Rusty Comes Home

by Ruskin Bond

  Shiv, in a happy and reflective mood, extols the qualities of his own wife, referring to her as ‘The Barrel.’ He tells us how, shortly after their marriage, she had threatened to throw a brick at the next-door girl. This little incident remains fresh in Shiv’s mind, after eighteen years of marriage.

  He says: ‘When the neighbours came and complained, I told them, “It is quite possible that my wife will throw a brick at your daughter. She is in the habit of throwing bricks.” The neighbours held their peace.’

  I think Shiv is rather proud of his wife’s militancy when it comes to taking on neighbours; recently she vanquished the woman next door (a formidable Sikh lady) after a verbal battle that lasted three hours. But in arguments or quarrels with Bhabiji, Shiv’s wife always loses, because Shiv takes his mother’s side.

  Arun, on the other hand, is afraid of both wife and mother, and simply makes himself scarce when a quarrel develops. Or he tells his mother she is right, and then, to placate Shobha, takes her to the pictures.

  Kishore turns up just as everyone is about to go to bed. Bhabiji is annoyed at first, because he has been drinking too much; but when he produces a bunch of cinema tickets, she is mollified and asks him to stay the night. Not even Bhabiji likes missing a new picture.

  Kishore is urging me to write his life story.

  ‘Your life would make a most interesting story,’ I tell him. ‘But it will be interesting only if I put in everything—your successes and your failures.’

  ‘No, no, only successes,’ exhorts Kishore. ‘I want you to describe me as a popular music director.’

  ‘But you have yet to become popular.’

  ‘I will be popular if you write about me.’

  Fortunately we are interrupted by the cots being brought in. Then Bhabiji and Shiv go into a huddle, discussing plans for building an extra room. After all, Kamal may be married soon.

  One by one, the children get under their quilts. Popat starts massaging Bhabiji’s back. She gives him her favourite blessing: ‘God protect you and give you lots of children.’ If God listens to all Bhabiji’s prayers and blessings, there will never be a fall in the population.

  The lights are off and Bhabiji settles down for the night. She is almost asleep when a small voice pipes up: ‘Bhabiji, tell us a story.’

  At first Bhabiji pretends not to hear; then, when the request is repeated, she says: ‘You’ll keep Aunty Shobha awake, and then she’ll have an excuse for getting up late in the morning.’ But the children know Bhabiji’s one great weakness, and they renew their demand.

  ‘Your grandmother is tired,’ says Arun. ‘Let her sleep.’

  But Bhabiji’s eyes are open. Her mind is going back over the crowded years, and she remembers something very interesting that happened when her younger brother’s wife’s sister married the eldest son of her third cousin . . .

  Before long, the children are asleep, and I am wondering if I will ever sleep, for Bhabiji’s voice drones on, into the darker reaches of the night.

  The Crooked Tree

  I WAS ITCHING to make a move again—not a move from one flat in Delhi to another, but I felt an urge to move to a nondescript town. The big-city mindset was something I had failed to cultivate in the two years I lived in Delhi. I felt like a misfit among the locals there, and though work-wise things were looking up, and I had made a few good friends there, I wanted to breathe the countryside air, be surrounded by the beauties and joys of the natural world, not by the crowds and concrete jungles of the city. So I moved to a district near Shahganj—a town in Uttar Pradesh.

  My room in Shahganj was very small. I had paced about in it so often that I knew its exact measurements: twelve feet by ten. The string of my cot needed tightening. The dip in the middle was so pronounced that I invariably woke up in the morning with a backache; but I was hopeless at tightening charpoy strings.

  Under the cot was my trunk. Its contents ranged from old, rejected manuscripts to clothes and letters and photographs. The rent was nominal and the window had a view of the bus stop and rickshaw-stand. I was satisfied with this change in my environment in any case.

  I did not live entirely alone. Sometimes a beggar spent the night on the balcony; and, during cold or wet weather, the boys from the tea shop, who normally slept on the pavement, crowded into the room.

