by Ruskin Bond
A rope oscillated in the breeze, the body turned slowly, turned this way and that, and I saw the face of a girl, her hair hanging loose, her eyes sightless, hands and feet limp; just turning, turning, while the waltz played on.
I turned off the player and ran downstairs.
Down the path through the trees, and on to the grassy knoll where the big oak stood.
A long-tailed magpie took fright and flew out from the branches, swooping low across the ravine. In the tree there was no one, nothing. A great branch extended halfway across the knoll, and it was possible for me to reach up and touch it. A girl could not have reached it without climbing the tree.
As I stood there, gazing up into the branches, someone spoke behind me.
‘What are you looking at?’
I swung round. A girl stood in the clearing, facing me, a girl of seventeen or eighteen; alive, healthy, with bright eyes and a tantalizing smile. She was lovely to look at. I hadn’t seen such a pretty girl in years.
‘You startled me,’ ‘I said. ‘You came up so unexpectedly.’
‘Did you see anything—in the tree?’ she asked.
‘I thought I saw someone from my window. That’s why I came down. Did you see anything?’
‘No.’ She shook her head, the smile leaving her face for a moment. ‘I don’t see anything. But other people do—sometimes.’
‘What do they see?’
‘My sister.’
‘Your sister?’
‘Yes. She hanged herself from this tree. It was many years ago. But sometimes you can see her hanging there.’
She spoke matter-of-factly: whatever had happened seemed very remote to her.
We both moved some distance away from the tree. Above the knoll, on a disused private tennis court (a relic from the hill station’s colonial past) was a small stone bench. She sat down on it, and, after a moment’s hesitation, I sat down beside her.
‘Do you live close by?’ I asked.
‘Further up the hill. My father has a small bakery.’
She told me her name—Hameeda. She had two younger brothers.
‘You must have been quite small when your sister died.’
‘Yes. But I remember her. She was pretty.’
‘Like you.’
She laughed in disbelief. ‘Oh, I am nothing compared to her. You should have seen my sister.’
‘Why did she kill herself?’
‘Because she did not want to live. That’s the only reason, no? She was to have been married but she loved someone else, someone who was not of her own community. It’s an old story and the end is always sad, isn’t it?’
‘Not always. But what happened to the boy—the one she loved? Did he kill himself too?’
‘No, he took a job in some other place. Jobs are not easy to get, are they?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never tried for one.’
‘Then what do you do?’
‘I write stories.’
‘Do people buy stories?’
‘Why not? If your father can sell bread, I can sell stories.’
‘People must have bread. They can live without stories.’
‘No, Hameeda, you’re wrong. People can’t live without stories.’
Hameeda! I couldn’t help loving her. Just loving her. No fierce desire or passion had taken hold of me. It wasn’t like that. I was happy just to look at her, watch her while she sat on the grass outside my cottage, her lips stained with the juice of wild bilberries. She chatted away—about her friends, her clothes, her favourite things.
‘Won’t your parents mind if you come here every day?’ I asked.
‘I have told them you are teaching me.’
‘Teaching you what?’
‘They did not ask. You can tell me stories.’
So I told her stories.
It was midsummer.
The sun glinted on the ring she wore on her third finger: a translucent golden topaz, set in silver.
‘That’s a pretty ring,’ I remarked.
‘You wear it,’ she said, impulsively removing it from her hand. ‘It will give you good thoughts. It will help you to write better stories.’
She slipped it on to my little finger.
‘I’ll wear it for a few days,’ I said. ‘Then you must let me give it back to you.’
On a day that promised rain I took the path down to the stream at the bottom of the hill. There I found Hameeda gathering ferns from the shady places along the rocky ledges above the water.
‘What will you do with them?’ I asked.
‘This is a special kind of fern. You can cook it as a vegetable.’
‘It is tasty?’
‘No, but it is good for rheumatism.’
‘Do you suffer from rheumatism?’
