by Ruskin Bond
‘Yes, there was such a girl here. I remember quite well,’ he said. ‘But she has stopped coming now.’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What happened to her?’
‘How should I know?’ said the man. ‘She was nothing to me.’
And once again I had to run for the train.
As Deoli platform receded, I decided that one day I would have to break journey there, spend a day in the town, make enquiries, and find the girl who had stolen my heart with nothing but a look from her dark, impatient eyes.
With this thought I consoled myself throughout my last term in college. I went to Dehra again in the summer and when, in the early hours of the morning, the night train drew into Deoli station, I looked up and down the platform for signs of the girl, knowing I wouldn’t find her but hoping just the same.
Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to break journey at Deoli and spend a day there. (If it was all fiction or a film, I reflected, I would have got down and cleaned up the mystery and reached a suitable ending for the whole thing.) I think I was afraid to do this. I was afraid of discovering what really happened to the girl. Perhaps she was no longer in Deoli, perhaps she was married, perhaps she had fallen ill. . .
In the last few years I have passed through Deoli many times and I always look out of the carriage window half expecting to see the same unchanged face smiling up at me. I wonder what happens in Deoli, behind the station walls. But I will never break my journey there. It may spoil my game. I prefer to keep hoping and dreaming and looking out of the window up and down that lonely platform, waiting for the girl with the baskets.
I never break my journey at Deoli but I pass through as often as I can.
Tribute to a Dead Friend
ow that Thanh is dead, I suppose it is not too treacherous of me to write about him. He was only a year older than I. He died in Paris, in his twenty-second year, and Pravin wrote to me from London and told me about it. I will get more details from Pravin when he returns to India next month. Just now I only know that Thanh is dead.
It is supposed to be in very bad taste to discuss a person behind his back and to discuss a dead person is most unfair, for he cannot even retaliate. But Thanh had this very weakness of criticizing absent people and it cannot hurt him now if I do a little to expose his colossal ego.
Thanh was a fraud all right but no one knew it. He had beautiful round eyes, a flashing smile and a sweet voice and everyone said he was a charming person. He was certainly charming but I have found that charming people are seldom sincere. I think I was the only person who came anywhere near to being his friend for he had cultivated a special loneliness of his own and it was difficult to intrude on it.
I met him in London in the summer of ’54. I was trying to become a writer while I worked part-time at a number of different jobs. I had been two years in London and was longing for the hills and rivers of India. Thanh was Vietnamese. His family was well-to-do and though the Communists had taken their home town of Hanoi, most of the family was in France, well established in the restaurant business. Thanh did not suffer from the same financial distress as other students whose homes were in Northern Vietnam. He wasn’t studying anything in particular but practised assiduously on the piano, though the only thing he could play fairly well was Chopin’s Funeral March.
My friend Pravin, a happy-go-lucky, very friendly Gujarati boy, introduced me to Thanh. Pravin, like a good Indian, thought all Asians were superior people, but he didn’t know Thanh well enough to know that Thanh didn’t like being an Asian.
At first, Thanh was glad to meet me. He said he had for a long time been wanting to make friends with an Englishman, a real Englishman, not one who was a Pole, a Cockney or a Jew; he was most anxious to improve his English and talk like Mr Glendenning of the BBC. Pravin, knowing that I had been born and bred in India, that my parents had been born and bred in India, suppressed his laughter with some difficulty. But Thanh was soon disillusioned. My accent was anything but English. It was a pronounced chi-chi accent.
‘You speak like an Indian!’ exclaimed Thanh, horrified. ‘Are you an Indian?’
‘He’s Welsh,’ said Pravin with a wink.
Thanh was slightly mollified. Being Welsh was the next best thing to being English. Only he disapproved of the Welsh for speaking with an Indian accent.
Later, when Pravin had gone, and I was sitting in Thanh’s room drinking Chinese tea, he confided in me that he disliked Indians.
‘Isn’t Pravin your friend?’ I asked.
