by Ruskin Bond
My next visitor is Constable Ghanshyam Singh, who tells me that the SP has extracted confessions from a couple of thieves simply by making them stand for hours and listen to him reciting his poetry. I know our police have a reputation for torturing suspects, but I think this is carrying things a bit too far.
‘And what about your transfer?’ I ask.
‘As soon as those poems are published in the Weekly.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ I promise.
(They appeared in the Bhopal Weekly. And a year later, when I was editing Imprint, I was able to publish one of the SP’s poems. He has always maintained that if I’d published more of them, the magazine would never have folded.)
A note on Miss Bun
Little Miss Bun is fond of bed,
But she keeps a cash box in her head.
April 8
Rev. Biggs at the door, book in hand.
‘I won’t take up your time, Mr Bond. But I thought it was time I returned your butterfly book.’
‘My butterfly book?’
‘Yes, thank you very much. I enjoyed it a great deal.’
Mr Biggs hands me the book on butterflies, a handsomely illustrated volume. It isn’t my book, but if Mr Biggs insists on giving me someone else’s book, who am I to quibble? He’d never find the right owner, anyway.
‘By the way, have you seen Mrs Biggs?’ he asks.
‘No, not this morning, sir.’
‘She went off without telling me. She’s always doing things like that. Very irritating.’
After he has gone, I glance at the fly leaf of the book. It says W. Biggs. So it’s one of his own…
A little later Mrs Biggs comes by.
‘Have you seen Will?’ she asks.
‘He was here about fifteen minutes ago. He was looking for you.’
‘Oh, he knew I’d gone to the garden shed. How tiresome! I suppose he’s wandered off somewhere.’
‘Never mind, Mrs Biggs, he’ll make his way home when he gets hungry. A good lunch will always bring a wanderer home. By the way, I’ve got his book on butterflies. Perhaps you’d return it to him for me? And he shouldn’t lend it to just anyone, you know. It’s a valuable book, you don’t want to lose it.’
‘I’m sure it was quite safe with you, Mr Bond.’
Books always are, of course. On principle, I never steal another man’s books. I might take his geraniums or his old school tie, but I wouldn’t deprive him of his books. Or the song or melody or dream be lives by. And here’s a little lullaby for Raki:
Little one, don’t be afraid of this big river.
Be safe in these warm arms for ever.
Grow tall, my child, be wise and strong.
But do not take from any man his song.
Little one, don’t be afraid of this dark night.
Walk boldly as you see the truth and light.
Love well, my child, laugh all day long,
But do not take from any man his song.
April 16
Is there something about the air at this height that makes people light-headed, absent-minded? Ten years from now I will probably be as forgetful as Mr Biggs. I must climb the next mountain before I forget where it is.
Outline for a story.
Someone lives in a small hut near a spring, within sound of running water. He never leaves the place, except to walk into the town for books, post, and supplies. ‘Don’t you ever get bored here?’ I ask. ‘Do you never wish to leave?’ ‘No,’ he replies, and tells me of his experience in the desert, when for two days and two nights (the limit of human endurance in regard to thirst), he went without water. On the second night, half dead, lying in the open beneath the stars, he dreamt of just such a spring in the mountains, and it was as though it gave him spiritual sustenance. So later, when he was fully recovered, he went in search of the spring (which he was sure existed), and found it while hiking in the Himalayas. He knew that as long as he remained by the spring he would never feel unsafe; it was where his guardian spirit lived…
And so I feel safe near my own spring, my own mountain, for this is where my guardian spirit lives too.
April 16
Visited the Tibetan shop and bought a small brass vase encrusted with pretty stones.
I’d no intention of buying anything, but the girl smiled at me as I passed, and then I just had to go in; and once in, I couldn’t just stand there, a fatuous grin on my face.
I had to buy something. And a vase is always a good thing to buy. If you don’t like it, you can give it away.
If she smiles at me every time I pass, I shall probably build up a collection of vases.
