by Ruskin Bond
Perhaps it was also concern for Arun that drew me back. A sense of sympathy is one of my weaknesses, and through hesitation over a theft I had often been caught. A successful thief must be pitiless. I was fond of Arun. My affection for him, my sense of sympathy, but most of all my desire to write whole sentences, drew me back to the room.
I hurried back to the room extremely nervous, for it is easier to steal something than to return it undetected. If I was caught beside the bed now, with the money in my hand, or with my hand under the mattress, there could be only one explanation: that I was actually stealing. If Arun woke up I would be lost.
I opened the door clumsily and stood in the doorway in clouded moonlight. Gradually my eyes became accustomed to the darkness of the room. Arun was still asleep. I went on all fours again and crept noiselessly to the head of the bed. My hand came up with the notes. I felt his breath on my fingers. I was fascinated by his tranquil features and easy breathing, and remained motionless for a minute. Then my hand explored the mattress, found the edge, slipped under it with the notes.
I awoke late next morning to find that Arun had already made the tea. I found it difficult to face him in the harsh light of day. His hand was stretched out towards me. There was a five-rupee note between his fingers. My heart sank.
‘I made some money yesterday,’ he said. ‘Now you’ll get paid regularly.’ My spirit rose as rapidly as it had fallen. I congratulated myself on having returned the money.
But when I took the note, I realized that he knew everything. The note was still wet from last night’s rain.
‘Today I’ll teach you to write a little more than your name,’ he said.
He knew but neither his lips nor his eyes said anything about their knowing.
I smiled at Arun in my most appealing way. And the smile came by itself, without my knowing it.
The Photograph
Iwas ten years old. My grandmother sat on the string bed under the mango tree. It was late summer and there were sunflowers in the garden and a warm wind in the trees. My grandmother was knitting a woollen scarf for the winter months. She was very old, dressed in a plain white sari. Her eyes were not very strong now but her fingers moved quickly with the needles and the needles kept clicking all afternoon. Grandmother had white hair but there were very few wrinkles on her skin.
I had come home after playing cricket on the maidan. I had taken my meal and now I was rummaging through a box of old books and family heirlooms that had just that day been brought out of the attic by my mother. Nothing in the box interested me very much except for a book with colourful pictures of birds and butterflies. I was going through the book, looking at the pictures, when I found a small photograph between the pages. It was a faded picture, a little yellow and foggy. It was the picture of a girl standing against a wall and behind the wall there was nothing but sky. But from the other side a pair of hands reached up, as though someone was going to climb the wall. There were flowers growing near the girl but I couldn’t tell what they were. There was a creeper too but it was just a creeper.
I ran out into the garden. ‘Granny!’ I shouted. ‘Look at this picture! I found it in the box of old things. Whose picture is it?’
I jumped on the bed beside my grandmother and she walloped me on the bottom and said, ‘Now I’ve lost count of my stitches and the next time you do that I’ll make you finish the scarf yourself.’
Granny was always threatening to teach me how to knit which I thought was a disgraceful thing for a boy to do. It was a good deterrent for keeping me out of mischief. Once I had torn the drawing-room curtains and Granny had put a needle and thread in my hand and made me stitch the curtain together, even though I made long, two-inch stitches, which had to be taken out by my mother and done again.
She took the photograph from my hand and we both stared at it for quite a long time. The girl had long, loose hair and she wore a long dress that nearly covered her ankles, and sleeves that reached her wrists, and there were a lot of bangles on her hands. But despite all this drapery, the girl appeared to be full of freedom and movement. She stood with her legs apart and her hands on her hips and had a wide, almost devilish smile on her face.
‘Whose picture is it?’ I asked.
‘A little girl’s, of course,’ said Grandmother. ‘Can’t you tell?’
‘Yes, but did you know the girl?’