‘I don’t trust him,’ he said. ‘I have to be friendly but I don’t trust him at all. I don’t trust any Indians.’
‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘They are too inquisitive,’ complained Thanh. ‘No sooner have you met one of them than he is asking you who your father is, and what your job is, and how much money you have in the bank.’
I laughed and tried to explain that in India inquisitiveness is a sign of a desire for friendship, and that he should feel flattered when asked such personal questions. I protested that I was an Indian myself and he said if that was so he wouldn’t trust me either.
But he seemed to like me and often invited me to his rooms. He could make some wonderful Chinese and French dishes. When we had eaten, he would sit down at his second-hand piano and play Chopin. He always complained that I didn’t listen properly.
He complained of my untidiness and my unwarranted self-confidence. It was true that I appeared most confident when I was not very sure of myself. I boasted of an intimate knowledge of London’s geography but I was an expert at losing my way and then blaming it on someone else.
‘You are a useless person,’ said Thanh, while with chopsticks I stuffed my mouth with delicious pork and fried rice. ‘You cannot find your way anywhere. You cannot speak English properly. You do not know any people except Indians. How are you going to be a writer?’
‘If I am as bad as all that,’ I said, ‘why do you remain my friend?’
‘I want to study your stupidity,’ he said.
That was why he never made any real friends. He loved to work out your faults and examine your imperfections. There was no such thing as a real friend, he said. He had looked everywhere but he could not find the perfect friend.
‘What is your idea of a perfect friend?’ I asked him. ‘Does he have to speak perfect English?’
But sarcasm was only wasted on Thanh—he admitted that perfect English was one of the requisites of a perfect friend!
Sometimes, in moments of deep gloom, he would tell me that he did not have long to live.
‘There is a pain in my chest,’ he complained. ‘There is something ticking there all the time. Can you hear it?’
He would bare his bony chest for me and I would put my ear to the offending spot. But I could never hear any ticking. ‘Visit the hospital,’ I advised. ‘They’ll give you an X-ray and a proper check-up.’
‘I have had X-rays,’ he lied. ‘They never show anything.’ Then he would talk of killing himself. This was his theme song: he had no friends, he was a failure as a musician, there was no other career open to him, he hadn’t seen his family for five years, and he couldn’t go back to Indo-China because of the Communists. He magnified his own troubles and minimized other people’s troubles. When I was in hospital with an old acquaintance, amoebic dysentery, Pravin came to see me every day. Thanh, who was not very busy, came only once and never again. He said the hospital ward depressed him.
‘You need a holiday,’ I told him when I was out of hospital. ‘Why don’t you join the students’ union and work on a farm for a week or two? That should toughen you up.’
To my surprise, the idea appealed to him and he got ready for the trip. Suddenly, he became suffused with goodwill towards all mankind. As evidence of his trust in me, he gave me the key of his room to keep (though he would have been secretly delighted if I had stolen his piano and chopsticks, giving him the excuse to say ‘never trust an Indian or an Anglo-Indian’), and introduc
ed me to a girl called Vu-Phuong, a small, very pretty Annamite girl who was studying at the Polytechnic. Miss Vu, Thanh told me, had to leave her lodgings next week and would I find somewhere else for her to stay? I was an experienced hand at finding bed-sitting rooms, having changed my own abode five times in six months (that sweet, nomadic London life!). As I found Miss Vu very attractive, I told her I would get her a room, one not far from my own, in case she needed any further assistance.
Later, in confidence, Thanh asked me not to be too friendly with Vu-Phuong as she was not to be trusted.
But as soon as he left for the farm, I went round to see Vu in her new lodgings which were one tube-station away from my own. She seemed glad to see me and as she too could make French and Chinese dishes I accepted her invitation to lunch. We had chicken noodles, soya sauce and fried rice. I did the washing-up. Vu said: ‘Do you play cards, Ruskin?’ She had a sweet, gentle voice that brought out all the gallantry in a man. I began to feel protective and hovered about her like a devoted cocker spaniel.
