by Ruskin Bond
As Sunder Singh sat down on the cot beside Suraj, a new sound reached both of them quite distinctly – a rhythmic sawing sound, as if someone was cutting through the branch of a tree.
‘What’s that?’ whispered Suraj.
‘It’s the leopard,’ said Sunder Singh.
‘I think it’s in the tunnel.’
‘The train will soon be here,’ reminded Suraj.
‘Yes, my friend. And if we don’t drive the leopard out of the tunnel, it will be run over and killed. I can’t let that happen.’
‘But won’t it attack us if we try to drive it out?’ asked Suraj, beginning to share the watchman’s concern.
‘Not this leopard. It knows me well. We have seen each other many times. It has a weakness for goats and stray dogs, but it won’t harm us. Even so, I’ll take my axe with me. You stay here, Suraj.’
‘No, I’m going with you. It’ll be better than sitting here alone in the dark!’
‘All right, but stay close behind me. And remember, there’s nothing to fear.’
Raising his lamp high, Sunder Singh advanced into the tunnel, shouting at the top of his voice to try and scare away the animal. Suraj followed close behind, but he found he was unable to do any shouting. His throat was quite dry.
They had gone just about twenty paces into the tunnel when the light from the lamp fell upon the leopard. It was crouching between the tracks, only fifteen feet away from them. It was not a very big leopard, but it looked lithe and sinewy. Baring its teeth and snarling, it went down on its belly, tail twitching.
Suraj and Sunder Singh both shouted together. Their voices rang through the tunnel. And the leopard, uncertain as to how many terrifying humans were there in the tunnel with him, turned swiftly and disappeared into the darkness.
To make sure that it had gone, Sunder Singh and Suraj walked the length of the tunnel. When they returned to the entrance, the rails were beginning to hum. They knew the train was coming.
Suraj put his hand to the rails and felt its tremor. He heard the distant rumble of the train. And then the engine came round the bend, hissing at them, scattering sparks into the darkness, defying the jungle as it roared through the steep sides of the cutting. It charged straight at the tunnel, and into it, thundering past Suraj like the beautiful dragon of his dreams.
And when it had gone, the silence returned and the forest seemed to breathe, to live again. Only the rails still trembled with the passing of the train.
And they trembled to the passing of the same train, almost a week later, when Suraj and his father were both travelling in it.
Suraj’s father was scribbling in a notebook, doing his accounts. Suraj sat at an open window staring out at the darkness. His father was going to Delhi on a business trip and had decided to take the boy along. (‘I don’t know where he gets to, most of the time,’ he’d complained. ‘I think it’s time he learnt something about my business.’)
The night mail rushed through the forest with its hundreds of passengers. Tiny flickering lights came and went, as they passed small villages on the fringe of the jungle.
Suraj heard the rumble as the train passed over a small bridge. It was too dark to see the hut near the cutting, but he knew they must be approaching the tunnel. He strained his eyes looking out into the night; and then, just as the engine let out a shrill whistle, Suraj saw the lamp.
He couldn’t see Sunder Singh, but he saw the lamp, and he knew that his friend was out there.
The train went into the tunnel and out again; it left the jungle behind and thundered across the endless plains; and Suraj stared out at the darkness, thinking of the lonely cutting in the forest, and the watchman with the lamp who would always remain a firefly for those travelling thousands, as he lit up the darkness for steam-engines and leopards.
Wild Fruit
t was a long walk to school. Down the hill, through the rhododendron trees, across a small stream, around a bare, brown hill, and then through the narrow little bazaar, past fruit stalls piled high with oranges, guavas, bananas, and apples.
The boy’s gaze often lingered on those heaps of golden oranges – oranges grown in the plains, now challenging the pale winter sunshine in the hills. His nose twitched at the sharp smell of melons in summer; his fingers would sometimes touch for a moment the soft down on the skin of a peach. But these were forbidden fruit. The boy hadn’t the money for them.
