Rendezvous with Horror & Nightmare Tales (2 in 1)

by Ruskin Bond

  The apotheosis of Jackson was in this wise.

  He became a Fakir. Perhaps, his success at the Calcutta music-hall suggested this unusual course. His remarkable knowledge of native idiom stood him in good stead, and he found the part easier to play than he would have supposed. His patter, with the impassive face, procured him free meals—even free drinks on the wooden platforms of country liquor shops. He never gave himself away, however drunk; for the more drunk he was the more he believed himself a Fakir. In a Fakir a certain wildness is expected; his dancing was looked upon as an idiosyncrasy, and gained him a reputation. He cultivated long hair, which he made tawny with henna; he wore nothing but a yellow cloth round his middle, and brown beads round his neck; a wild, wispy beard was also grown gradually, and dyed red; and white dust on his brown, naked body, and red caste-marks barring his forehead were easy. No one ever recognised Jackson. He had no name now. His wanderings are unknown; he must have seen much—enough, at least, to make him forget that he had ever been Jackson.

  Little wayside shrines knew him; he could puff out vile smoke from the earthenware pipe, and spit, and make strange guttural noises with any beggar priest in India. He ate no meat, but he throve on grain and milk, gifts of villagers; the Dancing Fakir became a finer figure on this fare than ever was Jackson. There is reason to believe that he drank less and less spirit. His diet must have stayed the craving. At any rate his physique improved vastly; he was really tall now, without the stoop; there was scarcely a taller Fakir in all the thousand villages he visited.

  Though his wanderings have not been chronicled, it is certain that he was at Bijapur at the time of the riot. It was Ramlila time—a season of religious festival and plays and fairs. Bijapur was gay with people in their brightest clothes. The steps of the temple above the river were thronged. There were bathers in scarlet and in yellow; women in blue and in red; coloured strips of flags; and, beyond, the houses of the bazaar were bright in the sun—light blue and yellow and white. In the narrow streets the crowds were promenading, chaffering, and admiring all day. In the cloth shops country folk were buying finery for Ramlila time—bright cottons, and tinsel for the children. All the booths were full of merchandise placed on little wooden platforms just raised above the ground, and the sellers squatted by their goods. Red, golden, and white grain was piled in heaps before the shops of the grain merchants; farther on, a pyramid of oranges; and beyond—in the street of the workers in brass—a great pile of brazen vessels flaunted the sun. The Dancing Fakir doubtless, saw all these things, as he sat at the street corner listening to the talk of two Sadhus with shaven heads and orange-coloured garb. He gathered that there was a good deal of ill-feeling under all the bustle and chatter. The Deputy Commissioner had forbidden the procession to pass down the Bara Bazaar on account of Mohammedan scruples about their mosque in that street. The procession was immemorial: curse that mosque; curse the Sircar, who ordered these things! There were extra police about too, who had arrived by rail—an officer and thirty men. There were to be speeches at the mela that afternoon; Babu Gopi Nath, the great speaker, was himself coming. He was the friend of Mahatma Gandhi Ji. The Sircar was afraid of Gopi Nath. He was no mere windbag either, for he had led the riot at Khaspur, when many men had been killed. So ran the talk; the Dancing Fakier was well used to it. Hatred of the English and their ways had become a common enough theme in the bazaar, and he generally disregarded it. This time he heard more than usual. There was a whisper about looting the liquor shops, and the arrival of two hundred wild men from Khaspur. The Dancing Fakir wandered on. He did not care.

