by Ruskin Bond
She had large soft breasts, long arms and broad thighs. She was majestic, and at the same time she was graceful. Above all, she was warm and full of understanding, and it was this tenderness of hers that overcame resentment and jealousy in other women.
She called me Ladla, her darling, and told me she had always wanted to look after me. She had never married. I did not, at that age, ponder the reasons for her single state. At six, I took all things for granted and accepted Mariam for what she was — my benefac- tress and guardian angel.
Her rooms were untidy compared with the neatness of my moth- er’s house. Mariam reveled in untidiness. I soon grew accustomed to the topsy-turviness of her rooms and found them comfortable. Beds (hers a very large and soft one) were usually left unmade, while clothes lay draped over chairs and tables.
A large watercolour hung on a wall, but Mariam’s bodice and knickers were usually suspended from it, and I cannot recall the subject of the painting. The dressing table was a fascinating place, crowded with all kinds of lotions, mascaras, paints, oil and ointments.
Mariam would spend much time sitting in front of the mirror running a comb through her long black hair, or preferably having young Mulia, a servant girl, comb it for her. Though a Christian, my aunt retained several Muslim superstitions, and never went into the open with her hair falling loose.
Once Mulia came into the rooms with her own hair open. ‘You ought not to leave your hair open. Better knot it,’ said Aunt Mariam.
‘But I have not yet oiled it, Aunty,’ replied Mulia. ‘How can I put it up?’
‘You are too young to understand. There are jinns — aerial spirits — who are easily attracted by long hair and pretty black eyes like yours.’
‘Do jinns visit human beings, Aunty?’
‘Learned people say so. Though I have never seen a jinn myself, I have seen the effect they can have on one.’
‘Oh, do tell about them,’ said Mulia.
‘Well, there was once a lovely girl like you, who had a wealth of black hair,’ said Mariam. ‘Quite unaccountably she fell ill, and in spite of every attention and the best medicines, she kept getting worse. She grew as thin as a whipping post, her beauty decayed, and all that remained of it till her dying day was her wonderful head of hair.’
It did not take me long to make friends in the Dilaram bazaar. At first I was an object of curiosity, and when I came down to play in the street both women and children would examine me as though, I was a strange marine creature.
‘How fair he is,’ observed Mulia.
‘And how black his aunt,’ commented the washerman’s wife, whose face was fiddled with the marks of smallpox.
‘His skin is very smooth,’ pointed out Mulia, who took considera- ble pride in having been the first to see me at close quarters. She pinched my cheeks with obvious pleasure.
‘His hair and eyes are black,’ remarked Mulia’s aging mother.
‘Is it true that his father was an Englishman?’
‘Mariam-bi says so,’ said Mulia. ‘She never lies.’
‘True,’ said the washerman’s wife, ‘Whatever her faults — and they are many — she has never been known to lie.’
My aunt’s other ‘faults’ were a deep mystery to me; nor did anyone try to enlighten me about them.
Some nights she had me sleep with her, other nights (I often wondered why ) she gave me a bed in an adjoining room, although I much preferred remaining with her — especially since, on cold January nights, she provided me with considerable warmth.
I would curl up into a ball just below her soft tummy. On the other side, behind her knees, slept Leila, an enchanting Siamese cat given to her by an American businessman whose house she would sometimes visit. Every night, before I fell asleep, Mariam would kiss me, very softly, on my closed eyelids. I never fell asleep until I had received this phantom kiss.
At first I resented the nocturnal visitors that Aunt Mariam free- quently received, their arrival meant that I had to sleep in the spare room with Leila. But when I found that these people were imper- manent creatures, mere ships that passed in the night, I learned to put up with them.
I seldom saw those men, though occasionally I caught a glimpse of a beard or an expensive waistcoat or white pyjamas. They did not interest me very much, though I did have a vague idea that they provided Aunt Mariam with some sort of income, thus enabling her to look after me.
