by Ruskin Bond
None of these dogs looked like the ones I had seen in the night.
‘Does anyone here keep a Retriever?’ I asked Colonel Fanshawe, when I met him taking his evening walk.
‘No one that I know of,’ he said and gave me a swift, penetrating look from under his bushy eyebrows. ‘Why, have you seen one around?’
‘No, I just wondered. There are a lot of dogs in the area, aren’t there?’
‘Oh, yes. Nearly everyone keeps a dog here. Of course, every now and then a panther carries one off. Lost a lovely little terrier myself only last winter.’
Colonel Fanshawe, tall and red-faced, seemed to be waiting for me to tell him something more—or was he just taking time to recover his breath after a stiff uphill climb?
That night I heard the dogs again. I went to the window and looked out. The moon was at the full, silvering the leaves of the oak trees.
The dogs were looking up into the trees and barking. But I could see nothing in the trees, not even an owl.
I gave a shout, and the dogs disappeared into the forest.
Colonel Fanshawe looked at me expectantly when I met him the following day. He knew something about those dogs, of that I was certain; but he was waiting to hear what I had to say. I decided to oblige him.
‘I saw at least six dogs in the middle of the night,’ I said. ‘A Cocker, a Retriever, a Peke, a Dachshund and two mongrels. Now, Colonel, I’m sure you must know whose they are.’
The Colonel was delighted. I could tell by the way his eyes glinted that he was going to enjoy himself at my expense. ‘You’ve been seeing Miss Fairchild’s dogs,’ he said with smug satisfaction.
‘Oh, and where does she live?’
‘She doesn’t, my boy. Died fifteen years ago.’
‘Then what are her dogs doing here?’
‘Looking for monkeys,’ said the Colonel. And he stood back to watch my reaction.
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘Let me put it this way,’ said the Colonel. ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’
‘I’ve never seen any,’ I said.
‘But you have, my boy, you have. Miss Fairchild’s dogs died years ago—a Cocker, a Retriever, a Dachshund, a Peke and two mongrels. They were buried on a little knoll under the oaks. Nothing odd about their deaths, mind you. They were all quite old, and didn’t survive their mistress very long. Neighbours looked after them until they died.’
‘And Miss Fairchild lived in the cottage where I stay? Was she young?’
‘She was in her mid-forties, an athletic sort of woman, fond of the outdoors. Didn’t care much for men. I thought you knew about her.’
‘No, I haven’t been here very long, you know. But what was it you said about monkeys? Why were the dogs looking for monkeys?’
‘Ah, that’s the interesting part of the story. Have you seen the langoor monkeys that sometimes come to eat oak leaves?’
‘No.’
‘You will, sooner or later. There has always been a band of them roaming these forests. They’re quite harmless really, except that they’ll ruin a garden if given half a chance…Well, Miss Fairchild fairly loathed those monkeys. She was very keen on her dahlias—grew some prize specimens—but the monkeys would come at night, dig up the plants and eat the dahlia bulbs. Apparently they found the bulbs much to their liking. Miss Fairchild would be furious. People who are passionately fond of gardening often go off balance when their best plants are ruined—that’s only human, I suppose. Miss Fairchild set her dogs on the monkeys whenever she could, even if it was in the middle of the night. But the monkeys simply took to the trees and left the dogs barking.
‘Then one day—or rather one night—Miss Fairchild took desperate measures. She borrowed a shotgun and sat up near a window. And when the monkeys arrived, she shot one of them dead.’
The Colonel paused and looked out over the oak trees which were shimmering in the warm afternoon sun.
‘She shouldn’t have done that,’ he said.
‘Never shoot a monkey. It’s not only that they’re sacred to Hindus—but they are rather human, you know. Well, I must be getting on. Good day!’ And the Colonel, having ended his story rather abruptly, set off at a brisk pace through the deodars.
I didn’t hear the dogs that night. But the next day I saw the monkeys—the real ones, not ghosts. There were about twenty of them, young and old, sitting in the trees munching oak leaves. They didn’t pay much attention to me, and I watched them for some time.