She isn’t a girl, really; she’s probably about thirty. I suppose she has a husband who smuggles Chinese goods in from Nepal, while her children—‘charity cases’—go to one of the posh public schools. But she’s fresh and pretty, and then, of course, I don’t have many young women smiling at me these days. I shall be forty-three next month.
April 17
Miss Bun still smiles at me, even though I frown at her when we pass.
This afternoon she brought me samosas and a rose.
‘Where’s your brother?’ I asked gruffly. ‘He has more to talk about.’
‘He’s busy in the bakery. See, I’ve brought you a rose.’
‘How much did it cost?’
‘Don’t be silly. It’s a present.’
‘Thanks. I didn’t know you grew roses.’
‘I don’t. It’s from the school garden.’
‘Well, thank you anyway. You actually stole something on my behalf!’
‘Where shall I put it?’
I found my new vase, filled it with fresh water, placed the rose in it and set it down on my dressing table.
‘It leaks,’ remarked Miss Bun.
‘My vase?’ I was incredulous.
‘See, the water’s spreading all over your nice table.’
She was right, of course. Water from the bottom of the vase was running across the varnished wood of great-grandmother’s old rosewood dressing table. The stain, I felt sure, would be permanent.
‘But it’s a new vase!’ I protested.
‘Someone must have cheated you. Why did you buy it without looking properly?’
‘Well, you see, I didn’t buy it actually. Someone gave it to me as a present.’
I fumed inwardly, vowing never again to visit the brassware shop. Never trust a smiling woman! I prefer Miss Bun’s scowl.
‘Do you want the vase?’ she asks.
‘No. Take it away.’
She places the rose on my pillow, throws the water out of the window and drops the vase into her cloth shopping bag.
‘What will you do with it?’ I ask.
‘I’ll seal the leak with flour,’ she says.
April 21
A clear fresh morning after a week of intermittent rain. And what a morning for birds! Three doves courting, a cuckoo calling, a bunch of minas squabbling, and a pair of king crows doing Swedish exercises.
I find myself doing exercises of an original nature, devised by Master Bun. These consist of various contortions of the limbs which, he says, are good for my sex drive.
‘But I don’t want a sex drive,’ I tell him. ‘I want something that will take my mind off sex.’
So he gives me another set of exercises which consist mostly of deep breathing.
‘Try holding your breath for five minutes,’ he suggests.
‘I know of someone who committed suicide by doing just that.’
‘Then hold it for two minutes.’
I take a deep breath and last only a minute.
‘No good,’ he says. ‘You have to relax more.’
‘Well, I am tired of trying to relax. It doesn’t work this way. What I need is a good meal.’
And Prem obliges by serving up my favourite kofta curry and rice. Satiated, I have no problem in relaxing for the rest of the afternoon.
April 28
Master Bun wears a
troubled expression.
‘It’s about my sister,’ he says.
‘What about her?’ I ask, fearing the worst.
‘She has run away.’
‘That’s bad. On her own?’
‘No… With a professor.’
‘That should be all right. Professors are usually respectable people. Maths or English?’
‘I don’t know. He has a wife and children.’
‘Then obviously he hasn’t taken them along.’
‘He has taken her to Roorkee. My sister is an innocent girl.’
‘Well, there is a certain innocence about her,’ I say, recalling Nobokov’s Lolita. ‘Maybe the professor wants to adopt her.’
‘But she’s a virgin.’
‘Then she must be rescued! Why are you here, talking to me about it, when you should be rushing down to Roorkee?’
‘That’s why I’ve come. Can you lend me the bus fare?’
‘Better still, I’ll come with you. We must rescue the professor—sorry, I mean your sister!’
May 1
—Roorkee, to Roorkee, to find a sweet girl,
Home again, home again, oh, what a whirl!