He took one meal at seven in the morning when he left home; another at seven in the evening when he returned from school. There were times – especially when he was at school, and his teacher droned on and on, lecturing on honesty, courage, duty, and self-sacrifice – when he felt very hungry; but on the way to school, or on the way home, there was nearly always the prospect of some wild fruit.
The boy’s name was Vijay, and he belonged to a village near Mussoorie. His parents tilled a few narrow terraces on the hill slopes. They grew potatoes, onions, barley, maize; barely enough to feed themselves. When greens were scarce, they boiled the tops of the stinging-nettle and made them into a dish resembling spinach.
Vijay’s parents realised the importance of sending him to school, and it didn’t cost them much, except for the books. But it was all of four miles to the town, and a long walk makes a boy hungry.
But there was nearly always the wild fruit. The purple berries of the thorny bilberry bushes, ripening in May and June. Wild strawberries, growing in shady places like spots of blood on the deep green monsoon grass. Small, sour cherries, and tough medlars. Vijay’s strong teeth and probing tongue extracted whatever tang or sweetness lay hidden in them. And in March there were the rhododendron flowers.
His mother made them into jam. But Vijay liked them as they were. He placed the petals on his tongue and chewed them till the sweet juice trickled down his throat. But in November, there was no wild fruit. Only acorns on the oak trees, and they were bitter, fit only for the monkeys.
He walked confidently through the bazaar, strong in the legs. He looked a healthy boy, until you came up close and saw the patches on his skin and the dullness in his eyes.
He passed the fruit stalls, wondering who ate all that fruit, and what happened to the fruit that went bad; he passed the sweet shop, where hot, newly-fried jelabies lay protected like twisted orange jewels in a glass case, and where a fat, oily man raised a knife and plunged it deep into a thick slab of rich amber-coloured halwa.
The saliva built up in Vijay’s mouth; there was a dull ache in his stomach. But his eyes gave away nothing of the sharp pangs he felt.
And now, a confectioner’s shop. Glass jars filled with chocolates, peppermints, toffees – sweets he didn’t know the names of, English sweets – wrapped in bits of coloured paper.
A boy had just bought a bag of sweets. He had one in his mouth. He was a well-dressed boy; coins jingled in his pocket. The sweet moved from one cheek to the other. He bit deep into it, and Vijay heard the crunch and looked up. The boy smiled at Vijay, but moved away.
They met again, further along the road. Once again the boy smiled, even looked as though he was about to offer Vijay a sweet; but this time, Vijay shyly looked away. He did not want it to appear that he had noticed the sweets, or that he hungered for one.
But he kept meeting the boy, who always managed to reappear at some corner, sucking a sweet, moving it about in his mouth, letting it show between his wet lips – a sticky green thing, temptingly, lusciously beautiful.
The bag of sweets was nearly empty.
Reluctantly, Vijay decided that he must overtake the boy, forget all about the sweets, and hurry home. Otherwise, he would be tempted to grab the bag and run!
And then, he saw the boy leave the bag on a bench, look at him once, and smile – smile shyly and invitingly – before moving away.
Was the bag empty? Vijay wondered with mounting excitement. It couldn’t be, or it would have blown away almost immediately. Obviously, there were still a few sweets in it. The boy had disappeared. He had gone for his tea, an
d Vijay could have the rest of the sweets.
Vijay took the bag and jammed it into a pocket of his shirt. Then he hurried homewards. It was getting late, and he wanted to be home before dark.
As soon as he was out of the town, he opened the bag and shook the sweets out. Their red wrappers glowed like rubies in the palm of his hand.
Carefully, he undid a wrapper.
There was no sweet inside, only a smooth, round stone.
Vijay found stones in all the wrappers. In his mind’s eye, Vijay saw the smiling face of the boy in the bazaar: a boy who smiled sweetly but exchanged stones for sweets.
Forcing back angry tears, Vijay flung the stones down the hillside. Then he shouldered his bag of books and began the long walk home.
