by Ruskin Bond
‘Jogiji,’ I replied, ‘my friend is young and inexperienced, all things seem known to you and your surmise is correct. We have come to see you and hear your story and if it please you we will keep it to ourselves.’
‘It matters naught, sahib, if the whole world knows my story, but I must ask you, if you repeat it, that no mention be made of my domain, as my sole desire is peace. Later, I may leave this and go once more among men, but that cannot be till I have made friends with the only enemy I have in all the world. He is an ungrateful elephant, who even now is watching us from a distance.’
It was unpleasant news and we could not help looking around. The jogi laughed. ‘There is nothing to fear, friends, his approach will be made known by those who watch over me.’
‘Watch over you,’ I repeated, ‘we see nothing.’
‘Nor will you till I intend,’ and the old man whistled softly at first and then louder.
Immediately from each side of us an animal made an appearance, a fine tiger and a leopard. Snarling and growling at us they took up their stations on either side of the aged man. ‘These be my watchmen, sahib. The leopard is old,’ and placing his hand lovingly on the tiger’s neck, he continued, ‘and this one replaces his father as you will come to know. The elephant, my enemy, comes not when these two are on guard. Should both go away, he would kill us all.’
My friend looked at me and I at him. We found ourselves in a distinctly unpleasant place, simply to satisfy our curiosity and were far from comfortable.
‘Years ago,’ droned the voice of the jogi, ‘many years ago, disappointed with living among men, I forsook the world and sought the security and silence of this jungle. Because of its nearness to human dwellings none suspect my dwelling place. I abode here at first with some trepidation, but for the last ten years I have dwelt in peace. My dwelling at first was up that tree, a fine and roomy one, and there through intercession and prayer, I acquired the influence over animals as you see; now the denizens of the jungle know me and are friendly, all but one, sahib. A call from me will bring many here, all except the elephant, who is filled with hatred for me, because in doing him a kind action he suffered some pain.
‘One day he came to me limping badly. After examining his feet carefully, I found a large bamboo splinter had become embedded in the flesh between his toes. “Hatiji,” I said “a cure can be effected, but not without pain.”
“I will mind not the pain so long as you can guarantee to free me of it eventually.”
‘Sahib, I extracted the thorn and in doing so nearly met with my death, for the ungrateful creature, enraged at my methods, sought my life. The leopard you see and the father of this fine tiger sprang at him, enabling me to escape by climbing a tree. Since then of all the animals and creeping things in this jungle, he alone is my enemy. Creeping up silently another night he nearly did me to death. I have studied deeply and for protection I have acquired great powers and using one of them, I turn myself into a fire at night. It is the only protection, for elephants fear fire alone.
‘Come some night and you will behold me a fire, from it I will speak with you, but remember, I leave the coming to you entirely, for great risk is attached to entering these jungles at night. On an elephant you have determined to come, let this tharoo drive the beast. Go now, friends, the hour grows late, I will send the tiger to protect you as far as the edge of the forest. Farewell.’
I thanked the aged jogi and with my friend took our departure in silence, the tharoo following. As we neared the forest edge, a streak of yellow shot past us, we knew it to be the tiger, who had obeyed his master’s instructions and guarded us. Once out of the forest, Maclaude could restrain himself no longer. He swore badly to begin with and then came out with a long-drawn-out, ‘I’ll be hanged! If I was to tell anyone in the Duars what you and I had seen today, I would be put into the same category as Ananias and Baron Munchausen.’
‘Mythical and mystical India,’ I said, ‘shall we ever know it. We see what we are allowed to see, things superficial, but always, the undercurrents remain hidden from us. When you hear a fire actually talking—well.’
‘Fire talking, man alive, sure you do not for a moment believe that cock and bull story.’
‘On the contrary every word of it. Two days hence, at sunset, we will start out, driven here by the mahaut to whom, I must remind you, you owe five rupees.’
‘O come, I say, it’s Rs. 2-8 each.’
‘You bargained for five and I have paid him on my own account and you must abide by the conditions made before starting. Remember you named the price.’
