by Ruskin Bond
Miss Babcock devised an ingenious method of waking her in an emergency. She tied a long piece of string to the foot of the sick person’s bed; then took the other end of the string to her own room, where, upon retiring for the night, she tied it to her big toe.
A vigorous pull on the string from the sick person, and Miss Babcock would be wide awake!
Now, what could be more tempting to a small boy than—such a device? The string was tied to the foot of Tata’s bed, and he was a restless fellow, always wanting water, always complaining of aches and pains. And sometimes, out of plain mischief, he would give several tugs on that string until Miss Babcock arrived with a pill or a glass of water.
‘You’ll have my toe off by morning,’ she complained. ‘You don’t have to pull quite so hard.’
And what was worse, when Tata did fall asleep, he snored to high heaven and nothing could wake him! I had to lie awake most of the night, listening to his rhythmic snoring. It was like a trumpet tuning up or a bullfrog calling to its mates.
Fortunately, a couple of nights later, we were joined in the ward by Bimal, a friend and fellow ‘feather’, who had also contracted mumps. One night of Tata’s snoring, and Bimal resolved to do something about it.
‘Wait until he’s fast asleep,’ said Bimal, ‘and then we’ll carry his bed outside and leave him in the veranda.’ We did more than that. As Tata commenced his nightly imitation of all the wind instruments in the London Philharmonic Orchestra, we lifted up his bed as gently as possible and carried it out into the garden, putting it down beneath the nearest pine tree.
‘It’s healthier outside,’ said Bimal, justifying our action. ‘All this fresh air should cure him.’ Leaving Tata to serenade the stars, we returned to the ward expecting to enjoy a good night’s sleep. So did Miss Babcock.
However, we couldn’t sleep long. We were woken by Miss Babcock running around the ward screaming, ‘Where’s Tata? Where’s Tata?’ She ran outside, and we followed dutifully, barefoot, in our pyjamas.
The bed stood where we had put it down, but of Tata, there was no sign. Instead, there was a large blackfaced langur at the foot of the bed, baring its teeth in a grin of disfavour.
‘Tata’s gone,’ gasped Miss Babcock.
‘He must be a sleepwalker.’ said Bimal.
‘Maybe the leopard took him,’ I said. Just then there was a commotion in the shrubbery at the end of the garden and shouting, ‘Help, help!’ Tata emerged from the bushes, followed by several lithe, long-tailed langurs, merrily giving chase. Apparently, he’d woken up at the crack of dawn to find his bed surrounded by a gang of inquisitive simians. They had meant no harm, but Tata had panicked, and made a dash for life and liberty, running into the forest instead of into the cottage. We got Tata and his bed back into the ward, and Miss Babcock took his temperature and gave him a dose of salts. Oddly enough, in all the excitement no one asked how Tata and his bed had travelled in the night.
And strangely, he did not snore the following night; so perhaps the pine-scented night air really helped. Needless to say, we all soon recovered from the mumps, and Miss Babcock’s big toe received a well-deserved rest.
A Dreadful Gurgle
ave you ever woken up in the night to find someone in your bed who wasn’t supposed to be there? Well, it happened to me when I was at boarding school in Shimla, many years ago.
I was sleeping in the senior dormitory, along with some twenty other boys, and my bed was positioned in a corner of the long room, at some distance from the others. There was no shortage of pranksters in our dormitory, and one had to look out for the introduction of stinging-nettle or pebbles or possibly even a small lizard under the bedsheets. But I wasn’t prepared for a body in my bed.
At first I thought a sleep-walker had mistakenly got into my bed, and I tried to push him out, muttering, ‘Devinder, get back into your own bed. There isn’t room for two of us.’ Devinder was a notorious sleep-walker, who had even ended up on the roof on one occasion.
But it wasn’t Devinder.
Devinder was a short boy, and this fellow was a tall, lanky person. His feet stuck out of the blanket at the foot of the bed. It must be Ranjit, I thought. Ranjit had huge feet.
‘Ranjit,’ I hissed. ‘Stop playing the fool, and get back to your own bed.’
No response.
