him the news; grandfather gives advice, Rakesh does the digging and the watering. Second, it is shown through doing things together — planting, peering at a seedling, being called out to the garden to see one blossom, sitting on the grass at dusk. Third, and most tellingly, it is comfortable in silence. At the end they sit side by side without speaking until the stars appear. People who need to fill every gap with words are not usually that close.

Neither of them ever says anything affectionate outright. The affection is entirely in the blackberry eyes, in the shout to come quickly and look, and in that one shared word: we planted it.

Here are the ideas this chapter is built on, in the order they are easiest to write about.

Luck is worthless until you use it. This is stated openly by grandfather near the start and then demonstrated for the rest of the story. A seed kept as a charm is a dead object in a pocket. The same seed pressed into soft earth becomes a tree taller than the man who advised planting it. The story never repeats the lesson or explains it again — it simply grows the proof in front of you.

Patience, and growth you cannot see. Almost every event in the story is separated from the next by a season. The seed takes a whole year to show itself. Rakesh watches the seedling daily and sees nothing, then looks away for a fortnight and finds it an inch taller. The first blossom takes years. The first fruit is sour and has to wait another year. Nothing in this story is quick, and the story treats that as normal rather than as a problem.

Resilience. Make a list when you answer this one, because the list is the argument. The tree is stripped of every leaf by a goat; it is cut clean in two by a scythe; it is bent low under snow; it is chewed by a caterpillar; its blossoms are pecked off and broken by birds. It survives all five. Grandfather's phrase about cherry trees being tough is offered early as reassurance, and the story then spends its whole length earning it.

A boy and a tree growing together. Watch how often the two are measured against each other: the tree reaches Rakesh's chest, then is almost as tall as him, then taller than him, then taller than grandfather. In the same breath we learn that Rakesh has come back from the fields thinner and stronger, that he can climb trees and run as well as most boys, and that he has become a keen reader. The tree is never called a symbol, but the parallel is unmistakable, and both need care, time and a bit of luck to come through.

Care for nature, given and returned. This is why the story sits in a unit about the environment. It makes no speech about saving trees. Instead it shows a boy watering, shielding and defending one small plant, and then shows what that plant gives back: nectar for bees, cherries for bulbuls and scarlet minivets, shade for an old man in a cane chair, and a patch of grass where a boy can lie and look at the sky. The argument for planting trees is made entirely by example.

Wonder. The story ends not with pride in a job done but with a whispered question about what it feels like to have made something live.

Now the craft — how Bond gets these effects. He marks time by nature, not by dates: wild duck flying north means spring, mist curling up the valley means monsoon, a bent branch means snow. He writes in plain, short sentences with very few difficult words, so the feeling comes from the detail chosen rather than from grand adjectives — a seed rolled on a tongue until the tang is gone, a bucket brought for a four-inch plant, field-mice in a roof. He uses gentle humour that never mocks anyone: grandfather asking what cherry tree, grandfather's stories turning gloomy when the newspaper stops, pebbles placed for privacy. He lightly personifies the tree — it has no intention of dying, it receives visitors — without ever letting it talk. And he ends on sensory detail and silence: stars, a nightjar, crickets and cicadas, the feel of smooth bark and the tip of a leaf.

Three practical tips for writing about this chapter. Be specific about the setbacks — naming the goat, the scythe and the snow separately is far stronger than saying the tree faced many difficulties. Keep the speakers straight — the remark about luck, the comment that cherry trees are tough and the four words about who planted it are all grandfather's, while the line about the tree having no intention of dying belongs to the narrator. And when you explain the closing question, say that it is a question, whispered and left unanswered, rather than a boast.