Collected Short Stories

by Ruskin Bond

  For a few moments Sher Dil had Phambiri almost helpless, but Phambiri wriggled out of a crushing grip, and using his legs once again, sent Sher Dil rocketing across the akhara. But Sher Dil landed on his belly, and even with Phambiri on top of him, it wasn’t victory.

  Nothing happened for several minutes, and the crowd became restless and shouted for more action. Phambiri thought of twisting his opponent’s ear but he realized that he might get disqualified for doing that, so he restrained himself. He relaxed his grip slightly, and this gave Sher Dil a chance to heave himself up and send Phambiri spinning across the akhara. Phambiri was still in a sitting position when the other took a flying leap at him. But Phambiri dived forward, taking his opponent between the legs, and then rising, flung him backwards with a resounding thud. Sher Dil was helpless, and Phambiri sat on his opponent’s chest to remove all doubts as to who was the winner. Only when the applause of the spectators told him that he had won did he rise and leave the ring.

  Accompanied by his proud father, Phambiri accepted the prize money, thirty rupees, and then went in search of a tap. After he had washed the oil and mud from his body, he put on fresh clothes. Then, putting his arms around Vijay and Sita, he said, ‘You have brought me luck, both of you. Now let us celebrate!’ And he led the way to the sweet shops.

  They ate syrupy rasgollas (made from milk and sugar) and almond-filled fudge, and little pies filled with minced meat, and washed everything down with a fizzy orange drink.

  ‘Now I will buy each of you a small present,’ said Phambiri. He bought a bright blue sports shirt for Vijay. He bought a new hookah bowl for his father. And he took Sita to a stall where dolls were sold, and asked her to choose one.

  There were all kinds of dolls—cheap plastic dolls, and beautiful dolls made by hand, dressed in the traditional costumes of different regions of the country. Sita was immediately reminded of Mumta, her own rag doll, who had been made at home with Grandmother’s help. And she remembered Grandmother, and Grandmother’s sewing machine, and the home that had been swept away, and the tears started to her eyes.

  The dolls seemed to smile at Sita. The shopkeeper held them up one by one, and they appeared to dance, to twirl their wide skirts, to stamp their jingling feet on the counter. Each doll made her own special appeal to Sita. Each one wanted her love.

  ‘Which one will you have?’ asked Phambiri. ‘Choose the prettiest, never mind the price!’

  But Sita could say nothing. She could only shake her head. No doll, no matter how beautiful, could replace Mumta. She would never keep a doll again. That part of her life was over.

  So instead of a doll Phambiri bought her bangles—coloured glass bangles which slipped easily on Sita’s thin wrists. And then he took them into a temporary cinema, a large shed made of corrugated tin sheets.

  Vijay had been to a cinema before—the towns were full of cinemas—but for Sita it was another new experience. Many things that were common enough for other boys and girls were strange and new for a girl who had spent nearly all her life on a small island in the middle of a big river.

  As they found seats, a curtain rolled up and a white sheet came into view. The babble of talk dwindled into silence. Sita became aware of a whirring noise somewhere not far behind her. But, before she could turn her head to see what it was, the sheet became a rectangle of light and colour. It came to life. People moved and spoke. A story unfolded.

  But, long afterwards, all that Sita could remember of her first film was a jumble of images and incidents. A train in danger, the audience murmuring with anxiety, a bridge over a river (but smaller than hers), the bridge being blown to pieces, the engine plunging into the river, people struggling in the water, a woman rescued by a man who immediately embraced her, the lights coming on again, and the audience rising slowly and drifting out of the theatre, looking quite unconcerned and even satisfied. All those people struggling in the water were now quite safe, back in the little black box in the projection room.

  Catching the Train

  And now a real engine, a steam engine belching smoke and fire, was on its way towards Sita.

  She stood with Vijay on the station platform along with over a hundred other people waiting for the Shahganj train.

