Collected Short Stories

by Ruskin Bond

  A panther’s or tiger’s claws are considered to be lucky charms.

  ‘I will take only three claws,’ said Bisnu. ‘One each for my mother and sister, and one for myself. You may give the others to Sanjay and Chittru and the smaller children.’

  As the sun set, a big fire was lit in the middle of the village of Manjari and the people gathered round it, singing and laughing. Kalam Singh killed his fattest goat and there was meat for everyone.

  IX

  Bisnu was on his way home. He had just handed in his first paper, arithmetic, which he had found quite easy. Tomorrow it would be algebra, and when he got home he would have to practice square roots and cube roots and fractional coefficients.

  Mr Nautiyal and the entire class had been happy that he had been able to sit for the exams. He was also a hero to them for his part in killing the panther. The story had spread through the villages with the rapidity of a forest fire, a fire which was now raging in Kemptee town.

  When he walked past the hospital, he was whistling cheerfully. Dr Taylor waved to him from the veranda steps.

  ‘How is Sanjay now?’ she asked.

  ‘He is well,’ said Bisnu.

  ‘And your mother and sister?’

  ‘They are well,’ said Bisnu.

  ‘Are you going to get yourself a new dog?’

  ‘I am thinking about it,’ said Bisnu. ‘At present I have a baby goat—I am teaching it to swim!’

  He started down the path to the valley. Dark clouds had gathered and there was a rumble of thunder. A storm was imminent.

  ‘Wait for me!’ shouted Sarru, running down the path behind Bisnu, his milk pails clanging against each other. He fell into step beside Bisnu.

  ‘Well, I hope we don’t have any more maneaters for some time,’ he said. ‘I’ve lost a lot of money by not being able to take milk up to Kemptee.’

  ‘We should be safe as long as a shikari doesn’t wound another panther. There was an old bullet wound in the maneater’s thigh. That’s why it couldn’t hunt in the forest. The deer were too fast for it.’

  ‘Is there a new postman yet?’

  ‘He starts tomorrow. A cousin of Mela Ram’s.’

  When they reached the parting of their ways, it had begun to rain a little.

  ‘I must hurry,’ said Sarru. ‘It’s going to get heavier any minute.’

  ‘I feel like getting wet,’ said Bisnu. ‘This time it’s the monsoon, I’m sure.’

  Bisnu entered the forest on his own, and at the same time the rain came down in heavy opaque sheets. The trees shook in the wind and the langoors chattered with excitement.

  It was still pouring when Bisnu emerged from the forest, drenched to the skin. But the rain stopped suddenly, just as the village of Manjari came into view. The sun appeared through a rift in the clouds. The leaves and the grass gave out a sweet, fresh smell.

  Bisnu could see his mother and sister in the field transplanting the rice seedlings. The menfolk were driving the yoked oxen through the thin mud of the fields, while the children hung on to the oxen’s tails, standing on the plain wooden harrows, and with weird cries and shouts sending the animals almost at a gallop along the narrow terraces.

  Bisnu felt the urge to be with them, working in the fields. He ran down the path, his feet falling softly on the wet earth. Puja saw him coming and waved to him. She met him at the edge of the field.

  ‘How did you find your paper today?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, it was easy.’ Bisnu slipped his hand into hers and together they walked across the field. Puja felt something smooth and hard against her fingers, and before she could see what Bisnu was doing, he had slipped a pair of bangles on her wrist.

  ‘I remembered,’ he said with a sense of achievement.

  Puja looked at the bangles and burst out: ‘But they are blue, Bhai, and I wanted red and gold bangles!’ And then, when she saw him looking crestfallen, she hurried on: ‘But they are very pretty and you did remember . . . Actually, they’re just as nice as red and gold bangles! Come into the house when you are ready. I have made something special for you.’

  ‘I am coming,’ said Bisnu, turning towards the house. ‘You don’t know how hungry a man gets, walking five miles to reach home!’

  The Good Old Days

  I took Miss Mackenzie an offering of a tin of Malabar sardines, and so lessened the sharpness of her rebuke.

  ‘Another doctor’s visit, is it?’ she said, looking reproachfully at me over her spectacles. ‘I might have been dead all this time . . .’