There were patches of snow on the ground. The grass was a dirty brown, the bushes were bare.
There is no wild fruit in November.
The Night the Roof Blew Off
e are used to sudden storms, up here on the first range of the Himalayas. The old building in which we live has, for more than a hundred years, received the full force of the wind as it sweeps across the hills from the east.
We’d lived in the building for more than ten years without a disaster. It had even taken the shock of a severe earthquake. As my granddaughter Dolly said, ‘It’s difficult to tell the new cracks from the old!’
It’s a two-storey building, and I live on the upper floor with my family: my three grandchildren and their parents. The roof is made of corrugated tin sheets, the ceiling of wooden boards. That’s the traditional Mussoorie roof.
Looking back at the experience, it was the sort of thing that should have happened in a James Thurber story, like the dam that burst or the ghost who got in. But I wasn’t thinking of Thurber at the time, although a few of his books were among the many I was trying to save from the icy rain pouring into my bedroom.
Our roof had held fast in many a storm, but the wind that night was really fierce. It came rushing at us with a high-pitched, eerie wail. The old roof groaned and protested. It took a battering for several hours while the rain lashed against the windows and the lights kept coming and going.
There was no question of sleeping, but we remained in bed for warmth and comfort. The fire had long since gone out, as the chimney had collapsed, bringing down a shower of sooty rainwater.
After about four hours of buffeting, the roof could take it no longer. My bedroom faces east, so my portion of the roof was the first to go.
The wind got under it and kept pushing until, with a ripping, groaning sound, the metal sheets shifted and slid off the rafters, some of them dropping with claps like thunder on to the road below.
So that’s it, I thought. Nothing worse can happen. As long as the ceiling stays on, I’m not getting out of bed. We’ll collect our roof in the morning.
Icy water splashing down on my face made me change my mind in a hurry. Leaping from the bed, I found that much of the ceiling had gone, too. Water was pouring on my open typewriter as well as on the bedside radio and bed cover.
Picking up my precious typewriter (my companion for forty years) I stumbled into the front sitting room (and library), only to find a similar situation there. Water was pouring through the slats of the wooden ceiling, raining down on the open bookshelves.
By now I had been joined by the children, who had come to my rescue. Their section of the roof hadn’t gone as yet. Their parents were struggling to close a window against the driving rain.
‘Save the books!’ shouted Dolly, the youngest, and that became our rallying cry for the next hour or two.
Dolly and her brother Mukesh picked up armfuls of books and carried them into their room. But the floor was awash, so the books had to be piled on their beds. Dolly was helping me gather some of my papers when a large field rat jumped on to the desk in front of her. Dolly squealed and ran for the door.
‘It’s all right,’ said Mukesh, whose love of animals extends even to field rats. ‘It’s only sheltering from the storm.’
Big brother Rakesh whistled for our dog, Tony, but Tony wasn’t interested in rats just then. He had taken shelter in the kitchen, the only dry spot in the house.
Two rooms were now practically roofless, and we could see the sky lit up by flashes of lightning.
There were fireworks indoors, too, as water spluttered and crackled along a damaged wire. Then the lights went out altogether.
Rakesh, at his best in an emergency, had already lit two kerosene lamps. And by their light we continued to transfer books, papers, and clothes to the children’s room.
We noticed that the water on the floor was beginning to subside a little.
‘Where is it going?’ asked Dolly.
‘Through the floor,’ said Mukesh. ‘Down to the flat below!’
Cries of concern from our downstairs neighbours told us that they were having their share of the flood.
Our feet were freezing because there hadn’t been time to put on proper footwear. And besides, shoes and slippers were awash by now. All chairs and tables were piled high with books. I hadn’t realised the extent of my library until that night!
The available beds were pushed into the driest corner of the children’s room, and there, huddled in blankets and quilts, we spent the remaining hours of the night while the storm continued.
