Adventures in a Banyan Tree by Ruskin Bond
Summary
Adventures in Banyan Tree is a beautiful short story written by a well-known Indian author Ruskin Bond. In this story, the boy, who is the narrator, says that his grandfather owned the house and the land where they lived in India. The old, beautiful banyan tree was his. Grandfather could no longer climb the tree when he was 65. Grandmother used to make fun of Grandfather about this. One grey squirrel became friends with the boy. Soon, it was friendly enough to eat from his hands. Many different birds would flock to a banyan tree that was full of red figs in the spring. It was so noisy that you couldn’t hear what was going on. In the middle of the tree, he had built a platform. It was where he used to spend his afternoons. He used to read books and look at different things while there. He read a lot of different types of books, like Treasure Island, Huckleberry Finn, The Mowgli stories, and the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Louisa May Alcott.
One April afternoon, when everyone was inside because of the warm breezes of summer, the boy saw a terrible fight between a cobra and a mongoose. He was sitting on the platform as he always did. Cobra and mongoose came out of the bushes at the same time, and they were both huge black snakes with long tails.
After the banyan tree, they came face-to-face in a small area. A myna and a jungle crow were also there to watch the show. This is how it works: Three of the cobra’s six feet rose off the ground and he spread his hood wide. As the mongoose pushed his tail, the long hair on his back stood up. The cobra was on the defensive, and the mongoose started to fight back. As a group of champions went head to head, it was very bad. The myna and crow also took part in the fight, and the crow hit the cobra hard and died. The mongoose attacked the cobra very hard. It bit on its back a lot, and the cobra died at the end of the fight.
With a shrill cry, the myna congratulated the mongoose and flew away.
In the fight, the mongoose won. Grandfather was happy that the mongoose won. This is why he let the mongoose live in the garden. It was good because it kept snakes away from both the house and the garden. In the bazaar, grandpa brought home a white rat. The boy used to take it with him to the banyan tree.
One day, Grandmother’s knitting was gone. They looked everywhere but didn’t find it. The next day, the boy saw something shiny in a hole in the banyan tree. There were three white squirrel babies and their wool in the hole when he looked in. This is how it worked: It was a surprise and a mystery to them to see them. That didn’t happen until the boy told Grandfather that his father used to take a white rat up a tree. Grandfather said that he must have fathered the white squirrel babies. Rats and squirrels could also have offspring together, he told us as well.
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