by Ruskin Bond
‘But what’s in it?’ persisted Wang. ‘Of what is it made?’
‘Of love,’ said his wife. ‘It is recommended in the book of Lu Fei. He says it is the best of all remedies, and cannot fail.’ She held the bowl to her husband’s lips.
He drank hurriedly to get it over with, and only when he was halfway through the bowl did he suspect that something was wrong. It was his wife’s terrible condition that made him sit up in bed, thrusting the bowl away. A terrible suspicion formed in his mind.
‘Do not deceive me,’ he demanded. ‘Tell me at once—what is this potion made of?’
She told him then; and when Wang Chei heard her confession, he knelt before his wife who had by now collapsed on the floor. Seizing the hurricane lantern, he held it to her. Her body was wrapped in a towel, but from her left breast, the region of the heart, blood was oozing through the heavy cloth.
She had read in the book of Lu Fei that only her own flesh and blood could cure her husband; and these she had unflinchingly taken from her soft and generous bosom.
You were right, Lu Fei, old sage. What more potent ingredients are there than love and compassion?
The Story of Madhu
I met little Madhu several years ago, when I lived alone in an obscure town near the Himalayan foothills. I was in my late twenties then, and my outlook on life was still quite romantic; the cynicism that was to come with the thirties had not yet set in.
I preferred the solitude of the small district town to the kind of social life I might have found in the cities; and in my books, my writing and the surrounding hills, there was enough for my pleasure and occupation.
On summer mornings I would often sit beneath an old mango tree, with a notebook or a sketch pad on my knees. The house which I had rented (for a very nominal sum) stood on the outskirts of the town, and a large tank and a few poor houses could be seen from the garden wall. A narrow public pathway passed under the low wall.
One morning, while I sat beneath the mango tree, I saw a young girl of about nine, wearing torn clothes, darting about on the pathway and along the high banks of the tank.
Sometimes she stopped to look at me; and, when I showed that I noticed her, she felt encouraged and gave me a shy, fleeting smile. The next day I discovered her leaning over the garden wall, following my actions as I paced up and down on the grass.
In a few days an acquaintance had been formed. I began to take the girl’s presence for granted, and even to look for her, and she, in turn, would linger about on the pathway until she saw me come out of the house.
One day, as she passed the gate, I called her to me.
‘What is your name?’ I asked. ‘And where do you live?’
‘Madhu,’ she said, brushing back her long, untidy black hair and smiling at me from large black eyes. She pointed across the road: ‘I live with my grandmother.’
‘Is she very old?’ I asked.
Madhu nodded confidingly and whispered: ‘A hundred years . . .’
‘We will never be that old,’ I said. She was very slight and frail, like a flower growing in a rock, vulnerable to wind and rain.
I discovered later that the old lady was not her grandmother but a childless woman who had found the baby girl on the banks of the tank. Madhu’s real parentage was unknown, but the wizened old woman had, out of compassion, brought up the child as her own.
My gate once entered, Madhu included the garden in her circle of activities. She was there every morning, chasing butterflies, stalking squirrels and mina, her voice brimming with laughter, her slight figure flitting about between the trees.
Sometimes, but not often, I gave her a toy or a new dress; and one day she put aside her shyness and brought me a present of a nosegay, made up of marigolds and wild blue cotton flowers.
‘For you,’ she said, and put the flowers in my lap.
‘They are very beautiful,’ I said, picking out the brightest marigold and putting it in her hair. ‘But they are not as beautiful as you.’
More than a year passed before I began to take more than a mildly patronizing interest in Madhu.
It occurred to me after some time that she should be taught to read and write, and I asked a local teacher to give her lessons in the garden for an hour every day. She clapped her hands with pleasure at the prospect of what was to be for her a fascinating new game.
In a few weeks Madhu was surprising us with her capacity for absorbing knowledge. She always came to me to repeat the lessons of the day, and pestered me with questions on a variety of subjects. How big was the world? And were the stars really like our world? Or were they the sons and daughters of the sun and the moon?