Once, when one particular visitor was very drunk, Mariam had to force him out of the flat. I glimpsed this episode through a crack in the door. The man was big, but no match for Aunt Mariam.
She thrust him out onto the landing, and then he lost his footing and went tumbling downstairs. No damage was done, and the man called on Mariam again a few days later, very sober and contrite, and was re-admitted to my aunt’s favours.
Aunt Mariam must have begun to worry about the effect these comings and goings might have on me, because after a few months she began to make arrangements for sending me to a boarding school in the hills.
I had not the slightest desire to go to school and raised many objections. We had long arguments in which she tried vainly to impress upon me the desirability of receiving an education.
‘To make a living, my Ladla,’ she said, ‘you must have an education.’
‘But you have no education,’ I said, ‘and you have no difficulty in making a living!’
Mariam threw up her arms in mock despair. ‘Ten years from now I will not be able to make such a living. Then who will support and help me? An illiterate young fellow, or an educated gentleman? When I am old, my son, when I am old . . .’
Finally I succumbed to her arguments and agreed to go to a boarding school. And when the time came for me to leave, both Aunt Mariam and I broke down and wept at the railway station.
I hung out of the window as the train moved away from the platform, and saw Mariam, her bosom heaving, being helped from the platform by Mulia and some of our neighbours.
My incarceration in a boarding school was made more unbeara- ble by the absence of any letters from Aunt Mariam. She could write little more than her name.
I was looking forward to my winter holidays and my return to Aunt Mariam and the Dilaram bazaar, but this was not to be. During my absence there had been some litigation over my custody, and my father’s relatives claimed that Aunt Mariam was not a fit person to be a child’s guardian.
And so when I left school, it was not to Aunt Mariam’s place that I was sent, but to a strange family living in a railway colony near Moradabad. I remained with these relatives until I finished school, but that is a different story.
I did not see Aunt Mariam again. The Dilaram bazaar and my beautiful aunt and the Siamese cat all became part of the receding world of my childhood.
I would often think of Mariam, but as time passed she became more remote and inaccessible in my memory. It was not until many years later, when I was a young man, that I visited the Dilaram bazaar again. I knew from my foster parents that Aunt Mariam was dead. Her heart, it seemed, had always been weak.
I was anxious to see the Dilaram bazaar and its residents again, but my visit was a disappointment. The place had disappeared; or rather, it had been swallowed up by a growing city.
It was lost in the complex of a much larger market which had sprung up to serve a new government colony. The older people had died, and the young ones had gone to colleges or factories or offices in different towns. Aunt Mariam’s rooms had been pulled down.
I found her grave in the little cemetery on the town’s outskirts. One of her more devoted admirers had provided a handsome gra- vestone, surmounted by a sculptured angel. One of the wings had broken off, and the face was chipped, which gave the angel a slightly crooked smile.
But in spite of the broken wing and the smile, it was a very ordinary stone angel and could not hold a candle to my Aunt Mariam, the very special guardian angel of my childhood.
Death of a Familiar
When I learnt from a mutu
al acquaintance that my friend Sunil had been killed, I could not help feeling a little surprised, even shocked. Had Sunil killed somebody, it would not have surprised me in the least; he did not greatly value the lives of others. But for him to have been the victim was a sad reflection of his rapid decline.
He was twenty-one at the time of his death. Two friends of his had killed him, stabbing him several times with their knives. Their motive was said to have been revenge: apparently he had seduced their wives. They had invited him to a bar in Meerut, had plied him with country liquor, and had then accompanied him out into the cold air of a December night. It was drizzling a little. Near the bridge over the canal, one of his companions seized him from behind, while the other plunged a knife first into his stomach and then into his chest. When Sunil slumped forward, the other friend stabbed him in the back. A passing cyclist saw the little group, heard a cry and a groan, saw a blade flash in the light from his lamp. He pedalled furiously into town, burst into the kotwali, and roused the sergeant on duty. Accompanied by two constables, they ran to the bridge but found the area deserted. It was only as the rising sun drew an open wound across the sky that they found Sunil’s body on the canal-bank, his head and shoulders on the sand, his legs in running water.
