by Ruskin Bond
‘Come and have a cup of tea,’ called out the contractor.
‘Get on with the loading,’ said Pritam. ‘I can’t hang about all afternoon. There’s another trip to make—and it gets dark early these days.’
But he sat down on a bench and ordered two cups of tea from the stall owner. The overseer strolled over to the group of labourers and told them to start loading. Nathu let down the grid at the back of the truck.
Nathu stood back while the men loaded the truck with limestone rocks. He was glad that he was chubby: thin people seemed to feel the cold much more—like the contractor, a skinny fellow who was shivering in his expensive overcoat.
To keep himself warm, Nathu began helping the labourers with the loading.
‘Don’t expect to be paid for that,’ said the contractor, for whom every extra paise spent was a paisa off his profits.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Nathu, ‘I don’t work for contractors. I work for Pritam Singh.’
‘That’s right,’ called out Pritam. ‘And mind what you say to Nathu—he’s nobody’s servant!’
It took them almost an hour to fill the truck with stones. The contractor wasn’t happy until there was no space left for a single stone. Then four of the six labourers climbed on the pile of stones. They would ride back to the depot on the truck. The contractor, his overseer, and the others would follow by jeep.
‘Let’s go!’ said Pritam, getting behind the steering wheel. ‘I want to be back here and then home by eight o’clock. I’m going to a marriage party tonight!’
Nathu jumped in beside him, banging his door shut. It never opened at a touch. Pritam always joked that his truck was held together with Sellotape.
He was in good spirits. He started his engine, blew his horn, and burst into a song as the truck started out on the return journey.
The labourers were singing too, as the truck swung round the sharp bends of the winding mountain road. Nathu was feeling quite dizzy. The door beside him rattled on its hinges.
‘Not so fast,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ said Pritam, ‘And since when did you become nervous about fast driving?’
‘Since today,’ said Nathu.
‘And what’s wrong with today?’
‘I don’t know. It’s just that kind of day, I suppose.’
‘You are getting old,’ said Pritam. ‘That’s your trouble.’
‘Just wait till you get to be my age,’ said Nathu.
‘No more cheek,’ said Pritam, and stepped on the accelerator and drove faster.
As they swung round a bend, Nathu looked out of his window. All he saw was the sky above and the valley below. They were very near the edge. But it was always like that on this narrow road.
After a few more hairpin bends, the road started descending steeply to the valley.
‘I’ll just test the brakes,’ said Pritam and jammed down on them so suddenly that one of the labourers almost fell off at the back. They called out in protest.
‘Hang on!’ shouted Pritam. ‘You’re nearly home!’
‘Don’t try any short cuts,’ said Nathu.
Just then a stray mule appeared in the middle of the road. Pritam swung the steering wheel over to his right; but the road turned left, and the truck went straight over the edge.
As it tipped over, hanging for a few seconds on the edge of the cliff, the labourers leapt from the back of the truck.
The truck pitched forward, bouncing over the rocks, turning over on its side and rolling over twice before coming to rest against the trunk of a scraggy old oak tree. Had it missed the tree, the truck would have plunged a few hundred feet down to the bottom of the gorge.
Two labourers sat on the hillside, stunned and badly shaken. The other two had picked themselves up and were running back to the quarry for help.
Nathu had landed in a bed of nettles. He was smarting all over, but he wasn’t really hurt.
His first impulse was to get up and run back with the labourers. Then he realized that Pritam was still in the truck. If he wasn’t dead, he would certainly be badly injured.
Nathu skidded down the steep slope, calling out, ‘Pritam, Pritam, are you all right?
There was no answer.
Then he saw Pritam’s arm and half his body jutting out of the open door of the truck. It was a strange position to be in, half in and half out. When Nathu came nearer, he saw Pritam was jammed in the driver’s seat, held there by the steering wheel which was pressed hard against his chest. Nathu thought he was dead. But as he was about to turn away and clamber back up the hill, he saw Pritam open one blackened swollen eye. It looked straight up at Nathu.
‘Are you alive?’ whispered Nathu, terrified.
‘What do you think?’ muttered Pritam.
He closed his eye again.
When the contractor and his men arrived, it took them almost an hour to get him to a hospital in the town. He had a broken collarbone, a dislocated shoulder, and several fractured ribs. But the doctors said he was repairable—which was more than could be said for his truck.
‘The truck’s finished,’ said Pritam, when Nathu came to see him a few days later. ‘Now I’ll have to go home and live with my sons. But you can get work on another truck.’
‘No,’ said Nathu. ‘I’m going home too.’
‘And what will you do there?’
‘I’ll work on the land. It’s better to grow things on the land than to blast things out of it.’
They were silent for some time.
‘Do you know something?’ said Pritam finally. ‘But for that tree, the truck would have ended up at the bottom of the hill and I wouldn’t be here, all bandaged up and talking to you. It was the tree that saved me. Remember that, boy.’