My interest in Madhu deepened, and my life, so empty till then, became imbued with a new purpose. As she sat on the grass beside me, reading aloud, or listening to me with a look of complete trust and belief, all the love that had been lying dormant in me during my years of self-exile surfaced in a sudden surge of tenderness.
Three years glided away imperceptibly, and at the age of thirteen Madhu was on the verge of blossoming into a woman. I began to feel a certain responsibility towards her.
It was dangerous, I knew, to allow a child so pretty to live almost alone and unprotected, and to run unrestrained about the grounds. And in a censorious society she would be made to suffer if she spent too much time in my company.
She could see no need for any separation but I decided to send her to a mission school in the next district, where I could visit her from time to time.
‘But why?’ said Madhu. ‘I can learn more from you and from the teacher who comes. I am so happy here.’
‘You will meet other girls and make many friends,’ I told her. ‘I will come to see you. And, when you come home, we will be even happier. It is good that you should go.’
It was the middle of June, a hot and oppressive month in the Siwaliks. Madhu had expressed her readiness to go to school, and when, one evening, I did not see her as usual in the garden, I thought nothing of it; but the next day I was informed that she had fever and could not leave the house.
Illness was something Madhu had not known before, and for this reason I felt afraid. I hurried down the path which led to the old woman’s cottage. It seemed strange that I had never once entered it during my long friendship with Madhu.
It was a humble mud hut, the ceiling just high enough to enable me to stand upright, the room dark but clean. Madhu was lying on a string cot, exhausted by fever, her eyes closed, her long hair unkempt, one small hand hanging over the side.
It struck me then how little, during all this time, I had thought of her physical comforts. There was no chair; I knelt down and took her hand in mine. I knew, from the fierce heat of her body, that she was seriously ill.
She recognized my touch, and a smile passed across her face before she opened her eyes. She held on to my hand, then laid it across her cheek.
I looked round the little room in which she had grown up. It had scarcely an article of furniture apart from two string cots, on one of which the old woman sat and watched us, her white, wizened head nodding like a puppet’s.
In a corner lay Madhu’s little treasures. I recognized among them the presents which, during the past four years, I had given her. She had kept everything. On her dark arm she still wore a small piece of ribbon which I had playfully tied there about a year ago. She had given her heart, even before she was conscious of possessing one, to a stranger unworthy of the gift.
As the evening drew on, a gust of wind blew open the door of the dark room, and a gleam of sunshine streamed in, lighting up a portion of the wall. It was the time when every evening she would join me under the mango tree. She had been quiet for almost an hour, and now a slight pressure of her hand drew my eyes back to her face.
‘What will we do now?’ she said. ‘When will you send me to school?’
‘Not for a long time. First you must get well and strong. That is all that matters.’
She didn’t seem to hear me. I think she knew she
was dying, but she did not resent it happening.
‘Who will read to you under the tree?’ she went on. ‘Who will look after you?’ she asked, with the solicitude of a grown woman.
‘You will, Madhu. You are grown up now. There will be no one else to look after me.’
The old woman was standing at my shoulder. A hundred years—and little Madhu was slipping away. The woman took Madhu’s hand from mine, and laid it gently down. I sat by the cot a little longer, and then I rose to go, all the loneliness in the world pressing upon my heart.
My First Love
Ayah, my childhood governess, was my first love. She was thirty and I was six. She was a tall, broad-limbed woman, and in my view extremely handsome. The west coast fishing community to which she belonged, and the Arab and African blood she had inherited, were partly responsible for her magnificent build and colourful personality. Occasionally when one of my parents’ guests called her ugly without really taking a proper look at her, I would exclaim, ‘No, she is beautiful!’ The vehemence of my reply would disconcert the guests and embarrass my parents.
We lived in a small Indian state on the Kathiawar coast, where my father had a job as guardian–tutor to the maharaja’s children. He conducted a small school in a corner of the palace, and was fully occupied most of the day. My mother would frequently be visiting other Anglo-Indian families. And I, being considered too much of a menace to be taken to other people’s houses, was left in the charge of Ayah.
