by Ruskin Bond
‘All the same, people are in danger.’
‘So, we’ll send for Jim Corbett. Aurora of the Green Bookshop should have his number.’
Mr Aurora was better informed than either of us. He told us that Jim Corbett had settled in Kenya several years ago.
Swami looked dismayed. ‘I thought he loved India so much that he refused to leave.’
‘You’re confusing him with Jack Gibson of the Mayo School,’ I said.
At this point the tiger came through the swing doors of the Indiana and started crossing the road. Mohan was driving slowly down Rajpur Road in his 1936 Hillman. He’d been up half the night, drinking and playing cards, and he had a terrible hangover. He was now heading for the Royal Cafe, convinced that only a chilled beer could help him recover. When he saw the tiger, his reflexes—never very good—failed him completely, and he drove his car on to the pavement and into the plate-glass window of Bhai Dhian Singh’s Wine and Liquor Shop. Mohan looked quite happy among the broken rum bottles. The heady aroma of XXX Rosa Rum, awash on the shopping veranda, was too much for a couple of old topers, who began to mop up the liquor with their handkerchiefs. Mohan would have done the same had he been conscious.
We carried him into the deserted Indiana and sent for Dr Sharma.
‘Nothing much wrong with him,’ said the doc, ‘but he looks anaemic,’ and proceeded to give him an injection of vitamin B12. This was Dr Sharma’s favourite remedy for anyone who was ailing. He was a great believer in vitamins.
I don’t know if the B12 did Mohan any good, but the jab of the needle woke him up, and he looked around, blinked up at me and said, ‘Thought I saw a tiger. Could do with a drink, old boy.’
‘I’ll stand you a beer,’ I said. ‘But you’ll have to pay the bill at Bhai Dhian’s. And your car needs repairs.’
‘And this injection costs five rupees,’ said Dr Sharma.
‘Beer is the same price. I’ll stand you one too.’
So we settled down in the Indiana and finished several bottles of beer, Dr Sharma expounding all the time on the miracle of Vitamin B12, while Mohan told me that he knew now what it felt like to enter the fourth dimension.
The tiger was soon forgotten, and when I walked back to my room a couple of hours later and found the postman waiting for me with a twenty-five rupee money-order from Sainik Samachar (the Armed Forces’ weekly magazine), I tipped him five rupees and put the rest aside for a rainy day—which, hopefully, would be the morrow, as monsoon clouds had been advancing from the south.
They say that those with a clear conscience usually sleep well. I have always done a lot of sleeping, especially in the afternoons, and have never been unduly disturbed by pangs of conscience, for I haven’t deprived any man of his money, his wife, or his song.
I kicked off my chappals and lay down and allowed my mind to dwell on my favourite Mexican proverb: ‘How sweet it is to do nothing, and afterwards to rest!’
I hoped the tiger had found a shady spot for his afternoon siesta. With goodwill towards one and all, I drifted into a deep sleep.
13
A dream crept into my sleep … a dream which followed the runaway tiger’s progress in Dehra town. The tiger padded silently but purposefully past the Dilaram Bazaar, paying no attention to the screaming and shouting of the little gesticulating creatures who fled at his approach. He’d seen them every night at the circus—all in search of excitement, provided there was no risk attached to it!
Walking down from the other end of the Dilaram Road was a tiger of another sort—sub-inspector Sher (‘Tiger’) Singh, in charge of the local police outpost. ‘Tiger’ Singh was feeling on top of the world. His little thana was notorious for beating up suspected criminals, and he’d had a satisfying night supervising the third-degree interrogation of three young suspects in a case of theft. None of them had broken down and confessed, but ‘Tiger’ had the pleasure (and what was it, if not a pleasure, an appeal to his senses?) of kicking one youth senseless, blackening the eyes of another, and fracturing the ankle and shin bone of the third. The damage done, they had been ejected into the street with a warning to keep their noses clean in the future.
