by Ruskin Bond
The fat fellow was now engrossed in a dog-eared book which seemed to be of a religious nature judging from the severe use it had evidently been subjected to and the red and yellow smudges on the faded jacket. Another passenger was checking the cash and papers in his oversized purse. Two others were engaged in conversation in secretive low tones, unaware, probably, of the fact that the train had started. Suddenly a strong flavour of fresh orange assailed Shekar. At the far end of the compartment a lady, who had the rough-and-ready look of one dedicated to things rural and their uplift, was peeling an orange.
In which part of the world could one come across such variety in such a limited space, Shekar mused! An article was germinating in his creative mind for the Messenger. But he felt depressed by the thought that probably by the time he returned The Messenger would be in the hands of a sugar merchant or a scrap iron dealer! He himself would be sitting at a table in an advertising agency writing copy to promote some pink soap ‘. . . it has the natural flavour of the freshness of forests in monsoon and contains the mineral oils of the earth to feed your complexion and keep it bright as dawn . . . .’ From The Messenger his mind automatically jumped to Asha. The rendezvous with her the previous day at the Hotel Riviera’s garden restaurant had pushed him rather too suddenly into a maze of plans, schemes, strategies which were all supposed to bring them together as man and wife and make them live happily ever after! Asha, of course, was in command of the situation and gave Shekar no chance to question her plan, the risk involved, the retribution to be faced at the hands of Sagar in case her strategy went awry. All the questions which came cropping up during their conversation were brushed aside by Asha as being minor details that would be tackled later. The more he listened to her the less hopeful he became of their ever getting married. It seemed more certain he would end up in jail for abduction and rape. She would probably be married off to a sugar baron’s son. He was torn between a great desire for her and the impossibility of consummating their union honourably as a wedded couple. Asha, for her part, was supremely confident and totally blind to the hazards of facing the volcanic fury of Sagar! Whenever he tried to bring this up she would ask, ‘Are you getting scared?’ ‘Are you feeling nervous?’ and laugh puckishly at him.
Shekar did not know if she was being serious in this matter or just playful. Her entire scheme seemed to be based on the romantic adventures of one of her classmates who, Shekar suspected, was the same one who had enlightened her about short-time room facilities provided at the Hotel Riviera.
According to Asha, there was a tiny temple in a patch of jungle on the outskirts of the city. In this temple there was an obliging priest. He was well versed in religious rituals and qualified to bring two souls together in holy wedlock. He would even secure the alliance with a temporary stamped certificate to protect the young ones from their parents and the police.
It was said he was once a flourishing lawyer. But he had renounced the world having become disgusted watching criminal minds at close quarters day after day. He had settled in this temple solving the problems of desperate souls. Asha was given to believe that the good priest helped out not less than fifty couples a month. Shekar began to accept the fact that Asha was talking in terms of a daring elopement one morning, getting married at the temple and disappearing to some remote place. It was as simple as that. Date and time of elopement, luggage to be carried, cash to be taken, transport to the temple and beyond were all minor details not to be bothered about at the garden restaurant of Hotel Riviera. Judged by Shekar’s journalistic temper this copy seemed badly done, needing drastic editing and details for a proper conclusion. But Shekar let Asha ramble on without interruption and was content just to watch her lovely face and vivacious facial expressions. He fell for her all over again.
* * *
Shekar had not noticed during his reverie that the world outside had quietly darkened. An occasional spark of light from a lamppost fluttered past like an iridescent bird. The train had glided in and out of many wayside stations without his being aware of it. His fellow passengers had become subdued and were spreading their beds, folding their clothes and variously preparing to retire for the night.
Shekar had brought with him some sandwiches and a flask of coffee for dinner. He bit into a sandwich but it left a metallic taste in his mouth. As he was hungry and thirsty he had no choice but to carry on munching the sandwich and neutralizing the taste by gulping down coffee with each bite.
