by Ruskin Bond
‘And now she’s been cremated,’ I said.
Pablo clapped his hands with childish glee and planted a kiss on my cheek.
‘I’ll walk home with you,’ I said.
It was a short walk through the woods to Hollow Oak. Birds and small animals were quite numerous in this patch of forest, but Pablo was no nature lover. He seemed ill at ease in this unfrequented stretch and was glad to be out in the open, on the bare hillside surrounding the estate.
‘Are you coming in?’ he asked at the gate.
‘Only when H.H. is here.’
‘My mother said we’ll be renting a place for ourselves. Then you’ll come?’
‘Of course. Meanwhile, there’s the old witch.’
Sister Clarissa was coming around the corner of the house. She did not look as though anyone had been stabbing her again and again. Her long, vigorous stride took her swiftly across the garden path. H.H.’s pekes danced at her heels, yapping at nothing in particular.
‘Your magic did not work,’ I whispered to Pablo. ‘But keep trying.’
‘You’re late for lunch,’ called the deep-voiced nun. ‘Your mother was worried. Don’t take off without telling us.’
Pablo gave me a wave and sauntered through the gate. Sister Clarissa stared at me disapprovingly but said nothing, knowing I was a friend of Neena’s.
Pablo gave me a conspiratorial look as I waved back. As much as to say, ‘I haven’t finished with her yet.’
9
Sometimes I couldn’t help feeling that Neena’s mission in life was to make life as unpleasant as possible for all those who had any claim on her purse or affections. And if they were dependent on her, she really applied the screws. It gave her a thrill to watch others dance to her tune. Even more of a thrill if they tripped and hurt themselves.
The boys received their allowances, but never quite enough to satisfy their longing for the good life, of which they’d had a taste and to which they felt they were entitled. They had been brought up to think of themselves as princes, and yet here they were, no better off than any teenager of modest means. They were incapable of self-employment or any employment. The younger one dropped out of school and took up with a bunch of drug addicts. He turned up from time to time, demanding money. H.H. always gave him enough to enable him to leave town. She’d washed her hands of him even before he was sixteen. Kartik, the older boy, was already a hopeless alcoholic. In his early twenties, he was a bed-wetter, barely capable of looking after himself. Neena maintained that they took after their father, and she may have been right; but she did nothing to help them straighten out their lives. The selfish streak that I had noticed in her when she was younger was now even more deeply embedded in her nature. Her own personal bank balance grew from stocks and shares and clever investments. If others were incapable of making money, then more fools they!
Neena was not smart enough to have become a politician, like some former royals who had made the transition quite successfully. Her views were so feudal, and she so outspoken, that political parties shied away from her. She believed in the old caste system, in the inequality of peoples and nations; she believed that the haves should have more than the have-nots. She was of the view that black people were inferior to fair people, and that there should be masters and servants, even a master race. She would have revived the slave trade had that been possible. There were probably a few people who agreed with her, but they were not so vocal about it.
Shunned by politicians and social activists, Neena gave her attention to diplomats and holy men. For the present, it was diplomats. But not the families of diplomats.
Mrs Montalban and her children were a nuisance, and H.H. wanted them out of the way—especially when dear Ricardo was in town. At the same time she wanted to have Ricardo visiting as often as possible. He was great in bed, and also a good provider of expensive wines, spirits and liqueurs. Neena liked the best, but she was no spendthrift. A diplomat had many uses.
Sister Clarissa was instructed to find a cottage for the family. The cottage was found, badly in need of repair and restoration. It would be at least a month before it could be occupied. As for school, it was already midterm and admissions were kept pending. Pablo’s extended holiday would be extended even further.
He clapped his hands gleefully. ‘You can teach me at home,’ he said. ‘You will be my tutor, all right? We will see lots of pictures!’
Most of my education had taken place in secondhand bookshops. It appeared that Pablo’s was to take place in Mussoorie’s cinema halls.
‘We’ll have to cut down on the pictures,’ I said. ‘More nature walks. That way you’ll learn some geography, botany and arithmetic.’
‘Geography, yes. Botany, yes. But arithmetic how?’
‘By counting the number of seeds in a sunflower and comparing if with the number of seeds in a dandelion. Which has more?’
‘I don’t know, amigo.’
‘Neither do I. So let’s start looking for dandelions.’
It was the beginning of innumerable walks. Sometimes they ended up at one of the cinemas, but most of the time we covered quite a lot of ground, taking in Cloud End, the Haunted House and the ruins of Colonel Everest’s house, all at the hill station’s extremities. Not many cars in those days, not many motorable roads either, so we did a lot of trudging, stopping at small inns and tea shops to sustain ourselves with boiled eggs, old buns and biscuits, and sweet, milky tea.
One day we ended up at an extensive cemetery, and I took Pablo down a winding path, in amongst old graves, some of them going back well over a hundred years. The lettering had worn off most of the slabs, but had lasted better on some of the more upright tombstones—most of them British graves from the colonial era.