They were handsome creatures, their fur a silver-grey, their tails long and sinuous. They leapt gracefully from tree to tree, and were very polite and dignified in their behaviour towards each other—unlike the bold, rather crude red monkeys of the plains. Some of the younger ones scampered about on the hillside, playing and wrestling with each other like schoolboys.
There were no dogs to molest them—and no dahlias to tempt them into the garden.
But that night, I heard the dogs again. They were barking more furiously than ever.
‘Well, I’m not getting up for them this time,’ I mumbled, and pulled the blanket over my ears.
But the barking grew louder, and was joined by other sounds, a squealing and a scuffling.
Then suddenly, the piercing shriek of a woman rang through the forest. It was an unearthly sound, and it made my hair stand up.
I leapt out of bed and dashed to the window.
A woman was lying on the ground, three or four huge monkeys were on top of her, biting her arms and pulling at her throat. The dogs were yelping and trying to drag the monkeys off, but they were being harried from behind by others. The woman gave another bloodcurdling shriek, and I dashed back into the room, grabbed hold of a small axe and ran into the garden.
But everyone—dogs, monkeys and shrieking woman—had disappeared, and I stood alone on the hillside in my pyjamas, clutching an axe and feeling very foolish.
The Colonel greeted me effusively the following day.
‘Still seeing those dogs?’ he asked in a bantering tone.
‘I’ve seen the monkeys too,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes, they’ve come around again. But they’re real enough, and quite harmless.’
‘I know—but I saw them last night with the dogs.’ ‘Oh, did you really? That’s strange, very strange.’ The Colonel tried to avoid my eye, but I hadn’t quite finished with him.
‘Colonel,’ I said. ‘You never did get around to telling me how Miss Fairchild died.’
‘Oh, didn’t I? Must have slipped my memory. I’m getting old, don’t remember people as well as I used to. But, of course, I remember about Miss Fairchild, poor lady. The monkeys killed her. Didn’t you know? They simply tore her to pieces…’
His voice trailed of, and he looked thoughtfully at a caterpillar that was making its way up his walking stick.
‘She shouldn’t have shot one of them,’ he said. ‘Never shoot a monkey—they’re rather human, you know…’
In Grandfather’s Garden
Though the house and grounds of our home in Dehra were Grandfather’s domain—where he kept an odd assortment of pets—the magnificent old banyan tree was mine, chiefly because Grandfather, at the age of sixty-five, could no longer climb it. Grandmother used to tease him about this, and would speak of a certain Countess of Desmond, an Englishwoman who lived till the age of 117, and would have lived longer if she hadn’t fallen while climbing an apple tree. The spreading branches of the banyan tree, which curved to the ground and took root again, forming a maze of arches, gave me endless pleasure. The tree was older than the house, older than Grandfather, as old as the town of Dehra, nestling in a valley at the foot of the Himalayas.
My first friend was a small grey squirrel. Arching his back and sniffing into the air, he seemed at first to resent my invasion of his privacy. But when he found that I did not arm myself with a catapult or air-gun, he became friendlier. And when I started leaving him pieces of cake and biscuit, he grew bolder, and finally
became familiar enough to take food from my hands.
Before long, he was delving into my pockets and helping himself to whatever he could find. He was a very young squirrel, and his friends and relatives probably thought of him as headstrong and foolish for trusting a human.
In the spring, when the banyan tree was full of small red figs, birds of all kinds would flock into its branches, the red-bottomed bulbul, cheerful and greedy; gossiping rosy pastors; and parrots and crows, squabbling with each other all the time. During the fig season, the banyan tree was the noisiest place on the road.
Halfway up the tree I had built a small platform on which I would often spend the afternoons when it wasn’t too hot. I could read there, propping myself up against the bole of the tree with the cushions taken from the drawing room. Treasure Island, Huckleberry Finn, the Mowgli stories, and detective novels made up my bag of very mixed reading.
