Voting at Fosterganj

by Ruskin Bond

  We were coming home through the mustard fields, which had turned from yellow to green, when I noticed that we were being followed by a small goat. It appeared to have been separated from its mother, and now attached itself to us. Though I tried driving the kid away, it continued tripping along at our heels, and when Suresh found that it persisted in accompanying us, he picked it up and took it home.

  The kid became his main obsession during the next few days. He fed it with his own hands and allowed it to sleep at the foot of his bed. It was a pretty little kid, with fairy horns and an engaging habit of doing a hop, skip and jump when moving about the house. Everyone admired the pet, and the boy’s mother and I both remarked on how pretty it was.

  His resentment against the animal began to show when others started admiring it. He suspected that they found it better-looking than its owner. I remember finding him squatting in front of a low mirror, holding the kid in his arms, and studying their reflections in the glass. After a few minutes of this, Suresh thrust the goat away. When he noticed that I was watching him, he got up and left the room without looking at me.

  Two days later, when I called at the house, I found his mother looking very upset. I could see that she had been crying. But she seemed relieved to see me, and took me into the sitting room. When Suresh saw me, he got up from the floor and ran to the verandah.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘It was the little goat,’ she said. ‘Suresh killed it.’

  She told me how Suresh, in a sudden and uncontrollable rage, had thrown a brick at the kid, breaking its skull. What had upset her more than the animal’s death was the fact that Suresh had shown no regret for what he had done.

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ I said, and went out to the verandah, but the boy had disappeared.

  ‘He must have gone to the bazaar,’ said his mother anxiously. ‘He does that when he’s upset. Sometimes I think he likes to be teased and beaten.’

  He was not in the bazaar. I found him near the stream, lying flat on his belly in the soft mud, chasing tadpoles with a stick.

  ‘Why did you kill the goat?’ I asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Did you enjoy killing it?’

  He looked at me and smiled and nodded his head vigorously.

  ‘How very cruel,’ I said. But I did not mean it. I knew that his cruelty was no different from mine or anyone else’s; only his was an untrammelled cruelty, primitive, as yet undisguised by civilizing restraints.

  He took a penknife from his shirt pocket, opened it, and held it out to me by the blade. He pointed to his bare stomach and motioned me to thrust the blade into his belly. He had such a mournful look on his face (the result of having offended me and not in remorse for the goat sacrifice) that I had to burst out laughing.

  ‘You are a funny fellow,’ I said, taking the knife from him and throwing it into the stream. ‘Come, let’s have a swim.’

  We swam all afternoon, and Suresh went home smiling. His mother and I conspired to keep the whole affair a secret from his father—who had not in any case been aware of the goat’s presence.

  Suresh seemed quite contented during the following weeks. And then I received a letter offering me a job in Delhi and I knew that I would have to take it, as I was earning very little from my writing at the time.

  The boy’s mother was disappointed, even depressed, when I told her I would be going away. I think she had grown quite fond of me. But the boy, always unpredictable, displayed no feeling at all. I felt a little hurt by his apparent indifference. Did our weeks of companionship mean nothing to him? I told myself that he probably did not realize that he might never see me again.

  On the evening my train was to leave, I went to the house to say goodbye. The boy’s mother made me promise to write to them, but Suresh seemed cold and distant, and refused to sit near me or take my hand. He made me feel that I was an outsider again—one of the mob throwing stones at odd and frightening people.

  At eight o’clock that evening I entered a third-class compartment and, after a brief scuffle with several other travellers, succeeded in securing a seat near a window. It enabled me to look down the length of the platform.

  The guard had blown his whistle and the train was about to leave when I saw Suresh standing near the station turnstile, looking up and down the platform.

  ‘Suresh!’ I shouted and he heard me and came hobbling along the platform. He had run the gauntlet of the bazaar during the busiest hour of the evening.

  ‘I’ll be back next year,’ I called.

  The train had begun moving out of the station, and as I waved to Suresh, he broke into a stumbling run, waving his arms in frantic, restraining gestures.