These young men could have saved themselves from physical injury had they disbursed a couple of hundred rupees to the sub-inspector and his cohorts, but they were unemployed and without friends of substance; so, beaten and humiliated, they crawled home as best they could. (My dream wasn’t far removed from reality. Such a character did exist in Dehra, and was dreaded by one and all. For, ‘Tiger’ Singh liked the money he sometimes picked up from suspects and the relatives of petty offenders; but many years in the service had brought out the sadistic side to his nature, and now he took a certain pleasure in seeing noses broken and teeth knocked out. He claimed that he could extract teeth without anaesthesia, and would do the job free for those who could not afford dentists’ bills. There were no takers.)
In my dream he strutted along the pavement, twirling his moustache with one hand and pulling up his trousers with the other. For he was a well-fed gentleman, whose belly protruded above his belt. He had a constant struggle keeping his trousers, along with his heavy revolver holster, from slipping to the ground. Had he not been in the direct path of the tiger, he would have been ignored. But he chose to stand frozen to the ground, really too terrified to reach for his gun or even hitch up his trousers.
The tiger slapped him to the ground, picked him up by his fat neck, and dragged him into the lantana bushes. Sher Singh let out one despairing cry, which turned into a gurgle as the blood spurted from his throat. (How dreams reflect our most concealed desires!)
This tiger did not eat humans. True, he had almost forgotten how to hunt, but his instincts told him that more succulent repasts could be found in the depths of the forest. And the forest was close at hand, so he abandoned the dead policeman, who would have made a more suitable meal for vultures had not his colleagues come and taken him away. His family received a pension and lived fairly happily ever after.
I opened my eyes. Well, it wasn’t such a bad dream, though a bit gruesome perhaps. So much for harbouring goodwill towards everybody. What was noteworthy about my dream however was that neither the tiger nor the S.I. was familiar with the Laws of Karma, or Emerson’s Law of Compensation, but they appeared to have been working all the same.
The clouds that had gathered over the foothills finally gave way under their burden of moisture. The first rain of the monsoon descended upon the hills, the valley, the town. In minutes, a two-month layer of dust was washed away from trees, rooftops and pavements. The rain swept across the streets of Dehra, sending people scattering for shelter. Umbrellas unfolded for the first time in months. A gust of wind shook the circus tent. I had gone to the circus ground to meet Sitaram. But he wasn’t to be found there, so I stood around a bit, waiting for him. The old lion, scenting the rain on the wind, sat up in its cage and gave a great roar of delight. The ponies shook their manes, an elephant trumpeted.
The rain swept over the railway yards, washing the soot and dust from the carriages and engines. It brought freshness and new life to the tea gardens and sugar cane fields. Even earthworms responded to the cool dampening of their environment and stretched sensuously in the soft mud.
Mud! Buffaloes wallowed in it; children romped in it; frogs broke into antiphonal chants. Glorious, squelchy mud. Hateful for the rest of the year, but wonderfully inviting on the first day of the monsoon. A large amount got washed down from the loose, eroded soil of the foothills, so that the streams and canals were soon clogged, silted up, and flooded their banks.
The mango and lichee trees were washed clean. Sal and shisham shook in the wind. Peepal leaves danced. The roots of the banyan drank up the good rain. The neem gave out its heady fragrance. Squirrels ran for shelter into the embracing branches of Krishna’s buttercup. Parrots made merry in the guava groves.
I walked home through the rain. Home, did I say? Yes, my small flat was becoming a home, what with Sitaram and his geraniums ups
tairs, my landlady below, and other familiars in the neighbourhood. Even the geckos on the wall were now recognizable, each acquiring an identity and personality of its own. Sitaram had trained one of them to take food from his fingers. At first he had stuck a bit of meat at the end of a long thin stick. The lizard had snapped up this morsel. Then, every day, he had shortened the stick until the lizard, growing in confidence, took his snack from the short end of the stick and finally from the boy’s fingers. I hadn’t got around to feeding the wall lizards. One of them had fallen with a plop on my forehead in the middle of the night, and my landlady told me of how a whole family had been poisoned when a gecko had fallen into a cooking pot and been served up with a mixed vegetable curry.