  Miss Mackenzie, at eighty-five, did not show the least signs of dying. She was the oldest resident of the hill station. She lived in a small cottage halfway up a hill. The cottage, like Longfellow’s village of Attri, gave one the impression of having tried to get to the top of the hill and failed halfway up. It was hidden from the road by oaks and maples.

  ‘I’ve been away,’ I explained. ‘I had to go to Delhi for a fortnight. I hope you’ve been all right?’

  I wasn’t a relative of Miss Mackenzie’s, nor a very old friend; but she had the knack of making people feel they were somehow responsible for her.

  ‘I can’t complain. The weather’s been good, and the padre sent me some eggs.’

  She set great store on what was given to her in the way of food. Her pension of forty rupees a month only permitted a diet of dal and rice; but the thoughtfulness of people who knew her and the occasional gift parcel from England lent variety to her diet and frequently gave her a topic of conversation.

  ‘I’m glad you have some eggs,’ I said. ‘They’re four rupees a dozen now.’

  ‘Yes, I know. And there was a time when they were only six annas a dozen.’

  ‘About thirty years ago, I suppose.’

  ‘No, twenty-five. I remember, May Taylor’s eggs were always the best. She lived in Fairville—the old house near the raja’s estate.’

  ‘Did she have a poultry farm?’

  ‘Oh, no, just her own hens. Very ordinary hens too, not White Leghorns or Rhode Island Red—but they gave lovely eggs, she knew how to keep her birds healthy . . . May Taylor was a friend of mine. She didn’t supply eggs to just anybody, you know.’

  ‘Oh, naturally not. Miss Taylor’s dead now, I suppose?’

  ‘Oh, yes, quite dead. Her sister saw to that.’

  ‘Oh!’ I sensed a story. ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘Well, it was a bit of a mystery really. May and Charlotte never did get on with each other and it’s a wonder they agreed to live together. Even as children they used to fight. But Charlotte was always the spoilt one—prettier, you see. May, when I knew her, was thirty-five, a good woman if you know what I mean. She saw to the house and saw to the meals and she went to church like other respectable people and everyone liked her. But Charlotte was moody and bad-tempered. She kept to herself—always had done, since the parents died. And she was a little too fond of the bottle.’

  ‘Neither of them were married?’

  ‘No—I suppose that’s why they lived together. Though I’d rather live alone myself than put up with someone disagreeable. Still they were sisters. Charlotte had been a gay, young thing once, very popular with the soldiers at the convalescent home. She refused several offers of marriage and then when she thought it time to accept someone there were no more offers. She was almost thirty by then. That’s when she started drinking—heavily, I mean. Gin and brandy, mostly. It was cheap in those days. Gin, I think, was two rupees a bottle.’

  ‘What fun! I was born a generation too late.’

  ‘And a good thing, too. Or you’d probably have ended up as Charlotte did.’

  ‘Did she get delirium tremens?’

  ‘She did nothing of the sort. Charlotte had a strong constitution.’

  ‘And so have you, Miss Mackenzie, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  ‘I take a drop when I can afford it—’ She gave me a meaningful look. ‘Or when I’m offered . . .’

  ‘Did you sometimes
have a drink with Miss Taylor?’

  ‘I did not! I wouldn’t have been seen in her company. All over the place she was when she was drunk. Lost her powers of discrimination. She even took up with a barber! And then she fell down a khud one evening, and broke her ankle!’

  ‘Lucky it wasn’t her head.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t her own head she broke, more’s the pity, but her sister May’s—the poor, sweet thing.’

  ‘She broke her sister’s head, did she?’ I was intrigued. ‘Why, did May find out about the barber?’

  ‘Nobody knows what it was, but it may well have been something like that. Anyway, they had a terrible quarrel one night. Charlotte was drunk, and May, as usual, was admonishing her.’

  ‘Fatal,’ I said. ‘Never admonish a drunk.’

  Miss Mackenzie ignored me and carried on.

  ‘She said something about the vengeance of God falling on Charlotte’s head. But it was May’s head that was rent asunder. Charlotte flew into a sudden rage—she was given to these outbursts even when sober—and brought something heavy down on May’s skull. Charlotte never said what it was. It couldn’t have been a bottle, unless she swept up the broken pieces afterwards. It may have been a heavy—what writers sometimes call a blunt instrument.