‘I’m not much of a card-player,’ I said.
‘Never mind, I’ll tell your fortune with them.’
She made me shuffle the cards. Then scattered them about on the bed in different patterns. I would be very rich, she said. I would travel a lot and I would reach the age of forty. I told her I was comforted to know it.
The month was June and Hampstead Heath was only ten minutes walk from the house. Boys flew kites from the hill and little painted boats scurried about on the ponds. We sat down on the grass, on the slope of the hill, and I held Vu’s hand.
For three days I ate with Vu and we told each other our fortunes and lay on the grass on Hampstead Heath and on the fourth day I said, ‘Vu, I would like to marry you.’
‘I will think about it,’ she said.
Thanh came back on the sixth day and said, ‘You know, Ruskin, I have been doing some thinking and Vu is not such a bad girl after all. I will ask her to marry me. That is what I need—a wife!’
‘Why didn’t you think of it before?’ I said. ‘When will you ask her?’
‘Tonight,’ he said. ‘I will come to see you afterwards and tell you if I have been successful.’
I shrugged my shoulders resignedly and waited. Thanh left me at six in the evening and I waited for him till ten o’clock, all the time feeling a little sorry for him. More disillusionment for Thanh! Poor Thanh. . .
He came in at ten o’clock, his face beaming. He slapped me on the back and said I was his best friend.
‘Did you ask her?’ I said.
‘Yes. She said she would think about it. That is the same as “yes”.’
‘It isn’t,’ I said, unfortunately for both of us. ‘She told me the same thing.’
Thanh looked at me as though I had just stabbed him in the back. Et tu Ruskin, was what his expression said.
We took a taxi and sped across to Vu’s rooms. The uncertain nature of her replies was too much for both of us. Without a definite answer neither of us would have been able to sleep that night.
Vu was not at home. The landlady met us at the door and told us that Vu had gone to the theatre with an Indian gentleman.
Thanh gave me a long, contemptuous look.
‘Never trust an Indian,’ he said.
‘Never trust a woman,’ I replied.
At twelve o’clock I woke Pravin. Whenever I could not sleep, I went to Pravin. He knew the remedy for all ailments.
As on previous occasions, he went to the cupboard and produced a bottle of Cognac. We got drunk. He was seventeen and I was nineteen and we were both quite decadent.
Three weeks later I returned to India. Thanh went to Paris to help in his sister’s restaurant. I did not hear of Vu-Phuong again.
And now, a year later, there is the letter from Pravin. All he can tell me is that Thanh died of some unknown disease. I wonder if it had anything to do with the ticking in his chest or with his vague threats of suicide. I doubt if I will ever know. And I will never know how much I hated Thanh, and how much I loved him, or if there was any difference between hating and loving him.
Love Is a Sad Song
sit against this grey rock, beneath a sky of pristine blueness, and think of you, Sushila. It is November and the grass is turning brown and yellow. Crushed, it still smells sweet. The afternoon sun shimmers on the oak leaves and turns them a glittering silver. A cricket sizzles its way through the long grass. The stream murmurs at the bottom of the hill—that stream where you and I lingered on a golden afternoon in May.
I sit here and think of you and try to see your slim brown hand resting against this rock, feeling its warmth. I am aware again of the texture of your skin, the coolness of your feet, the sharp tingle of your fingertips. And in the pastures of my mind I run my hand over your quivering mouth and crush your tender breasts. Remembered passion grows sweeter with the passing of time.
You will not be thinking of me now, as you sit in your home in the city, cooking or sewing or trying to study for examinations. There will be men and women and children circling about you, in that crowded house of your grandmother’s, and you will not be able to think of me for more than a moment or two. But I know you do think of me sometimes, in some private moment which cuts you off from the crowd. You will remember how I wondered what it is all about, this loving, and why it should cause such an upheaval. You are still a child, Sushila—and yet you found it so easy to quieten my impatient heart.
