by Ruskin Bond
When Anil got home, he found it difficult to account for the cuts and bruises that showed on his face, arms and legs. He could not conceal the fact that he had been in a bad fight, and his mother insisted on his staying at home for the rest of the day.
That evening, though, he slipped out of the house and went to the bazaar where he found comfort and solace in a bottle of vividly coloured lemonade and a banana-leaf full of hot, sweet jalebis. He had just finished the lemonade when he saw his recent adversary coming down the road.
Anil's first impulse was to turn away and look elsewhere; his second to throw the empty bottle at his enemy; but he did neither of these things. Instead, he stood his ground and scowled at his opponent. And the Punjabi boy said nothing either, but scowled back with equal ferocity.
The next day was as hot as the previous one. Anil felt weak and lazy and not at all eager for a fight. His body was stiff and sore after the previous day's encounter. But he couldn't refuse the challenge. Not to turn up at the pool would be an acknowledgement of defeat. But from the way he was feeling, he knew he would be beaten in another fight. Yet he must defy his enemy, outwit him if possible. To surrender now would be to forfeit all rights to the pool in the forest; and he knew it was his pool.
He was half-hoping that the Punjabi boy would have forgotten the challenge, but as soon as Anil arrived he saw his opponent stripped to the waist, sitting on a rock at the far end of the pool. The Punjabi boy was rubbing oil on his body, massaging it into his broad thighs. He saw Anil beneath the sal trees, and called a challenge across the water.
"Come over to this side and fight!" he shouted.
But Anil was not going to submit to any conditions laid down by his opponent.
"Come this side and fight," he shouted back defiantly.
"Swim over and fight me here!" called the other. "Or perhaps you cannot swim the length of this pool!"
Anil could have swum the length of the pool a dozen times without tiring, and in this department he knew he could show the Punjabi boy his superiority. Slipping out of his vest and shorts, he dived straight into the water, cutting through it like a golden fish and surfacing with hardly a splash. The Punjabi boy's mouth hung open in amazement.
'You can dive!" he exclaimed.
"It is easy," said Anil, treading water and waiting for another challenge. "Can't you dive?"
"No," said the other. "I jump straight in. But if you will tell me how, I'll make a dive."
"It is easy," said Anil. "Stand straight on the rock, hold your arms out, and allow your head to displace your feet."
The Punjabi boy stood up, stiff and straight, stretched out his arms, and threw himself at the water. He landed flat on his belly, with a crash that sent the birds screaming out of the trees.
Anil burst into laughter.
"Are you trying to empty the pool?" he asked, as the Punjabi boy came to the surface, spouting water like a small whale.
"Wasn't it good?" asked the boy, evidently proud of his feat.
"Not very good," said Anil. 'You should have more practice. See, 1 will do it again!"
And pulling himself up on a rock, he executed another perfect dive. The Punjabi boy waited for him to come up, but, swimming under water in a world of soft lights and crooked sunshine, Anil circled the boy and came up from behind.
"How did you do that?" asked the astonished youth.
"Can't you swim under water?" asked Anil.
"No, but I will try."
The Punjabi boy made a tremendous effort to plunge to the bottom of the pool; indeed, he thought he had gone right down, but his bottom, like a duck's, remained above the surface.
Anil, however, did not want to sound too discouraging. He was involved in a game of high diplomacy.
"That was not bad," he said. "But you need a lot of practice."
"Will you teach me?" asked his enemy.
"If you like, I will teach you."
"You must teach me. If you do not teach me, I will thrash you. Will you come here every day and teach me?"
"If you like," said Anil. They had pulled themselves out of the water and were sitting side by side on a smooth grey rock.
"My name is Vijay," said the Punjabi boy. "What is yours?"
"It is Anil."
"I am strong, am I not?" said Vijay, bending his arm so that a ball of muscle stood up.
'You are strong," said Anil. 'You are like a wrestler, a pahlwan."
"One day I will be Mister Universe!" said Vijay, slapping his thighs, which shook with the impact of his hand.