I never saw a five rupee G.C. note parted with more reluctantly.
Two nights went by and during the morning of the day we were to set out at sunset, my friend was suffering from nerves.
‘Chuck it,’ I suggested.
‘Not for anything on earth,’ came the reply.
When the hour arrived to set out, and were glad after an hour’s swaying from side to side to know we had arrived at the sadhu’s abode. With the sinking of the sun all light had died out in the forest. Silently the mahaut moved the animal towards the sadhu’s seat and halted ten yards from it. The tiger skin, the tongs and gourd bowl were in their place, but no signs could be seen of the sadhu. In front of the tiger skin a fire glowed brightly and as we watched it, it shot into a flame. ‘So you have braved the dangers of the forest to satisfy your curiosity—Welcome.’
‘Say nothing, huzoor,’ warned the tharoo in a whisper. A minute went by and the same voice spoke: ‘O, sons of white men, who show no fear yet feel it. I, the jogi, speak to you from out of the fire. I waited for you, until I could wait no longer, for at the setting of the sun came my enemy, an earlier visit than usual, and I was compelled to avoid him by the only means I have. He still hovers at a distance and watches us, but as long as I glow with a brightness, he will do no harm.
There was no other voice in the forest depth and from the fire alone the jogi’s voice floated towards us.
‘The young man desires to spend the night in the forest to see from where I appear at dawn. My fire-talk leaves him sceptical of any powers. The glow will die down when I call my guards.’
A loud whistle rang through the forest and was answered by the roar of the tiger. They came almost immediately, paying no heed to our presence and took up their stations on either side of the tiger skin. The glow of the fire now began perceptibly to lessen, we watched it fascinated. It had nearly gone out and it appeared as if the tiger had actually laughed. Looking round in the direction of the empty tiger skin, we were surprised to see the aged jogi calmly sitting on it, watching us.
‘I am here, young man, from the fire have I come, believe me or not. I am here to bid you farewell for I will never see you two together again. I send an elephant to show your animal the way. My fire dies down, I must replenish it again with my body. Farewell.’
The fire immediately glowed brighter, the tiger skin was again empty and from the depths of the forest, the breaking of boughs and the trumpeting of an enraged elephant gave us an idea why the jogi had hurried us away.
The tharoo turned our elephant and hurried us out. As we neared the edge into lesser darkness, for the first time we perceived that the jogi had not failed us in providing a guide.
Two years after, when taking the short cut between Gyabari and Kurseong, I saw the sadhu sitting near the monolithic monuments of the Lepchas. I saluted him and was about to pass on when he stopped me.
‘Your friend?’ he simply asked.
‘Dead,’ I answered.
‘It is as I foretold. I was not to see you two together again. Pass on for you will only be in time to catch your train and without a meal you must do until you reach your abode. We will meet again on Mahakhal’s Hill.’
Truth to tell I was glad to get away, for since our experience in the Darjeeling Tarai, the very thought of the fire-jogi made my flesh creep. I had seen many extraordinary things in my life, but like the chowkidar, said to myself
, ‘This thing I have never seen.’
I hurried up the hill and was only in time to catch the train I had left at Gyabari.
The Fourth Man
Hilton Brown
Whatever may be obscure or questionable about this history, there is nothing either the one or the other in the record of the establishment known once as ‘Sammy’s Hotel’ and thereafter as the ‘Scandal Bay Mahal’. On no material point concerning it is there any divergence of opinion.
To those who travel between England and the Orient, whether on duty or on pleasure, Scandal Bay is a well-known milestone. It is one of those places, not infrequent in the Far East and the Far West, which after remaining unchanged for some two thousand years have changed out of all recognition in as many days. Thirty years ago—twenty years ago almost—Scandal Bay was a strip of delightful beach on the South-West coast of India, a fishing village and Sammy’s Hotel. Today it is a strip of delightful beach, a fishing village and the stark remains of the Scandal Bay Mahal. In the interval the Mahal has come, prospered, perished.