On the night you came to stay with us, the light from the street lamp shone through the branches of the peach tree and made leaf patterns on the walls. Through the glass panes of the front door I caught a glimpse of little Sunil’s face, bright and questing, and then—a hand—a dark, long-fingered hand that could only have belonged to you.
It was almost a year since I had seen you, my dark and slender girl. And now you were in your sixteenth year. And Sunil was twelve; and your uncle, Dinesh, who lived with me, was twenty-three. And I was almost thirty—a fearful and wonderful age, when life becomes dangerous for dreamers.
I remember that when I left Delhi last year, you cried. At first I thought it was because I was going away. Then I realized that it was because you could not go anywhere yourself. Did you envy my freedom—the freedom to live in a poverty of my own choosing, the freedom of the writer? Sunil, to my surprise, did not show much emotion at my going away. This hurt me a little, because during that year he had been particularly close to me, and I felt for him a very special love. But separations cannot be of any significance to small boys of twelve who live for today, tomorrow, and—if they are very serious—the day after.
Before I went away with Dinesh, you made us garlands of marigolds. They were orange and gold, fresh and clean and kissed by the sun. You garlanded me as I sat talking to Sunil. I remember you both as you looked that day—Sunil’s smile dimpling his cheeks, while you gazed at me very seriously, your expression very tender. I loved you even then. . .
Our first picnic.
The path to the little stream took us through the oak forest, where the flashy blue magpies played follow-my-leader with their harsh, creaky calls. Skirting an open ridge (the place where I now sit and write), the path dipped through oak, rhododendron and maple, until it reached a little knoll above the stream. It was a spot unknown to the tourists and summer visitors. Sometimes a milkman or woodcutter crossed the stream on the way to town or village but no one lived beside it. Wild roses grew on the banks.
I do not remember much of that picnic. There was a lot of dull conversation with our neighbours, the Kapoors, who had come along too. You and Sunil were rather bored. Dinesh looked preoccupied. He was fed up with college. He wanted to start earning a living: wanted to paint. His restlessness often made him moody, irritable.
Near the knoll the stream was too shallow for bathing, but I told Sunil about a cave and a pool further downstream and promised that we would visit the pool another day.
That same night, after dinner, we took a walk alon
g the dark road that goes past the house and leads to the burning ghat. Sunil, who had already sensed the intimacy between us, took my hand and put it in yours. An odd, touching little gesture!
‘Tell us a story,’ you said.
‘Yes, tell us,’ said Sunil.
I told you the story of the pure in heart. A shepherd boy found a snake in the forest and the snake told the boy that it was really a princess who had been bewitched and turned into a snake and that it could only recover its human form if someone who was truly pure in heart gave it three kisses on the mouth. The boy put his lips to the mouth of the snake and kissed it thrice. And the snake was transformed into a beautiful princess. But the boy lay cold and dead.
‘You always tell sad stories,’ complained Sunil.
‘I like sad stories,’ you said. ‘Tell us another.’
‘Tomorrow night. I’m sleepy.’
We were woken in the night by a strong wind which went whistling round the old house and came rushing down the chimney, humming and hawing and finally choking itself.
Sunil woke up and cried out, ‘What’s that noise, Uncle?’
‘Only the wind,’ I said.
‘Not a ghost?’
‘Well, perhaps the wind is made up of ghosts. Perhaps this wind contains the ghosts of all the people who have lived and died in this old house and want to come in again from the cold.’
You told me about a boy who had been fond of you in Delhi. Apparently he had visited the house on a few occasions, and had sometimes met you on the street while you were on your way home from school. At first, he had been fond of another girl but later he switched his affections to you. When you told me that he had written to you recently, and that before coming up you had replied to his letter, I was consumed by jealousy—an emotion which I thought I had grown out of long ago. It did not help to be told that you were not serious about the boy, that you were sorry for him because he had already been disappointed in love.