‘I’ll remember,’ said Nathu.
The Window
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 myna, a crow, and at night, a pair of flying-foxes. The squirrels were busy in the afternoons, 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.
‘Hallo,’ 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 a
dults 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 round 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 on the clothes line and if there was a breeze, to chase a few garments across the compound. When the rain came, it 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 on 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 flowerbeds. 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 flowerbeds. 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 myna had been in a fight—with a crow perhaps—and the feathers had been knocked off its head. A bougainvillaea 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 forever, 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 bougainvillaea.
When the tonga was out of sight I took the spray of bougainvillaea 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 Fight
anji had been less than a month in Rajpur when he discovered the pool in the forest. It was the height of summer, and his school had not yet opened, and, having as yet made no friends in this semi-hill station, he wandered about a good deal by himself into the hills and forests that stretched away interminably on all sides of the town. It was hot, very hot, at that time of year, and Ranji walked about in his vest and shorts, his brown feet white with the chalky dust that flew up from the ground. The earth was parched, the grass brown, the trees listless, hardly stirring, waiting for a cool wind or a refreshing shower of rain.
It was on such a day—a hot, tired day—that Ranji found the pool in the forest. The water had a gentle translucency, and you could see the smooth round pebbles at the bottom of the pool. A small stream emerged from a cluster of rocks to feed the pool. During the monsoon, this stream would be a gushing torrent, cascading down from the hills, but during the summer it was barely a trickle. The rocks, however, held the water in the pool, and it did not dry up like the pools in the plains.
When Ranji saw the pool, he did not hesitate to get into it. He had often gone swimming, alone or with friends, when he had lived with his parents in a thirsty town in the middle off the Rajputana desert. There, he had known only sticky, muddy pools, where buffaloes wallowed and women washed clothes. He had never seen a pool like this—so clean and cold and inviting. He threw off all his clothes, as he had done when he went swimming in the plains, and leapt into the water. His limbs were supple, free of any fat, and his dark body glistened in patches of sunlit water.
The next day he came again to quench his body in the cool waters of the forest pool. He was there for almost an hour, sliding in and out of the limpid green water, or lying stretched out on the smooth yellow rocks in the shade of broad-leaved sal trees. It was while he lay thus, naked on a rock, that he noticed another boy standing a little distance away, staring at him in a rather hostile manner. The other boy was a little older than Ranji, taller, thick-set, with a broad nose and thick, red lips. He had only just noticed Ranji, and he stood at the edge of the pool, wearing a pair of bathing shorts, waiting for Ranji to explain himself.
When Ranji did not say anything, the other called out, ‘What are you doing here, Mister?’
Ranji, who was prepared to be friendly, was taken aback at the hostility of the other’s tone.
‘I am swimming,’ he replied. ‘Why don’t you join me?’
‘I always swim alone,’ said the other. ‘This is my pool, I did not invite you here. And why are you not wearing any clothes?’
It is not your business if I do not wear clothes. I have nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘You skinny fellow, put on your clothes.’
‘Fat fool, take yours off.’
This was too much for the stranger to tolerate. He strode up to Ranji, who sti
ll sat on the rock and, planting his broad feet firmly on the sand, said (as though this would settle the matter once and for all), ‘Don’t you know I am a Punjabi? I do not take replies from villagers like you!’
‘So you like to fight with villagers?’ said Ranji. ‘Well, I am not a villager. I am a Rajput!’
‘I am a Punjabi!’
‘I am a Rajput!’
They had reached an impasse. One had said he was a Punjabi, the other had proclaimed himself a Rajput. There was little else that could be said.
‘You understand that I am a Punjabi?’ said the stranger, feeling that perhaps this information had not penetrated Ranji’s head.
‘I have heard you say it three times,’ replied Ranji.
‘Then why are you not running away?’
‘I am waiting for you to run away!’
‘I will have to beat you,’ said the stranger, assuming a violent attitude, showing Ranji the palm of his hand.
‘I am waiting to see you do it,’ said Ranji.
‘You will see me do it,’ said the other boy.
Ranji waited. The other boy made a strange, hissing sound. They stared each other in the eye for almost a minute. Then the Punjabi boy slapped Ranji across the face with all the force he could muster. Ranji staggered, feeling quite dizzy. There were thick red finger marks on his cheek.
‘There you are!’ exclaimed his assailant. ‘Will you be off now?’
For answer, Ranji swung his arm up and pushed a hard, bony fist into the other’s face.
And then they were at each other’s throats, swaying on the rock, tumbling on to the sand, rolling over and over, their legs and arms locked in a desperate, violent struggle. Gasping and cursing, clawing and slapping, they rolled right into the shallows of the pool.
Even in the water the fight continued as, spluttering and covered with mud, they groped for each other’s head and throat. But after five minutes of frenzied, unscientific struggle, neither boy had emerged victorious. Their bodies heaving with exhaustion, they stood back from each other, making tremendous efforts to speak.
