by Ruskin Bond
Gulabi brought up her children in village style. She heard stories of Wilson’s dalliance with the Mussoorie woman and, on one of his rare visits, she confronted him and voiced her resentment, demanding that he leave the other woman. He brushed her aside and told her not to listen to idle gossip. When he turned away from her, she picked up the flintlock pistol that lay on the gun table and fired one shot at him. The bullet missed him and shattered her looking glass. Gulabi ran out of the house, through the orchard and into the forest, then down the steep path to the bridge built by Wilson only two or three years before. When he had recovered his composure, he mounted his horse and came looking for her. It was too late. She had already thrown herself off the bridge into the swirling waters far below. Her body was found a mile or two downstream, caught between some rocks.
This was the tale that Ram Singh told me, with various flourishes and interpolations of his own. I thought it would make a good story to tell my friends that evening, before the fireside in the rest house. They found the story fascinating, but when I told them I had seen Gulabi’s ghost, they thought I was doing a little embroidering of my own. Mrs Dutta thought it was a tragic tale. Young Mrs Ray thought Gulabi had been very silly. ‘She was a simple girl,’ opined Mr Dutta. ‘She responded in the only way she knew...’; ‘Money can’t buy happiness,’ said Mr Ray. ‘No,’ said Mrs Dutta, ‘but it can buy you a great many comforts.’ Mrs Ray wanted to talk of other things, so I changed the subject. It can get a little confusing for a bachelor who must spend the evening with two married couples. There are undercurrents which he is aware of but not equipped to deal with.
I would walk across the bridge quite often after that. It was busy with traffic during the day, but after dusk there were only a few vehicles on the road and seldom any pedestrians. A mist rose from the gorge below and obscured the far end of the bridge. I preferred walking there in the evening, half expecting, half hoping to see Gulabi’s ghost again. It was her face that I really wanted to see. Would she still be as beautiful as she was fabled to be?
It was on the evening before our departure that something happened that would haunt me for a long time afterwards.
There was a feeling of restiveness as our days there drew to a close. The Rays had apparently made up their differences, although they weren’t talking very much. Mr Dutta was anxious to get back to his office in Delhi and Mrs Dutta’s rheumatism was playing up. I was restless too, wanting to return to my writing desk in Mussoorie.
That evening I decided to take one last stroll across the bridge to enjoy the cool breeze of a summer’s night in the mountains. The moon hadn’t come up, and it was really quite dark, although there were lamps at either end of the bridge providing sufficient light for those who wished to cross over.
I was standing in the middle of the bridge, in the darkest part, listening to the river thundering down the gorge, when I saw the sari-draped figure emerging from the lamplight and making towards the railings.
Instinctively I called out, ‘Gulabi!’
She half turned towards me, but I could not see her clearly. The wind had blown her hair across her face and all I saw was wildly staring eyes. She raised herself over the railing and threw herself off the bridge. I heard the splash as her body struck the water far below.
Once again I found myself running towards the part of the railing where she had jumped. And then someone was running towards the same spot, from the direction of the rest house. It was young Mr Ray.
‘My wife!’ he cried out. ‘Did you see my wife?’
He rushed to the railing and stared down at the swirling waters of the river.
‘Look! There she is!’ He pointed at a helpless figure bobbing about in the water.
We ran down the steep bank to the river but the current had swept her on. Scrambling over rocks and bushes, we made frantic efforts to catch up with the drowning woman. But the river in that defile is a roaring torrent, and it was over an hour before we were able to retrieve poor Mrs Ray’s body, caught in driftwood about a mile downstream.
She was cremated not far from where we found her and we returned to our various homes in gloom and grief, chastened but none the wiser for the experience.
If you happen to be in that area and decide to cross the bridge late in the evening, you might see Gulabi’s ghost or hear the hoofbeats of Wilson’s horse as he canters across the old wooden bridge looking for her. Or you might see the ghost of Mrs Ray and hear her husband’s anguished cry. Or there might be others. Who knows?
The Playing Fields of Simla
IT HAD BEEN a lonely winter for a twelve-year-old boy. I hadn’t really got over my father’s untimely death two years previously; nor had I as yet reconciled myself to my mother’s marriage to the Punjabi gentleman who dealt in second-hand cars. The three-month winter break over, I was almost happy to return to my boarding school in Simla—that elegant hill station once celebrated by Kipling and soon to lose its status as the summer capital of the Raj in India.
It wasn’t as though I had many friends at school. I had always been a bit of a loner, shy and reserved, looking out only for my father’s rare visits—on his brief leaves from RAF duties—and to my sharing his tent or air force hutment outside Delhi or Karachi. Those unsettled but happy days would not come again. I needed a friend but it was not easy to find one among a horde of rowdy, pea-shooting fourth formers, who carved their names on desks and stuck chewing gum on the class teacher’s chair. Had I grown up with other children, I might have developed a taste for schoolboy anarchy; but, in sharing my father’s loneliness after his separation from my mother, I had turned into a premature adult. The mixed nature of my reading—Dickens, Richmal Crompton, Tagore and Champion and Film Fun comics—probably reflected the confused state of my life. A book reader was rare even in those pre-electronic times. On rainy days most boys played cards or Monopoly, or listened to Artie Shaw on the wind-up gramophone in the common room.
