With the help of his grandchildren, the author struggles to save his books during a fierce storm.
This is the story of a man who lives life on his own terms. Read it for a glimpse into a rowdy lifestyle at its glorious best.
When the trees walked and other stories by Ruskin Bond
The last of the series is about an American who stayed over in Vietnam. He is photographed by a journalist and his picture is posted in a magazine. The Vietnamese family that he now has is worried that he might have another family in The US.
Told in two distinct segments, the first involves a discussion between two house servants about their employer’s little boy, who has a history of running away. The second segment explores the mother's efforts to reassure her son and help him cope with his fears. The story opens with the two house servants, Mrs. Snell and Sandra, discussing the homeowner's young son, Lionel. Sandra is very worried that Lionel will tell Boo Boo (Mrs. Tannenbaum), her employer, that Sandra has made some anti-Semitic remarks about Lionel’s Jewish father (“gonna have a nose just like his father†[8]). Boo Boo finds Lionel in a dinghy preparing to cast off, and refuses to allow his mother to join him. Boo Boo pretends to be admiral of the imaginary ship in order to win Lionel over and discover why he is trying to run away. He resists, even going so far as to throw his uncle Seymour's old goggles into the lake. Lionel tells Boo Boo that Sandra called his father a "big sloppy kike".[9] While he doesn't know what this ethnic slur means, conflating the epithet “kike†with “kiteâ€, he nevertheless grasps its derogatory connotation. Boo Boo, in an effort to reassure the boy and help him cope with the episode, succeeds in providing him insights into her own needs and the love she feels for him. At the end of the story, they race across the beach toward home, and Lionel wins.
The setting for the entire story is the drawing room of Olga Ivanovna Irnina, a woman who is estranged from her husband and is currently involved with Nikolay Ilyich Belyaev. The story opens with a brief description of Belyaev: He is a “well-fed,†“pink young man of about thirty-two†years of age. He has three principal activities in life: He is a “St. Petersburg landlord,†he is “very fond of the race-course,†and he has a “liaison†with Olga.