  That year the crowd at the mela beat all records, and the Bijapur maidan was filled to overflowing. On the outskirts, children rode on rough merry-go-rounds at two pies a time. There were conjurers who spent most of their time drum-beating to an audience always on the move. There were snake-charmers from Khaspur; a man who had crawled on all-fours from Hyderabad, and who now lay on the ground yelling strangely; a travelling show from Benaras, the actors wearing red masks; three bands of one sort and another; and a Dancing Fakir who never changed his face. But the main attraction was a rough platform in the centre of the open meadow, where Gopi Nath was speaking. He was not much to look at—a little dark man with a moustache, glasses, and a small round black cap on his head. But when he held up his hand and began to speak of wrongs, there was a subtle change in the crowd. Hitherto there had been idle bustle. Now there was a silence—then a restlessness; an atmosphere of expectation; something vaguely menacing. Gopi Nath did not rant; at first he spoke slowly; then took advantage of the lull to grip his hearers, following with an appeal of swift eloquence. He had caught that crowd: eyes stared; breathing quickened; men pressed forward without knowing it. One by one the side-shows ceased. The Dancing Fakir was still, listening on the outskirts. No one moved, except the police in their khaki coats and red turbans quietly patrolling the crowd. Then there was a rustle—a murmur, like the sea. Gopi Nath was urging the crowd to loot the liquor shops, sources of the Sircar's wealth. Then later—one could not miss the words; they were like a clarion call—'Hotel'—'Club'—'Blood of the English dogs!' There came that unmistakable low growl of an angry mob, for one moment before the rush—then pandemonium.

  Babu Gopi Nath had won them. The mob was beyond control; respectable people were fleeing from the ground to lock themselves in their houses. The rest were as one man—and that man was mad and would soon be drunk as well. Bijapur was only a Civil Station; it had no garrison beyond fifty police; Government was credited with trusting to luck in these matters; the English ladies were at the Club, playing tennis.

  Babu Gopi Nath slipped off quietly to the car placed at his disposal by the All-India Non-cooperation Society, and was soon far away. After all, he was not a man of action.

  Then came the awakening of the Dancing Fakir. He did not consider explanations; he had never cared an anna for the Government, and had been long estranged from his own kind. But he thought of the Club—half a mile away, at the bottom of the straight, broad road from the maidan. He had passed it the day before. It lay straight ahead, beyond the cross-roads, where you turned to the right for the Collector's Court and the Treasury, and to the left for the bazaar and the river. The crowd would keep straight on; it had one idea only: the Club was the goal suggested. At this thought, a little spark which had almost died in the Dancing Fakir glowed up and fired him. He became not Jackson, but Alfred Henry Jackson. He saw only the tennis players.

  He would have to act very quickly; the police had been overpowered; the crowd were beating their dead bodies with lathis. Just as well—they would hardly move seriously for a few minutes. There was a struggling mass of humanity outside the liquor shop in the little street abutting on the maidan. The Dancing Fakir suddenly grew active. He ran, leaping and shouting, to the liquor shop, passing a group of men who were beating two bunnias. The shop was already alight; bottles and pipas were broken, and the contents were streaming into the road. The Dancing Fakir knelt down, with others, in the dust, and lapped and lapped at the liquor. The spirit, to which he had lately been a stranger, fired his brain and gave him great strength. He could lead now—lead ten thousand men. He must lead them to the right at those cross-roads, towards the Treasury. He had seen a strong armed guard on the Treasury. But there was no time to lose: the crowd had begun to move; they were leaving the bodies.

  Suddenly, the Dancing Fakir leapt to his feet, caught a sword from a man near him, and danced madly through the crowd, yelling. He danced up to the nearest dead policeman, with leaps like those of a charging animal, and wildly hacked off his head; he snatched a long lathi, and impaled the head, tying it firm with the red turban. Then he raised it on high. People noticed the wild Fakir dancing through the crowd; two or three followed him; then more and more. Faster he went, and faster—the head aloft—waving his wild hair, singing. And, the crowd followed him with an ugly sound, filling the wide road with a mass of running, pushing figures. The Dancing Fakir had only one tho
ught—"Would they turn to the right?" Now, they were at the cross-roads; he brandished the head and danced facing them, adjuring them, screaming at them. And, they followed him. For a crowd is one man, and the Dancing Fakir had hit upon an old secret of leading rabbles. They will follow something on high—and a head on a pole is the best leader of all. He was covered in dust; blood was on his face and body—and something unearthly in his eyes; but in his heart he triumphed as he had never triumphed before. He led them right down the road to the Treasury; the police reinforcements cut off their rear and barricaded the cross-roads behind them. The police guard on the Treasury held their fire till the crowd came very near, and then fired volley after volley.

