Collected Short Stories

by Ruskin Bond

  The lights are off and Bhabiji settles down for the night. She is almost asleep when a small voice pipes up: ‘Bhabiji, tell us a story.’

  At first Bhabiji pretends not to hear; then, when the request is repeated, she says: ‘You’ll keep Aunty Shobha awake, and then she’ll have an excuse for getting up late in the morning.’ But the children know Bhabiji’s one great weakness, and they renew their demand.

  ‘Your grandmother is tired,’ says Arun. ‘Let her sleep.’

  But Bhabiji’s eyes are open. Her mind is going back over the crowded years, and she remembers something very interesting that happened when her younger brother’s wife’s sister married the eldest son of her third cousin . . .

  Before long, the children are asleep, and I am wondering if I will ever sleep, for Bhabiji’s voice drones on, into the darker reaches of the night.

  Masterji

  I was strolling along the platform, waiting for the arrival of the Amritsar Express, when I saw Mr Khushal, handcuffed to a policeman.

  I hadn’t recognized him at first—a paunchy gentleman with a lot of grey in his beard and a certain arrogant amusement in his manner. It was only when I came closer, and we were almost face to face, that I recognized my old Hindi teacher.

  Startled, I stopped and stared. And he stared back at me, a glimmer of recognition in his eyes. It was over twenty years since I’d last seen him, standing jauntily before the classroom blackboard, and now here he was tethered to a policeman and looking as jaunty as ever . . .

  ‘Good—good evening, sir,’ I stammered, in my best public school manner. (You must always respect your teacher, no matter what the circumstances.)

  Mr Khushal’s face lit up with pleasure. ‘So you remember me! It’s nice to see you again, my boy.’

  Forgetting that his right hand was shackled to the policeman’s left, I made as if to shake hands. Mr Khushal thoughtfully took my right hand in his left and gave it a rough squeeze. A faint odour of cloves and cinnamon reached me, and I remembered how he had always been redolent of spices when standing beside my desk, watching me agonize over my Hindi–English translation.

  He had joined the school in 1948, not long after the Partition. Until then there had been no Hindi teacher; we’d been taught Urdu and French. Then came a ruling that Hindi was to be a compulsory subject, and at the age of sixteen I found myself struggling with a new script. When Mr Khushal joined the staff (on the recommendation of a local official), there was no one else in the school who knew Hindi, or who could assess Mr Khushal’s abilities as a teacher . . .

  And now once again he stood before me, only this time he was in the custody of the law.

  I was still recovering from the shock when the train drew in, and everyone on the platform began making a rush for the compartment doors. As the policeman elbowed his way through the crowd, I kept close behind him and his charge, and as a result I managed to get into the same third-class compartment. I found a seat right opposite Mr Khushal. He did not seem to be the least bit embarrassed by the handcuffs, or by the stares of his fellow-passengers. Rather, it was the policeman who looked unhappy and ill-at-ease.

  As the train got under way, I offered Mr Khushal one of the parathas made for me by my Ferozepur landlady. He accepted it with alacrity. I offered one to the constable as well, but although he looked at it with undisguised longing, he felt duty-bound to decline.

  ‘Why have they arrested you, sir?’ I asked. ‘Is it very serious?’

  ‘A trivial matter,’ said Mr Khushal. ‘Nothing to worry about. I shall be at liberty soon.’

  ‘But what did you do?’

  Mr Khushal leant forward. ‘Nothing to be ashamed of,’ he said in a confiding tone. ‘Even a great teacher like Socrates fell foul of the law.’

  ‘You mean—one of your pupils—made a complaint?’

  ‘And why should one of my pupils make a complaint?’ Mr Khushal looked offended. ‘They were the beneficiaries—it was for them.’ He noticed that I looked mystified, and decided to come straight to the point: ‘It was simply a question of false certificates.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, feeling deflated. Public school boys are always prone to jump to the wrong conclusions . . .

  ‘Your certificates, sir?’

  ‘Of course not. Nothing wrong with my certificates—I had them printed in Lahore, in 1946.’