Then he climbed up to his reserved upper berth and stretched out on the bare rexine upholstery. He hoped he would go off to sleep cradled by the movement of the train. But his thoughts returned to Asha after a brief interval like in a cinema show. He began to analyse and assess her suggestions objectively and found them not so crazy after all. He admired her boldness: here she was an only daughter of a wealthy mafia don ready to sacrifice everything for Shekar’s sake and face and defy her formidable father. It was stupid of him to expect in the matter of elopement a draft plan as if chalked out by a travel agency giving the details of date of departure, scheduled time, mode of transport, destination, room reservation and so on. It was left to the male of the species to sort all these out. First, he would look for a reliable taxi, fix a place for Asha to meet him. He wondered how big her suitcase would be and who would be carrying it to the meeting place. Surely he would not be churlish enough to let her carry it . . . she would have to squirrel out her things bit by little bit over the days and hide them away in a friend’s place and later pack them in a box and . . . .
He fell fast asleep before he had charted out the elopement further.
The Cherry Choo-Choo
Victor Banerjee
THE 19TH of MARCH 1927, would have been just another day if it were not the last day that the ‘Cherry Choo-Choo’ would stop at the little village station of Tangchik about forty miles north of Buksa Duar. It was also the day Jigme’s Grandpa, Palden, picked to die.
It was in 1926, when Master Bridges (for he refused to be called Mister) twirled his handle-bar moustache and turned his sights to Taga Zong, beyond the Teesta valley, in the highlands along the banks of the Torsa, and decided to railroad the Sikkimese and immigrant Tibetans into a more civilized and British way of life.
Lumding in the north-east frontier was dangerous terrain and one of Bridges’ colleagues, an engineer tunnelling through the Naga hills, had been devoured by a tiger whose widow bravely sat over the ‘kill’ and shot the beast. Bridges didn’t pretend to be a hero, or an engineer, nor had he opted for a posting from Huddersfield to India to be devoured by a rabid rhinoceros in some backward tropical outback. He was of the ilk who hung a mosquito net like a visor under his solar hat and had natives beat the grass before he put a single foot forward, just in case he was stepping into a nest of mating cobras.
While Bridges sat back on his deck chair and smoked Nepalese tobacco in his briar pipe, the sun-burned natives had no idea what they were doing setting twin tracks of steel across the hills, high above the frothing white waters of the Teesta. Steam engines were still a novelty in England just like the puffing weed in Bridges’ pipe that turned him red around the ears, gradually thrust his eyeballs out of their sockets until choking at death’s door he would fly off his chair, cough his entrails out and bend right over on his knees till his wheezing curled the grass beneath his breath. He would then rise ashen-faced and not let the tobacco bother him till the bout next morning. The native labourers loved it and, during their break for salted raw tea, offered him some of their home grown stuff which Bridges always turned down with a sneer because they came out of grimy pockets mapped with salt licks of a fortnight’s sweat and were proffered held between fingers that had travelled and explored who knows what, where.
Every evening just before sundown, little girls plucking tea on the slopes beyond Darjeeling would stop and giggle at a mad white man hurtling down the tracks on a trolley pedaled by red-turbaned Biharis whose bare knees below ill-fitted khaki shorts bristled with goose bumps, a
s the freezing mountain air swooped into their loins and flapped through their groin, across their bobbing bellies, under their chins and around and out past their collars. Bridges with his net sucked into his face and flapping like a pennant behind his stiff neck, looked like an azuri harem girl dashing to her annual appointment with the sheikh of Arabi.
Master Brides felt like a pioneer.
Often, while the trolley plummeted down hill, free-wheeling precariously around curves that lifted Bridges’ scrotum into his tonsils, the Englishmen pondered upon writing his memoirs one day; but Huddersfield was a smog that he would never breathe again. Ironically, he would die three years later, of malaria, while studying French to marry the Missionary’s daughter, in Chandanagore.
The steam engine arrived in Buksa Duar midst a standing ovation from the labourers of several plantations, who had gathered with their sahibs to gape at a wonder of the world.
The blue-eyed, brown-haired and pale-skinned Anglo-Indian engine driver who had rolled the ‘Choo-Choo’ into town, was whisked away by hordes of admirers, laced with rice wine that had fermented for weeks in diurnal anticipation of the arrival of the train and, in the morning, was discovered dead in a local brothel where, introduced as an Apollo from Calcutta, he succumbed to an endless striving to uphold his standard.