We did everything except find Miss Bun. Our first evening in Roorkee we roamed the bazaar and the canal banks; the second day we did the rounds of the university, the regimental barracks and the headquarters of the Boys’ Brigade. We made inquiries from all the bakers in Roorkee (many of them known to Master Bun), but none of them had seen his sister. On the college campus we asked for the professor, but no one had heard of him either.
Finally, we bought platform tickets and sat down on a bench at the end of the railway platform and watched the arrival and departure of trains, and the people who got on and off; we saw no one who looked in the least like Miss Bun. Master Bun bought an astrological guide from the station bookstall and studied his sister’s horoscope to see if that might help, but it didn’t. At the same bookstall, hidden under a pile of pirated Harold Robbins novels, I found a book of mine that had been published ten years earlier. No one had bought it in all that time. I replaced it at the top of the pile. Never lose hope!
On the third day we returned to Barlowganj and found Miss Bun at home.
She had gone no further than Debra’s Paltan Bazaar, it seemed, and had ditched the professor there, having first made him buy her three dress pieces, two pairs of sandals, a sandalwood hair brush, a bottle of scent, and a satchel for her school books.
May 5
And now it’s Mr Biggs’s turn to disappear.
‘Have you seen our Will?’ asks Mrs Biggs at my gate.
‘Not this morning, Mrs Biggs.’
‘I can’t find him anywhere. At breakfast he said he was going out for a walk, but nobody knows where he went, and he isn’t in the school compound, I’ve just inquired. He’s been gone over three hours!’
‘Don’t worry, Mrs Biggs. He’ll turn up. Someone on the hillside must have asked him in for a cup of tea, and he’s sitting there talking about the crocodile he shot in Orissa.’
But at lunchtime Mr Biggs hadn’t returned; and that was alarming, because Mr Biggs had never been known to miss his favourite egg curry and pilaf.
We organized a search. Prem and I walked the length of the Barlowganj bazaar and even lodged an unofficial report with Constable Ghanshyam. No one had seen him in the bazaar. Several members of the school staff combed the hillside without picking up the scent.
Mid-afternoon, while giving my negative report to Mrs Biggs, I heard a loud thumping coming from the direction of her storeroom.
‘What’s all that noise downstairs?’ I asked.
‘Probably rats. I don’t hear anything.’
I ran downstairs and opened the storeroom door, and there was Mr Biggs looking very dusty and very disgruntled. He wanted to know why the devil (the first time he’d taken the devil’s name in vain) Mrs Biggs had shut him up for hours. He’d gone into the storeroom in search of an old walking stick, and Mrs Biggs, seeing the door open, had promptly bolted it, failing to hear her husband’s cries for immediate release. But for Mr Bond’s presence of mind, he averred, he might have been discovered years later, a mere skeleton!
The cook was still out hunting for him, so Mr Biggs had his egg curry cold. Still in a foul mood, he sat down and wrote a letter to his sister in Tunbridge Wells, asking her to send over a hearing aid for Mrs Biggs.
Constable Ghanshyam turned up in the evening to inform me that Mr Biggs had last been seen at Rajpur in the foothills, in the company of several gypsies!
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘These old men get that way. One last fling, one last romantic escapade, one last tilt at the windmill. If you have a dream, Ghanshyam, don’t let them take it away from you.’
He looked puzzled, but went on to tell me that he was being transferred to Bareilly jail, where they keep those who have been found guilty but of unsound mind. It’s a reward, no doubt, for his services in getting the SP’s poems published. These journal entries date back some twenty years. What happened to Miss Bun? Well, she finally opened a beauty parlour in New Delhi, but I still can’t tell you where it is, or give you her name.
Two or three years later, Mrs Biggs was laid to rest near her old friends in the Mussoorie cemetery. Rev. Biggs was flown home to Tunbridge Wells and his sister gave him a solid tombstone, so that he wasn’t tempted to get up and wander off somewhere, in search of crocodiles.
A lot can happen in twenty years, and unfortunately not all of it gets recorded. ‘Little Raki’ is today a married man!