  ‘With age comes respectability,’ I remarked. ‘In that case, whose . . . ?’

  ‘Why, the matriculation certificates I’ve been providing all these years to the poor idiots who would never have got through on their own!’

  ‘You mean you gave them your own certificates?’

  ‘That’s right. And if it hadn’t been for so many printing mistakes, no one would have been any wiser. You can’t find a good press these days, that’s the trouble . . . It was a public service, my boy, I hope you appreciate that . . . It isn’t fair to hold a boy back in life simply because he can’t get through some puny exam . . . Mind you, I don’t give my certificates to anyone. They come to me only after they have failed two or three times.’

  ‘And I suppose you charge something?’

  ‘Only if they can pay. There’s no fixed sum. Whatever they like to give me. I’ve never been greedy in these matters, and you know I am not unkind . . .’

  Which is true enough, I thought, looking out of the carriage window at the green fields of Moga and remembering the half-yearly Hindi exam when I had stared blankly at the question paper, knowing that I was totally incapable of answering any of it. Mr Khushal had come walking down the line of desks and stopped at mine, breathing cloves all over me. ‘Come on, boy, why haven’t you started?’

  ‘Can’t do it, sir,’ I’d said. ‘It’s too difficult.’

  ‘Never mind,’ he’d urged in a whisper. ‘Do something. Copy it out, copy it out!’

  And so, to pass the time, I’d copied out the entire paper, word for word. And a fortnight later, when the results were out, I found I had passed!

  ‘But, sir,’ I had stammered, approaching Mr Khushal when I found him alone. ‘I never answered the paper. I couldn’t translate the passage. All I did was copy it out!’

  ‘That’s why I gave you pass marks,’ he’d answered imperturbably. ‘You have such neat handwriting. If ever you do learn Hindi, my boy, you’ll write a beautiful script!’

  And remembering that moment, I was now filled with compassion for my old teacher; and leaning across, I placed my hand on his knee and said: ‘Sir, if they convict you, I hope it won’t be for long. And when you come out, if you happen to be in Delhi or Ferozepur, please look me up. You see, I’m still rather hopeless at Hindi, and perhaps you could give me tuition. I’d be glad to pay . . .’

  Mr Khushal threw back his head and laughed, and the entire compartment shook with his laughter.

  ‘Teach you Hindi!’ he cried. ‘My dear boy, what gave you the idea that I ever knew any Hindi?’

  ‘But, sir—if not Hindi what were you teaching us all the time at school?’

  ‘Punjabi!’ he shouted, and everyone jumped in their seats. ‘Pure Punjabi! But how were you to know the difference?’

  As Time Goes By

  Prem’s boys are growing tall and healthy, on the verge of manhood. How can I think of death, when faced with the full vigour and confidence of youth? They remind me of Somi and Daljit, who were the same age when I knew them in Dehra during our schooldays. But remembering Somi and Dal reminds me of death again—for Dal had died a young man—and I look at Prem’s boys again, haunted by the thought of suddenly leaving this world, and pray that I can be with them a little longer.

  Somi and Dal . . . I remember: it was going to rain. I could see the rain moving across the hills, and I could smell it on the breeze. But instead of turning back, I walked on through the leaves and brambles that grew over the disused path, and wandered into the forest. I had heard the sound of rushing water at the bottom of the hill, and there was no question of returning until I had found the water. />
  I had to slide down some smooth rocks into a small ravine, and there I found the stream running across a bed of shingle. I removed my shoes and socks and started walking up the stream. Water trickled down from the hillside, from amongst ferns and grass and wild flowers, and the hills, rising steeply on either side, kept the ravine in shadow. The rocks were smooth, almost soft, and some of them were grey and some yellow. The pool was fed by a small waterfall, and it was deep beneath the waterfall. I did not stay long, because now the rain was swishing over the sal trees, and I was impatient to tell the others about the pool. Somi usually chose the adventures we were to have, and I would just grumble and get involved in them; but the pool was my own discovery, and both Somi and Daljit gave me credit for it.