A neighbour, who worked for Madras Coffee House, told me that down south there were a number of omens connected with the fall of the wall lizard, especially if it dropped on some part of your body. He told me that I’d been fortunate that the lizard fell on my forehead, but had it fallen on my tummy I’d have been in for a period of bad luck. But I wasn’t taking any chances. The lizards could have all the snacks they wanted from Sitaram, but I wasn’t going to encourage any familiarity.
Now, happy to get my clothes wet with the first monsoon shower, I ran up the steps to my room, but found it empty. Then Sitaram’s voice, raised in song, wafted down to me from the rooftop. I climbed up to the roof by means of an old iron ladder that was always fixed there, and found him on the flat roof, prancing about in his underwear.
‘Come and join me,’ he shouted. ‘It is good to dance in the first monsoon shower.’
‘You might be seen from the roofs across the road,’ I said.
‘Never mind. Don’t you think I look like a hero?’
‘Far from it,’ I said, and retreated below.
14
It was still 1955, and the middle of the monsoon, when Sitaram decided to throw his lot in with the circus and leave Dehra. Those roses of the south had a lot to do with it. I wasn’t sure if he was in love with one of the pony-riders, or with the girl on the flying trapeze.
Perhaps both of them; perhaps all of them. He was at an age when his romantic dreams had to be directed somewhere, and those beautiful, dusky circus girls were certainly more approachable, and more glamorous, than the coy college girls we saw every day.
‘So you’re going to desert me,’ I said, when he told me of his plans.
‘Only for a few months. I’ll see the country this way.’
‘Once with the circus, always with the circus.’
‘Well, you have your Indu.’
‘I don’t. I hear she’s getting engaged to that cricket-playing princeling. I hate all cricketers!’
‘You’re better-looking.’
‘But I’m not a prince. I haven’t any money, and I don’t play cricket. Well, I played a little at school, but they always made me twelfth man, which meant carrying out the drinks like a waiter. What a stupid game!’
‘I agree. Football is better.’
‘More manly. But not as glamorous.’
Sitaram pondered a while, and then gave me the benefit of his wisdom.
‘To win Indu you must win her mother.’
‘And how do I do that? She’s a dragon.’
‘Well, you must pretend you like dragons.’
I was sitting in the Indiana, having my coffee, when Indu’s mother walked in. She was alone. (Indu was probably with her prince, learning to bowl underarm.) I said good morning and asked her if she’d like to join me for a cup of coffee. To my surprise, she assented. Larry Gomes was playing Love Is a Many-Splendoured Thing, and the Maharani was just a bit dreamy-eyed and probably a little sloshed too. But she wasn’t in any way attractive. Her eyes were baggy and her skin was coarse (too many skin lotions?) and her chin was developing a dewlap. Would Indu look like her one day?
She drank her coffee and asked me if I would like a drive. On the assumption that she would be driving me to her house, I thanked her and followed her out of the restaurant, while Larry Gomes looked anxiously at me over his spectacles and broke into the Funeral March.
15
Well, it was very nearly my funeral.
The Maharani’s intentions weren’t clear to me before we left the restaurant, but now I couldn’t help suddenly noticing the striking similarity between her and the repulsive crocodile. So, how could a monster like the Maharani have produced a beautiful, tender, vivacious, electrifying girl like Indu? It was like making a succulent dish from a pumpkin, a bitter gourd and a spent cucumber.
The Maharani had denied me the dish, but it looked as if she was prepared to give me the ingredients.
She drove me to her home in her smart little Sunbeam-Talbot, and no sooner was I settled on her sofa, with a glass of Carew’s Gin in my hand, than I found my free hand encased in a fold of crocodile skin—her hand!
It had never occured to me that this badly-preserved Christmas pudding could be of an amorous disposition. I had always thought of middle-aged mothers as having gone beyond the pursuit of carnal pleasures. But not this one!
She tried to set me at my ease.
‘I’m a child psychologist, you know.’
‘But I’m twenty-five.’
‘All the better to treat you, my dear.’
‘Your Highness,’ I began.
‘Don’t “Highness” me, darling. My pet name is Liz.’
‘As in lizard?’