The bar-keeper was able to describe Sunil’s companions, and they were arrested that same morning in their homes. They had not found time to get rid of their blood-soaked clothes. As they were not known to me, I took very little interest in the proceedings against them; but I understand that they have appealed against their sent- ences of life imprisonment.
I was in Delhi at the time of the murder, and it was almost a year since I had last seen Sunil. We had both lived in Shahganj and had left the place for jobs; I to work in a newspaper office, he in a paper factory owned by an uncle. It had been hoped that he would in time acquire a sense of responsibility and some stability of character; but I had known Sunil for over two years, and in that time it had been made abundantly clear that he had not been torn to fit in with the conventions. And as for character, his had the stability of a gras- shopper. He was forever in search of new adventures and sensa- tions, and this appetite of his for every novelty led him into some awkward situations.
He was a product of Partition, of the frontier provinces, of Anglo- Indian public schools, of films Indian and American, of medieval India, knights in armour, hippies, drugs, sex-magazines and the subtropical Terai. Had he lived in the time of the Moghuls, he might have governed a province with saturnine and spectacular success. Being born into the 20th century, he was but a juvenile delinquent.
It must be said to his credit that he was a delinquent of charm and originality. I realised this when I first saw him, sitting on the wall of the football stadium, his long legs — looking even longer and thinner because of the tight trousers he wore —dangling over the wall, his chappals trailing in the dust of the road, while his white bush-shirt lay open, unbuttoned, showing his smooth brown chest. He had a smile on his long face, which, with its high cheekbones, gave his cheeks a cavernous look, an impression of unrequited hunger.
We were both watching the wrestling. Two practice bouts were in progress — one between two thin, undernourished boys, and the other between the master of the akhara and a bearded Sikh who drove trucks for a living. They struggled in the soft mud of the wrestling pit, their well-oiled bodies glistening in the sunlight that filtered through a massive banyan tree. I had been standing near the akhara for a few minutes when I became conscious of the young man’s gaze. When I turned round to look at him, he smiled satanically.
‘Are you a wrestler, too?’ he asked. ‘Do I look like one?’ I countered.
‘No, you look more like an athlete’ he said. ‘I mean a long- distance runner. Very thin.’
‘I’m a writer. Like long-distance runners, most writers are very thin.’
‘You’re an Anglo-Indian, aren’t you?’
‘My family history is very complicated, otherwise I’d be delighted to give you all the details.’
‘You could pass for a European, you know. You’re quite fair. But you have an Indian accent.’
‘An Indian accent is very similar to a Welsh accent,’ I observed. ‘I might pass for Welsh, but not many people in India have met Welshmen!’
He chuckled at my answer; then stared at me speculatively. ‘I say,’ he said at length, as though an idea of great weight and importance had occurred to him. ‘Do you have any magazines with pictures of dames?’
‘Well, I may have some old Playboys. You can have them if you like.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, getting down from the wall. ‘I’ll come and fetch them. This wrestling is boring, anyway.’
He slipped his hand into mine (a custom of no special signifi- cance), and began whistling snatches of Hindi film tunes and the latest American hits.
I was living at the time in a small flat above the town’s main shopping centre. Below me there were shops, restaurants and a cinema. Behind the building lay a junkyard littered with the frame- work of vintage cars and broken-down tongas. I was paying thirty rupees a month for my two rooms, and sixty to the Punjabi restau- rant where I took my meals. My earnings as a freelance writer were something like a hundred and fifty rupees a month, sufficient to enable me to make both ends meet, provided I remained in the back-water, that was Shahganj.