Master Bridges was lunching with the Chogyal of Yatang, savouring the idea of another British take-over, and sucking dripping noodles from his chin thrust above a bowl of thukpa, when news of the tragedy reached him. Out of respect for the Monarch, and in allegiance to stiff upper lips, he said not a word, though in keeping with the mysticism of the East, the sombre Chogyal was already aware of what had happened.
That is where the problems began, and where Jigme’s grandfather, a jolly septuagenarian who refused to retire from active service, unexpectedly entered the scene heroically.
In a gravelly base voice tuned in the gumpas of ancient Tibetan monasteries the visionary Monarch said to Bridges, ‘Tough.’ Bridges nodded. His, future was at stake. Where in these God-forsaken mountains would he find an engine driver? ‘Palden.’ Bridges who hadn’t spoken, wondered if the Monarch might have burped. ‘Palden,’ repeated the king. ‘Pa-r-don?’ queried Bridges, ‘Palden’ came the swift reply. ‘Pardon?’
‘Palden.’ After the briefest of pauses, ‘Pardonnez mois?’ Tried Bridges, as a polite variant. ‘Palden, my boiler room mechanic!’ came an involuntary roar from a monarch whose tolerance was being tried. Bridges shrank behind a pile of steaming dumplings that had been set before him and asked most ingratiatingly, ‘Why sir, what’s he done? Aren’t the dumplings to your Highness’s liking?’
The Chogyal threw his head back and roared with laughter. With tears welling under both his slanted lids, he said, ‘You English hardly ever learn to speak your own language. While we falter over your dialectic mispronunciations, your audacious presumption that we natives can never speak your King’s English is terribly amusing. Palden, young man, could save your unpardonable neck and perhaps guarantee that your train leaves on its inaugural run to Taga Zong tomorrow. He is a genius with engines and with a few pointers might even save the day.’ Bridges fell to his knees and, embarrassed and elated, kissed the hem of the Chogyal’s brocade gown. If he could help it, Yatang would never be colonized.
That afternoon Jigme’s grandpa, Palden, was whisked out of the boiler room of the summer palace in Gangtok and carried in a chair on the shoulders of porters, down to the plains of India, where a horse carriage transported him with Master Bridges to Buksa Duar. As they jolted down the country roads, Bridges opened up a manual that gave people in his rank a working knowledge of the knobs one twiddled and the chains one pulled to operate a steam engine. He turned to show it to the old man, but the tumble and sway of the carriage had turned Palden’s yellowish face, green; his hill belly, bilious; the net result, motion sickness. Palden threw up.
When they arrived at the railway station, they were stopped by the funeral procession for Owen Bambridge, the engine driver. Master Bridges was expected and obliged to accompany the body of the dear deceased to the cemetery. Palden, still dizzy from the ride, looked sorrier than any one else in the congregation while everyone’ hugged and consoled Master Bridges for the passing of ‘Bam-Bridge,’ who they presumed from the name, must have been a relative.
Lilies cast aside, Bridges took Palden to the engine parked at a siding, and there stared aghast at meters and brass knobs that hadn’t featured in his obsolete catalogue. What could he say; Palden didn’t speak a word of English though even he could recognize stupidity and ignorance in any face. Bridges began to feel nauseous and stepped down onto the tracks and squatted on the rails as he had seen his labourers do. The cold rail burned through his trousers like his old headmaster’s cane. He had failed again.
With his head slumped between quaking knees, he heard a hiss. It was steam. The little engine gasped and gurgled and lurched forward in jerks and the wild grinning face of Palden appeared over the side as the locomotive gathered speed and began to run down the tracks until it suddenly lunged and raced in a cloud of smoke and steam towards the station. Palden looked out at Bridges who was running frantically alongside, screaming and yelling hysterically at Palden to pull the brake. Over the rattle and din of the engine, Palden, his every long, discoloured tooth visible in a maniacal grin, was screaming hilariously back at Bridges and never turned to look and see what was ahead.