He looked critically at Anil's hard, thin body. 'You are quite strong yourself," he conceded, "but you are too bony. I know, you people do not eat enough. You must come and have your meals with me. I drink a pitcher of milk every day. You see, we have got our own cow. Be my friend, and I will make you a real pahlwan like me! I know — if you teach me to dive and swim under water, I will make you a pahlwan. This is fair, isn't it?"
"It's fair," said Anil, though he doubted if he was getting the better of the exchange.
Vijay put his arm around the younger boy's shoulders and said, "We are friends now, yes?"
They looked at each other with unflinching eyes, and in that moment a friendship was born.
"We are friends," said Anil.
The birds had settled again in the branches of the sal trees, and the pool was still and limpid in the afternoon shadows.
"It is our pool," said Vijay. "Nobody else can come here. Who would dare?"
'Yes, who would dare?" said Anil, smiling with the knowledge that he had won the day.
THE WINDOW
hen Amir was thirteen, he decided that he was old enough to have a room of his own.
"What for?" asked his mother.
"The kids make too much noise," he said, referring to his younger brothers and sisters. "I can't study."
"Well, if you really want to study, you can have your own room," said his grandfather, who owned the old building. "There's the room on the roof."
So Amir took the room on the roof.
It was a long, low building with large cracks in the walls from which peepul trees were growing. Amir's grandfather said he couldn't afford to have it repaired. There were a number of tenants in the building and they were paying rents that had been fixed forty years back, when rents were very low, so there wasn't much money coming in. Amir's father had a tailor's shop in the bazaar, but that didn't make much money either. The building had a flat roof, with just one small room — called a barsati — opening on to it. From the window of his room Amir looked out upon a world quite different from the world below.
The banyan tree, just opposite, was his, and its inhabitants his subjects. There were two squirrels, several mynahs, a crow and, at night, a pair of flying foxes. The squirrels were busy in the afternoon, the birds in the morning and evening, the foxes at night. Amir wasn't very busy. He'd look at his books now and then, but decided that it wasn't a very good year for studying. There was much more to learn from looking out of his window.
At first he felt lonely in the room. But then he discovered the power of the window. It looked out on the banyan tree and the mango grove, on the rather untidy garden, on the broad path running past the building, and out over the roofs of other houses, over roads and fields, as far as the horizon. The path was a busy one: fruit and vegetable vendors came and went, as did the toy-seller and the balloon-man, their wares strung on poles; there were boys on cycles, babies in prams, schoolgirls chattering, housewives quarrelling, old men gossiping ... all passed his way, the way of his window.
Early that summer a tonga came rattling and jingling down the path and stopped in front of the building. A girl and an elderly lady got down, while a servant unloaded their luggage. They went into the house and the tonga moved off.
The next day the girl looked up from the garden and saw Amir at the window.
She had black hair that came to her shoulders. Her eyes were black, like her hair, and just as shiny. She must
have been about eleven years old.
"Hallo, "said Amir.
She looked up at him suspiciously. "Who are you? " she asked.
"I am a ghost."
She laughed, and her laugh had a gay, mocking quality: 'You look like one!"
Amir didn't think her remark was very funny, but he had asked for it.
"What are you doing up there?" she asked.
"Practising magic," he said.
She laughed again but this time without the mockery. "I don't believe you," she said.
"Why don't you come up and see for yourself?"
She came round to the steps and began climbing them slowly, cautiously. When she entered the room, she stared at Amir and said: "Where's your magic?"
"Come here," he said, and he took her to the window and showed her his world.
She said nothing, just stared out of the window. Then she turned and smiled at Amir, and they were friends.
He only knew that she was called Chummo, and that she had come with her aunt for the summer months. He did not need to know any more about her, and she did not need to know any more about him except that he wasn't really a ghost.
She came up the steps nearly every day and joined Amir at the window. There was a lot of excitement to be had in the world of the window, especially when the monsoon rains arrived.