  The platform was littered with the familiar bedrolls (or holdalls) without which few people in India ever travel. On these rolls sat women, children, great-aunts and great-uncles, grandfathers, grandmothers and grandchildren, while the more active adults hovered at the edge of the platform, ready to leap on to the train as soon as it arrived and reserve a space for the family. In India, people do not travel alone if they can help it. The whole family must be taken along—especially if the reason for the journey is a marriage, a pilgrimage, or simply a visit to friends or relations.

  Moving among the piles of bedding and luggage were coolies; vendors of magazines, sweetmeats, tea and betel-leaf preparations; also stray dogs, stray people and sometimes a stray stationmaster. The cries of the vendors mingled with the general clamour of the station and the shunting of a steam engine in the yard. ‘Tea, hot tea!’, ‘Fresh limes!’ Sweets, papads, hot stuff, cold drinks, mangoes, toothpowder, photos of film stars, bananas, balloons, wooden toys! The platform had become a bazaar. What a blessing for those vendors that trains ran late and that people had to wait, and waiting, drank milky tea, bought toys for children, cracked peanut shells, munched bananas and chose little presents for the friends or relations on whom they were going to descend very shortly.

  But there came the train!

  The signal was down. The crowd surged forward, swamping an assistant stationmaster. Vijay took Sita by the hand and led her forward. If they were too slow, they would not get a place on the crowded train. In front of them was a tall, burly, bearded Sikh from the Punjab. Vijay decided it would be a wise move to stand behind him and move forward at the same time.

  The station bell clanged and a big, puffing, black steam engine appeared in the distance. A stray dog, with a lifetime’s experience of trains, darted away across the railway lines. As the train came alongside the platform, doors opened, window shutters fell, eager faces appeared in the openings, and even before the train had come to a stop, people were trying to get in or out.

  For a few moments there was chaos. The crowd surged backwards and forwards. No one could get out. No one could get in! Fifty people were leaving the train, a hundred were catching it! No one wanted to give way. But every problem has a solution somewhere, provided one looks for it. And this particular problem was solved by a man climbing out of a window. Others followed his example. The pressure at the doors eased and people started squeezing into the compartments.

  Vijay stayed close to the Sikh who forged a way through the throng. The Sikh reached an open doorway and was through. Vijay and Sita were through! They found somewhere to sit and were then able to look down at the platform, into the whirlpool and enjoy themselves a little. The vendors had abandoned the people on the platform and had started selling their wares at the windows. Hukam Singh, after buying their tickets, had given Vijay and Sita a rupee to spend on the way. Vijay bought a freshly split coconut, and Sita bought a comb for her hair. She had never bothered with her hair before.

  They saw a worried man rushing along the platform searching for his family; but they were already in the compartment, having beaten him to it, and eagerly helped him in at the door. A whistle shrilled and they were off! A couple of vendors made last-minute transactions, then jumped from the slow-moving train. One man did this expertly with a tray of teacups balanced on one hand.

  The train gathered speed.

  ‘What will happen to all those people still on the platform?’ asked Sita anxiously. ‘Will they all be left behind?’

  She put her head out of the window and looked back at the receding platform. It was strangely empty. Only the vendors and the coolies and the stray dogs and the dishevelled railway staff were in evidence. A miracle had happened. No one—absolutely no one—had been left behind!
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br />   Then the train was rushing through the night, the engine throwing out bright sparks that danced away like fireflies. Sometimes the train had to slow down, as flood water had weakened the embankments. Sometimes it stopped at brightly lit stations.

  When the train started again and moved on into the dark countryside, Sita would stare through the glass of the window, at the bright lights of a town or the quiet glow of village lamps. She thought of Phambiri and Hukam Singh, and wondered if she would ever see them again. Already they were like people in a fairy tale, met briefly on the road and never seen again.

  There was no room in the compartment in which to lie down; but Sita soon fell asleep, her head resting against Vijay’s shoulder.

