by Ruskin Bond
‘Look!’ exclaimed Kamla, pointing to the ground where the tortoise had been lying. ‘What’s in that hole?’
They peered into the hole. It was about half a metre deep, and at the bottom were five or six white eggs, a little smaller than a hen’s eggs.
‘Put it back,’ said Kamla. ‘It was sitting on its eggs.’
Romi shrugged and dropped the tortoise back on its hole. It peeped out from behind its shell, saw the children were still present, and retreated into its shell again.
‘I must go,’ said Kamla. ‘It’s getting late. Granny will wonder where I have gone.’
They walked back to the mango tree, and washed their hands and feet in the cool clear water from the well; but only after Romi had assured Kamla that there weren’t any snakes in the well—he had been talking about an old disused well on the far side of the village. Kamla told Romi she would take him to her house one day, but it would have to be next year, or perhaps the year after, when she came to India again.
‘Is it very far, where you are going?’ asked Romi.
‘Yes, England is across the seas. I have to go back to my parents. And my school is there, too. But I will take the plane from Delhi. Have you ever been to Delhi?’
‘I have not been further than Jaipur,’ said Romi. ‘What is England like? Are there canals to swim in?’
‘You can swim in the sea. Lots of people go swimming in the sea. But it’s too cold most of the year. Where I live, there are shops and cinemas and places where you can eat anything you like. And people from all over the world come to live there. You can see red faces, brown faces, black faces, white faces!’
‘I saw a red face once,’ said Romi. ‘He came to the village to take pictures. He took one of me sitting on the camel. He said he would send me the picture, but it never came.’
Kamla noticed the flute lying on the grass. ‘Is it your flute?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Romi. ‘It is an old flute. But the old ones are best. I found it lying in a field last year. Perhaps it was the God Krishna’s! He was always playing the flute.’
‘And who taught you to play it?’
‘Nobody. I learnt by myself. Shall I play it for you?’
Kamla nodded, and they sat down on the grass, leaning against the trunk of the mango tree, and Romi put the flute to his lips and began to play.
It was a slow, sweet tune, a little sad, a little happy, and the notes were taken up by the breeze and carried across the fields. There was no one to hear the music except the birds and the camel and Kamla. Whether the camel liked it or not, we shall never know; it just kept going round and round the well, drawing up water for the fields. And whether the birds liked it or not, we cannot say, although it is true that they were all suddenly silent when Romi began to play. But Kamla was charmed by the music, and she watched Romi while he played, and the boy smiled at her with his eyes and ran his fingers along the flute. When he stopped playing, everything was still, everything silent, except for the soft wind sighing in the wheat and the gurgle of water coming up from the well.
Kamla stood up to leave.
‘When will you come again?’ asked Romi.
‘I will try to come next year,’ said Kamla.
‘That is a long time. By then you will be quite old. You may not want to come.’
‘I will come,’ said Kamla.
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
Romi put the flute in her hands and said, ‘You keep it. I can get another one.’
‘But I don’t know how to play it,’ said Kamla.
‘It will play by itself,’ said Romi.
She took the flute and put it to her lips and blew on it, producing a squeaky little note that startled a lone parrot out of the mango tree. Romi laughed, and while he was laughing, Kamla turned and ran down the path through the fields. And when she had gone some distance, she turned and waved to Romi with the flute. He stood near the well and waved back at her.
Cupping his hands to his mouth, he shouted across the fields, ‘Don’t forget to come next year!’
And Kamla called back, ‘I won’t forget.’ But her voice was faint, and the breeze blew the words away and Romi did not hear them.
Was England home? wondered Kamla. Or was this Indian city home? Or was her true home in that other India, across the busy Trunk Road? Perhaps she would find out one day.
Romi watched her until she was just a speck in the distance, and then he turned and shouted at the camel, telling it to move faster. But the camel did not even glance at him; it just carried on as before, as India has carried on for thousands of years, round and round and round the well, while the water gurgled and splashed over the smooth stones.
Chachi’s Funeral
Chachi died at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, 5 April, and came to life again exactly twenty minutes later. This is how it happened. Chachi was, as a rule, a fairly tolerant, easy going person, who waddled about the house without paying much attention to the swarms of small sons, daughters, nephews and nieces who poured in and out of the rooms. But she had taken a particular aversion to her ten-year-old nephew, Sunil. She was a simple woman and could not understand Sunil. He was a little brighter than her own sons, more sensitive, and inclined to resent a scolding or a cuff across the head. He was better looking than her own children. All this, in addition to the fact that she resented having to cook for the boy while both his parents went out to office jobs, led her to grumble at him a little more than was really necessary.
Sunil sensed his aunt’s jealousy and fanned its flames. He was a mischievous boy, and did little things to annoy her, like bursting paperbags behind her while she dozed, or commenting on the width of her pyjamas when they were hung out to dry. On the evening of 5 April, he had been in particularly high spirits and, feeling hungry, entered the kitchen with the intention of helping himself to some honey. But the honey was on the top shelf, and Sunil wasn’t quite tall enough to grasp the bottle. He got his fingers to it but as he tilted it towards him, it fell to the ground with a crash.