‘Yes, I knew her,’ said Granny, ‘but she was a very wicked girl and I shouldn’t tell you about her. But I’ll tell you about the photograph. It was taken in your grandfather’s house about sixty years ago. And that’s the garden wall and over the wall there was a road going to town.’
‘Whose hands are they,’ I asked, ‘coming up from the other side?’
Grandmother squinted and looked closely at the picture, and shook her head. ‘It’s the first time I’ve noticed,’ she said. ‘They must have been the sweeper boy’s. Or maybe they were your grandfather’s.’
‘They don’t look like Grandfather’s hands,’ I said. ‘His hands are all bony.’
‘Yes, but this was sixty years ago.’
‘Didn’t he climb up the wall after the photo?’
‘No, nobody climbed up. At least, I don’t remember.’
‘And you remember well, Granny.’
‘Yes, I remember … I remember what is not in the photograph. It was a spring day and there was a cool breeze blowing, nothing like this. Those flowers at the girl’s feet, they were marigolds, and the bougainvillea creeper, it was a mass of purple. You cannot see these colours in the photo and even if you could, as nowadays, you wouldn’t be able to smell the flowers or feel the breeze.’
‘And what about the girl?’ I said. ‘Tell me about the girl.’
‘Well, she was a wicked girl,’ said Granny. ‘You don’t know the trouble they had getting her into those fine clothes she’s wearing.’
‘I think they are terrible clothes,’ I said.
‘So did she. Most of the time, she hardly wore a thing. She used to go swimming in a muddy pool with a lot of ruffianly boys, and ride on the backs of buffaloes. No boy ever teased her, though, because she could kick and scratch and pull his hair out!’
‘She looks like it too,’ I said. ‘You can tell by the way she’s smiling. At any moment something’s going to happen.’
‘Something did happen,’ said Granny. ‘Her mother wouldn’t let her take off the clothes afterwards, so she went swimming in them and lay for half an hour in the mud.’
I laughed heartily and Grandmother laughed too.
‘Who was the girl?’ I said. ‘You must tell me who she was.’
‘No, that wouldn’t do,’ said Grandmother, but I pretended I didn’t know. I knew, because Grandmother still smiled in the same way, even though she didn’t have as many teeth.
‘Come on, Granny,’ I said, ‘tell me, tell me.’
But Grandmother shook her head and carried on with the knitting. And I held the photograph in my hand looking from it to my grandmother and back again, trying to find points in common between the old lady and the little pig-tailed girl. A lemon-coloured butterfly settled on the end of Grandmother’s knitting needle and stayed there while the needles clicked away. I made a grab at the butterfly and it flew off in a dipping flight and settled on a sunflower.
‘I wonder whose hands they were,’ whispered Grandmother to herself, with her head bowed, and her needles clicking away in the soft, warm silence of that summer afternoon.
The Window
I came in the spring, and took the room on the roof. It was a long, low building which housed several families; the roof was flat, except for my room and a chimney. I don’t know whose room owned the chimney, but my room owned the roof. And from the window of my room I owned the world.
But only from the window.
The banyan tree, just opposite, was mine, and its inhabitants my subjects. They were two squirrels, a few mina, a crow and at night, a pair of flying foxes. The squirrels were busy in the afternoon
s, the birds in the mornings and evenings, the foxes at night. I wasn’t very busy that year; not as busy as the inhabitants of the banyan tree.
There was also a mango tree but that came later, in the summer, when I met Koki and the mangoes were ripe.
At first, I was lonely in my room. But then I discovered the power of my window. I looked out on the banyan tree, on the garden, on the broad path that ran beside the building, and out over the roofs of other houses, over roads and fields, as far as the horizon. The path was not a very busy one but it held variety: an ayah, with a baby in a pram; the postman, an event in himself; the fruit seller, the toy seller, calling their wares in high-pitched familiar cries; the rent collector; a posse of cyclists; a long chain of schoolgirls; a lame beggar … all passed my way, the way of my window …
In the early summer, a tonga came rattling and jingling down the path and stopped in front of the house. A girl and an elderly lady climbed down, and a servant unloaded their baggage. They went into the house and the tonga moved off, the horse snorting a little.