Sunil (I had learnt his name during our walk from the stadium), made himself at home in my flat as soon as he entered it. He went through all my magazines, books and photographs with the tho- roughness of an executor of a will. In India, it is customary for people to try and find out all there is to know about you, and Sunil went through the formalities with considerable thoroughness. While he spoke, his roving eyes made a mental inventory of all my belongings. These were few — a typewriter, a small radio, and a cupboard-full of books and clothes, besides the furniture that went with the flat. I had no valuables. Was he disappointed? I could not be sure. He wore good clothes and spoke fluent English, but good clothes and good English are no criterion of honesty. He was a little too glib to inspire confidence. Apparently, he was still at college. His father owned a cloth shop; a strict man who did not give his son much spending money.
But Sunil was not seriously interested in money, as I was shortly to discover. He was interested in experience, and searched for it in various directions.
‘You have a nice view,’ he said, leaning over my balcony and looking up and down the street. ‘You can see everyone on parade. Girls! They’re becoming quite modern now. Short hair and small blouses. Tight salwars. Maxis, minis. Falsies. Do you like girls?’
‘Well . . .’ I began, but he did not really expect an answer to his question.
‘What are little girls made of? That’s an English poem, isn’t it?’ ‘Sugar, and spice and everything nice . . .,’ ‘and I don’t remember the rest.’ He lowered his voice to a confidential undertone. ‘Have you had any girls?’
‘Well . . .’
‘I had fun with a girl, you know, my cousin. She came to stay with us last summer. Then there’s a girl in college who’s stuck on me. But this is such a backward country. We can’t be seen together in public, and I can’t invite her to my house. Can I bring her here some day?’
‘Well, I don’t know . . .’ I hadn’t lived in a small town like Shah- ganj for some time, and wasn’t sure if morals had changed along with the fashions.
‘Oh, not now,’ he said. ‘There’s no hurry. I’ll give you plenty of warning, don’t worry.’ He put an arm around my shoulders and looked at me with undisguised affection. ‘We are going to be great friends, you and I.’
After that I began to receive almost daily visits from Sunil. His college classes gave over at three in the afternoon, and though it was seldom that he attended them, he would stop at my place after putting in a brief appearance at the study hall. I could hardly blame him for neglecting his books: Shakespeare and Chaucer were pres- cribed for students who had but a rudimentary knowledge of Mod-
ern English usage. Vast numbers of graduates were produced every year, and most of them became clerks or bus-conductors or, perhaps, school-teachers. But Sunil’s father wanted the best for his son. And in Shahganj that meant as many degrees as possible.
Sunil would come stamping into my rooms, waking me from the siesta which had become a habit during summer afternoons. When he found that I did not relish being woken up, he would leave me to sleep while he took a bath under the tap. After making liberal use of my hair-cream and after-shave lotion (he had just begun shaving, but used the lotion on his body), he would want to go to a picture or restaurant, and would sprinkle me with cold water so that I leapt off the bed.
One afternoon he felt more than usually ebullient, and poured a whole bucket of water over me, soaking the sheets and mattress. I retaliated by flinging the water-jug at his head. It missed him and shattered itself against the wall. Sunil then went berserk and started splashing water all over the room, while I threatened and shouted. When I tried restraining him by force, we rolled over on the ground, and I banged my head against the bedstead and almost lost con- sciousness. He was then full of contrition, and massaged the lump on my head with hair-cream and refused to borrow any money from me that day.
Sunil’s ‘borrowing’ consisted of extracting a few rupee-notes from my wallet, saying he needed the money for books or a tailor’s bill or a shopkeeper who was threatening him with violence, and then spending it on something quite different. Before long I gave up asking him to return anything, just as I had given up asking him to stop seeing me.
Sunil was one of those people best loved from a distance. He was born with a special talent for trouble. I think it pleased his vanity when he was pursued by irate creditors, shopkeepers, brothers whose sisters he had insulted, and husbands whose wives he had molested. My association with him did nothing to improve my own reputation of Shahganj.
My landlady, a protective, motherly, Punjabi widow, said: ‘Son, you are in bad company. Do you know that Sunil has already been expelled from one school for stealing, and from another for sexual offences?’