  Usually I woke early in the mornings, as sleep was fitful, uneasy, crowded with dreams. I knew it was five o’clock when I heard the first upcountry bus leaving its shed. I would then get up and take a walk in the fields beyond the railroad tracks.

  One morning, while I was walking in the fields, I noticed someone lying across the pathway, his head and shoulders hidden by the stalks of young sugar cane. When I came near, I saw he was a boy of about eighteen. His body was twitching convulsively, his face was very white, except where a little blood had trickled down his chin. His legs kept moving, and his hands fluttered restlessly, helplessly.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I asked, kneeling down beside him.

  But he was unconscious and could not answer me.

  I ran down the footpath to a well and, dipping the end of my shirt in a shallow trough of water, ran back and sponged the boy’s face. The twitching ceased and, though he still breathed heavily, his hands were still and his face calm. He opened his eyes and stared at me, without any immediate comprehension.

  ‘You have bitten your tongue,’ I said, wiping the blood from his mouth. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll stay with you until you feel better.’

  He sat up now, and said, ‘I’m all right, thank you.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, sitting down beside him.

  ‘Oh, nothing much. It often happens, I don’t know why. But I cannot control it.’

  ‘Have you seen a doctor?’

  ‘I went to the hospital in the beginning. They gave me some pills, which I had to take every day. But the pills made me so tired and sleepy that I couldn’t work properly. So I stopped taking them. Now this happens once or twice a month. But what does it matter? I’m all right when it’s over, and I don’t feel anything while it is happening.’

  He got to his feet, dusting his clothes and smiling at me. He was slim, long-limbed and bony. There was a little fluff on his cheeks and a thin moustache.

  ‘Where do you live?’ I asked. ‘I’ll walk back with you.’

  ‘I don’t live anywhere,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I sleep in the temple, sometimes in the gurdwara. In summer months I sleep in the municipal gardens.’

  ‘Well, then let me come with you as far as the gardens.’

  He told me that his name was Ketan, that he studied at the Shahganj High School, and that he hoped to pass his examinations in a few months’ time. He was studying hard and, if he passed with a good division, he hoped to attend college. If he failed, there was only the prospect of continuing to live in the municipal gardens . . . He worked as a salesman in one of the cloth shops in the town. Since he was required to be at the shop only in the evenings, he managed to not only attend day school, but also earned enough to cover his school fees and food expenses.

  He told me all this while we walked back to the bus stand. I returned to my room, to try and write something, while Ketan went on to get ready for school.

  There was nothing very unusual about Ketan’s being an orphan and a refugee. During the communal holocaust of 1947, thousands of homes had been broken up, and women and children had been killed. He reminded me of Devinder—my friend in Dehra. He too was a victim of similar circumstances. What was unusual in Ketan was his sensitivity, a quality I thought rare in a Punjabi youth who had grown up in the Frontier Provinces during a period of hate and violence. And it was not so much his positive attitude to life that appealed to me (most people in Shahganj were completely resigned to their lot) as his gentleness, his quiet voice and the smile that flickered across his face regardless of whether he was sad or happy.

  Next morning, when I opened my door, I found Ketan asleep at the top of the steps. His sc
hoolbag lay a few feet away. I shook him gently, and he woke at once.

  ‘Have you been sleeping here all night?’ I asked. ‘Why didn’t you come inside?’

  ‘It was very late,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’

  ‘Someone could have stolen your bag while you slept.’

  ‘Oh, I sleep quite lightly. Besides, I have nothing of special value. But I came to ask you something.’

  ‘Do you need any money?’

  ‘No. I want you to take your meal with me tonight.’ ‘But where? You don’t have a place of your own. It will be too expensive in a restaurant.’

  ‘In your room,’ said Ketan. ‘I will bring the food and cook it here. You have a stove?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I will have to look for it.’

  ‘I will come at seven,’ said Ketan, strapping on his bag. ‘Don’t worry Rusty. I know how to cook!’