The next morning the girl looked up from the garden and saw me at my window.
She had long black hair that fell to her waist, tied with a single red ribbon. Her eyes were black like her hair and just as shiny. She must have been about ten or eleven years old.
‘Hello,’ I said with a friendly smile.
She looked suspiciously at me. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘I’m a ghost.’
She laughed, and her laugh had a gay, mocking quality. ‘You look like one!’
I didn’t think her remark particularly flattering, but I had asked for it. I stopped smiling anyway. Most children don’t like adults smiling at them all the time.
‘What have you got up there?’ she asked.
‘Magic,’ I said.
She laughed again but this time without mockery. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said.
‘Why don’t you come up and see for yourself?’
She hesitated a little but came round to the steps and began climbing them, slowly, cautiously. And when she entered the room, she brought a magic of her own.
‘Where’s your magic?’ she asked, looking me in the eye.
‘Come here,’ I said, and I took her to the window and showed her the world.
She said nothing but stared out of the window uncomprehendingly at first, and then with increasing interest. And after some time she turned around and smiled at me, and we were friends.
I only knew that her name was Koki, and that she had come with her aunt for the summer months; I didn’t need to know any more about her, and she didn’t need to know anything about me except that I wasn’t really a ghost—not the frightening sort anyway …
She came up my steps nearly every day and joined me at the window. There was a lot of excitement to be had in our world, especially when the rains broke.
At the first rumblings, women would rush outside to retrieve the washing from the clothesline and if there was a breeze, to chase a few garments across the compound. When the rains came, they came with a vengeance, making a bog of the garden and a river of the path. A cyclist would come riding furiously down the path, an elderly gentleman would be having difficulty with an umbrella, naked children would be frisking about in the rain. Sometimes Koki would run out to the roof, and shout and dance in the rain. And the rain would come through the open door and window of the room, flooding the floor and making an island of the bed.
But the window was more fun than anything else. It gave us the power of detachment: we were deeply interested in the life around us, but we were not involved in it.
‘It is like a cinema,’ said Koki. ‘The window is the screen, the world is the picture.’
Soon the mangoes were ripe, and Koki was in the branches of the mango tree as often as she was in my room. From the window I had a good view of the tree, and we spoke to each other from the same height. We ate far too many mangoes, at least five a day.
‘Let’s make a garden on the roof,’ suggested Koki. She was full of ideas like this.
‘And how do you propose to do that?’ I asked.
‘It’s easy. We bring up mud and bricks and make the flower beds. Then we plant the seeds. We’ll grow all sorts of flowers.’
‘The roof will fall in,’ I predicted.
But it didn’t. We spent two days carrying buckets of mud up the steps to the roof and laying out the flower beds. It was very hard work, but Koki did most of it. When the beds were ready, we had the opening ceremony. Apart from a few small plants collected from the garden below, we had only one species of seeds—pumpkin …
We planted the pumpkin seeds in the mud, and felt proud of ourselves.
But it rained heavily that night, and in the morning I discovered that everything—except the bricks—had been washed away.
So we returned to the window.
A mina had been in a fight—with a crow perhaps—and the feathers had been knocked off its head. A bougainvillea that had been climbing the wall had sent a long green shoot in through the window.
Koki said, ‘Now we can’t shut the window without spoiling the creeper.’
‘Then we will never close the window,’ I said.
And we let the creeper into the room.
The rains passed, and an autumn wind came whispering through the branches of the banyan tree. There were red leaves on the ground, and the wind picked them up and blew them about, so that they looked like butterflies. I would watch the sun rise in the morning; the sky all red until its first rays splashed the windowsill and crept up the walls of the room. And in the evening, Koki and I watched the sun go down in a sea of fluffy clouds; sometimes the clouds were pink and sometimes orange; they were always coloured clouds framed in the window.