I tried pushing, but without success. The body was heavy and inert. It was also very cold.
I lay there wondering who it could be, and then it began to dawn on me that the person beside me wasn’t breathing, and the horrible realization came to me that there was a corpse in my bed. How did it get there, and what was I to do about it?
‘Vishal,’ I called out to a boy who was sleeping a short distance away. ‘Vishal, wake up, there’s a corpse in the bed!’
Vishal did wake up. ‘You’re dreaming, Bond. Go to sleep and stop disturbing everyone.’
Just then there was a groan followed by a dreadful gurgle, from the body beside me. I shot out of the bed, shouting at the top of my voice, waking up the entire dormitory.
Lights came on. There was total confusion. The Housemaster came running. I told him and everyone else what had happened. They came to my bed and had a good look at it. But there was no one there.
On my insistence, I was moved to the other end of the dormitory. The house prefect, Johnson, took over my former bed. Two nights passed without further excitement, and a couple of boys started calling me a funk and a scaredy-cat. My response was to punch one of them on the nose.
Then, on the third night, we were all woken by several ear-splitting shrieks, and Johnson came charging across the dormitory, screaming that two icy hands had taken him by the throat and tried to squeeze the life out of him. Lights came on, and the poor old Housemaster came dashing in again. We calmed Johnson down and put him in a spare bed. The Housemaster shone his torch on the boy’s face and neck, and sure enough, we saw several bruises on his flesh and the outline of a large hand.
Next day, the offending bed was removed from the dormitory, but it was a few days before Johnson recovered from the shock. He was kept in the infirmary until the bruises disappeared. But for the rest of the year he was a nervous wreck.
Our nursing sister, who had looked after the infirmary for many years, recalled that some twenty years earlier, a boy called Tomkins had died suddenly in the dormitory. He was very tall for his age, but apparently suffered from a heart problem. That day he had taken part in a football match, and had gone to bed looking pale and exhausted. Early next morning, when the bell rang for morning gym, he was found stiff and cold, having died during the night.
‘He died peacefully, poor boy,’ recalled our nursing sister.
But I’m not so sure. I can still hear that dreadful gurgle from the body in my bed. And there was the struggle with Johnson. No, there was nothing peaceful about that death. Tomkins had gone most unwillingly…
A Face in the Dark
t may give you some idea of rural humour if I begin this tale with an anecdote that concerns me. I was walking alone through a village at night when I met an old man carrying a lantern. I found, to my surprise, that the man was blind. ‘Old man,’ I asked, ‘if you cannot see, why do you carry a lamp?’
‘I carry this,’ he replied, ‘so that fools do not stumble against me in the dark.’
This incident has only a slight connection with the story that follows, but I think it provides the right sort of tone and setting. Mr Oliver, an Anglo-Indian teacher, was returning to his school late one night, on the outskirts of the hill station of Shimla. The school was conducted on English public school lines and the boys, most of them from well-to-do Indian families, wore blazers, caps and ties. Life magazine, in a feature on India, had once called this school the ‘Eton of the East’.
Individuality was not encouraged; they were all destined to become ‘leaders of men’.
Mr Oliver had been teaching in the school for several years. Sometimes it seemed like an eternity, for one day follow
ed another with the same monotonous routine. The Shimla bazaar, with its cinemas and restaurants, was about two miles from the school; and Mr Oliver, a bachelor, usually strolled into the town in the evening, returning after dark, when he would take a short-cut through a pine forest.
When there was a strong wind, the pine trees made sad, eerie sounds that kept most people to the main road. But Mr Oliver was not a nervous or imaginative man. He carried a torch and, on the night I write of, its pale gleam—the batteries were running down—moved fitfully over the narrow forest path. When its flickering light fell on the figure of a boy, who was sitting alone on a rock, Mr Oliver stopped. Boys were not supposed to be out of school after 7 p.m., and it was now well past nine.
‘What are you doing out here, boy?’ asked Mr Oliver sharply, moving closer so that he could recognize the miscreant. But even as he approached the boy, Mr Oliver sensed that something was wrong. The boy appeared to be crying. His head hung down, he held his face in his hands, and his body shook convulsively. It was a strange, soundless weeping, and Mr Oliver felt distinctly uneasy.
