by Ruskin Bond
‘You’ll have to wait,’ said the girl. ‘My mother’s having a baby.’
I threw the ball across the table. She caught it neatly, marched out through the swing doors, and began bouncing the ball on the pavement. As soon as she had gone, I heard a baby crying in the inner room. For about five minutes I sat listening, and then I began to feel foolish. I was about to leave when the Chinese came bustling into the room, his face creased with smiles.
‘I am very sorry, sir!’ he exclaimed. ‘I have made you wait a long time. But the doctor could not arrive in time, and the baby would not wait for the doctor. So my wife and I—we had to manage by ourselves. All is well now, sir. Here is the menu.’
I gazed at him in wonder, while he bubbled over with enthusiasm.
‘Your lunch is on the house, sir,’ he said. ‘Chicken noodles, chow mein, lobster fuyong, anything you like!
We have had six children, but all girls. Now we have a boy!’
I congratulated him, and accepted the offer of lunch. It was a good meal, lovingly prepared. My long wait had been worthwhile, and Limehouse had, after all, come up to expectations. Where else in London could this have happened to me?
The Man Who Was Kipling
I WAS SITTING on a bench in the Indian section of the Victoria and Albert Museum, when a tall, stooping, elderly gentleman sat down beside me. I gave him a quick glance, noting his swarthy features, heavy moustache and horn-rimmed spectacles. There was something familiar and disturbing about his face and I couldn’t resist looking at him again.
I noticed that he was smiling at me.
‘Do you recognize me?’ he asked in a soft, pleasant voice.
‘Well, you do seem familiar,’ I said. ‘Haven’t we met somewhere?’
‘Perhaps. But if I seem familiar to you, that is at least something. The trouble these days is that people don’t know me anymore—I’m a familiar, that’s all. Just a name standing for a lot of outmoded ideas.’
A little perplexed, I asked, ‘What is it you do?’
‘I wrote books once. Poems and tales … Tell me, whose books do you read?’
‘Oh, Maugham, Priestley, Thurber. And among the older lot, Bennett and Wells … ’ I hesitated, groping for an important name, and I noticed a shadow, a sad shadow, pass across my companion’s face.
‘Oh yes, and Kipling,’ I said. ‘I read a lot of Kipling.’
His face brightened up at once and the eyes behind the thick-lensed spectacles suddenly came to life.
‘I’m Kipling,’ he said.
I stared at him in astonishment. And then, realizing that he might perhaps be dangerous, I smiled feebly and said, ‘Oh yes?’
‘You probably don’t believe me. I’m dead, of course.’
‘So I thought.’
‘And you don’t believe in ghosts?’
‘Not as a rule.’
‘But you’d have no objection to talking to one if he came along?’
‘I’d have no objection. But how do I know you’re Kipling? How do I know you’re not an impostor?’
‘Listen, then:
When my heavens were turned to blood,
When the dark had filled my day,
Furthest, but most faithful, stood
That lone star I cast away.
I had loved myself, and I
Have not lived and dare not die.
‘Once,’ he said, gripping me by the arm and looking me straight in the eye. ‘Once in life I watched a star but I whistled her to go.’
‘Your star hasn’t fallen yet,’ I said, suddenly moved, suddenly quite certain that I sat beside Kipling. ‘One day, when there is a new spirit of adventure abroad, we will discover you again.’
‘Why have they heaped scorn on me for so long?’
‘You were too militant, I suppose—too much of an Empire man. You were too patriotic for your own good.’
He looked a little hurt. ‘I was never very political,’ he said. ‘I wrote over 600 poems. And you could only call a dozen of them political. I have been abused for harping on the theme of the White Man’s burden but my only aim was to show off the Empire to my audience— and I believed the Empire was a fine and noble thing. Is it wrong to believe in something? I never went deeply into political issues, that’s true. You must remember, my seven years in India were very youthful years. I was in my twenties, a little immature if you like, and my interest in India was a boy’s interest. Action appealed to me more than anything else. You must understand that.’