  ‘When Charlotte saw what she had done, she went out of her mind. They found her two days later wandering about near some ruins, babbling a lot of nonsense about how she might have been married long ago if May hadn’t clung to her.’

  ‘Was she charged with murder?’

  ‘No, it was all hushed up. Charlotte was sent to the asylum at Ranchi. We never heard of her again. May was buried here. If you visit the old cemetery you’ll find her grave on the second tier, third from the left.’

  ‘I’ll look it up some time. It must have been an awful shock for those of you who knew the sisters.’

  ‘Yes, I was quite upset about it. I was very fond of May. And then, of course, the chickens were sold and I had to buy my eggs elsewhere and they were never so good. Still, those were the days, the good old days—when eggs were six annas a dozen and gin only two rupees a bottle!’

  Death of the Trees

  The peace and quiet of the Maplewood hillside disappeared forever one winter. The powers that be decided to build another new road into the mountains, and the PWD saw fit to take it right past the cottage, about six feet from the large window which had overlooked the forest.

  In my journal I wrote:

  Already they have felled most of the trees. The walnut was one of the first to go. A tree I had lived with for over ten years, watching it grow just as I had watched Prem’s little son, Rakesh, grow up . . . Looking forward to its new leafbuds, the broad, green leaves of summer turning to spears of gold in September when the walnuts were ripe and ready to fall. I knew this tree better than the others. It was just below the window, where a buttress for the road is going up.

  Another tree I’ll miss is the young deodar, the only one growing in this stretch of the woods. Some years back it was stunted from lack of sunlight. The oaks covered it with their shaggy branches. So I cut away some of the overhanging branches and after that the deodar grew much faster. It was just coming into its own this year; now cut down in its prime like my young brother on the road to Delhi last month: both victims of the roads; the tree killed by the PWD, my brother by a truck.

  Twenty oaks have been felled. Just in this small stretch near the cottage. By the time this bypass reaches Jabarkhet, about six miles from here, over a thousand oaks will have been slaughtered, besides many other fine trees—maples, deodars and pines—most of them unnecessarily, as they grow some fifty to sixty yards from the roadside.

  The trouble is, hardly anyone (with the exception of the contractor who buys the felled trees) really believes that trees and shrubs are necessary. They get in the way so much, don’t they? According to my milkman, the only useful tree is one which can be picked clean of its leaves for fodder! And a young man remarked to me: ‘You should come to Pauri. The view is terrific, there are no trees in the way!’

  Well, he can stay here now, and enjoy the view of the ravaged hillside. But as the oaks have gone, the milkman will have to look further afield for his fodder.

  Rakesh calls the maples the butterfly trees because when the winged seeds fall they flutter like butterflies in the breeze. No maples now. No bright red leaves to flame against the sky. No birds!

  That is to say, no birds near the house. No longer will it be possible for me to open the window and watch the scarlet minivets flitting through the dark green foliage of the oaks; the long-tailed magpies gliding through the trees; the barbet calling insistently from his perch on top of the deodar. Forest birds, all of them, they will now be in search of some other stretch of surviving forest. The only visitors will be the crows, who have learnt to live with, and off, humans and seem to multiply along with roads, houses and people. And even when all the people have gone, the crows will still be around.

  Other things to look forward to: trucks thundering past in the night; perhaps a tea and pakora shop round the corner; the grinding of gears, the music of motor horns. Will the whistling thrush be heard above them? The explosions that continually shatter the silence of the mountains—as thousand-year-old rocks are dynamited—have frightened away all but the most intrepid of birds and animals. Even the bold langoors haven’t shown their faces for over a fortnight.

  Somehow, I don’t think we shall wait for the tea shop to arrive. There must be some other quiet corner, possibly on the next mountain, where new roads have yet to come into being. No doubt this is a negative attitude, and if I had any sense I’d open my own tea shop. To retreat is to be a loser. But the trees are losers too; and when they fall, they do so with a certain dignity.

  Never mind. Men come and go; the mountains remain.