‘Of course not. They are for my grandmother, she is very old.’
‘There are more ferns further upstream,’ I said. ‘But we’ll have to get into the water.’
We removed our shoes and began paddling upstream. The ravine became shadier and narrower, until the sun was almost completely shut out. The ferns grew right down to the water’s edge. We bent to pick them but instead found ourselves in each other’s arms; and sank slowly, as in a dream, into the soft bed of ferns, while overhead a whistling thrush burst out in dark sweet song.
‘It isn’t time that’s passing by,’ it seemed to say. ‘It is you and I. It is you and I …’
I waited for her the following day, but she did not come.
Several days passed without my seeing her.
Was she sick? Had she been kept at home? Had she been sent away? I did not even know where she lived, so I could not ask. And if I had been able to ask, what would I have said?
Then one day I saw a boy delivering bread and pastries at the little tea shop about a mile down the road. From the upward slant of his eyes, I caught a slight resemblance to Hameeda. As he left the shop, I followed him up the hill. When I came abreast of him, I asked: ‘Do you have your own bakery?’
He nodded cheerfully, ‘Yes. Do you want anything—bread, biscuits, cakes? I can bring them to your house.’
‘Of course. But don’t you have a sister? A girl called Hameeda?’
His expression changed. He was no longer friendly. He looked puzzled and slightly apprehensive.
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I haven’t seen her for some time.’
‘We have not seen her either.’
‘Do you mean she has gone away?’
‘Didn’t you know? You must have been away a long time. It is many years since she died. She killed herself. You did not hear about it?’
‘But wasn’t that her sister—your other sister?’
‘I had only one sister—Hameeda—and she died, when I was very young. It’s an old story, ask someone else about it.’
He turned away and quickened his pace, and I was left standing in the middle of the road, my head full of questions that couldn’t be answered.
That night there was a thunderstorm. My bedroom window kept banging in the wind. I got up to close it and, as I looked out, there was a flash of lightning and I saw that frail body again, swinging from the oak tree.
I tried to make out the features, but the head hung down and the hair was blowing in the wind.
Was it all a dream?’
It was impossible to say. But the topaz on my hand glowed softly in the darkness. And a whisper from the forest seemed to say, ‘It isn’t time that’s passing by, my friend. It is you and I …’
Susanna’s Seven Husbands
Locally the tomb was known as ‘the grave of the seven times married one.’
You’d be forgiven for thinking it was Bluebeard’s grave; he was reputed to have killed several wives in turn because they showed undue curiosity about a locked room. But this was the tomb of Susanna Anna-Maria Yeates, and the inscription (most of it in Latin) stated that she was mourned by all who had benefited from her generosity, her beneficiaries having inc
luded various schools, orphanages, and the church across the road. There was no sign of any other graves in the vicinity and presumably her husbands had been interred in the old Rajpur graveyard, below the Delhi Ridge.
I was still in my teens when I first saw the ruins of what had once been a spacious and handsome mansion. Desolate and silent, its well-laid paths were overgrown with weeds, and its flower beds had disappeared under a growth of thorny jungle. The two-storeyed house had looked across the Grand Trunk Road. Now abandoned, feared and shunned, it stood encircled in mystery, reputedly the home of evil spirits.
Outside the gate, along the Grand Trunk Road, thousands of vehicles sped by—cars, trucks, buses, tractors, bullock carts—but few noticed the old mansion or its mausoleum, set back as they were from the main road, hidden by mango, neem and peepul trees. One old and massive peepul tree grew out of the ruins of the house, strangling it much as its owner was said to have strangled one of her dispensable paramours.
As a much-married person with a quaint habit of disposing of her husbands whenever she tired of them, Susanna’s malignant spirit was said to haunt the deserted garden. I had examined the tomb, I had gazed upon the ruins, I had scrambled through shrubbery and overgrown rose bushes, but I had not encountered the spirit of this mysterious woman. Perhaps, at the time, I was too pure and innocent to be targeted by malignant spirits. For malignant she must have been, if the stories about her were true.