  A Meeting and a Parting

  Sita did not know where to look for her grandfather. For an hour she and Vijay wandered through the Shahganj bazaar, growing hungrier all the time. They had no money left and they were hot and thirsty.

  Outside the bazaar, near a small temple, they saw a tree in which several small boys were helping themselves to the sour, purple fruit.

  It did not take Vijay long to join the boys in the tree. They did not object to his joining them. It wasn’t their tree, anyway.

  Sita stood beneath the tree while Vijay threw the jamuns down to her. They soon had a small pile of the fruit. They were on the road again, their faces stained with purple juice.

  They were asking the way to the Shahganj hospital, when Sita caught a glimpse of her grandfather on the road.

  At first the old man did not recognize her. He was walking stiffly down the road, looking straight ahead, and would have walked right past the dusty, dishevelled girl, had she not charged straight at his thin, shaky legs and clasped him round the waist.

  ‘Sita!’ he cried, when he had recovered his wind and his balance. ‘Why are you here? How did you get off the island? I have been very worried—it has been bad, these last two days . . .’

  ‘Is Grandmother all right?’ asked Sita.

  But even as she spoke, she knew that Grandmother was no longer with them. The dazed look in the old man’s eyes told her as much. She wanted to cry—not for Grandmother, who could suffer no more, but for Grandfather, who looked so helpless and bewildered. She did not want him to be unhappy. She forced back her tears and took his gnarled and trembling hand, and with Vijay walking beside her, led the old man down the crowded street.

  She knew, then, that it would be on her shoulder that Grandfather would lean in the years to come.

  They decided to remain in Shahganj for a couple of days, staying at a dharamsala—a wayside rest house—until the flood waters subsided. Grandfather still had two of the goats—it had not been necessary to sell more than one—but he did not want to take the risk of rowing a crowded boat across to the island. The river was still fast and dangerous.

  But Vijay could not stay with Sita any longer.

  ‘I must go now,’ he said. ‘My father and mother will be very worried and they will not know where to look for me. In a day or two the water will go down, and you will be able to go back to your home.’

  ‘Perhaps the island has gone forever,’ said Sita.

  ‘It will be there,’ said Vijay. ‘It is a rocky island. Bad for crops but good for a house!’

  ‘Will you come?’ asked Sita.

  What she really wanted to say was, ‘Will you come to see me?’ but she was too shy to say it; and besides, she wasn’t sure if Vijay would want to see her again.

  ‘I will come,’ said Vijay. ‘That is, if my father gets me another boat!’

  As he turned to go, he gave her his flute.

  ‘Keep it for me,’ he said. ‘I will come for it one day.’ When he saw her hesitate, he smiled and said, ‘It is a good flute!’

  The Return

  There was more rain, but the worst was over, and when Grandfather and Sita returned to the island, the river was no longer in spate.

  Grandfather could hardly believe his eyes when he saw that the tree had disappeared—the tree that had seemed as permanent as the island, as much a part of his life as the river itself had been. He marvelled at Sita’s escape.

  ‘It was the tree that saved you,’ he said.

  ‘And the boy,’ said Sita.

  ‘Yes, and the boy.’

  She thought about Vijay and wondered if she would ever see him again. Would he, like Phambiri and Hukam Singh, be one of those people who arrived as though out of a fairy tale and then disappeared silently and mysteriously? She did not know it then, but some of the moving forces of our lives are meant to touch us briefly and go their way . . .

  And because Grandmother was no longer with them, life on the island was quite different. The evenings were sad and lonely.

  But there was a lot of work to be done, and Sita did not have much time to think of Grandmother or Vijay or the world she had glimpsed during her journey.

  For three nights they slept under a crude shelter made out of gunny bags. During the day, Sita helped Grandfather rebuild the mud hut. Once again they used the big rock for support.