  I saw him stumble against someone’s bedding roll and fall sprawling on the ground. The engine picked up speed and the platform receded.

  And that was the last I saw of Suresh, lying alone on the crowded platform, alone in the great grey darkness of the world, crooked and bent and twisted—the most beautiful boy in the world.

  Voting at Fosterganj

  I am standing under the deodars, waiting for a taxi. Devilal, one of the candidates in the civic election, is offering free rides to all his supporters, to ensure that they get to the polls in time. I have assured him that I prefer walking but he does not believe me; he fears that I will settle down with a bottle of beer rather than walk the two miles to the Fosterganj polling station to cast my vote. He has gone to the expense of engaging a taxi for the day just to make certain of lingerers like me. He assures me that he is not using unfair means—most of the other candidates are doing the same thing.

  It is a cloudy day, promising rain, so I decide I will wait for the taxi. It has been plying since 6 a.m., and now it is ten o’clock. It will continue plying up and down the hill till 4 p.m. and by that time it will have cost Devilal over a hundred rupees.

  Here it comes. The driver—like most of our taxi drivers, a Sikh—sees me standing at the gate, screeches to a sudden stop, and opens the door. I am about to get in when I notice that the windscreen carries a sticker displaying the Congress symbol of the cow and calf. Devilal is an Independent, and has adopted a cock bird as his symbol.

  ‘Is this Devilal’s taxi?’ I ask.

  ‘No, it’s the Congress taxi,’ says the driver.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I don’t know the Congress candidate.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ he says agreeably; he isn’t a local man and has no interest in the outcome of the election. ‘Devilal’s taxi will be along any minute now.’

  He moves off, looking for the Congress voters on whose behalf he has been engaged. I am glad that the candidates have had to adopt different symbols; it has saved me the embarrassment of turning up in a Congress taxi, only to vote for an Independent. But the real reason for using symbols is to help illiterate voters know whom they are voting for when it comes to putting their papers in the ballot box. All through the hill station’s mini-election campaign, posters have been displaying candidates’ symbols—a car, a radio, a cock bird, a tiger, a lamp—and the narrow, winding roads resound to the cries of children who are paid to shout, ‘Vote for the Radio!’ or ‘Vote for the Cock!’

  Presently my taxi arrives. It is already full, having picked up others on the way, and I have to squeeze in at the back with a stout lalain and her bony husband, the local ration-shop owner. Sitting up front, near the driver, is Vinod, a poor, ragged, quite happy-go-lucky youth, who contrives to turn up wherever I happen to be, and frequently involves himself in my activities. He gives me a namaste and a wide grin.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I ask him.

  ‘Same as you, Bond Sahib. Voting. Maybe Devilal will give me a job if he wins.’

  ‘But you already have a job. I thought you were the games-boy at the school.’

  ‘That was last month, Bond Sahib.’

  ‘They kicked you out?’

  ‘They asked me to leave.’

  The taxi gath
ers speed as it moves smoothly down the winding hill road. The driver is in a hurry; the more trips he makes, the more money he collects. We swerve round sharp corners, and every time the lalain’s chubby hands, covered with heavy bangles and rings, clutch at me for support. She and her husband are voting for Devilal because they belong to the same caste; Vinod is voting for him in the hope of getting a job; I am voting for him because I like the man. I find him simple, courteous and ready to listen to complaints about drains, street lighting and wrongly assessed taxes. He even tries to do something about these things. He is a tall, cadaverous man, with paan-stained teeth; no Nixon, Heath or Indira Gandhi; but he knows that Fosterganj folk care little for appearances.

  Fosterganj is a small ward (one of four in the hill station of Mussoorie); it has about 1,000 voters. An election campaign has, therefore, to be conducted on a person-to-person basis. There is no point in haranguing a crowd at a street corner; it would be a very small crowd. The only way to canvass support is to visit each voter’s house and plead one’s cause personally. This means making a lot of promises with a perfectly straight face.