  I think it was the pool that brought us together more than anything else. We made it a secret, private pool, and invited no others. Somi was the best swimmer. He dived off rocks and went gliding about under the water, like a long, golden fish. Dal threshed about with much vigour but little skill. I could dive off a rock too, but I usually landed on my belly.

  There were slim silverfish in the waters of the stream. At first we tried catching them with a line, but they usually took the bait and left the hook. Then we brought a bedsheet and stretched it across one end of the stream, but the fish wouldn’t come near it. Eventually Somi, without telling us, brought along a stick of dynamite, and Dal and I were startled out of a siesta by a flash across the water and a deafening explosion. Half the hillside tumbled into the pool, and Somi along with it; but we got him out, as well as a good supply of stunned fish which were too small for eating.

  The effects of the explosion gave Somi another idea, and that was to enlarge our pool by building a dam across one end. This he accomplished with Dal’s and my labour. But one afternoon, when it rained heavily, a torrent of water came rushing down the stream, bursting the dam and flooding the ravine; our clothes were all carried away by the current, and we had to wait for night to fall before creeping home through the darkest alleyways, for we used to bathe quite naked; it would have been umnanly to do otherwise.

  Our activities at the pool included wrestling and buffalo riding. We wrestled on a strip of sand that ran beside the stream, and rode on a couple of buffaloes that sometimes came to drink and wallow in the more muddy parts of the stream. We would sit astride the buffaloes, and kick and yell and urge them forward, but on no occasion did we ever get them to move. At the most, they would roll over on their backs, taking us with them into a pool of slush.

  But the buffaloes were always comfortable to watch. Solid, earthbound creatures, they liked warm days and cool, soft mud. There is nothing so satisfying to watch than buffaloes wallowing in mud, or ruminating over a mouthful of grass, absolutely oblivious to everything else. They watched us with sleepy, indifferent eyes, and tolerated the pecking of crows. Did they think all that time, or did they just enjoy the sensuousness of soft, wet mud, while we perspired under a summer sun . . .? No, thinking would have been too strenuous for those supine creatures; to get neck-deep in water was their only aim in life.

  It didn’t matter how muddy we got ourselves, because we had only to dive into the pool to get rid of the muck. In fact, mud fighting was one of our favourite pastimes. It was like playing snowballs, only we used mud balls.

  If it was possible for Somi and Dal to get out of their houses undetected at night, we would come to the pool and bathe by moonlight, and at these times we would bathe silently and seriously, because there was something subduing about the stillness of the jungle at night.

  I don’t exactly remember how we broke up, but we hardly noticed it at the time. That was because we never really believed we were finally parting, or that we would not be seeing the pool again. After about a year, Somi passed his matriculation and entered the military academy. The last time I saw him, about twenty-five years ago, he was about to be commissioned, and sported a fierce and very military moustache. He remembered the pool in a sentimental, military way, but not as I remembered it.

  Shortly after Somi had matriculated, Dal and his family left town, and I did not see him again, until after I returned from England. Then he was in Air Force uniform, tall, slim, very handsome, completely unrecognizable as the chubby little boy who had played with me in the pool. Three weeks after this meeting I heard that he had been killed in an air crash. Sweet Dal . . . I feel you are close to me now . . . I want to remember you exactly as you were when we first met. Here is my diary for 1951 (this diary formed the nucleus of my first novel, The Room on the Roof), when I was sixteen and you thirteen or fourteen:

  September 7: ‘Do you like elephants?’ Somi asked me.

  ‘Yes, when they are tame.’

  ‘That’s all right, then. Daljit!’ he called. ‘You can come up. Ruskin likes elephants.’

  Dal is not exactly an elephant. He is one of us.

  He is fat, oh, yes he is fat, but it is his good nature that is so like an elephant’s. His fatness is not grotesque or awkward; it is a very pleasant plumpness, and nothing could suit him better. If Dal were thin he would be a failure.

  His eyes are bright and round, full of mischievousness and a sort of grumpy gaiety.

  And what of the pool?