Two questions arise. In the first place—why was it called Scandal Bay, which is not and never can have been a native name? That I can answer but I will not, because there are still in these parts many friends and even relatives of the principal lady involved in the transaction. It is, in any case, quite a separate story. The second question—what caused the change in its destinies?—I can answer readily and will. Eight miles south of Scandal Bay is Kalashi which was, until the beginning of this century a third-rate port visited only by coasting steamers which lay far out and negotiated with the shore through the medium of lighters. Then came Barrow—the great Sir Alexis Barrow—and discovered that there existed at Kalashi the material for a first-class harbour where all the big east-going liners could call. As happens when the dreamer is big enough and has big enough friends, his dream took shape. The oriental traveller put in at Kalashi after the wearisome landless trek across the Arabian Sea and found it a place of no amenities. As did the rare old-time resident of Kalashi, he chartered a vehicle and drove north to Scandal Bay where he found a divinely-appointed bathing beach and an infernally-appointed hotel masquerading in the mouldering remains of a forty-year-old bungalow. He clamoured for better things and a Bombay syndicate descended on the place, bought up the descendant of the original ‘Sammy’ and scrapped the bungalow. Hence rose the ‘Mahal’ which had a glorious dining-room open on three sides, European sanitation and I know not all what. For some years the oriental traveller swarmed to it.
Now for the proper understanding of this tale it is necessary to go back a little—back to the original Sammy. Sammy was the butler of one Maclagan who was collector of the district of Quilay for twelve years somewhere in the eighties and nineties. His name may have been Ramaswami or Muniswami or Thambuswami or any other Swami and when Maclagan, retiring in the fullness of the years, pensioned him off and set him up in the little bungalow at Scandal Bay which he, Maclagan, in those spacious days had built, the place may have been called Ramaswami’s Hotel or Thambuswami’s. In those days there was no such place as Scandal Bay, for the Scandal had not happened; it was called Kapil, as the fishing village is called still. In those days again Kalashi was a place of no importance and the few Europeans who inhabited it—there may have been a dozen and a half all told—were mainly agents of Madras firms and shipping companies. To such ‘Ramaswami’ and ‘Thambuswami’ were inconvenient mouthfuls; they shortened him presently and by accepted usage to Sammy. And in the nineties and in the early years of this century the thing to do at the weekend was to make up a select party—it had to be select because Sammy’s accommodation was limited in the extreme—and drive down to Scandal Bay (which was then just earning its name) and bathe and play cards and drink such liquor as Sammy provided. Wild nights there have been on that gentle moonlit beach while the villagers of Kapil went about their peaceful ways.
At the dead-centre between century and century, Kalashi was at its very lowest ebb. Trade was bad; one or two agencies had closed down, one or two steamship lines had ceased to call. The Government had transferred the collector’s headquarters from Kalashi to Amay, dealing thereby an almost fatal blow. Barrow still tarried in the womb of time and nobody had yet seen the enormous protective advantages of the great sheering headland the local Europeans called Noah’s Ark. The place was dying—was almost already dead. At this time the European population—leaving out the Missionaries who do not come into this tale—was reduced to a bare half dozen of whom four were old and established friends. These were Brent, the Agent of the Asiatic Bank; Hartle and Macrae, merchants; and the strange man Ranken, whom they called The Doctor, was not an old man—not more than forty and I think he must have established himself rather by force of personality than by any real length of residence. He was an institution in the Kalashi Club when Macrae first saw it; and in these days he used sometimes to be called ‘The Major’, but he discouraged this and it dropped. Whether or not he was ever a major I cannot say; he was indeed a doctor, but if you ask me why a doctor of any qualifications at all should choose to settle in a place of the miserable prospects and pretensions then appertaining to Kalashi, again I cannot say. He had doubtless his own reasons. He was, as I have said, a man of about forty, very tall, in good hard condition in spite of what he drank and a fine horseman. He had unruly reddish hair and an unkempt moustache, a dissolute mouth and nostrils and a wild uncertain eye. There is an enlarged photograph of him, said to be a very good likeness, in the Kalashi Club; it used to be in the billiard room but men took to saying that the uneasy eyes of it spoiled their breaks and it hangs now in an obscure dark corner just outside the bar. If you take it into the light and look at it you will see a man hag-ridden and tormented from within who made things worse for himself by trying too hard to make them better.