  The bazaar and village of Fosterganj crouch in a vale on the way down the mountain to Dehra. The houses on either side of the road are nearly all English-looking, most of them built before the turn of the century. The bazaar is Indian, charming and quite prosperous: tailors sit cross-legged before their sewing machines, turning out blazers and tight trousers for the well-to-do students who attend the many public schools that still thrive here; halwais—pot-bellied sweet vendors—spend all day sitting on their haunches in front of giant frying pans; and coolies carry huge loads of timber or cement or grain up the steep hill paths.

  The police station, the little Church of the Resurrection, and the ruined brewery were among the earliest buildings in Fosterganj. The brewery is a mound of rubble, but the road that came into existence to serve the needs of the old Crown Brewery is the one that now serves our taxi. Buckle and Co.’s ‘Bullock Train’ was the chief means of transport in the old days. Mr Bohle, one of the pioneers of brewing in India, started the ‘Old Brewery’ at Mussoorie in 1830. Two years later he got into trouble with the authorities for supplying beer to soldiers without permission; he had to move elsewhere.

  But the great days of the brewery business really began in 1876, when everyone suddenly acclaimed a much-improved brew. The source was traced to Vat 42 in Whymper’s Crown Brewery (the one whose ruins we are now passing), and the beer was retasted and retested until the diminishing level of the barrel revealed the perfectly brewed remains of a soldier who had been reported missing some months previously. He had evidently fallen into the vat and been drowned and, unknown to himself, had given the Fosterganj beer trade a real fillip. Apocryphal though this story may sound, I have it on the authority of the owner of the now defunct Mafasalite Press who, in a short account of Mussoorie, wrote that ‘meat was thereafter recognized as the missing component and was scrupulously added till more modern, and less cannibalistic, means were discovered to satiate the froth-blower.’

  Recently, confirmation came from an old Indian hand now living in London. He wrote to me reminiscing of early days in the hill station and had this to say:

  Uncle Georgie Forster was working for the Crown Brewery when a coolie fell in. Coolies were employed to remove scum etc. from the vats. They walked along planks suspended over the vats. Poor devil must have slipped and fallen in. Uncle often told us about the incident and there was no doubt that the beer tasted very good.

  What with soldiers and coolies falling into the vats with seeming regularity, one wonders whether there may have been more to these accidents than met the eye. I have a nagging suspicion that Whymper and Buckle may have been the Burke and Hare of Mussoorie’s beer industry.

  But no beer is made in Mussoorie today, and Devilal probably regrets the passing of the breweries as much as I do. Only the walls of the breweries remain, and these are several feet thick. The roofs and girders must have been removed for use in other buildings. Moss and sorrel grow in the old walls, and wildcats live in dark corners protected from rain and wind.

  We have taken the sharpest curves and steepest gradients, and now our taxi moves smoothly along a fairly level road which might pass for a country lane in England were it not for the clumps of bamboo on either side.

  A mist has come up the valley to settle over Fosterganj, and out of the mist looms an imposing mansion, Sikander Hall, which is still owned and occupied by the Skinners, descendants of Colonel James Skinner who raised a body of Irregular Horse for the Marathas. This was absorbed by the East India Company’s forces in 1803. The cavalry regiment is still known as Skinner’s Horse, but of course it is a tank regiment now. Skinner’s troops called him ‘Sikander’ (a corruption of both Skinner and Alexander), and that is the name his property bears. The Skinners who live here now have, quite sensibly, gone in for keeping pigs and poultry.

  The next house belongs to the Raja of K but he is unable to maintain it on his diminishing privy purse, and it has been rented out as an ashram for members of a saffron-robed sect who would rather meditate in the hills than in the plains. There was a time when it was only the Sahibs and rajas who could afford to spend the entire ‘season’ in Mussoorie. The new rich are the industrialists and maharishis. The coolies and rickshaw pullers are no better off than when I was a boy in Mussoorie. They still carry or pull the same heavy loads, for the same pittance, and seldom attain the age of forty. Only their clientele has changed.