At the first rumblings, women would rush outside to retrieve their washing from the clothes-line and, if there was a breeze, to chase a few garments across the compound. When the rain came, it came with a vengeance, making a bog of the garden and a river of the path.
A cyclist would come riding furiously down the path, an elderly gentleman would be having difficulty with his umbrella, naked toddlers would be frisking about in the rain. Sometimes Amir would run out on the roof and shout and dance in the rain. And the rain would come through the open door and window of the room, flooding the floor and making an island of the bed.
But the window was more fun than anything else.
"It's like a film," said Chummo. "The window is the screen, the world outside is the picture."
Soon the mangoes were ripe and Chummo was in the branches of the mango tree as often as she was at Amir's window. Amir was supposed to be deep in study, so any forays into the mango tree on his part would not have pleased his grandfather. But from the window he had a good view of the tree, and he could speak to Chummo from about the same level. She brought him unripe mangoes, and they ate far too many of them and had tummy aches for the rest of the day.
"Let's make a garden on the roof," said Chummo.
"How do we do that?" asked Amir.
"It's easy. We bring up mud and bricks and make the flower-beds. Then we plant the seeds. We'll grow all sorts of flowers."
"The roof will fall in," said Amir.
"Never mind," said Chummo.
They spent two days carrying buckets of mud up the steps to the roof and laying out the flower-beds. It was hard work, but Chummo did most of it. When the beds were ready, they had a planting ceremony. But apart from a few small plants collected from the garden below, they had only one kind of seed — pumpkin.
"I can't eat pumpkins," said Amir.
"Have you ever met anyone who likes pumpkins?" asked Chummo.
"No. Everyone hates them."
"True. And yet people keep on growing them, and selling them, and forcing children to eat them."
"They just do it to make us suffer," said Amir.
"True. We'll present our pumpkins to our enemies."
So they planted the pumpkin seeds in the mud and felt proud of themselves.
But the following night it rained very heavily, and in the morning they discovered that everything — except the bricks — had been washed away.
So they returned to the window.
A mynah had been in a fight and the feathers had been knocked off its head. A bougainvillaea creeper that had been climbing the wall had sent a long green shoot in through the window.
Chummo said, "Now we can't shut the window without spoiling the creeper."
"Then we won't close the window," said Amir.
And they let the creeper into the room.
The rains passed and an autumn wind came whispering through the branches of the banyan tree. There were red leaves on the ground and the wind picked them up and blew them about so that they looked like butterflies. Amir would watch the sunrise, the sky all red until the first rays splashed the window-sill and crept up the walls of the room. And in the evening Chummo and Amir would watch the sun go down in a sea of fluffy clouds. Sometimes the clouds were pink, sometimes orange; they were nearly always coloured clouds, framed in the window.
"I'm going tomorrow," said Chummo one evening.
Amir was too surprised to say anything.
'You stay here all the time, don't you?" she said.
Amir nodded.
"When I come again next year, you'll still be here, won't you?"
"I suppose so," said Amir.
In the morning the tonga was at the door, and the servant, the aunt and Chummo were in it. Amir was at his window, Chummo waved up to him. Then the driver flicked the pony's reins, the tonga creaked and rattled, the bell jingled. Down the path and through the compound gate went the tonga, and all the time Chummo waved.
When the tonga was out of sight, Amir took the spray of bougainvillaea and pushed it out of the room. Then he closed the window. It would be opened only when the spring and Chummo came again.
MUKESH STARTS A ZOO
n a visit to Delhi with his parents, Mukesh spent two crowded hours at the zoo. He was dazzled by the many colourful birds, fascinated by the reptiles, charmed by the gibbons and chimps, and awestruck by the big cats — the lions, tigers and leopards. There was no zoo in the small town of Dehra where he lived, and the jungle was some way across the riverbed. So, as soon as he got home, he decided that he would have a zoo of his own.
"I'm going to start a zoo," he announced at breakfast, the day after his return.
"But you don't have any birds or animals," said Dolly, his little sister.
