Tales of Fosterganj

by Ruskin Bond

  I was waist-deep in water, but the current was strong, taking me along. The menfolk picked up the smaller children and struggled to reach the shore. The women struggled to follow them.

  Two of the older women were carried downstream; I have no idea what happened to them.

  Sunil was splashing about near the capsized boat. ‘Where’s my suitcase?’ he yelled.

  I saw it bobbing about on the water, just out of his reach. He made a grab for it, but it was swept away. I saw it disappearing downstream. It might float for a while, then sink to the bottom of the river. No one would find it there. Or some day the suitcase would burst open, its contents carried further downstream, and the emerald bracelet be washed up among the pebbles of the riverbed. A fisherman might find it. In older times he would have taken it to his king. In present times he would keep it.

  We struggled ashore with the others and sank down on the sand, exhausted but happy to be alive.

  Those who still had some strength left sang out: ‘Ganga-maiki jai!’ And so did I.

  Sunil still had the sapphire ring on his hand, but it hadn’t done him much good.

  End of the Road

  We stayed in Sunil’s village for almost a month. I have to say I enjoyed the experience, in spite of the absence of modern conveniences. Electricity had come to the village—which was surprising for that time—and in our room there was a ceiling fan and an old radio. But sanitation was basic, and early in the morning one had to visit a thicket of thorn bushes, which provided more privacy than the toilets at the bus stop. Water came from an old well. It was good sweet water. There were pigeons nesting in the walls of the well, and whenever we drew up a bucket of water the pigeons would erupt into the air, circle above us, and then settle down again.

  There were other birds. Parrots, green and gold, settled in the guava trees and proceeded to decimate the young fruit. The children would chase them away, but they would return after an hour or two.

  Herons looked for fish among the hyacinths clogging up the village pond. Kingfishers swooped low over the water. A pair of Sarus cranes, inseparable, treaded gingerly through the reeds. All on fishing expeditions.

  The outskirts of an Indian village are a great place for birds. You will see twenty to thirty species in the course of a day. Bluejays doing their acrobatics, sky-diving high above the open fields; cheeky bulbuls in the courtyard; seven sisters everywhere; mynas quarrelling on the verandah steps; scarlet minivets and rosy pastors in the banyan tree; and at night, the hawk cuckoo or brain fever bird shouting at us from the mango-tope.

  Almost every village has its mango-tope, its banyan tree, its small temple, its irrigation canal. Old men smoking hookahs; the able-bodied in the fields; children playing gulli-danda or cricket. An idyllic setting, but I did not envy my hosts. They toiled from morn till night—ploughing, sowing, reaping, always with an eye on the clouds—and then having to sell, in order to buy…

  Sunil’s uncle urged him to stay, to help them on the farm; but he was too lazy for any work that required physical exertion. Towns and cities were his milieu. He was fidgety all the time we were in the village. And when I told him it was time for me to start working, looking for a job in Delhi, he did not object to my leaving but instead insisted on joining me. He too would find a job in Delhi, he said. He could work in a hotel or a shop or even start his own business.

  And so I found myself back in my old room in dusty Shahdara in Delhi, and within a short time I’d found work with a Daryaganj publisher, polishing up the English of professors who were writing guides to Shakespeare, Chaucer and Thomas Hardy.

  Sunil had friends in Delhi, and he disappeared for long periods, turning up only occasionally, when he was out of pocket or in need of somewhere to spend the night.

  And then one of his friends came by to tell me he’d been arrested at the New Delhi railway station. He’d been back to his old ways, relieving careless travellers of their cash or wristwatches. He was a skilful practitioner of his art, but he’d grown careless.

  The police took away the sapphire ring, and of course he never saw it again. It must have brought a little affluence but not much joy to whoever flaunted it next.

  Denied bail, Sunil finally found himself lodged in a new, modern jail that had come up at a village called Tihar, on the old Najafgarh road. As a boy I’d gone fishing in the extensive Najafgarhjheel, but now much of it had been filled in and built over. The herons and kingfishers had moved on, the convicts had moved in.

  Sunil had been there a few months when at last I was able to see him. He was looking quite cheerful, not in the least depressed; but then, he was never the despondent type. He was working in the pharmacy, helping out the prison doctor. He had become popular with the inmates, largely due to his lively renderings of Hindi film songs.

  Our paths had crossed briefly, and now diverged. I knew we would probably not see each other again. And we didn’t. What became of him? Perhaps he spent many more months in jail, making up prescriptions for ailing dacoits, murderers, embezzlers, fraudsters and sexual offenders; and perhaps when he came out, he was able to start a chemist’s shop. Unlikely, but possible. In any case, he would have made Delhi his home. The big city would have suited him.