When I didn’t want to read, I could look down through the banyan leaves at the world below, at Grandmother hanging up or taking down the washing, at the cook quarrelling with a fruit vendor, or at Grandfather grumbling at the hardy Indian marigold, which insisted on springing up all over his very English garden. Usually nothing very exciting happened while I was in the banyan tree, but on one particular afternoon I had enough excitement to last me through the summer.
That was the time I saw a mongoose and a cobra fight to death in the garden, while I sat directly above them in the banyan tree.
It was an April afternoon. The warm breezes of approaching summer had sent everyone, including Grandfather, indoors. I was feeling drowsy myself and was wondering if I should go to the pond behind the house for a swim, when I saw a huge black cobra gliding out of a clump of cacti and making for some cooler part of the garden. At the same time a mongoose (whom I had often seen) emerged from the bushes and went straight for the cobra.
In a clearing beneath the tree, in bright sunshine, they came face to face.
The cobra knew only too well that the grey mongoose, three feet long, was a superb fighter, clever and aggressive. But the cobra was a skilful and experienced fighter, too. He could move swiftly and strike with the speed of light, and the sacs behind his long, sharp fangs were full of deadly venom.
It was to be a battle of champions.
Hissing defiance, his forked tongue darting in and out, the cobra raised three of his six feet off the ground, and spread his broad, spectacled hood. The mongoose bushed his tail. The long hair on his spine stood up (in the past, the very thickness of his hair had saved him from bites that would have been fatal to others).
Though the combatants were unaware of my presence in the banyan tree, they soon became aware of the arrival of two other spectators. One was a mynah and the other a jungle crow (not the wily urban crow). They had seen these preparations for battle, and had settled on the cactus to watch the outcome. Had they been content only to watch, all would have been well with both of them.
The cobra stood on the defensive, swaying slowly from side to side, trying to mesmerize the mongoose into making a false move. The mongoose knew the power of his opponent’s glassy, twinkling eyes, and refused to meet them. Instead, he fixed his gaze at a point just below the cobra’s hood, and opened the attack.
Moving forward quickly until he was just within the cobra’s reach, he made a feint to one side. Immediately, the cobra struck. His great hood came down so swiftly that I thought nothing could save the mongoose. But the little fellow jumped neatly to one side, and darted in as swiftly as the cobra, biting the snake on the back and darting away again out of reach.
The moment the cobra struck, the crow and the mynah hurled themselves at him, only to collide heavily in mid-air. Shrieking at each other, they returned to the cactus plant.
A few drops of blood glistened on the cobra’s back.
The cobra struck again and missed. Again the mongoose sprang aside, jumped in and bit. Again the birds dived at the snake, bumped into each other instead, and returned shrieking to the safety of the cactus.
The third round followed the same course as the first but with one dramatic difference. The crow and the mynah, still determined to take part in the proceedings, dived at the cobra, but this time they missed each other as well as their mark. The mynah flew on and reached its perch, but the crow tried to pull up in mid-air and turn back. In the second that it took him to do this, the cobra whipped his head back and struck with great force, his snout thudding against the crow’s body.
I saw the bird flung nearly twenty feet across the garden, where, after fluttering about for a while, it lay still. The mynah remained on the cactus plant, and when the snake and the mongoose returned to the fray, it very wisely refrained from interfering again!
The cobra was weakening, and the mongoose, walking fearlessly up to it, raised himself on his short legs, and with a lightning snap had the big snake by the snout. The cobra writhed and lashed about in a frightening manner, and even coiled itself about the mongoose, but all to no avail. The little fellow hung grimly on, until the snake had ceased to struggle. He then smeared along its quivering length, gripping it round the hood, and dragging it into the bushes.
The mynah dropped cautiously to the ground, hopped about, peered into the bushes from a safe distance, and then, with a shrill cry of congratulation, flew away.