Most children who saw Ayah drew away from her in fright. Her size, her wrestler’s arms, her broad quivering hips, were at first disconcerting to a child. She had thick, crinkly hair and teeth stained red with the juice of innumerable paan leaves. Her hands were rough and heavy, as I knew from the number of times she had brought them down on my bottom. When she was angry, her face resembled a menacing thundercloud; but when she smiled with pleasure it was as though the sun had just emerged, lighting up her features with a great dazzle. Ayah frequently beat me, but soon afterwards she would be overcome by remorse, and then she would take me in her strong arms and plant heavy wet kisses on my eyes and cheeks and mouth. She was in love with my soft white skin, and often made believe that I was her own child, pressing my face to her great breasts, bathing and dressing me with infinite tenderness, and defending me against everyone, including my parents.
Sometimes, when my parents were out, I would insist that she bathe with me. We would wallow together in the long, marble tub: I, small, pink and podgy; and Ayah like a benevolent hippopotamus, causing the bath tub to overflow. She scrubbed and soaped me, while I relaxed and enjoyed the sensation of her rough hands moving over my back and tummy. And then, before she could heave herself out of the tub, I would leap from the water and charge out of the bathroom without my clothes. Ayah would come flapping after me, a sheet tied hurriedly about her waist and we would race through the rooms until finally she caught up with me, gave me several resounding slaps, watched me burst into tears, and then broke down herself and took me to her comfortable bosom.
Ayah taught me many things. One of these was the eating of paan—a betel leaf containing lime, finely cut areca nut, and some cardamom.
It was the scarlet tinge in the mouth which came from eating paan that appealed most to me. I did not care much for the taste, which was bitter, but I was fascinated by the red juice which Ayah was able to spit so accurately about the garden. When my parents were out, she would share her paan with me, and we would sit in the kitchen and gossip with the cook. Before my parents came home, Ayah would make me rinse my mouth with warm water, and with her rough fingers she would scrub my teeth clean.
A number of snakes lived in the old walls surrounding both our bungalow and the palace grounds. They seldom ventured into the house, but when they did, Ayah was against killing them. She always maintained that they would not harm us provided we left them alone.
She once told me the story of a snake who married a poor but beautiful girl. At first the girl very naturally did not wish to marry the snake, whom she had met in a forest. But the snake insisted saying, ‘I will kill you if you refuse,’ which, of course, left her with no alternative. Then the snake led his bride away, and took her to a great treasure. ‘I was a prince in my former life,’ explained the snake, ‘and this is my treasure. Now it is all yours.’ And then he very gallantly disappeared.
‘Which goes to show that even snakes are good at heart,’ said Ayah.
Sometimes she would leave a saucer of milk beneath an old peepul tree, and once I saw a young cobra glide up to the saucer and finish the milk. When I told Ayah about this, she was a little perturbed, and said she had actually left the milk out for the spirits who lived in the peepul tree.
‘I haven’t seen any spirits in the tree,’ I told her.
‘And I hope you never will, my son,’ said Ayah. ‘But they are there all the same. If you happen to be standing beneath the tree after dark, and feel like yawning, don’t forget to snap your fingers in front of your mouth, otherwise the spirit will jump down your throat.’
‘And what if it does?’ I asked.
For a moment Ayah was at a loss for an answer; then she brightened and said, ‘It will probably upset your tummy.’
The peepul was a cool tree to sit beneath. Its heart-shaped leaves spun round in the faintest breeze, sending currents of cool air down from its branches. The leaf itself was likened by Ayah to the perfect male torso—a broad chest tapering down to a very slim waist—and she told me I ought to be built that way when I grew up.
One day we strayed into the ruined palace, which had turrets and towers and winding passageways. And there we found a room with many small windows, each windowpane set with coloured glass. I was often to spend hours in this room, gazing out at the palace and lake and gardens through the coloured windowpanes. When the sun came through the windows, the entire room was suffused with beams of red and gold and green and purple light, playing on the walls and on my face and clothes.