  He ran down the steps and made for the bazaar. I began to look for the oil stove, found it at the bottom of my tin trunk, and then discovered I hadn’t any pots or pans or dishes. Finally, I borrowed these from Deep Chand, the barber.

  Ketan brought a chicken for our dinner. This was a costly luxury in Shahganj, to be taken only two or three times a year. He had bought the bird for three rupees, which was cheap, considering it was not too skinny. While Ketan set about roasting it, I went down to the bazaar and procured a bottle of beer on credit, and this served as an appetizer.

  ‘We are having an expensive meal,’ I observed. ‘Three rupees for the chicken and three rupees for the beer. But I wish we could do it more often.’

  ‘We should do it at least once a month,’ said Ketan. ‘It should be possible if we work hard.’

  ‘You know how to work. You work the moment you are free from school.’

  ‘But you are a writer, Rusty. That is different. You have to wait for a mood.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not a genius that I can afford the luxury of moods. No, I’m just lazy, that’s all.’

  ‘Perhaps you are writing the wrong things.’ ‘Perhaps. But I don’t know how I can write anything else.’

  ‘Have you tried?’

  ‘Yes, but there is no money in it. I wish I could make a living in some other way. Even if I repaired cycles, I would make more money.’

  ‘Then why not repair cycles?’

  ‘No, I will not repair cycles. I would rather be a bad writer than a good repairer of cycles. But let us not think of work. There is time enough for work. I want to know more about you.’

  Ketan did not know if his parents were alive or dead. He had lost them, literally, when he was three. It happened at the Amritsar Railroad Station, where trains coming across the border disgorged thousands of refugees, or pulled into the station half-empty, drenched with blood and littered with corpses.

  Ketan and his parents were lucky to escape the massacre. Had they travelled on an earlier train (they had tried desperately to get into one), they might well have been killed; but circumstances favoured them then, only to trick them later.

  Ketan was clinging to his mother’s sari, while she remained close to her husband, who was elbowing his way through the frightened, bewildered throng of refugees. Glancing over his shoulder at a woman who lay on the ground, wailing and beating her breasts, Ketan collided with a burly Sikh and lost his grip on his mother’s sari.

  The Sikh had a long curved sword at his waist and Ketan stared up at him in awe and fascination—at his long hair, which had fallen loose, and his wild black beard, and the bloodstains on his white shirt. The Sikh pushed him out of the way and when Ketan looked around for his mother, she was not to be seen. She was hidden from him by a mass of restless bodies, pushed in different directions. He could hear her calling, ‘Ketan, where are you, Ketan?’ He tried to make his way through the crowd, in the direction of the voice, but he was too small and got carried the other way . . .

  At night, when the platform was empty, he was still searching for his mother. Eventually, some soldiers took him away. They looked for his parents, but without success, and, finally, they sent Ketan to a refugee camp. From there he went to an orphanage. But when he was eight, and felt himself a man, he ran away.

  He worked for some time as a helper in a tea shop; but, when he started getting epileptic fits, the shopkeeper asked him to leave, and he found himself on the streets, begging for a living. He begged for a year, moving from one town to another, and ending up finally at Shahganj. By then he was twelve and too old to beg; but he had saved some money, and with it he bought some new clothes and enrolled himself in the only school in town. Soon, he began to work in the cloth shop to pay for his expenses.

  I began to look forward to Ketan’s presence. He dispelled some of my own loneliness. I found I could work better, knowing that I did not have to work alone. And Ketan came to me, perhaps because I was the first person to have taken a personal interest in his life, and because I saw nothing frightening in his sickness. Most people in Shahganj thought epilepsy was infectious; some considered it a form of divine punishment for sins committed in a former life. Except for children, those who knew of his condition generally gave him a wide berth.

  Ketan combined the bloom of youth with the beauty of the short-lived. It made me sad even to look at his pale, slim body. It hurt me to look into his eyes. Life and death were always struggling in their depths.