‘Well, what’s the matter?’ he asked, his anger giving way to concern. ‘What are you crying for?’ The boy would not answer or look up. His body continued to be racked with silent sobbing.
‘Come on, boy, you shouldn’t be out here at this hour. Tell me the trouble. Look up!’
The boy looked up. He took his hands from his face and looked up at his teacher. The light from Mr Oliver’s torch fell on the boy’s face—if you could call it a face.
He had no eyes, ears, nose or mouth. It was just a round smooth head—with a school cap on top of it. And that’s where the story should end—as indeed it has for several people who have had similar experiences and dropped dead of inexplicable heart attacks. But for Mr Oliver it did not end there.
The torch fell from his trembling hand. He turned and scrambled down the path, running blindly through the trees and calling for help. He was still running towards the school buildings when he saw a lantern swinging in the middle of the path. Mr Oliver had never before been so pleased to see the night watchman. He stumbled up to the watchman, gasping for breath and speaking incoherently.
‘What is it, sir?’ asked the watchman. ‘Has there been an accident? Why are you running?’
‘I saw something—something horrible—a boy weeping in the forest—and he had no face!’
‘No face, sir?’
‘No eyes, nose, mouth—nothing.’
‘Do you mean it was like this, sir?’ asked the watchman, and raised the lamp to his own face. The watchman had no eyes, no ears, no features at all—not even an eyebrow!
The wind blew the lamp out, and Mr Oliver had his heart attack.
The Whistling Schoolboy
he moon was almost at the full. Bright moonlight flooded the road. But I was stalked by the shadows of the trees, by the crooked oak branches reaching out towards me—some threateningly, others as though they needed companionship.
Once I dreamt that the trees could walk. That on moonlit nights like this they would uproot themselves for a while, visit each other, talk about old times—for they had seen many men and happenings, especially the older ones. And then, before dawn, they would return to the places where they had been condemned to grow. Lonely sentinels of the night. And this was a good night for them to walk. They appeared eager to do so: a restless rustling of leaves, the creaking of branches—these were sounds that came from within them in the silence of the night.
Occasionally other strollers passed me in the dark. It was still quite early, just eight o’clock, and some people were on their way home. Others were walking into town for a taste of the bright lights, shops and restaurants. On the unlit road I could not recognize them. They did not notice me. I was reminded of an old song from my childhood. Softly, I began humming the tune, and soon the words came back to me:
We three,
We’re not a crowd;
We’re not even company—
My echo,
My shadow,
And me…
I looked down at my shadow, moving silently beside me. We take our shadows for granted, don’t we? There they are, the uncomplaining companions of a lifetime, mute and helpless witnesses to our every act of commission or omission. On this bright moonlit night I could not help noticing you, Shadow, and I was sorry that you had to see so much that I was ashamed of; but glad, too, that you were around when I had my small triumphs. And what of my echo? I thought of calling out to see if my call came back to me; but I refrained from doing so, as I did not wish to disturb the perfect stillness of the mountains or the conversations of the trees.
The road wound up the hill and levelled out at the top, where it became a ribbon of moonlight entwined between tall deodars. A flying squirrel glided across the road, leaving one tree for another. A nightjar called. The rest was silence.
The old cemetery loomed up before me. There were many old graves—some large and monumental—and there were a few recent graves too, for the cemetery was still in use. I could see flowers scattered on one of them—a few late dahlias and scarlet salvia. Further on near the boundary wall, part of the cemetery’s retaining wall had collapsed in the heavy monsoon rains. Some of the tombstones had come down with the wall. One grave lay exposed. A rotting coffin and a few scattered bones were the only relics of someone who had lived and loved like you and me.
Part of the tombstone lay beside the road, but the lettering had worn away. I am not normally a morbid person, but something made me stoop and pick up a smooth round shard of bone, probably part of a skull. When my hand closed over it, the bone crumbled into fragments. I let them fall to the grass. Dust to dust. And from somewhere, not too far away, came the sound of someone whistling.