  One more gate, and here is Colonel Powell in his khaki bush shirt and trousers, a uniform that never varies with the seasons. He is an old shikari; once wrote a book called The Call of the Tiger. He is too old for hunting now, but likes to yarn with me when we meet on the road. His wife has gone home to England, but he does not want to leave India.

  ‘It’s the mountains,’ he was telling me the other day. ‘Once the mountains are in your blood, there is no escape. You have to come back again and again. I don’t think I’d like to die anywhere else.’

  Today there is no time to stop and chat. The taxi driver, with a vigorous blowing of his horn, takes the car round the last bend, and then through the village and narrow bazaar of Fosterganj, stopping about a hundred yards from the polling stations.

  There is a festive air about Fosterganj today, I have never seen so many people in the bazaar. Bunting, in the form of rival posters and leaflets, is strung across the street. The tea shops are doing a roaring trade. There is much last-minute canvassing, and I have to run the gamut of various candidates and their agents. For the first time I learn the names of some of the candidates. In all, seven men are competing for this seat.

  A schoolboy, smartly dressed and speaking English, is the first to accost me. He says: ‘Don’t vote for Devilal, sir. He’s a big crook. Vote for Jatinder! See, sir, that’s his symbol—the bow and arrow.’

  ‘I shall certainly think about the bow and arrow,’ I tell him politely.

  Another agent, a man, approaches, and says, ‘I hope you are going to vote for the Congress candidate.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about him,’ I say.

  ‘That doesn’t matter. It’s the party you are voting for. Don’t forget it’s Mrs Gandhi’s party.’

  Meanwhile, one of Devilal’s lieutenants has been keeping a close watch on both Vinod and me, to make sure that we are not seduced by rival propaganda. I give the man a reassuring smile and stride purposefully towards the polling station, which has been set up in the municipal schoolhouse. Policemen stand at the entrance, to make sure that no one approaches the voters once they have entered the precincts.

  I join the patient queue of voters. Everyone is in good humour, and there is no breaking of the line; these are not film stars we have come to see. Vinod is in another line, and grins proudly at me across the passageway. This is the one day in his life on which he has been made to feel really important. And he is. In a small constituency like Fosterganj, every vote counts.

>   Most of my fellow voters are poor people. Local issues mean something to them, affect their daily living. The more affluent can buy their way out of trouble, can pay for small conveniences; few of them bother to come to the polls. But for the ‘common man’—the shopkeeper, clerk, teacher, domestic servant, milkman, mule driver—this is a big day. The man he is voting for has promised him something, and the voter means to take the successful candidate up on his promise. Not for another five years will the same fuss be made over the local cobblers, tailors and laundrymen. Their votes are indeed precious.

  And now it is my turn to vote. I confirm my name, address and roll number. I am down on the list as ‘Rusking Bound’, but I let it pass: I might forfeit my right to vote if I raise any objection at this stage! A dab of marking-ink is placed on my forefinger—this is so that I do not come around a second time—and I am given a paper displaying the names and symbols of all the candidates. I am then directed to the privacy of a small booth, where I place the official rubber stamp against Devilal’s name. This done, I fold the paper in four and slip it into the ballot box.

  All has gone smoothly. Vinod is waiting for me outside. So is Devilal.

  ‘Did you vote for me?’ asks Devilal.

  It is my eyes that he is looking at, not my lips, when I reply in the affirmative. He is a shrewd man, with many years’ experience in seeing through bluff. He is pleased with my reply, beams at me, and directs me to the waiting taxi.

  Vinod and I get in together, and soon we are on the road again, being driven swiftly homewards up the winding hill road.

  Vinod is looking pleased with himself; rather smug, in fact. ‘You did vote for Devilal?’ I ask him. ‘The symbol of the cock bird?’

  He shakes his head, keeping his eyes on the road. ‘No, the cow,’ he says.

  ‘You ass!’ I exclaim. ‘Devilal’s symbol was the cock, not the cow!’

  ‘I know,’ he says, ‘but I like the cow better.’*