  ‘Should I go to Delhi and take up a job?’ I asked. I wasn’t interested in going back to Delhi so soon, but I really wanted to do something about Ketan’s epilepsy, and Delhi was the nearest big city where such medical help would be available.

  ‘Why not? You are always talking about it.’

  ‘Why don’t you come, too? Perhaps they can stop your fits.’

  ‘We will need money for that. When I have passed my examinations, I will come.’

  ‘Then I will wait,’ I said. I didn’t want to rush him and there was world enough and time for everything.

  We decided to save a little money from his small earnings and my occasional payments. We would need money to go to Delhi, money to live there until we could earn a living. We put away twenty rupees one week, but lost it the next, when we lent it to a friend who owned a cycle rickshaw. But this gave us the occasional use of his cycle, and early one morning, with Ketan sitting on the crossbar, I rode out of Shahganj.

  After cycling for about two miles, we got down and pushed the cycle off the road, taking a path through a paddy field and then through a field of young maize, until in the distance we saw a tree, a crooked tree, growing beside an old well.

  I do not know the name of that tree. I had never seen one like it before. It had a crooked trunk and crooked branches, and was clothed in thick, broad, crooked leaves, like the leaves on which food is served in the bazaar.

  In the trunk of the tree there was a hole, and, when we set the bicycle down with a crash, a pair of green parrots flew out, and went dipping and swerving across the fields. There was grass around the well, cropped short by grazing cattle.

  We sat in the shade of the crooked tree, and Ketan untied the red cloth in which he had brought our food. When we had eaten, we stretched ourselves out on the grass. I closed my eyes, and became aware of a score of different sensations. I heard a cricket singing in the tree, the cooing of pigeons from the walls of the old well, Ketan breathing quietly, the parrots returning to the tree, the distant hum of an airplane. I smelled the grass and the old bricks round the well and the promise of rain. I felt Ketan’s fingers against my arm, and the sun creeping over my cheek. And, when I opened my eyes, there were clouds on the horizon, and Ketan was asleep, his arm thrown across his face to keep out the glare.

  I went to the well, and, putting my shoulders to the ancient handle, turned the wheel, moving it around while cool, clean water gushed out over the stones and along the channel to the fields. The discovery that I could water a field, that I had the power to make things grow, gave me a thrill of satisfaction; it was like writing a story that had t
he ring of truth. I drank from one of the trays; the water was sweet with age.

  Ketan was sitting up, looking at the sky.

  ‘It’s going to rain,’ he said.

  We began cycling homeward but we were still some way out of Shahganj when it began to rain. A lashing wind swept the rain across our faces, but we exulted in it, and sang at the top of our voices until we reached the Shahganj bus stop.

  Across the railroad tracks and the dry riverbed, fields of maize stretched away, until there came a dry region of thorn bushes and lantana scrub, where the earth was cut into jagged cracks, like a jigsaw puzzle. Dotting the landscape were old abandoned brick kilns. When it rained heavily, the hollows filled up with water.

  Ketan and I came to one of these hollows to bathe and swim. There was an island in the middle of it, and on this small mound lay the ruins of a hut where a night watchman had once lived, looking after the brick kilns. We would swim out to the island, which was only a few yards from the banks of the hollow. There was a grassy patch in front of the hut, and early in the mornings, before it got too hot, we would wrestle on the grass.

  Now, while we wrestled on the new monsoon grass, I felt his body go tense. He stiffened, his legs jerked against my body, and a shudder passed through him. I knew that he had a fit coming on but I was unable to extricate myself from his arms.

  He gripped me more tightly as the fit took possession of him. Instead of struggling, I lay still and pressed against Ketan, and whispered soothingly into his ear; and then, when I noticed his mouth working, I thrust my fingers between his teeth to prevent him from biting his tongue. But so violent was the convulsion that his teeth bit into the flesh of my palm and ground against my knuckles. I shouted with the pain and tried to jerk my hand away, but it was impossible to loosen the grip of his jaws. So I closed my eyes and counted—counted till seven—until consciousness returned to him, and his muscles relaxed.