Whispering in the Dark
A wild night. Wind moaning, trees lashing themselves in a frenzy, rain beating down on the road, thunder over the mountains. Loneliness stretched ahead of me, a loneliness of the heart as well as a physical loneliness. The world was blotted out by a mist that had come up from the valley, a thick, white, clammy shroud.
I groped through the forest, groped in my mind for the memory of a mountain path, some remembered rock or ancient deodar. Then a streak of blue lightning gave me a glimpse of a barren hillside and a house cradled in mist.
It was an old-world house, built of limestone rock on the outskirts of a crumbling hill station. There was no light in its windows; probably the electricity had been disconnected long ago. But if I could get in it would do for the night.
I had no torch, but at times the moon shone through the wild clouds, and trees loomed out of the mist like primeval giants. I reached the front door and found it locked from within. I walked round to the side and broke a windowpane, put my hand through shattered glass and found the bolt.
The window, warped by over a hundred monsoons, resisted at first. Then it yielded, and I climbed into the mustiness of a long-closed room, and the wind came in with me, scattering papers across the floor and knocking some unidentifiable object off a table. I closed the window, bolted it again, but the mist crawled through the broken glass, and the wind rattled in it like a pair of castanets.
There were matches in my pocket. I struck three before a light flared up.
I was in a large room, crowded with furniture. Pictures on the walls. Vases on the mantlepiece. A candlestand. And, strangely enough, no cobwebs. For all its external look of neglect and dilapidation, the house had been cared for by someone. But before I could notice anything else, the match burnt out.
As I stepped further into the room, the old deodar flooring creaked beneath my weight. By the light of another match I reached the mantlepiece and lit the candle, noticing at the same time that the candlestick was a genuine antique with cutglass hangings. A deserted cottage with good furniture and glass. I wondered why no one had ever broken in. And then realized that I had just done so.
I held the candlestick high and glanced round the room. The walls were hung with several watercolours and portraits in oils. There was no dust anywhere. But no one answered my call, no one responded to my hesitant knocking. It was as though the occupants of the house were in hiding, watching me obliquel
y from dark corners and chimneys.
I entered a bedroom and found myself facing a full-length mirror. My reflection stared back at me as though I were a stranger, as though my reflection belonged to the house, while I was only an outsider.
As I turned from the mirror, I thought I saw someone, something, some reflection other than mine, move behind me in the mirror. I caught a glimpse of whiteness, a pale oval face, burning eyes, long tresses, golden in the candlelight. But when I looked in the mirror again there was nothing to be seen but my own pallid face.
A pool of water was forming at my feet. I set the candle down on a small table, found the edge of the bed—a large old four-poster—sat down, and removed my soggy shoes and socks. Then I took off my clothes and hung them over the back of a chair.
I stood naked in the darkness, shivering a little. There was no one to see me—and yet I felt oddly exposed, almost as though I had stripped in a room full of curious people.
I got under the bedclothes—they smelt slightly of eucalyptus and lavender—but found there was no pillow. That was odd. A perfectly made bed, but no pillow! I was too tired to hunt for one. So I blew out the candle—and the darkness closed in around me, and the whispering began…
The whispering began as soon as I closed my eyes. I couldn’t tell where it came from. It was all around me, mingling with the sound of the wind coughing in the chimney, the stretching of old furniture, the weeping of trees outside in the rain.
Sometimes I could hear what was being said. The words came from a distance: a distance not so much of space as of time…
‘Mine, mine, he is all mine….’
‘He is ours, dear, ours.’
Whispers, echoes, words hovering around me with bats’ wings, saying the most inconsequential things with a logical urgency. ‘You’re late for supper….’
‘He lost his way in the mist.’
‘Do you think he has any money?’
‘To kill a turtle you must first tie its legs to two posts.’
‘We could tie him to the bed and pour boiling water down his throat.’
‘No, it’s simpler this way.’