Hundreds of graves—the city of the dead—all reminders of our frail hold on this life and the oblivion into which we must pass. The famous, the humble, the wicked, the innocent, the ancient, the infant, struck down at random, sometimes in the midst of a busy life, sometimes when it had hardly got started …
Sceptre and crown must tumble down
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
I remembered these lines from a poem I’d learnt at school, but I couldn’t remember the name of the poet. I spoke them aloud for Pablo’s benefit, but he wasn’t listening.
‘This angel has lost her head,’ he said, pausing in front of a small statue of a winged angel carved out of granite. The head was indeed missing. As were the heads and limbs of other statuary in the cemetery. Somebody had been collecting angels’ heads. Even the odd wing!
‘This one has only one wing,’ observed Pablo, indicating another broken angel. ‘How will she fly?’
‘Angels were invented before aeroplanes,’ I said. ‘Now that everyone can fly, who needs angels? Science hasn’t left us with much to believe in.’
Pablo sat down on the grass and said, ‘I’m tired. What are you looking for, amigo?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Just contemplating the void.’
‘The void?’
‘The emptiness. The futility of it all. The yearning, the struggle, the desire, the loving, the hating. And it all ends here, or on the funeral pyre. Dust or ashes.’
‘Finit. Kaput.’
‘You heard that in a movie.’
‘Alan Ladd doesn’t die.’
‘He died last month.’
‘But we can still see his movies.’
‘True enough. There’s immortality, after all, courtesy Hollywood. So enough of graves and worms and epitaphs, let’s go to the pictures.’
We began climbing the steep path to the lychgate.
‘Look, there’s an empty grave,’ said Pablo, indicating a newly dug entrenchment.
‘They always keep one or two ready,’ I said. ‘So they don’t have to dig one at the last moment.’
‘Well, this one is for Sister Clarissa,’ said Pablo.
‘You seem very certain.’
/> ‘Very soon.’
‘She looks healthy enough.’
He gripped me by the arm, and gave me an odd, intense look that I couldn’t fathom. ‘Something will happen, I’m sure of it.’
‘Come, we’ll go to the pictures. This place has a depressing effect.’
We saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and walked home singing Raindrops keep falling on my head.
A small crowd had collected in the palace garden. Another party, perhaps.
Mrs Montalban ran towards us, visibly upset. ‘Something terrible has happened, something terrible.’
‘Is the Maharani all right?’ I was always expecting something awful to happen to her, in spite of her claim to possess nine lives.
‘Not the Maharani, Sister Clarissa. She tripped and fell down the stairs.’
‘Is she dead?’ asked Pablo.
His mother nodded, and led us indoors. ‘Fell all the way down. All the way to the bottom step. Broke her neck. The Maharani will tell you more.’
10
There wasn’t much more to tell.
H.H. arranged the funeral, but balked at paying for an expensive coffin and settled for a cheap plywood box.
There was only one undertaker in Mussoorie. Coffins were not in great demand, as the Christian population had declined over the years, and the undertaker—Mistriji as we called him—really made his living as a carpenter, making cupboards, desks and box-beds to order.
A box-bed was very like a coffin, but bigger, made to accommodate various household items that were not in regular use. You slept on top of the box-bed, opening it only when necessary. They were quite popular with some of the smaller hotels. Only recently a family had moved into a hotel room, settled down for the night, and then found that the box-bed wasn’t properly closed. They sat on it and jumped on it, but they couldn’t get the lid to fasten. So they opened it and found a dead person inside. He’d been left behind by the previous customers—strangled and then stuffed rather clumsily into the box-bed. The culprits were never traced.
Anyway, Mistriji made a cheap standard-size coffin for Sister Clarissa who was duly interred in the grand city of the dead—and that too, in the very grave that Pablo had indicated would be her last resting place.
A handful of people attended the last rites. There were just four of us fit enough to act as pall-bearers, and we had some difficulty lowering the coffin. At the last moment the cheap, frayed rope broke and the coffin landed in the cavity with a crash, splitting open and revealing its occupant, no longer in her habit and very unlike the menacing figure we had known.
There was nothing we could do about it, except cover the smashed coffin and its occupant with flowers, leaves and earth. As it was now monsoon time there was plenty of foliage at hand. We left it to the chowkidar to finish the job.
‘You might at least have given her a better coffin,’ I chided Neena as we trudged out of the cemetery.
‘And who would have appreciated it?’ countered H.H. ‘She wasn’t royalty, you know.’
‘I thought she was related to your late husband.’
‘No, just his nanny. Or something else.’
Outside the lychgate I collared Dr Bisht, our local GP.
‘You did the post-mortem, doctor. Tell me. Was she really a woman?’
The good doctor took me aside and said, ‘H.H. asked me not to talk about it. But since I know you to be the soul of discretion, I can tell you in confidence—she was neither. The perfect hermaphrodite.’
Pablo had not attended the funeral.
‘Not for children,’ his mother had said.
So he had spent the afternoon at the Rialto, watching an adult film. He met me on the way home. He had a poster too. The Blue Angel.
‘Not for children,’ I said.
‘Have you seen it?’
‘I saw the earlier version. Before you were born. It was much better.’
‘Did you like the funeral?’
‘No.’