Bridges receded and disappeared in clouds of dust and soot and as Palden stared, the passing station with women and children and the town’s elders putting up streamers and banners for the next day’s inauguration stopped their work to wave jubilantly at him: he scattered confetti in wind-blown eddying billows over everyone’s head. Then suddenly, Palden was in open country. The breeze soothed and cooled his cheeks in the burning heat that blazed from the furnace he had stoked. It still had not dawned on Palden that he was alone, without any knowledge of how to stop or go back.
He pulled a chain, and the shinning whistle shrieked overhead. He pulled it again, and again; it shrieked and shrieked. He began enjoying this. He slowly moved a brass handle, and the needle on a meter above it moved too. He gave it a short yank and the air and cabin around him filled with steam. He cranked it back, and the engine gained speed. He moved another brass lever and the wheels began to squeak. He pulled and pulled, and it squeaked and squeaked. He gave it a turn, and was almost thrown into the red hot coals as the train slowed down.
Bridges meanwhile had mustered a trolley and was goading the poor Biharis to go faster and faster in pursuit. He could see the train in the distance. When he saw clouds of steam suddenly rise from it, he stood up on his seat, plugged his ears with his index fingers, and stared in horror; waiting for it all to blow up. When it didn’t, he took off his solar topee and waved it in the air to set a rhythm for the poor Biharis who were breaking their backs for their crazed sahib.
Bridges couldn’t believe his eyes when the trolley began to rapidly catch up with the train. Then to his utter consternation he realized that it was not his zeal that was propelling them faster, but old Palden’s engine that was reversing full throttle towards them. He screamed at the Biharis to jam on the brakes and waited in shock for the skidding wheels to stop sliding on the tracks. With less than fifty yards to go he shouted, ‘Abandon ship’ and leapt off. The Biharis who had brought the trolley to a halt jumped off, threw the trolley off the rails and, just as they stepped aside, Palden steamed past waving and grinning at them.
At noon the following day, Bridges stood proudly beside Palden the engine driver as, midst the cheering of crowds and the wail of mismatched shehnais mixed with jungle drums and Buddhist chants, the little steam engine bedecked in marigolds pulled out of the station on its journey to Taga Zong. Bridges would always remain grateful to the native intelligence of the people of India.
It was on that historic journey, as they huffed and puffed past the drowsy village of Tangchik, where Palden originally cam
e from, that Bridges promised to make a small station there, as a token of remembrance and gratitude. It was on that same dream journey that Palden and Bridges took the little train through some of the world’s most spectacular scenery and cherry orchards.
Grandpa had told Jigme the story more than a hundred times. Each time the clusters of cherry blossom grew heavier on the boughs, and the flight of long-tailed blue magpies, golden orioles and scarlet minivets, painted special rainbows across their Himalayan skies; and each time a certain regret, and remorse, crept into the tale for having intruded upon, and tainted, paradise.
Grandfather Palden remembered how his brain had been lulled by the fragrant liquor he drank, and how his tired old knees shook while he danced with the beautiful women and children; how the people had welcomed the first supplies of salt, cotton from the mills of Bengal and English medicines they had never heard of before. When he left them, he returned with several hollowed bamboos filled with cherry brandy and a basket of cherry blossoms for Jigme. Ever since that first journey into the cherry blossom land, the train had been called the ‘Cherry Choo-Choo’.
But the run proved unprofitable. The colonizers built no summer resorts, no traders arrived to set up shop in the poor little town of Tang Zong. In a couple of months, the authorities reduced the operation to just once a week, and now, after only a year, the service was being withdrawn altogether.
To the people of Tangchik it hardly made a difference. They lived happily in their sleepy mountain village and whenever the Cherry Choo-Choo passed, they would wave to it from their fields. It stopped at the little slate-roofed hut which was their station, and old Palden, who had been made the honorary station-master, would exchange a few words and a pink slip of paper with the driver who seldom stepped down. On the way back, the driver would hand Palden a long bamboo flask that would help the old man relive his visit to the paradise he once knew. Jigme and his friends from school always rushed to the station to greet the train and Jigme was always given pride of place on his granddad’s knee while the old man told the class a little story about his adventures in Sikkim and, of course, Tang Zong. The village schoolmaster would spend the half hour staring at the little pink slip and sipping a small cup of cherry brandy that Palden agreed was fair recompense for letting the children chat with him one day, each week.