Weekend after weekend, by unalterable routine, Brent, Hartle, Macrae and Ranken drove down to Scandal Bay and commandeered Sammy’s till Monday. They left Kalashi after tiffin on Saturdays and drove down in separate jatkas—a most uncomfortable method but part of the game. The jatkas raced and the last man in paid for the Saturday night’s dinner. All Sunday they bathed in the sea and played whist, which passed with the later night into poker. They did not go to bed at all on Sunday night—this at least was the theory of the game—but played till dawn, bathed, breakfasted and went back to Kalashi and such work as awaited them. They drank, I imagine, colossally. This they did fifty-two weeks in the year; none of them ever went away even in the depth of the hot weather; none of them had any womenkind—at any rate of his own race; if strangers came to Kalashi they were not encouraged to join the Four. As a four they cornered Sammy’s and—this is important indeed from the point of view of this story—but for them Sammy’s must have closed and perished.
You may call them four very bad men or you may call them four extraordinary asses—it is according to your point of view. You might also call them, as I am inclined to call them, four tragic and pitiable figures. Brent, if left to himself, would have spent his Sundays as a naturalist; he was very interested in birds and wanted to take up Indian butterflies. Hartle, if he had had any money and if circumstances had been different, would have married a nice honest girl and spent his Sundays in a nursery. Neither of them really cared for the weekends at Sammy’s in their hearts. Macrae had reached the appalling stage when a bottle of whisky represented all the remaining entertainment and all the possible adventure the world could still offer him; but even he would have drunk that bottle contentedly in the Kalashi Club and would not have driven out eight miles into a wild region of combing breakers and singing coco-palms to do it. It was Ranken, The Doctor, that wild uneasy spirit, that man without rest, who dominated the other three. It was Ranken who said that, come what might, they must spend their weekends at Sammy’s; and sick or ill, hot weather or cold, monsoon rain or April sunshine, to Sammy’s they went. It was Ranken really who kept Sammy’s going.
To Sammy’s these four went withou
t break for perhaps two years; then, as so often happens in India, established custom disintegrated very suddenly. It began with a terrible Saturday afternoon, a nightmare of an afternoon. The jatkas were racing as usual and it was a very close thing—a neck and neck finish down the last slight gradient into Kapil. Half-way down it the left wheel of Macrae’s jatka came off, and the resulting smash would have done credit to a Roman chariot race. The driver flew clear but Macrae and the jatka and the pony went over and over and over. The Doctor did what he could, but a fractured skull is a fractured skull and there ended Macrae.
It broke up Hartle, ever too soft of nature for these wild doings. Macrae’s head and face had been unspeakably battered in the smash; and in the stark sunshine of a March afternoon, the blood and the dust and the sweat and the pony with a broken leg waving and kicking horribly must have been a dreadful sight enough. Hartle said he could not stop seeing it; he took to drinking—real drinking—for a couple of days at the end of which time he was picked out of a ditch by a missionary to whom thenceforward he transferred his allegiance. Whether or not Ranken, The Doctor, would have tried to find another two men in place of Hartle and Macrae I do not know: at all events things were settled by the sudden transfer of Brent to a distant agency. A man was sent in his place and a man was sent in Macrae’s place but they were both youngsters and Ranken, for all his unease, for all his desperate need of comrades and subalterns, was no seducer of boys. Besides, the fourth man was still to seek.
‘I like four,’ said Ranken, as he had said it many a time. ‘It’s a good number. If you can’t get a four, then keep to yourself.’ This, in view of what I shall have to tell, seems important. At any rate Ranken put his preaching into practice, for he quitted Kalashi and lived, day in day out, alone by himself at Sammy’s.