  The Dancing Fakir sprang high in the air at the first volley, and fell—quite dead.

  Maza: A Vignette

  By 'Ganpat'

  Maza lay in the warm glow of the afternoon sun, a mud-built village upon a mound in the lee of low hills, the outliers of the ranges which climbed away northward, ever higher and higher, towards the forest-clad slopes forming the outer wall of Asmaka which nineteen hundred years later a German philologist called Dardistan.

  The sky was cloudless and the air still and wine-like, the air of the northern Indian spring. The emerald of the young crops showed in the wide expanse of the fields about and a dozen little water channels ran glinting silver among the green from where, higher up, the stony bed of a torrent debouched from the hills. In the fields around men and women were working, and here and there grazed cattle and a herd or two of goats.

  On the highest mud tower of the village stood a watchman with an ancient spear, who leaned against the parapet looking out towards the north. He was not very alert for the day was warm and although it was his duty to watch for raiders, of late years things had been so quiet, nothing eventful ever happened now. Moreover, he was an oldish man and his eyes not so keen as they had once been in his youth. Besides, there was nothing really for him to do, for peace lay upon the land, the wars of his youth were things of the past, indeed, men now seemed to think that there would never be any more war. The land was full of talk, full of new edicts and laws from far away rulers and nearer priests and lawmakers. The last few months, however, there had been many rumours from the outer countries, talk of restless people moving southward seeking new lands to conquer, of the Sakoi in particular, but all the wise men explained that this was empty babble, nothing like war or invasion could ever happen again. Had not Buddha shown the way of peace five hundred years earlier and had not the whole world—at least all of it that mattered, one did not worry about the outer barbarians who could not even write—now absorbed his teaching thoroughly? Witness the great shrines growing up everywhere in India.

  In the old watchman's youth things, of course, had been different, men had frequently made war, raid and counter-raid had been the normal business along the frontier, and every man who laid claim to the title of his manhood was a fighting man at need, trained to fight and skilled with his weapons. Thus, the land had flourished and the little Græco-Bactrian colonies, first founded by Alexander of Macedon, had thriven and grown into states where men might reap what each has sown, each household secure in the linked strength of the villages and of the state which saw to the defence of all.

  There were not so many men as usual in the fields today, for many of them were absent at Bazira whither they had gone for the big fair two days previously. In the watchman's youth they had also gone there but then it had been for other things, for weapon showings and trials of skill at arms and manly contests. It seemed that this year there was to be another of these disputations by men from the south, great teachers, skilled in warfare of words, swift in the splitting of hairs whereby they gained great honour and, still more important, place which spelt riches. This year there was one in particular whom all the countryside had gathered to hear, he had new explanations of old truths, and his silver tongue could disprove the very existence of all those things which hitherto men had considered as the most palpable facts inseparable from man's very nature.

  The watchman who belonged to a fast disappearing generation felt sometimes that it was all very much above his head, and today as he looked out occasionally into the dazzling sunshine he wished in an incoherent way that times were simpler. Then, he rubbed his eyes a little and stared at what seemed to be rather an unusual sight at that early hour of the afternoon—a herd of goats coming down the steep track which led out under some clay cliffs. It was very early for the goats to return and he wondered why they were coming back, wondered still more when he saw that the two youths in charge of them were evidently hurrying their flock.

  Suddenly, one of the youth shot on ahead down the steep incline, and a moment later a horseman appeared behind the goats, then another, then three more, all moving fast. The old man stared for few horsemen ever came by that road. Then, he understood as he saw the horsemen increase their pace, observed the startled goats scatter from the hurrying hoofs, and then saw the frantic dash of the second youth as he tried to escape the spear point, which in another moment had driven in under his shoulder blades and flung him forward on to his face. The horses swept on and at the foot of the track the scene was repeated while higher up a score more horsemen came into sight.