At first I thought it was another late-evening stroller, whistling to himself much as I had been humming my old song. But the whistler approached quite rapidly; the whistling was loud and cheerful. A boy on a bicycle sped past. I had only a glimpse of him, before his cycle went weaving through the shadows on the road.
But he was back again in a few minutes. And this time he stopped a few feet away from me, and gave me a quizzical half-smile. A slim dusky boy of fourteen or fifteen. He wore a school blazer and a yellow scarf. His eyes were pools of liquid moonlight.
‘You don’t have a bell on your cycle,’ I said.
He said nothing, just smiled at me with his head a little to one side. I put out my hand, and I thought he was going to take it. But then, quite suddenly, he was off again, whistling cheerfully though rather tunelessly. A whistling schoolboy. A bit late for him to be out but he seemed an independent sort.
The whistling grew fainter, then faded away altogether. A deep sound-denying silence fell upon the forest. My shadow and I walked home.
Next morning I woke to a different kind of whistling—the song of the thrush outside my window.
It was a wonderful day, the sunshine warm and sensuous, and I longed to be out in the open. But there was work to be done, proofs to be corrected, letters to be written. And it was several days before I could walk to the top of the hill, to that lonely tranquil resting place under the deodars. It seemed to me ironic that those who had the best view of the glistening snow-capped peaks were all buried several feet underground.
Some repair work was going on. The retaining wall of the cemetery was being shored up, but the overseer told me that there was no money to restore the damaged grave. With the help of the chowkidar, I returned the scattered bones to a little hollow under the collapsed masonry, and left some money with him so that he could have the open grave bricked up. The name on the gravestone had worn away, but I could make out a date—20 November 1950—some fifty years ago, but not too long ago as gravestones go.
I found the burial register in the church vestry and turned back the yellowing pages to 1950, when I was just a schoolboy myself. I found the name there—Michael Dutta, aged fifteen—and the cause of death: road accident.
&nb
sp; Well, I could only make guesses. And to turn conjecture into certainty, I would have to find an old resident who might remember the boy or the accident.
There was old Miss Marley at Pine Top. A retired teacher from Woodstock, she had a wonderful memory, and had lived in the hill station for more than half a century.
White-haired and smooth-cheeked, her bright blue eyes full of curiosity, she gazed benignly at me through her old-fashioned pince-nez.
‘Michael was a charming boy—full of exuberance, always ready to oblige. I had only to mention that I needed a newspaper or an Aspirin, and he’d be off on his bicycle, swooping down these steep roads with great abandon. But these hills roads, with their sudden corners, weren’t meant for racing around on a bicycle. They were widening our roads for motor traffic, and a truck was coming uphill, loaded with rubble, when Michael came round a bend and smashed headlong into it. He was rushed to the hospital, and the doctors did their best, but he did not recover consciousness. Of course, you must have seen his grave. That’s why you’re here. His parents? They left shortly afterwards. Went abroad, I think… A charming boy, Michael, but just a bit too reckless. You’d have liked him, I think.’
I did not see the phantom bicycle rider again for some time, although I felt his presence on more than one occasion. And when, on a cold winter’s evening, I walked past that lonely cemetery, I thought I heard him whistling far away. But he did not manifest himself. Perhaps it was only the echo of a whistle, in communion with my insubstantial shadow.
It was several months before I saw that smiling face again. And then it came at me out of the mist as I was walking home in drenching monsoon rain. I had been to a dinner party at the old community centre, and I was returning home along a very narrow, precipitous path known as the Eyebrow. A storm had been threatening all evening. A heavy mist had settled on the hillside. It was so thick that the light from my torch simply bounced off it. The sky blossomed with sheet lightning and thunder rolled over the mountains. The rain became heavier. I moved forward slowly, carefully, hugging the hillside. There was a clap of thunder, and then I saw him emerge from the mist and stand in my way—the same slim dark youth who had materialized near the cemetery. He did not smile. Instead he put up his hand and waved at me. I hesitated, stood still. The mist lifted a little, and I saw that the path had disappeared. There was a gaping emptiness a few feet in front of me. And then a drop of over a hundred feet to the rocks below.