When I had also made a cautious descent from the tree and returned to the house, I told Grandfather of the fight I had seen. He was pleased that the mongoose had won. He had encouraged it to live in the garden, to keep away the snakes, and fed it regularly with scraps from the kitchen. He had never tried taming it, because a wild mongoose was more useful than a domesticated one.
From the banyan tree I often saw the mongoose patrolling the four corners of the garden, and once I saw him with an egg in his mouth and knew he had been in the poultry house; but he hadn’t harmed the birds, and I knew Grandmother would forgive him for stealing as long as he kept the snakes away.
The banyan tree was also the setting for what we were to call the Strange Case of the Grey Squirrel and the White Rat.
The white rat was Grandfather’s—he had bought it from the bazaar for four annas—but I would often take it with me into the banyan tree, where it soon struck up a friendship with one of the squirrels. They would go off together on little excursions among the roots and branches of the old tree.
Then the squirrel started building a nest. At first, she tried building it in my pockets, and when I went indoors and changed my clothes I would find straw and grass falling out. Then one day Grandmother’s knitting was missing. We hunted for it everywhere but without success.
Next day I saw something glinting in the hole in the banyan tree and, going up to investigate, saw that it was the end of Grandmother’s steel knitting needle. On looking further, I discovered that the hole was crammed with knitting. And amongst the wool were three baby squirrels—all of them white!
Grandfather had never seen white squirrels before, and we gazed at them in wonder. We were puzzled for some time, but when I mentioned the white rat’s frequent visits to the tree, Grandfather told me that the rat must be the father. Rats and squirrels were related to each other, he said, and so it was quite possible for them to have offspring—in this case, white squirrels!
Ghosts of the Savoy
The clock over the Savoy Bar is stationary at 8.20 and has been like that since the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima fifty years ago. That’s what Nandu tells me, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. Many of his more outlandish statements often turn out to be true.
Almost any story about this old hotel in Mussoorie has a touch of the improbable about it, even when supported by facts. A previous owner, Mr McClintock, had a false nose—according to Nandu, who never saw it. So I checked with old Negi, who first came to work in the hotel as a room boy back in 1932 (a couple of years before I was born) and who, sixty years and two wives later, looks after the front office. Negi tells me it’s quite true.
‘I u
sed to take McClintock sahib his cup of cocoa last thing at night. After leaving his room I’d dash around to one of the windows and watch him until he went to bed. The last thing he did, before putting the light out, was to remove his false nose and place it on the bedside table. He never slept with it on. I suppose it bothered him whenever he turned over or slept on his face. First thing in the morning, before having his cup of tea, he’d put it on again. A great man, McClintock sahib.’
‘But how did he lose his nose in the first place?’ I asked.
‘Wife bit it off,’ said Nandu.
‘No, sir,’ said Negi, whose reputation for telling the truth is proverbial. ‘It was shot away by a German bullet during World War I. He got the Victoria Cross as compensation.’ ‘And when he died, was he wearing his nose?’ I asked.
‘No, sir,’ said old Negi, continuing his tale with some relish. ‘One morning when I took the sahib his cup of tea, I found him stone dead, without his nose! It was lying on the bedside table. I suppose I should have left it there, but McClintock sahib was a good man, I could not bear to have the whole world knowing about his false nose. So I stuck it back on his face and then went and informed the manager. A natural death, just a sudden heart attack. But I made sure that he went into his coffin with his nose attached!’
We all agreed that Negi was a good man to have around, especially in a crisis.
Mr McClintock’s ghost is supposed to haunt the corridors of the hotel, but I have yet to encounter it. Will the ghost be wearing its nose? Old Negi thinks not (the false nose being man-made), but then he hasn’t seen the ghost at close quarters, only receding into the distance between the two giant deodars on the edge of the Beer Garden. Those deodars have been there a couple of hundred years, before the hotel was built, before the hill station came up.
A lot of people who enter the Bar look pretty far gone, and sometimes I have difficulty distinguishing the living from the dead. But the real ghosts are those who manage to slip away without paying for their drinks.