  The old man grasped his spear and called with high quavering voice the call he had known so well in his earlier years, the call to arms. "The Sakoi! Sakoi! Sakoi! A raid! A raid! Men to their arms. The women within the walls! The Sakoi! A raid!"

  But Maza of late was unaccustomed to quick action—there had been peace too long on the northern border, and a generation had grown up which knew not war, so that it was some long time before his cry was repeated elsewhere and he saw men and women hurrying back from the fields. A grey bearded village elder, steel cap hurriedly pulled onto his sparse locks, an old sword gripped in his hand, came panting up the stairs to enquire what was afoot. Behind him followed a sleek clean-shaven man in flowing garments with a somewhat fleshy and sensual but very intellectual face, to whom both the old men seemed to pay considerable deference. He was an official of Bazira although he hailed from much further south as could be seen by his features.

  The watchman pointed to where, not three hundred yards away, a dozen wild horsemen were rounding up some women in the fields, then to a little way beyond them where fully fifty armed men on ponies were pouring down the track. Behind these again a swirl of dust above the clay cliffs showed more arriving. The watchman and the elder turned to the clean-shaven man for orders—in their younger days both had seen raids, heard also upon such occasions men above them issuing swift orders. But now, instead, they saw the official girding up his garments and slipping down the stairs. Ten minutes later they caught a last sight of him lashing a fast pony down the track to Bazira. He considered it his urgent duty to report the matter at once, for he felt, quite rightly, that he was utterly incompetent to deal with such a situation. Talk, however plausible, would serve no purpose with the savages yonder, and neither he nor any of his ancestors had ever handled steel or faced anything so uncivilised as a fighting man with drawn sword in his hand.

  The village elder was as old as the watchman, moreover, he limped badly from a wound got many years before when he had been a leader under one of the Græco-Bactrian chiefs, a noted fighter. Like the watchman he felt a little out of his depth in this modern world of talk—he had never had a fluent tongue. He called out some orders to those assembling below and he spat very deliberately over the edge of the parapet as he saw the clean shaven one mounting his horse. There had never been any love lost between those two whose views on life were poles apart.

  The raiders were now close on the village, and men slammed to the heavy iron-studded wooden gates and, hurriedly armed or half-armed with axes and spears, took post on the mud walls while a couple of bowmen climbed into perches above the entrance. Maza was not a big village and though it contained, perhaps, two hundred men of fair fighting age, many of these were away at Bazira. Nevertheless, hal
f-armed and quite untrained as they were, the grey beards and the boys and the few men of fighting age fought well enough, for they were folk of the soil, uneducated and not at all vocal, conversant only with the hard facts of life, and lacking all knowledge of speculative theories. But they checked the raiders for a time.

  Behind them the women gathered, talking in low hushed tones at this sudden unexpected materialisation of what they had come to regard as unthinkable attack by men with weapons in their hands, men who would kill and loot and rape, outland men of no civilisation to whom the cultured few referred as savages, as from one point of view the Scythian hordes, the forerunners of the fighting people who later settled in the northern Punjab, indeed were, since they believed in deeds and not in words, and what they wanted they took, unless they found the owners stronger than themselves.

  Presently, however, the shouts from the south side of the village betokened ill, and shortly afterwards a panting wounded man came bearing news that the enemy were in at the south gate and driving up the narrow street. There were not less than four hundred of them to judge by the mass of rough haired ponies tethered out of arrowshot of the walls, and they were all hardbitten fighting men under a shrewd and cunning leader. On the low hills to southward another hundred had taken up a position covering the track from Bazira to deal with any attempt at help. As the fierce faced Sakoi leader, however, had remarked to his second in command when he sent that party there, there would be nothing for them to do since the nominal rulers of Bazira would merely talk, they had done nothing else for years.

  That day Maza learnt the price of unpreparedness, learned it to the full as the Sakoi drove up through the little twisted alleys, killing all before them, men, women, and children. They were tall men and gaunt, many of them clad in skin cloaks of wild beasts, and they laughed sometimes as their blades or spear points went home, laughed immoderately over the death struggles of grey-bearded householders killed, while trying to save their women-folk from worse than death.