Chachi reached the scene of the accident before Sunil could slip away. Removing her slipper, she dealt him three or four furious blows across the head and shoulders. This done, she sat down on the floor and burst into tears.
Had the beating come from someone else, Sunil might have cried; but his pride was hurt and, instead of weeping, he muttered something under his breath and stormed out of the room.
Climbing the steps to the roof, he went to his secret hiding place, a small hole in the wall of the unused barsati, where he kept his marbles, kite string, tops and a clasp knife. Opening the knife, he plunged it thrice into the soft wood of the window frame.
‘I’ll kill her!’ he whispered fiercely. ‘I’ll kill her, I’ll kill her!’
‘Who are you going to kill, Sunil?’
It was his cousin Madhu, a dark, slim girl of twelve, who aided and abetted him in most of his exploits. Sunil’s chachi was her mami. It was a very big family.
‘Chachi,’ said Sunil. ‘She hates me, I know. Well, I hate her too. This time I’ll kill her.’
‘How are you going to do it?’
‘I’ll stab her with this.’ He showed her the knife. ‘Three times, in the heart.’
‘But you’ll be caught. The CID is very clever. Do you want to go to jail?’
‘Won’t they hang me?’
‘They don’t hang small boys. They send them to boarding schools.’
‘I don’t want to go to a boarding school.’
‘Then better not kill your chachi. At least not this way. I’ll show you how.’
Madhu produced pencil and paper, went down on her hands and knees, and screwing up her face in sharp concentration, made a rough drawing of Chachi. Then, with a red crayon, she sketched in a big heart in the region of Chachi’s stomach.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘stab her to death!’
Sunil’s eyes shone with excitement. Here was a great new game. You could always depend on Madhu for
something original. He held the drawing against the woodwork, and plunged his knife three times into Chachi’s pastel breast.
‘You have killed her,’ said Madhu.
‘Is that all?’
‘Well, if you like, we can cremate her.’
‘All right.’
She took the torn paper, crumpled it up, produced a box of matches from Sunil’s hiding place, lit a match and set fire to the paper. In a few minutes all that remained of Chachi was a few ashes.
‘Poor Chachi,’ said Madhu.
‘Perhaps we shouldn’t have done it,’ said Sunil, beginning to feel sorry.
‘I know, we’ll put her ashes in the river!’
‘What river?’
‘Oh, the drain will do.’
Madhu gathered the ashes together and leant over the balcony of the roof. She threw out her arms, and the ashes drifted downwards. Some of them settled on the pomegranate tree, a few reached the drain and were carried away by a sudden rush of kitchen water. She turned to face Sunil.
Big tears were rolling down Sunil’s cheeks.
‘What are you crying for?’ asked Madhu.
‘Chachi, I didn’t hate her so much.’
‘Then why did you want to kill her?’
‘Oh, that was different.’
‘Come on, then, let’s go down. I have to do my homework.’ As they came down the steps from the roof, Chachi emerged from the kitchen.
‘Oh, Chachi!’ shouted Sunil. He rushed to her and tried to get his arms around her ample waist.
‘Now what’s up?’ grumbled Chachi. ‘What is it this time?’
‘Nothing, Chachi. I love you so much. Please don’t leave us.’ A look of suspicion crossed Chachi’s face. She frowned down at the boy. But she was reassured by the look of genuine affection that she saw in his eyes.
‘Perhaps he does care for me, after all,’ she thought and patted him gently on the head. She took him by the hand and led him back to the kitchen.
The Man Who Was Kipling
I was sitting on a bench in the Indian Section of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, when a tall, stooping, elderly gentleman sat down beside me. I gave him a quick glance, noting his swarthy features, heavy moustache and horn-rimmed spectacles. There was something familiar and disturbing about his face and I couldn’t resist looking at him again.
I noticed that he was smiling at me.
‘Do you recognize me?’ he asked in a soft pleasant voice. ‘Well, you do seem familiar,’ I said. ‘Haven’t we met somewhere?’
‘Perhaps. But if I seem familiar to you, that is at least something. The trouble these days is that people don’t know me anymore— I’m familiar, that’s all. Just a name standing for a lot of outmoded ideas.’
A little perplexed, I asked. ‘What is it you do?’
‘I wrote books once. Poems and tales . . . Tell me, whose books do you read?’
‘Oh, Maugham, Priestley, Thurber. And among the older lot, Bennett and Wells . . .’ I hesitated, groping for an important name, and I noticed a shadow, a sad shadow, pass across my companion’s face.
‘Oh, yes, and Kipling,’ I said, ‘I read a lot of Kipling.’
His face brightened up at once and the eyes behind the thick-lensed spectacles suddenly came to life.
‘I’m Kipling,’ he said.
I stared at him in astonishment. And then, realizing that he might perhaps be dangerous, I smiled feebly and said, ‘Oh, yes?’
‘You probably don’t believe me. I’m dead, of course.’
‘So I thought.’
‘And you don’t believe in ghosts?’
‘Not as a rule.’
‘But you’d have no objection to talking to one if he came along?’