The vaults of the ruined mansion were rumoured to contain a buried treasure—the amassed wealth of the lady Susanna. But no one dared go down there, for the vaults were said to be occupied by a family of cobras, traditional guardians of buried treasure. Had she really been a woman of great wealth, and could treasure still be buried there? I put these questions to Naushad, the furniture-maker, who had lived in the vicinity all his life, and whose father had made the furniture and fittings for this and other great houses in Old Delhi.
‘Lady Susanna, as she was known, was much sought after for her wealth,’ recalled Naushad. ‘She was no miser, either. She spent freely, reigning in state in her palatial home, with many horses and carriages at her disposal. Every evening she rode through the Roshanara Gardens, the cynosure of all eyes, for she was beautiful as well as wealthy. Yes, all men sought her favours, and she could choose from the best of them. Many were fortune hunters. She did not discourage them. Some found favour for a time, but she soon tired of them. None of her husbands enjoyed her wealth for very long!
‘Today no one enters those ruins, where once there was mirth and laughter. She was the Zamindari lady, the owner of much land, and she administered her estate with a strong hand. She was kind if rents were paid when they fell due, but terrible if someone failed to pay.
‘Well, over fifty years have gone by since she was laid to rest, but still men speak of her with awe. Her spirit is restless, and it is said that she often visits the scenes of her former splendour. She has been seen walking through this gate, or riding in the gardens, or driving in her phaeton down the Rajpur road.’
‘And what happened to all those husbands?’ I asked.
‘Most of them died mysterious deaths. Even the doctors were baffled. Tomkins Sahib drank too much. The lady soon tired of him. A drunken husband is a burdensome creature, she was heard to say. He would eventually have drunk himself to death, but she was an impatient woman and was anxious to replace him. You see those datura bushes growing wild in the grounds? They have always done well here.’
‘Belladonna?’ I suggested.
‘That’s right, huzoor. Introduced in the whisky-soda, it put him to sleep for ever.’
‘She was quite humane in her way.’
‘Oh, very humane, sir. She hated to see anyone suffer. One sahib, I don’t know his name, drowned in the tank behind the house, where the water lilies grew. But she made sure he was half-dead before he fell in. She had large, powerful hands, they said.’
‘Why did she bother to marry them? Couldn’t she just have had men friends?’
‘Not in those days, huzoor. Respectable society would not have tolerated it. Neither in India nor in the West would it have been permitted.’
‘She was born out of her time,’ I remarked.
‘True, sir. And remember, most of them were fortune hunters. So we need not waste too much pity on them.’
‘She did not waste any.’
‘She was without pity. Especially when she found out what they were really after. Snakes had a better chance of survival.’
‘How did the other husbands take their leave of this world?’
‘Well, the Colonel sahib shot himself while cleaning his rifle. Purely an accident, huzoor. Although some say she had loaded his gun without his knowledge. Such was her reputation by now that she was suspected even when innocent. But she bought her way out of trouble. It was easy enough, if you were wealthy.’
‘And the fourth husband?’
‘Oh, he died a natural death. There was a cholera epidemic that year, and he was carried off by the haija. Although, again, there were some who said that a good dose of arsenic produced the same symptoms! Anyway it was cholera on the death certificate. And the doctor who signed it was the next to marry her.’
‘Being a doctor, he was probably quite careful about what he ate and drank.’
‘He lasted about a year.’
‘What happened?’
‘He was bitten by a cobra.’
‘Well, that was just bad luck, wasn’t it? You could hardly blame it on Susanna.’
‘No, huzoor, but the cobra was in his bedroom. It was coiled around the bedpost. And when he undressed for the night, it struck! He was dead when Susanna came into the room an hour later. She had a way with snakes. She did not harm them and they never attacked her.’