‘I’m going tomorrow,’ said Koki one evening.
I was too surprised to say anything.
‘You stay here for ever, don’t you?’ she said.
I remained silent.
‘When I come again next year you will still be here, won’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But the window will still be here.’
‘Oh, do be here next year,’ she said, ‘or someone will close the window!’
In the morning the tonga was at the door, and the servant, the aunt and Koki were in it. Koki waved to me at my window. Then the driver flicked the reins, the wheels of the carriage creaked and rattled, the bell jingled. Down the path went the tonga, down the path and through the gate, and all the time Koki waved; and from the gate I must have looked like a ghost, standing alone at the high window, amongst the bougainvillea.
When the tonga was out of sight, I took the spray of bougainvillea in my hand and pushed it out of the room. Then I closed the window. It would be opened only when the spring and Koki came again.
The Boy Who Broke the Bank
Nathu grumbled to himself as he swept the steps of the Pipalnagar Bank, owned by Seth Govind Ram. He used the small broom hurriedly and carelessly, and the dust, after rising in a cloud above his head, settled down again on the steps. As Nathu was banging his pan against a dustbin, Sitaram, the washerman’s son, passed by.
Sitaram was on his delivery round. He had a bundle of freshly pressed clothes balanced on his head.
‘Don’t raise such dust!’ he called out to Nathu. ‘Are you annoyed because they are still refusing to pay you an extra two rupees a month?’
‘I don’t wish to talk about it,’ complained the sweeper boy. ‘I haven’t even received my regular pay. And this is the twentieth of the month. Who would think a bank would hold up a poor man’s salary? As soon as I get my money, I’m off! Not another week do I work in this place.’ And Nathu banged the pan against the dustbin several times, just to emphasize his point and give himself confidence.
‘Well, I wish you luck,’ said Sitaram. ‘I’ll keep a lookout for any jobs that might suit you.’ And he plodded barefoot along the road, the big bundle of clothes hiding most of his head and s
houlders.
At the fourth home he visited, Sitaram heard the lady of the house mention that she was in need of a sweeper. Tying his bundle together, he said, ‘I know of a sweeper boy who’s looking for work. He can start from next month. He’s with the bank just now but they aren’t giving him his pay, and he wants to leave.’
‘Is that so?’ said Mrs Srivastava. ‘Well, tell him to come and see me tomorrow.’
And Sitaram, glad that he had been of service to both a customer and his friend, hoisted his bag on his shoulders and went his way.
Mrs Srivastava had to do some shopping. She gave instructions to the ayah about looking after the baby, and told the cook not to be late with the midday meal. Then she set out for the Pipalnagar marketplace, to make her customary tour of the cloth shops.
A large, shady tamarind tree grew at one end of the bazaar, and it was here that Mrs Srivastava found her friend Mrs Bhushan sheltering from the heat. Mrs Bhushan was fanning herself with a large handkerchief. She complained of the summer which, she affirmed, was definitely the hottest in the history of Pipalnagar. She then showed Mrs Srivastava a sample of the cloth she was going to buy, and for five minutes they discussed its shade, texture and design. Having exhausted this topic, Mrs Srivastava said, ‘Do you know, my dear, that Seth Govind Ram’s bank can’t even pay its employees? Only this morning I heard a complaint from their sweeper, who hasn’t received his wages for over a month!’
‘Shocking!’ remarked Mrs Bhushan. ‘If they can’t pay the sweeper they must be in a bad way. None of the others could be getting paid either.’
She left Mrs Srivastava at the tamarind tree and went in search of her husband, who was sitting in front of Kamal Kishore’s photographic shop, talking to the owner.
‘So there you are!’ cried Mrs Bhushan. ‘I’ve been looking for you for almost an hour. Where did you disappear?’