‘I’d have no objection. But how do I know you’re Kipling? How do I know you’re not an impostor?’
‘Listen, then:
When my heavens were turned to blood,
When the dark had filled my day,
Furthest, but most faithful, stood
That lone star I cast away.
I had loved myself, and I
Have not lived and dare not die.
‘Once,’ he said, gripping me by the arm and looking me straight in the eye, ‘once in life I watched a star but I whistled her to go.’
‘Your star hasn’t fallen yet,’ I said, suddenly moved, suddenly quite certain that I sat beside Kipling. ‘One day, when there is a new spirit of adventure abroad, we will discover you again.’
‘Why have they heaped scorn on me for so long?’
‘You were too militant, I suppose—too much of an Empire man. You were too patriotic for your own good.’
He looked a little hurt. ‘I was never very political,’ he said. ‘I wrote over six hundred poems. And you could only call a dozen of them political. I have been abused for harping on the theme of the white man’s burden but my only aim was to show off the Empire to my audience—and I believed the Empire was a fine and noble thing. Is it wrong to believe in something? I never went deeply into political issues, that’s true. You must remember, my seven years in India were very youthful years. I was in my twenties, a little immature if you like, and my interest in India was a boy’s interest. Action appealed to me more than anything else. You must understand that.’
‘No one has described action more vividly, or India so well. I feel at one with Kim wherever he goes along the Grand Trunk Road, in the temples of Banaras, amongst the Saharanpur fruit gardens, on the snow-covered Himalayas. Kim has colour and movement and poetry.’
He sighed and a wistful look came into his eyes.
‘I’m prejudiced, of course,’ I continued. ‘I’ve spent most of my life in India—not your India, but an India that does still have much of the colour and atmosphere that you captured. You know, Mr Kipling, you can still sit in a third-class railway carriage and meet the most wonderful assortment of people. In any village you will still find the same courtesy, dignity and courage that the Lama and Kim found on their travels.’
‘And the Grand Trunk Road? Is it still a long, winding procession of humanity?’
‘Well, not exactly,’ I said a little ruefully. ‘It’s just a procession of motor vehicles now. The poor Lama would be run down by a truck if he became too dreamy on the Grand Trunk Road. Times have changed. There are no more Mrs Hawksbees in Simla, for instance.’
There was a faraway look in Kipling’s eyes. Perhaps he was imagining himself a boy again. Perhaps he could see the hills or the red dust of Rajputana. Perhaps he was having a private conversation with Privates Mulvaney and Ortheris, or perhaps he was out hunting with the Seonce wolf pack. The sound of London’s traffic came to us through the glass doors but we heard only the creaking of bullock-cart wheels and the distant music of a flute.
He was talking to himself, repeating a passage from one of his stories. ‘And the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages, the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, that man will at the last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die.’
A mist seemed to have risen between us—or had it come in from the streets?—and when it cleared, Kipling had gone away.
I asked the gatekeeper if he had seen a tall man with a slight stoop, wearing spectacles.
‘Nope,’ said the gatekeeper. ‘Nobody been by for the last ten minutes.’
‘Did someone like that come into the gallery a little while ago?’
‘No one that I recall. What did you say the bloke’s name was?’
‘Kipling,’ I said.
‘Don’t know him.’
‘Didn’t you ever read The Jungle Books?’
‘Sounds familiar. Tarzan stuff, wasn’t it?’
I left the museum and wandered about the streets for a long time but I couldn’t find Kipling anywhere. Was it the boom of London’s traffic that I heard or the boom of the Sutlej
river racing through the valleys?
The Girl from Copenhagen
This is not a love story but it is a story about love. You will know what I mean.
When I was living and working in London I knew a Vietnamese girl called Phuong. She studied at the Polytechnic. During the summer vacations she joined a group of students—some of them English, most of them French, German, Indian and African— picking raspberries for a few pounds a week and drinking in some real English country air. Late one summer, on her return from a farm, she introduced me to Ulla, a sixteen-year-old Danish girl who had come over to England for a similar holiday.
‘Please look after Ulla for a few days,’ said Phuong. ‘She doesn’t know anyone in London.’
‘But I want to look after you,’ I protested. I had been infatuated with Phuong for some time, but though she was rather fond of me, she did not reciprocate my advances and it was possible that she had conceived of Ulla as a device to get rid of me for a little while.
‘This is Ulla,’ said Phuong, thrusting a blonde child into my arms. ‘Bye and don’t get up to any mischief!’
Phuong disappeared, and I was left alone with Ulla at the entrance to the Charing Cross underground station. She grinned at me and I smiled back rather nervously. She had blue eyes and smooth, tanned skin. She was small for a Scandinavian girl, reaching only to my shoulders, and her figure was slim and boyish. She was carrying a small travel bag. It gave me an excuse to do something.
‘We’d better leave your bag somewhere,’ I said taking it from her.
And after depositing it in the left-luggage office, we were back on the pavement, grinning at each other.
‘Well, Ulla,’ I said, ‘how many days do you have in London?’
‘Only two. Then I go back to Copenhagen.’
‘Good. Well, what would you like to do?’