  I looked for it, after an interval of more than thirty years, but couldn’t find it. I found the ravine, and the bed of shingle, but there was no water. The stream had changed its course, just as we had changed ours.

  I turned away in disappointment, and with a dull ache in my heart. It was cruel of the pool to disappear; it was the cruelty of time. But I hadn’t gone far when I heard the sound of rushing water, and the shouting of children; and pushing my way through the jungle, I found another stream and another pool and about half-a-dozen children splashing about in the water.

  They did not see me, and I kept in the shadow of the trees and watched them play. But I didn’t really see them. I was seeing Somi and Daljit and the lazy old buffaloes, and I stood there for almost an hour, a disembodied spirit, romping again in the shallows of our secret pool. Nothing had really changed. Time is like that.

  Death of a Familiar

  When I learnt from a mutual acquaintance that my friend Sunil had been killed, I could not help feeling a little surprised, even shocked. Had Sunil killed somebody, it would not have surprised me in the least; he did not greatly value the lives of others. But for him to have been the victim was a sad reflection of his rapid decline.

  He was twenty-one at the time of his death. Two friends of his had killed him, stabbing him several times with their knives. Their motive was said to have been revenge. Apparently he had seduced their wives. They had invited him to a bar in Meerut, had plied him with country liquor, and had then accompanied him out into the cold air of a December night. It was drizzling a little. Near the bridge over the canal, one of his companions seized him from behind, while the other plunged a knife first into his stomach and then into his chest. When Sunil slumped forward, the other friend stabbed him in the back. A passing cyclist saw the little group, heard a cry and a groan, saw a blade flash in the light from his lamp. He pedalled furiously into town, burst into the kotwali and roused the sergeant on duty. Accompanied by two constables, they ran to the bridge but found the area deserted. It was only as the rising sun drew an open wound across the sky that they found Sunil’s body on the canal bank, his head and shoulders on the sand, his legs in running water.

  The bar keeper was able to describe Sunil’s companions, and they were arrested that same morning in their homes. They had not found time to get rid of their blood-soaked clothes. As they were not known to me, I took very little interest in the proceedings against them; but I understand that they have appealed against their sentences of life imprisonment.

  I was in Delhi at the time of the murder, and it was almost a year since I had last seen Sunil. We had both lived in Shahganj and had left the place for jobs; I to work in a newspaper office, he in a paper factory owned by an uncle. It had been hoped that he wo
uld in time acquire a sense of responsibility and some stability of character. But I had known Sunil for over two years, and in that time it had been made abundantly clear that he had not been born to fit in with the conventions. And as for character, his had the stability of a grasshopper. He was forever in search of new adventures and sensations, and this appetite of his for every novelty led him into some awkward situations.

  He was a product of Partition, of the frontier provinces, of Anglo-Indian public schools, of films Indian and American, of medieval India, knights in armour, hippies, drugs, sex magazines and the subtropical Terai. Had he lived in the time of the Moguls, he might have governed a province with saturnine and spectacular success. Being born into the twentieth century, he was but a juvenile delinquent.

  It must be said to his credit that he was a delinquent of charm and originality. I realized this when I first saw him, sitting on the wall of the football stadium, his long legs—looking even longer and thinner because of the tight trousers he wore—dangling over the wall, his chappals trailing in the dust of the road, while his white bush-shirt lay open, unbuttoned, showing his smooth brown chest. He had a smile on his long face, which, with its high cheekbones, gave his cheeks a cavernous look, an impression of unrequited hunger.

  We were both watching the wrestling. Two practice bouts were in progress—one between two thin, undernourished boys, and the other between the master of the akhara and a bearded Sikh who drove trucks for a living. They struggled in the soft mud of the wrestling pit, their well-oiled bodies glistening in the sunlight that filtered through a massive banyan tree. I had been standing near the akhara for a few minutes when I became conscious of the young man’s gaze. When I turned round to look at him, he smiled satanically.

  ‘Are you a wrestler, too?’ he asked.

  ‘Do I look like one?’ I countered.