‘Cheeky! After Queen Elizabeth.’ And she gave me a sharp pinch on the thigh. ‘You write poetry, don’t you? Recite one of your poems.’
‘You need moonlight and roses.’
‘I prefer sunshine and cactii.’
‘Well, here’s a funny one.’ I was anxious to please her without succumbing to her blandishments and advances. So I recited my latest limerick.
There was a fat man in Lucknow
Who swallowed six plates of pillau,
When his belly went bust
(As distended, it must)
His buttons rained down upon Mhow.
She clapped her hands and shrieked with delight. ‘Buttons, buttons!’ I then tried to get up from the sofa, but she pulled me down again.
‘You deserve a reward,’ she said, producing a lump of barley sugar from a box on the side table. ‘This came all the way from Calcutta. Open your mouth.’
Dutifully I opened my mouth. But instead of popping the sweet in, she kissed me passionately.
What can you do in such a situation? Not much, really. You must let the more active partner take over—in this case, the rich Maharani of Magador. She certainly knew how to get you worked up. One thing led to another and the undesirable (as far as I was concerned) but inevitable thing happened.
Afterwards I was rewarded with more barley sugar and Turkish coffee.
She offered to drop me home, but I said I’d walk. I wanted to put my head in order. My thoughts were in a whirl. How could I be the Maharani’s lover while I was in love with her daughter? Love lyrics for Indu, and limericks for her mother?
‘There’s no justice anywhere,’ I said aloud, in my best William Brown manner. ‘’Tisn’t fair.’ And then, as Popeye would have said, ‘It’s disgustipating!’
And as I closed the gate and stepped onto the sidewalk, who should appear but Indu, riding pillion on her cricketing prince’s Triumph motorbike. At the sight of him my feelings of guilt evaporated. And looking at Indu, smiling insincerely at me, I began to see points of resemblance between her and her mother. Would she be like the Maharani in twenty years’ time? I had never seen her father (the late deceased Maharaja of Magador) but fervently hoped that he had been as good-looking as his portraits suggested and that Indu had taken after him.
I gave her and her escort a polite bow (after all, why reveal my mind) and set off at a dignified pace in the direction of the bazaar. A car would never be mine, but at least my legs wouldn’t atrophy from disuse. Hadn’t this very cricketing legend suffered from several torn ligaments in the course of his sh
ort career? Chasing cricket balls is a certain way to get a hernia, I said to myself, and then turned my thoughts to the composition of a new limerick in honour of the lady who had just tormented me into becoming her lover. There was no Amnesty International in those days; I had to defend myself in my own way. So I composed the following lines:
They called her the Queen of the Nile,
For she walked like a fat crocodile.
But she said, ‘ You young boy,
Don’t act so coy,’
And took me to bed with a smile.
16
We all need one friend in whom to confide—to whom we can confess our misdemeanours, look for sympathy in times of trouble. Sitaram was my only intimate, and he listened with bated breath while I gave him a hair-raising account of my experience with the Maharani. But he wasn’t sympathetic. His first response was the following succinct remark:
‘Congratulations, you have signed your own death warrant.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because you cannot escape her now. She’ll suck you dry.’
‘A succubus, forsooth!’
‘Don’t use fancy language—you know what I mean. When an older woman gets hold of a young man, she doesn’t let him go until he’s quite useless to her or anyone else! You’d better join the circus with me.’
‘And what do I do in the circus? Feed the animals?’
‘They need someone for giving massage.’
‘I’ve always fancied myself as a masseur. Whom do I get to massage—the acrobats, the dancing girls, the trapeze artistes?’
‘The elephants. They lie down and you massage their legs. And backsides.’
‘I’ll stick to the Maharani,’ I said. ‘Her skin has the same sort of texture, but there’s not so much of it.’
‘Well, please yourself … See, I’ve brought you a pretty tree. Will you look after it while I’m away?’
It was a red oleander in a pot. It was just coming into flower. We placed it on the balcony beside the rose bush and the geraniums. There were several geraniums now—white, cerise, salmon pink and bright red—and they were all in flower, making quite a display on the sunny veranda.