Towards morning the wind fell, and it began to snow. Through the door to the sitting room I could see snowflakes drifting through the gaps in the ceiling, settling on picture-frames. Ordinary things like a glue bottle and a small clock took on a certain beauty when covered with soft snow.
Most of us dozed off.
When dawn came, we found the windowpanes encrusted with snow and icicles. The rising sun struck through the gaps in the ceiling and turned everything golden. Snow crystals glistened on the empty bookshelves. But the books had been saved.
Rakesh went out to find a carpenter and tinsmith, while the rest of us started putting things in the sun to dry. By evening we’d put much of the roof back on.
It’s a much-improved roof now, and we look forward to the next storm with confidence!
A Traveller’s Tale
opalpur-on-sea!
A name to conjure with… And as a boy I’d heard it mentioned, by my father and others, and described as a quaint little seaside resort with a small port on the Orissa coast. The years passed, and I went from boyhood to manhood and eventually old age (is seventy-six old age? I wouldn’t know) and still it was only a place I’d heard about and dreamt about but never visited.
Until last month, when I was a guest of KiiT International School in Bhubaneswar, and someone asked me where I’d like to go, and I said, ‘Is Gopalpur very far?’
‘And off I went, along a plam-fringed highway, through busy little market-towns with names Rhamba and Humma, past the enormous Chilika Lake which opens into the sea through paddy fields and keora plantations, and finally on to Gopalpur’s beach road, with the sun glinting like gold on the great waves of the ocean, and the fishermen counting their catch, and the children sprinting into the sea, tumbling about in the shallows.
But the seafront wore a neglected look. The hotels were empty, the cafés deserted. A cheeky crow greeted me with a disconsolate caw from its perch on a weathered old wall. Some of the buildings were recent, but around us there were also the shells of older buildings that had fallen into ruin. And no one was going to preserve these relics of a colonial past. A small house called ‘Brighton Villa’ still survived.
But away from the seafront a tree-lined road took us past some well-maintained bungalows, a school, an old cemetery, and finally a PWD rest house where we were to spend the night.
It was growing dark when we arrived, and in the twilight I could just make out the shapes of the trees that surround the old bungalow – a hoary old banyan, a jack-fruit and several mango trees. The light from the bungalow’s veranda fell on some oleander bushes. A hawk moth landed on my shirt-front and appeared reluctant to leave. I to
ok it between my fingers and deposited it on the oleander bush.
It was almost midnight when I went to bed. The rest-house staff – the caretaker and the gardener – went to some trouble to arrange a meal, but it was a long time coming. The gardener told me the house had once been the residence of an Englishman who had left the country at the time of Independence, some sixty years or more ago. Some changes had been carried out, but the basic structure remained – high-ceilinged rooms with skylights, a long veranda and enormous bathrooms. The bathroom was so large you could have held a party in it. But there was just one potty and a basin. You could sit on the potty and meditate, fixing your thoughts (or absence of thought) on the distant basin.
I closed all doors and windows, switched off all lights (I find it impossible to sleep with a light on), and went to bed.
It was a comfortable bed, and I soon fell asleep. Only to be awakened by a light tapping on the window near my bed.
Probably a branch of the oleander bush, I thought, and fell asleep again. But there was more tapping, louder this time, and then I was fully awake.
I sat up in bed and drew aside the curtains.
There was a face at the window.
In the half-light from the veranda I could not make out the features, but it was definitely a human face.
Obviously someone wanted to come in, the caretaker perhaps, or the chowkidar. But then, why not knock on the door? Perhaps he had. The door was at the other end of the room, and I may not have heard the knocking.
I am not in the habit of opening my doors to strangers in the night, but somehow I did not feel threatened or uneasy, so I got up, unlatched the door, and opened it for my midnight visitor.
Standing on the threshold was an imposing figure.
A tall dark man, turbaned, and dressed all in white. He wore some sort of uniform – the kind worn by those immaculate doormen at five-star hotels; but a rare sight in Gopalpur-on-sea.