  Miss Bun and Others

  March 1, 1975

  Beer in the sun. High in the spruce tree the barbet calls, heralding summer. A few puffy clouds drift lazily over the mountains. Is this the great escape?

  I could sit here all day soaking up beer and sunshine, but at some time during the day I must wipe the dust from my typewriter and produce something readable. There’s only eight hundred rupees in the bank, book sales are falling off, and magazines are turning away from fiction.

  Prem spoils me, giving me rice and kofta curry for lunch, which means that I sleep till four when Miss Bun arrives with patties and samosas.

  Miss Bun is the baker’s daughter.

  Of course that’s not her real name. Her real name is very long and beautiful, but I won’t give it here for obvious reasons and also because her brother is big and ugly.

  I am seeing Miss Bun after two months. She’s been with relatives in Bareilly.

  She sits at the foot of my bed, absolutely radiant. Her raven-black hair lies loose on her shoulders, her eyelashes have been trimmed and blackened and so have her eyes, with kajal. Her eyes, so large and innocent—and calculating!

  There are pretty glass bangles on her wrists and she wears a pair of new slippers. Her kameez is new too—green silk, with gold-embroidered sleeves.

  ‘You must have a rich lover,’ I remark, taking her hand and gently pulling her towards me. ‘Who gave you all this finery?’

  ‘You did. Don’t you remember? Before I went away, you gave me a hundred rupees.’

  ‘That was for the train and bus fares, I thought.’

  ‘Oh, my uncle paid the fares. So I bought myself these things. Are they nice?’

  ‘Very pretty. And so are you. If you were ten years older and I ten years younger, we’d make a good pair. But I’d have been broke long before this!’

  She giggles and drops a paper bag full of samosas on the bedside table. I hate samosas and patties, but I keep ordering them because it gives Miss Bun a pretext for visiting me. It’s all in the way of helping the bakery get by. When she goes, I give the lot to Bijju and Binya or whoever might be passing.

  ‘You’ve
been away a long time,’ I complain. ‘What if I’d got married while you were away?’

  ‘Then you’d stop ordering samosas.’

  ‘Or get them from that old man Bashir, who makes much better ones, and cheaper!’

  She drops her head on my shoulder. Her hair is heavily scented with jasmine hair oil, and I nearly pass out. They should use it instead of anaesthesia.

  ‘You smell very nice,’ I lie. ‘Do I get a kiss?’

  She gives me a long kiss, as though to make up for her long absence. Her kisses always have a nice wholesome flavour, as you would expect from someone who lives in a bakery.

  ‘That was an expensive kiss.’

  ‘I want to buy some face cream.’

  ‘You don’t need face cream. Your complexion is perfect. It must be the good quality flour you use in the bakery.’

  ‘I don’t put flour on my face. Anyway, I want the cream for my elder sister. She has pockmarks.’

  I surrender and give her two fives, quickly putting away my wallet.

  ‘And when will you pay for the samosas?’

  ‘Next week.’

  ‘I’ll bring you something nice next week,’ she says, pausing in the doorway.

  ‘Well, thanks, I was getting tired of samosas.’

  She was gone in a twinkling.

  I’ll say this for Miss Bun—she doesn’t trouble to hide her intentions.

  March 4

  My policeman calls on me this morning. Ghanshyam, the constable attached to the Barlowganj outpost.

  He is not very tall for a policeman, and he has a round, cheerful countenance, which is unusual in his profession. He looks smart in his uniform. Most constables prefer to hang around in their pyjamas most of the time.

  Nothing alarming about Ghanshyam’s visit. He comes to see me about once a week, and has been doing so ever since I spent a night in the police station last year.

  It happened when I punched a Muzzaffarnagar businessman in the eye for bullying a rickshaw coolie. The fat slob very naturally lodged a complaint against me, and that same evening a sub-inspector called and asked me to accompany him to the thana. It was too late to arrange anything and in any case I had only been taken in for questioning, so I had to spend the night at the police post. The sub-inspector went home and left me in the charge of a constable. A wooden bench and a charpoy were the only items of furniture in my cell, if you could call it that. The charpoy was meant for the night-duty constable, but he very generously offered it to me.