After a month in the fourth form I began to notice a new boy, Omar, and then only because he was a quiet, almost taciturn person who took no part in the form’s feverish attempts to imitate the Marx Brothers at the circus. He showed no resentment at the prevailing anarchy, nor did he make a move to participate in it. Once he caught me looking at him, and he smiled ruefully, tolerantly. Did I sense another adult in the class? Someone who was a little older than his years?
Even before we began talking to each other, Omar and I developed an understanding of sorts, and we’d nod almost respectfully to each other when we met in the classroom corridors or the environs of dining hall or dormitory. We were not in the same house. The house system practised its own form of apartheid, whereby a member of, say, Curzon House was not expected to fraternize with someone belonging to Rivaz or Lefroy! Those public schools certainly knew how to clamp you into compartments. However, these barriers vanished when Omar and I found ourselves selected for the School Colts’ hockey team—Omar as a fullback, I as goalkeeper. I think a defensive position suited me by nature. In all modesty I have to say that I made a good goalkeeper, both at hockey and football. And fifty years on, I am still keeping goal. Then I did it between goalposts, now I do it off the field—protecting a family, protecting my independence as a writer...
The taciturn Omar now spoke to me occasionally, and we combined well on the field of play. A good understanding is needed between goalkeeper and fullback. We were on the same wavelength. I anticipated his moves, he was familiar with mine. Years later, when I read Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, I thought of Omar.
It wasn’t until we were away from the confines of school, classroom and dining hall that our friendship flourished. The hockey team travelled to Sanawar on the next mountain range, where we were to play a couple of matches against our old rivals, the Lawrence Royal Military School. This had been my father’s old school, but I did not know that in his time it had also been a military orphanage. Grandfather, who had been a private foot soldier—of the likes of Kipling’s Mulvaney, Otheris and Learo
yd—had joined the Scottish Rifles after leaving home at the age of seventeen. He had died while his children were still very young, but my father’s more rounded education had enabled him to become an officer.
Omar and I were thrown together a good deal during the visit to Sanawar, and in our more leisurely moments, strolling undisturbed around a school where we were guests and not pupils, we exchanged life histories and other confidences. Omar, too, had lost his father—had I sensed that before?—shot in some tribal encounter on the Frontier, for he hailed from the lawless lands beyond Peshawar. A wealthy uncle was seeing to Omar’s education. The RAF was now seeing to mine.
We wandered into the school chapel, and there I found my father’s name—A.A. Bond—on the school’s roll of honour board: old boys who had lost their lives while serving during the two World Wars.
‘What did his initials stand for?’ asked Omar.
‘Aubrey Alexander.’
‘Unusual names, like yours. Why did your parents call you Ruskin?’
‘I am not sure. I think my father liked the works of John Ruskin, who wrote on serious subjects like art and architecture. I don’t think anyone reads him now. They’ll read me, though!’ I had already started writing my first book. It was called Nine Months (the length of the school term, not a pregnancy), and it described some of the happenings at school and lampooned a few of our teachers. I had filled three slim exercise books with this premature literary project, and I allowed Omar to go through them. He must have been my first reader and critic. ‘They’re very interesting,’ he said, ‘but you’ll get into trouble if someone finds them. Especially Mr Oliver.’ And he read out an offending verse:
Olly, Olly, Olly, with his balls on a trolley,
And his arse all painted green!
I have to admit it wasn’t great literature. I was better at hockey and football. I made some spectacular saves, and we won our matches against Sanawar. When we returned to Simla, we were school heroes for a couple of days and lost some of our reticence; we were even a little more forthcoming with other boys. And then Mr Fisher, my housemaster, discovered my literary opus, Nine Months, under my mattress, and took it away and read it (as he told me later) from cover to cover. Corporal punishment then being in vogue, I was given six of the best with a springy malacca cane, and my manuscript was torn up and deposited in Fisher’s waste-paper basket. All I had to show for my efforts were some purple welts on my bottom. These were proudly displayed to all who were interested, and I was a hero for another two days.
‘Will you go away too when the British leave India?’ Omar asked me one day.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘My stepfather is Indian.’
‘Everyone is saying that our leaders and the British are going to divide the country. Simla will be in India, Peshawar in Pakistan!’
‘Oh, it won’t happen,’ I said glibly. ‘How can they cut up such a big country?’ But even as we chatted about the possibility, Nehru and Jinnah and Mountbatten and all those who mattered were preparing their instruments for major surgery.
Before their decision impinged on our lives and everyone else’s, we found a little freedom of our own—in an underground tunnel that we discovered below the third flat.
It was really part of an old, disused drainage system, and when Omar and I began exploring it, we had no idea just how far it extended. After crawling along on our bellies for some twenty feet, we found ourselves in complete darkness. Omar had brought along a small pencil torch, and with its help we continued writhing forward (moving backwards would have been quite impossible) until we saw a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Dusty, musty, very scruffy, we emerged at last on to a grassy knoll, a little way outside the school boundary.