  The trunk which Sita had packed so carefully had not been swept off the island, but water had got into it and the food and clothing had been spoilt. But Grandfather’s hookah had been saved, and in the evenings, after work was done and they had eaten their light meal which Sita prepared, he would smoke with a little of his old contentment and tell Sita about other floods which he had experienced as a boy. And he would tell her about the wrestling matches he had won, and the kites he had flown.

  Sita planted a mango seed in the same spot where the peepul tree had stood. It would be many years before it grew into a big tree, but Sita liked to imagine herself sitting in the branches, picking the mangoes straight from the tree and feasting on them all day.

  Grandfather was more particular about making a vegetable garden, putting down peas, carrots, gram and mustard.

  One day, when most of the hard work had been done and the new hut was ready, Sita took the flute which had been given to her by Vijay, and walked down to the water’s edge and tried to play it. But all she could produce were a few broken notes, and even the goats paid no attention to her music.

  Sometimes Sita thought she saw a boat coming down the river, and she would run to meet it; but usually there was no boat, or if there was, it belonged to a stranger or to another fisherman. And so she stopped looking out for boats.

  Slowly, the rains came to an end. The flood waters had receded, and in the villages people were beginning to till the land again and sow crops for the winter months. There were more cattle fairs and wrestling matches. The days were warm and sultry. The water in the river was no longer muddy, and one evening Grandfather brought home a huge mahseer, and Sita made it into a delicious curry.

  Deep River

  Grandfather sat outside the hut, smoking his hookah. Sita was at the far end of the island, spreading clothes on the rocks to dry. One of the goats had followed her. It was the friendlier of the two, and often followed Sita about the island. She had made it a necklace of coloured beads.

  She sat down on a smooth rock, and as she did so, she noticed a small bright object in the sand near her feet. She picked it up. It was a little wooden toy—a coloured peacock, God Krishna’s favourite bird—it must have come down on the river and been swept ashore on the island. Some of the paint had been rubbed off; but for Sita, who had no toys, it was a great find.

  There was a soft footfall behind her. She looked round, and there was Vijay, barefoot, standing over her and smiling.

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t come,’ said Sita.

  ‘There was much work in my village. Did you keep my flute?’

  ‘Yes, but I cannot play it properly.’

  ‘I will teach you,’ said Vijay.

  He sat down beside her and they cooled their feet in the water, which was clear now, taking in the blue of the sky. They could see the sand and the pebbles of the riverbed.

  ‘Sometimes the river is angry and sometimes i
t is kind,’ said Sita.

  ‘We are part of the river,’ said Vijay.

  It was a good river, deep and strong, beginning in the mountains and ending in the sea.

  Along its banks, for hundreds of miles, lived millions of people, and Sita was only one small girl among them, and no one had ever heard of her, no one knew her—except for the old man, and the boy, and the water that was blue and white and wonderful.

  The Tunnel

  It was almost noon, and the jungle was very still, very silent. Heat waves shimmered along the railway embankment where it cut a path through the tall evergreen trees. The railway lines were two straight black serpents disappearing into the tunnel in the hillside.

  Ranji stood near the cutting, waiting for the midday train. It wasn’t a station and he wasn’t catching a train. He was waiting so he could watch the steam engine come roaring out of the tunnel.

  He had cycled out of town and taken the jungle path until he had come to a small village. He had left the cycle there, and walked over a low, scrub-covered hill and down to the tunnel exit.

  Now he looked up. He had heard, in the distance, the shrill whistle of the engine. He couldn’t see anything, because the train was approaching from the other side of the hill, but presently a sound like distant thunder came from the tunnel, and he knew the train was coming through.

  A second or two later the steam engine shot out of the tunnel, snorting and puffing like some green, black and gold dragon, some beautiful monster out of Ranji’s dreams. Showering sparks right and left, it roared a challenge to the jungle.

  Instinctively Ranji stepped back a few paces. Waves of hot steam struck him in the face. Even the trees seemed to flinch from the noise and heat. And then the train had gone, leaving only a plume of smoke to drift lazily over the tall shisham trees.