‘And there were no antidotes in those days. Exit the doctor. Who was the sixth husband?’
‘A handsome man. An indigo planter. He had gone bankrupt when the indigo trade came to an end. He was hoping to recover his fortune with the good lady’s help. But our Susanna mem, she did not believe in sharing her fortune with anyone.’
‘How did she remove the indigo planter?’
‘It was said that she lavished strong drink upon him, and when he lay helpless, she assisted him on the road we all have to take by pouring molten lead in his ears.’
‘A painless death, I’m told.’
‘But a terrible price to pay, huzoor, simply because one is no longer needed …’
We walked along the dusty highway, enjoying the evening breeze, and some time later we entered the Roshanara Gardens, in those days Delhi’s most popular and fashionable meeting place.
‘You have told me how six of her husbands died, Naushad. I thought there were seven?’
‘Ah the seventh was a gallant young magistrate who perished right here, huzoor. They were driving through the park after dark when the lady’s carriage was attacked by brigands. In defending her, the young man received a fatal sword wound.’
‘Not the lady’s fault, Naushad.’
‘No, huzoor. But he was a magistrate, remember, and the assailants, one of whose relatives had been convicted by him, were out for revenge. Oddly enough, though, two of the men were given employment by the lady Susanna at a later date. You may draw your own conclusions.’
‘And were there others?
‘Not husbands. But an adventurer, a soldier of fortune came along. He found her treasure, they say. And he lies buried with it, in the cellars of the ruined house. His bones lie scattered there, among gold and silver and precious jewels. The cobras guard them still! But how he perished was a mystery, and remains so till this day.’
‘And Susanna? What happened to her?’
‘She lived to a ripe old age. If she paid for her crimes, it wasn’t in this life! She had no children, but she started an orphanage and gave generously to the poor and to various schools and institutions, including a home for widows. She died peacefully in her sleep.’
‘A merry w
idow,’ I remarked. ‘The Black Widow spider!’
Don’t go looking for Susanna’s tomb. It vanished some years ago, along with the ruins of her mansion. A smart new housing estate came up on the site, but not after several workmen and a contractor succumbed to snake bite! Occasionally residents complain of a malignant ghost in their midst, who is given to flagging down cars, especially those driven by single men. There have also been one or two mysterious disappearances.
And after dusk, an old-fashioned horse and carriage can sometimes be seen driven through the Roshanara Gardens. If you chance upon it, ignore it, my friend. Don’t stop to answer any questions from the beautiful fair lady who smiles at you from behind lace curtains. She’s still looking for her final victim.
The Amorous Servant
The only servant I ever had for any length of time was Kundan Singh.
Why I took him on, and why I kept him, I do not really know, for I never cared much for him. He was not very efficient, he ate more than most people, borrowed money, gambled in the bazaars, drank raw country liquor, and usually overslept in the mornings.
When Kundan Singh first came to me for a job, I thought he looked unreliable. He had a dull, rather expressionless face, and eyes that refused to meet mine.
However, he addressed me as ‘sahib’—this was the first time I had received this title, and it immediately made me feel important—and told me he could cook, wash dishes, make a garden and cut trees. As I was living at the time in a small room in a crowded city area, I had no garden and the nearest tree was a mile distant. Nevertheless, I thought I could do with a cook and general factotum. And what pleased me in Kundan Singh was that he had absolutely no references.
In those days, most domestic servants carried around with them a number of ‘chits’—letters from former employers, testifying to the solid worth and honesty of the servant whom they were so ready to be rid of. Not only did I distrust these chits, but I disliked their worn, tattered appearance. They made one think of a graduate carrying his bachelor’s degree around in his pocket. Kundan Singh had never heard of ‘chits’, and this pleased me. It meant he had not worked in a very posh household, and that I would not, therefore, have to consider myself his inferior. Either that, or it meant he had been dismissed from all his previous positions.