‘I told you, didn’t I? I told you it would happen.’
‘Yes, you did. But don’t make any more predictions. I like you better without them.’
He gave me his most engaging smile and took me by the hand. ‘You are a very nice man.’
‘Thank you. And you are a very nice boy. Sometimes.’
‘Gracias!’
11
H.H. back in town meant that Signor Montalban was back too, and for the convenience of all concerned it was decided that his family would move into the rented house selected for them. Pablo did not object to the move, as the house was nearer to the town and its cinemas. It meant that I would see less of them as my cottage was almost an hour’s walk in the opposite direction.
Montalban’s visits to Mussoorie to see his beloved were brief, and he spent more time at the Hollow Oak palace than at his wife’s residence. H.H. threw a party whenever he was in town. Mrs Montalban, pleading indisposition, stayed away. I attended only one of them, a lugubrious affair which ended with Neena drinking too much and ending up, quite literally, under the table. In trying to extricate her, I too collapsed on the floor, and we ended up a tangle of arms and legs.
‘Just like old times,’ said Neena, subsiding into a sofa. ‘I wish you had got to grips with me when we were a little younger.’
‘I did try,’ I said. ‘But you were always as elusive as a shark. You were looking for other prey.’
‘Well, you were rather dull. Always had your head in a book. But I hear you’re quite friendly with that equally dull creature, Signora Montalban.’
‘She likes books too,’ I said. ‘I lend her mine and she lends me hers.’
‘How romantic. Like Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, reading their poems to each other.’
‘Bet you never read any of their poetry.’
‘Yes, I did. At school, remember? “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”. And you’re a bit of a Pied Piper yourself. That boy follows you around everywhere.’
‘Pablo. He needs a father. But his father doesn’t need him. Too busy elsewhere. Too busy mixing drinks.’
Montalban was doing just that—standing behind H.H.’s minibar, making drinks for her guests.
‘Diplomatic duties,’ I said.
‘You’re just jealous,’ said Neena.
‘And you’re jealous of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.’
Neena gave a shriek of laughter, got up, and sat down on the floor again. This time I did not help her up, but left her to the attentions of a tall, strikingly handsome foreigner wearing a saffron robe. It turned out that he was an Anglo-German neophyte at an ashram up in the mountains. He was drinking apple juice.
Mrs Montalban moved into her new abode without any fuss or bother, engaged a cook and a maidservant, and directed all her energies into caring for her children. In other words, she was the ideal Indian wife and mother.
So, while H.H. played the femme fatale and Montalban fancied himself a Valentino, Mrs Montalban was simply a homely bread-and-butter woman who busied herself baking cakes and cookies.
And she baked them well, as I discovered one afternoon when I dropped in at Pablo’s invitation a week or two after they had moved into their new abode.
Already, the wide veranda looked like no veranda I had ever seen. The walls were festooned with film posters, all assiduously collected over the summer months. Apart from the manager of the Picture Palace, Pablo had made friends with the projectionist at the Rialto, the ticket seller at the Majestic, and the tea stall owner at the Jubilee—all of whom had gone out of their way to save posters for him. Partly it was due to his personal charm and friendly nature; partly due to his generosity with his mother’s cakes and cookies.
And now, on my first visit to the rented house, I was taken from one poster to another as though I were the chief guest at a grand art exhibition—which is what it was, in a way. For here were the great stars of the sixties and earlier in some of their most famous roles. And Pablo, in a way, was a pioneer, for he had discovered
that the film poster was an art form in itself, and I doubt if anyone, till then, had built up such a collection. He must have had close to a hundred posters. Not all were on the veranda wall. His favourites were in his bedroom. And when I went to the bathroom to ease myself, I found myself staring at a large poster of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. And I had to agree with it.
It was little sister Anna’s birthday.
A large cake stood on a table in the sunroom—a small sitting room with glazed windows. During the day it received the morning sun; at night, the rising moon. It was Anna’s favourite room, and she liked to sit there and draw or paint until it grew dark.
I looked at some of her sketches—flower studies, trees, small animals—all quite charming but nothing out of the ordinary—until I came to a sketch of a face, just a line drawing, incomplete but in a way quite compelling; the face of a girl, pretty and vivacious, but a little old-fashioned, judging by the plaited hair and the ribbons.
‘Who’s this?’ I asked.
‘Just a girl I saw the other day. She looked at me over the gate and hurried away. It was raining. I saw her again yesterday. She had her face pressed to the window. She looked very sweet, but shy like a gazelle—she had her face against the glass and she kept staring at me. That’s how I remember her features so well. But when I got up to open the window, she ran off. Just disappeared! I hope she comes again. I’d like her for a friend.’
I was the only guest at that little birthday party. Mrs Montalban had met a number of people while staying at Hollow Oak, but they had all been Neena’s friends; she hadn’t hit it off with any of them. Her English was weak and her Hindi non-existent; she spoke to her children in Spanish. But she was aware of Pablo’s growing affection for me and she was glad of any overtures of friendship towards her and her family.
Montalban was of course absent—out of town—away on a diplomatic mission to Thailand or Timbuctoo, and this time without H.H. for company.