"I'll soon find them," said Mukesh. "That's what a zoo is all about — collecting animals."
He was gazing at the whitewashed walls of the verandah, where a gecko, a small wall lizard, was in pursuit of a fly. A little later Mukesh was trying to catch the lizard. But it was more alert than it looked, and always managed to keep a few inches ahead of his grasp.
"That's not the way to catch a lizard," said Teju, appearing on the verandah steps. Teju and his sister Koki lived next door.
"You catch it, then," said Mukesh.
Teju fetched a stick from the garden, where it had been used to prop up sweet-peas. He used the stick to tip the lizard off the wall and into a shoe-box.
'You'll be my Head Keeper," said Mukesh, and soon he and Teju were at work in the back garden setting up enclosures with a roll of wire-netting they had found in the poultry shed.
"What else can we have in the zoo?" asked Teju. "We need more than a lizard."
"There's your grandmother's parrot," said Mukesh.
"That's a good idea. But we won't tell her about it — not yet. I don't think she'd lend it to us. You see, it's a religious parrot. She's taught it lots of prayers and chants."
"Then people are sure to come and listen to it. They'll pay, too."
"We must have the parrot, then. What else?"
"Well, there's my dog," said Mukesh. "He's very fierce,"
"But a dog isn't a zoo animal."
"Mine is — he's a wild dog. Look, he's black all over and he's got yellow eyes. There's no other dog like him."
Mukesh's dog, who spent most of his time sleeping on the verandah, raised his head and obligingly revealed his yellow eyes.
"He's got jaundice," said Teju.
"They've always been yellow."
"All right, then, we've got a lizard, a parrot and a black dog with yellow eyes."
"Koki has a white rabbit. Will she lend it to u
s?"
"I don't know. She thinks a lot of her rabbit. Maybe we can rent it from her."
"And there's Sitaram's donkey."
Sitaram, the dhobi-boy, usually used a donkey to deliver and collect the laundry from the houses along this particular street.
"Do you really want a donkey?" asked Teju doubtfully.
"Why not? It's a wild donkey. Haven't you heard of them?"
"I've heard of a wild ass, but not a wild donkey."
"Well, they're all related to each other — asses, donkeys and mules."
"Why don't you paint black stripes on it and call it a zebra?"
"No, that's cheating. It's got to be a proper zoo. No tricks — it's not a circus!"
On Saturday afternoon, a large placard with corrected spelling announced the opening of the zoo. It hung from the branches of the jack-fruit tree. Children were allowed in free but grownups had to buy tickets at fifty paise each, and Koki and Dolly were selling home-made tickets to the occasional passer-by or parent who happened to look in. Mukesh and his friends had worked hard at making notices for the various enclosures and each resident of the zoo was appropriately named.
The first attraction was a large packing-case filled with an assortment of house-lizards. They looked rather sluggish, having been generously fed with a supply of beetles and other insects.
Then came an enclosure in which Koki's white rabbit was on display. Freshly washed and brushed, it looked very cuddly and was praised by all.
Staring at it with evil intent from behind wire-netting was Mukesh's dog — RARE BLACK DOG WITH YELLOW EVES read the notice. Those yellow eyes were now trying hard to hypnotise the pink eyes of Koki's nervous rabbit. The dog pawed at the ground, trying to dig its way out from under the fence to get at the rabbit.
Tethered to a mango tree was a placard saying WILD ASS FROM KUTCH. A distant relative it may have been, but everyone recognised it as the local washerman's beast of burden. Every now and then it tried to break loose, for it was long past its feeding time.
There was also a duck that did not seem to belong to anyone, and a small cow that had strayed in on its own; but the star attraction was the parrot. As it could recite three different prayers, over and over again, it was soon surrounded by a group of admiring parents, all of whom wished they had a parrot who could pray, or rather, do their praying for them. Oddly enough, Koki's grandmother had chosen that day for visiting the temple, so she was unaware of the fuss that was being made of her pet, or even that it had been made an honorary member of the zoo. Teju had convinced himself she wouldn't mind.