The state had a busy little port, and Arab dhows sailed to and fro across the Gulf of Kutch. My father was friendly with the captain of a steamer making trips to Aden and back. The captain was a jovial, whisky-drinking Scotsman, who stuffed me with chocolates and suggested that I join the crew of his ship. The idea appealed to me, and I made elaborate plans for the voyage, only to discover one day when I went down to the docks that the ship had sailed away forever.
Ayah was more dependable. She hated seeing me disappointed. When I told her about the treachery of Captain MacWhirr she consoled me with the promise of a ride in a tonga—a two-wheeled horse-drawn buggy. Apparently she had a friend who plied a tonga in the bazaar.
He came the next day, a young man sporting an orange waistcoat and a magnificent moustache. His name was Bansi Lal. Ayah put me on the front seat beside him, while she sat at the back to try and maintain some sort of equilibrium. We went out of the gate at a brisk trot, but as soon as we were on the open road circling the lake, Bansi Lal lashed his horse into a gallop, and we went tearing along the road at a furious and exhilarating pace. Ayah shouted to her friend to slow down, and I shouted to him to go faster. He grinned at both of us while a devil danced in his eyes, and he cracked his whip and called endearments to both Ayah and his horse.
When finally we reached open country, he slowed down and brought the tonga to rest in a mango grove. Ayah struggled out and, after berating Bansi Lal, sank down on the grass while I went off to explore the mango grove. The fruit on the trees was as yet unripe, but the crows and minas had already begun to feast on the mangoes. I wandered about for some time, returning to the clearing by a different route to find Ayah and Bansi Lal embracing each other. Ayah had her back to me, but the tonga driver had a rapt, rather funny expression on his face. This changed to a look of confusion when he saw me watching them with undisguised curiosity, and he got up hurriedly, fumbling with his pyjama strings. I threw myself gaily upon Ayah and asked her what she had been doing; but for once she gave me an evasive re
ply. I don’t think the incident had any immediate effect on my innocence, but as I grew older I found myself looking back on it with a certain amount of awe.
Both Ayah and I—for different reasons, as it turned out—began looking forward to our weekly tonga rides. Bansi Lal took us to some very lonely places—scrub jungle or ruins or abandoned brick kilns—and he and Ayah were extraordinarily tolerant of where I wandered during these excursions.
But the tonga rides really meant the end of my affair with Ayah. One day she informed my parents that she intended marrying Bansi Lal and going away with him. While my parents considered this a perfectly natural desire on Ayah’s part, I looked upon it as an act of base treachery. For several days I went about the house in a rebellious and sulky mood, refusing to speak to Ayah no matter how much she coaxed and petted me.
On Ayah’s last day with us, Bansi Lal arrived in his tonga to take her away. He had painted the woodwork, scrubbed his horse down, and changed his orange waistcoat for a green one. He gave me a cheerful salaam, but I scowled darkly at him from the veranda steps, and he looked guiltily away.
Ayah tossed her bedding and few belongings into the tonga, and then came to say goodbye to me. But I had hidden myself in the jasmine bushes, and though she called and looked for me, I would not emerge. Sadly she climbed into the tonga, weighing it down at the back. Bansi Lal cracked his whip, shouted to his horse, and the tonga went rattling away down the gravel path. Ayah still looked to left and right, hoping to see me; and at last, unable to bear my misery any longer, I came out from the bushes and ran after the tonga, waving to her. Bansi reined in his horse, and Ayah got down and gathered me up in her great arms; and when the tonga finally took her away, there was a dazzling smile on her sweet and gentle face—the face of the lover whom I was never to see again . . .
The Kitemaker
There was but one tree in the street known as Gali Ram Nath— an ancient banyan that had grown through the cracks of an abandoned mosque—and little Ali’s kite was caught in its branches. The boy, barefoot and clad only in a torn shirt, ran along the cobbled stones of the narrow street to where his grandfather sat nodding dreamily in the sunshine in their back courtyard.