‘No one has described action more vividly, or India so well. I feel at one with Kim wherever he goes along the Grand Trunk Road, in the temples at Banaras, amongst the Saharanpur fruit gardens, on the snow-covered Himalayas. Kim has colour and movement and poetry.’
He sighed and a wistful look came into his eyes.
‘I’m prejudiced, of course,’ I continued. ‘I’ve spent most of my life in India—not your India, but an India that does still have much of the colour and atmosphere that you captured. You know, Mr Kipling, you can still sit in a third-class railway carriage and meet the most wonderful assortment of people. In any village you will still find the same courtesy, dignity and courage that the Lama and Kim found on their travels.’
‘And the Grand Trunk Road? Is it still a long winding procession of humanity?’
‘Well, not exactly,’ I said a little ruefully. ‘It’s just a procession of motor vehicles now. The poor Lama would be run down by a truck if he became too dreamy on the Grand Trunk Road. Times have changed. There are no more Mrs Hawksbees in Simla, for instance.’
There was a faraway look in Kipling’s eyes. Perhaps he was imagining himself a boy again. Perhaps he could see the hills or the red dust of Rajputana. Perhaps he was having a private conversation with Privates Mulvaney and Ortheris, or perhaps he was out hunting with the Seonce wolf pack. The sound of London’s traffic came to us through the glass doors but we heard only the creaking of bullock-cart wheels and the distant music of a flute.
He was talking to himself, repeating a passage from one of his stories. ‘And the last puff of the day wind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp woodsmoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, that man will at the last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die.’
A mist seemed to have risen between us—or had it come in from the streets?—and when it cleared, Kipling had gone away.
I asked the gatekeeper if he had seen a tall man with a slight stoop, wearing spectacles.
‘Nope,’ said the gatekeeper. ‘Nobody’s been by for the last ten minutes.’
‘Did someone like that come into the gallery a little while ago?’
‘No one that I recall. What did you say the bloke’s name was?’
‘Kipling,’ I said.
‘Don’t know him.’
‘Didn’t you ever read The Jungle Book?’
‘Sounds familiar. Tarzan stuff, wasn’t it?’
I left the museum and wandered about the streets for a long time but I couldn’t find Kipling anywhere. Was it the boom of London’s traffic that I heard or the boom of the Sutlej river racing through the valleys?
Tribute to a Dead Friend
NOW THAT THANH is dead, I suppose it is not too treacherous of me to write about him. 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.
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, 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 with him 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 anyone here. 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 introduced 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 bedsitting rooms, having changed my own abode five times in two years (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, Rusty?’ 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 as we lay on the grass on Hampstead Heath. On the fourth day she told me that she was going to Berkshire and would be back only after a fortnight. When she returned, 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, Rusty, 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, un
fortunately 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 Rusty 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.
Three weeks later Thanh went to Paris to help in his sister’s restaurant. I did not hear from Vu-Phuong for some time.
A couple of months later, Pravin brought the news that Thanh was dead. He didn’t have any details; all he could tell me was 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 liked him, or if there was any difference between hating and liking him.
The Girl from Copenhagen
I DON’T KNOW why exactly I fell in love with Vu-Phuong. Maybe it is quite simple at that age to fall in love with someone, and Vu was the sort of girl—pretty, soft-spoken, demure—who could enslave me without any apparent effort.
She was happy to accompany me on walks across Hampstead Heath and over Primrose Hill. It was summer time and the grass smelt sweet and was good to lie upon. We lay close to each other and watched boys flying kites. No one bothered us. She put her hand in mine. I walked her home and she made tea for me.
We went about together. She said she looked upon me as a friend, a brother (fatal word!), and would depend upon me for many things. When she went away for a fortnight, I was desolate. It was only as far as a farm in Berkshire where she had joined some other girl students picking strawberries. On a Sunday I took a train to Newbury and then a small branch line to the village of Kintbury—a pretty little place with an old inn, a couple of small shops and plenty of farmland. I had Vu’s address, and after lunching at the inn, I set off for the farm where Vu and her friends were working. It was a lovely summer’s day, and my first walk in the English countryside.