It’s always a great thrill to escape beyond the boundaries that adults have devised. Here we were in unknown territory. To travel without passports—that would be the ultimate in freedom!
But more passports were on their way and more boundaries.
Lord Mountbatten, viceroy and governor-general-to-be, came for our Founder’s Day and gave away the prizes. I had won a prize for something or the other, and mounted the rostrum to receive my book from this towering, handsome man in his pinstripe suit. Bishop Cotton’s was then the premier school of India, often referred to as the ‘Eton of the East’. Viceroys and governors had graced its functions. Many of its boys had gone on to eminence in the civil services and armed forces. There was one ‘old boy’ about whom they maintained a stolid silence—General Dyer, who had ordered the massacre at Amritsar and destroyed the trust that had been building up between Britain and India.
Now Mountbatten spoke of the momentous events that were happening all around us—the War had just come to an end, the United Nations held out the promise of a world living in peace and harmony, and India, an equal partner with Britain, would be among the great nations...
A few weeks later, Bengal and Punjab provinces were bisected. Riots flared up across northern India, and there was a great exodus of people crossing the newly drawn frontiers of Pakistan and India. Homes were destroyed, thousands lost their lives.
The common-room radio and the occasional newspaper kept us abreast of events, but in our tunnel, Omar and I felt immune from all that was happening, worlds away from all the pillage, murder and revenge. And outside the tunnel, on the pine knoll below the school, there was fresh untrodden grass, sprinkled with clover and daisies, the only sounds the hammering of a woodpecker, the distant insistent call of the Himalayan barbet. Who could touch us there?
‘And when all the wars are done,’ I said, ‘a butterfly will still be beautiful.’
‘Did you read that somewhere?’
‘No, it just came into my head.’
‘Already you’re a writer.’
‘No, I want to play hockey for India or football for Arsenal. Only winning teams!’
‘You can’t win forever. Better to be a writer.’
When the monsoon rains arrived, the tunnel was flooded, the drain choked with rubble. We were allowed out to the cinema to see Lawrence Olivier’s Hamlet, a film that did nothing to raise our spirits on a wet and gloomy afternoon—but it was our last picture that year, because communal riots suddenly broke out in Simla’s Lower Bazaar, an area that was still much as Kipling had described it—‘a man who knows his way there can defy all the police of India’s summer capital’—and we were confined to school indefinitely.
One morning after chapel, the headmaster announced that the Muslim boys—those who had their homes in what was now Pakistan—would have to be evacuated, sent to their homes across the border with an armed convoy.
The tunnel no longer provided an escape for us. The bazaar was out of bounds. The flooded playing field was deserted. Omar and I sat on a damp wooden bench and talked about the future in vaguely hopeful terms; but we didn’t solve any problems. Mountbatten and Nehru and Jinnah were doing all the solving.
It was soon time for Omar to leave—he along with some fifty other boys from Lahore, Pindi and Peshawar. The rest of us—Hindus, Christians, Parsis—helped them load their luggage into the waiting trucks. A couple of boys broke down and wept. So did our departing school captain, a Pathan who had been known for his stoic and unemotional demeanour. Omar waved cheerfully to me and I waved back. We had vowed to meet again some day.
The convoy got through safely enough. There was only one casualty—the school cook, who had strayed into an off-limits area in the foothill town of Kalka and been set upon by a mob. He wasn’t seen again.
Towards the end of the school year, just as we were all getting ready to leave for the school holidays, I received a letter from Omar. He told me something about his new school and how he missed my company and our games and our tunnel to freedom. I replied and gave him my home address, but I did not hear from him again. The land, though divided, was still a big one, and we were very small.
Some seventeen or eighteen years later I did get news of Omar, but in an entirely different
context. India and Pakistan were at war and in a bombing raid over Ambala, not far from Simla, a Pakistani plane was shot down. Its crew died in the crash. One of them, I learnt later, was Omar.
Did he, I wonder, get a glimpse of the playing fields we knew so well as boys?
Perhaps memories of his schooldays flooded back as he flew over the foothills. Perhaps he remembered the tunnel through which we were able to make our little escape to freedom.
But there are no tunnels in the sky.
The Superior Man
JAJALI WAS A famous ascetic—one who practised extreme self-discipline. He had a thorough knowledge of the Vedas, most ancient of sacred books, and attended to the sacrificial fires. He observed long fasts. During the rainy season he slept under the open sky by night and lay in water by day.
In the hot weather Jajali did not seek protection from either the burning sun or the scorching wind. He slept in the most uncomfortable places, and smeared his body and long, unkempt hair with filth and mud. If he wore any clothes at all, they were made of rags and skins. He travelled over the whole earth, and dwelt in forests, mountains, or by the shores of the ocean. Once, when he was beside the ocean, he decided to conceal himself beneath its waters. He was able to do so by means of the great self-discipline which he had learnt. He could also project his mind in every direction and make himself aware of all that was happening in different parts of the world.
As Jajali lay one day at the bottom of the ocean, thinking of how his mind could travel everywhere, pride filled his heart, and he told himself that there was nobody quite like him in all the world. As he made this boast, a voice spoke in his ear. It was the voice of a spirit who had been watching him.