  Fosterganj was a far cry from all this, and I was too busy to give it much thought. And then one Sunday, when I was at home, had a visitor.

  It was Hassan.

  He had come to Delhi to attend a relative’s marriage and he had got my address from the publisher in Daryaganj. Having given up any hope of seeing me again in Fosterganj, he’d brought along my books, typewriter, and the gramophone.

  He spent all morning with me, bringing me up to date on happenings in Fosterganj.

  Vishaal had been transferred, getting a promotion, and taking over a branch in the heart of Madhya Pradesh. Mowgli country! Leopard country! Vishaal would be happy there.

  ‘And how’s old Foster?’ I asked.

  ‘Not too good. He says he won’t last long, and he may be right. He wants to know if you’ll accept his uncle’s skull as a gift.’

  ‘Tell him to gift it to the Mussoorie municipality. I believe they are starting a museum in the Clock Tower. But thanks for bringing the gramophone down. I could do with a little music.’

  Hassan then told me that the hotel was now coming up on the site of the old palace. It would be a posh sort of place, very expensive.

  ‘What are they calling it?’ I asked.

  ‘Lake View Hotel.’

  ‘But there isn’t a lake.’

  ‘They plan to make one. Extend the old pool, and feed it with water from the dhobi ghat. Fosterganj is changing fast.’

  ‘Well, as long as it’s good for business. Should be good for the bakery.’

  ‘Oh, they’ll have their own bakery. But I’ll manage. So many workers and labourers around now. Population is going up. So when will you visit us again?’

  ‘Next year, perhaps. But I can’t afford Lake View Palaces.’

  ‘You don’t need to. Your room is still there.’

  ‘Then I’ll come.’

  ~

  Over the next three or four years I lost touch with Fosterganj. My life changed a little. I found companionship when I was least expecting it, and I became a freelance writer for a travel magazine. It was funded by a Parsi gentleman who was rumoured to own half of Bombay. I saw no evidence of the wealth in the cheques I received for my stories, but at least I got to travel a lot, zipping around the country by train, bus and, on one occasion, a dilapidated old Dakota of the Indian Airlines.

  The forests of Coonoor; the surge of the sea at Gopalpur; old settlements on the Hooghly; the ghats of Banaras; the butterflies of the western ghats; the forts of Gwalior; the sacred birds of Mathura; the gardens of Kashmir—all were grist to my mill, or rather to the portable typewriter which had taken the place of the clumsy old office machine. How could Fosterganj’s modest charms compare with the splendours that were on offer elsewhere in the land?

  So
Fosterganj was far from my thoughts—until one day I picked up a newspaper and came across a news item that caught my attention.

  On the outskirts of the hill station of Nahan a crime had been committed. An elderly couple living alone in a sprawling bungalow had been strangled to death. The police had been clueless for several weeks, and the case was almost forgotten, until a lady turned up with information about the killer. She led them to a spot among the pines behind the bungalow, where a boy was digging up what looked like a small wooden chest. It contained a collection of valuable gemstones. The murdered man had been a well-known jeweller with an establishment in Simla.

  The accused claimed that he was a minor, barely fifteen years old. And certainly he had looked no older to the police. But the woman told them he was only a few years younger than her, and that she was nearly fifty. She confessed to being his accomplice in similar crimes in the past; it was always gems and jewellery he was after. He had been her lover, she said. She had been under his domination for too long.

  I looked at the photograph of the man-boy that accompanied the report. A bit fuzzy, but it certainly looked like Bhim the Lucky. Who else could it have been?

  The next few mornings I scanned the papers for more information on the case. There was a small update, which said that a medical test had confirmed the accused was in his forties. And the woman had disappeared.

  Then there was nothing. The newspapers had moved on to other scandals and disasters.

  I felt sorry for the woman. We had met only twice, but I had sensed in her a fellow feeling, a shared loneliness that was on the verge of finding relief. But for her it was not to be. I wondered where she was, and what she would do to forget she had given many years of her life for a love that had never truly existed.

  I never saw her again.

  ~

  Not the happiest memory to have of Fosterganj. When I look back on that year, I prefer to think of Hassan and Sunil and Vishaal, and even old Foster (long gone), and the long-tailed magpies flitting among the oak trees, and the children playing on the dusty road.

  And last winter, when I was spending a few weeks in a bungalow by the sea—far from my Himalayan haunts—I remembered Fosterganj and thought: I have written about moonlight bathing the Taj and the sun beating down on the Coromandel coast—and so have others—but who will celebrate little Fosterganj?

  And so I decided to write this account of the friends I made there—a baker, a banker, a pickpocket, a hare-lipped youth, an old boozer of royal descent, and a few others—to remind myself that there had been such a place, and that it had once been a part of my life.

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