The Best of Ruskin Bond

by Bond, Ruskin

  Across the courtyard, on a level with my room, are three separate windows, belonging to three separate rooms, each window barred in the same unimaginative way. During the day it is difficult to look into these rooms. The harsh, cruel sunlight fills the courtyard, mailing the windows patches of darkness.

  My room is very small. I have paced about in it so often that I know its exact measurements. My foot, from heel to toe, is eleven inches. That makes the room just over fifteen feet in length; when I measure the last foot, my toes turn up against the wall. In breadth, the room is exactly eight feet.

  The plaster has been peeling off the walls, and there are many greasy stains and patches which are difficult to hide. I cover the worst stains with pictures cut from magazines, but as there is no symmetry about the stains there is none about the pictures. My personal effects are few, and none of them precious.

  On a shelf in the wall are a pile of paper-backs, in English, Hindi and Urdu; among them my two Urdu thrillers, Khoon (Blood) and Jasoosi (Detective). They did not take long to write. Some passages were my own, some free translations from English authors. Having been brought up in a Hindu home in a Muslim city—and in an English school—I was fairly proficient in three languages. The books have sold quite well—for my publisher . . .

  My publisher, who operated from a Meerut by-lane, paid me two hundred rupees for each book; a flat and final payment, no royalties. I could not get better terms from any other publisher. It is a good country for publishers but not for writers. To quote Byron: ‘Now Barabbas was a publisher . . .’

  ‘If you want to make money,’ he confided in me when he handed me my last cheque, ‘publish your own books. Not detective stories. They have a limited market. Haven’t you realized that India in fuller than ever of young people trying to pass exams? It is a desperate matter, this race for academic qualifications. Half the entrants fall by the wayside. The other half are even more unfortunate. They pass their exams and then they fall by the wayside. The point is, millions are sitting for exams, for MA, BSc, Ph.D., and other degrees. They all want to get these degrees the easy way, without reading too many books or attending more than half a dozen lectures—and that’s where a smart person like you comes in! Why should they wade through five volumes of political history when they can get a dozen model-answer papers? They are seldom wrong, the guess-papers. All you have to do is make friends with someone on the University Board, write your papers, print them cheaply—never mind a few printing errors—and flood the market. They’ll sell like hot cakes,’ he concluded, using an English expression.

  I told him I would think about his proposal, but I never really liked the idea. I preferred spilling the blood of fictitious prostitutes to spoon-feeding the brains of misguided students.

  Besides, it would have been very boring.

  A friend who shall be nameless offered to teach me the art of pickpocketing. But I had to give up after a few clumsy attempts on his pocket. The pick someone’s pocket successfully is definitely an art. My friend practised his craft at various railway stations and made a good living from it. I would have to stick to writing cheap thrillers.

  Two

  The string of my charpai needs tightening. The dip in the middle of the bed is so pronounced that invariably I wake up in the morning with a backache. But I am hopeless at tightening charpai strings and will have to wait until one of the boys from the tea-shop pays me a visit.

  Under the charpai is my tin trunk. Its contents range from old, rejected manuscripts to photographs, clothes, newspaper cuttings and all that goes with the floating existence of an itinerant bachelor.

  I do not live entirely alone. Sometimes a beggar, if he is not diseased, spends the night on the balcony; during cold or rainy weather the boys from the tea-shop, who normally sleep on the pavement, crowd into my room. But apart from them, there are the lizards on the wall—friends, these—and a large rat who gets in and out of the window and carries away manuscripts and clothing; definitely an enemy.

  *

  June nights are the most uncomfortable of all. Mosquitoes emerge from all the ditches and gullies and ponds, and take over control of Pipalnagar. Bugs, finding it uncomfortable inside the woodwork of the charpai, scramble out at night and find their way under my sheet. I wrap myself up in the sheet like a corpse, but the mosquitoes bite through the thin material, and the bugs get in at the tears and holes.

  The lizards wander listlessly over the walls, impatient for the monsoon rains, when they will be able to feast off thousands of insects.

  Everyone is waiting for the cool, quenching relief of the monsoon. But two months from now, when roofs have fallen in, the road is flooded, and the drinking water contaminated, we will be cursing the monsoon and praying for its speedy retreat.

  To wake in the morning is not difficult, as sleep is fitful, uneasy, crowded with dreams and fantasies. I know it is five o’clock when I hear the first bus coming out of the shed. If I am to defecate in private, I must be up and away into the fields beyond the railway tracks. The public lavatory near the station hasn’t been cleaned for over a week.

  Afterwards I return to the balcony and, slipping out of my vest and pyjamas, rub down my body with mustard oil. If the boy from the tea-shop is awake, I get him to massage me, while I lie flat on my back or on my belly, dreaming of things less mundane than life in Pipalnagar.

  As the passengers alight from the first bus, I sit in the barber shop and talk to Deep Chand while he lathers my face with soap. The knife moves cleanly across my cheeks and throat, and Deep Chand’s breath, smelling of cloves and cardamoms—he is a perpetual eater of paan—plays on my face. In the next chair the sweetmeat-seller is having the hair shaved from under his great flabby armpits; he is looked after by Deep Chand’s younger brother, Ramu, who is deputed to attend to the less popular customers. Ramu flashes a smile at me when I enter the shop; we have had a couple of natural excursions together.

  Deep Chand is a short, thick-set man, very compact, dark and smooth-skinned from his waist upwards. Below his waist, from his hips to his ankles, he is a mass of soft black hair. An extremely virile man, he is very attractive to women.

  Deep Chand and Ramu know all there is to know about me—in fact, all there is to know about Pipalnagar.

  ‘When are you going to get married, brother?’ Deep Chand asked me recently.

  ‘Oh, after five or ten years,’ I replied. ‘Unless I find a woman rich enough to support me.’

  ‘You are twenty-five now,’ he said. ‘This is the time to marry. Once you are thirty, it will not be so easy to find a wife. In Pipalnagar, when you are thirty you are old.’

  I feel too old already,’ I said. ‘Don’t talk to me of marriage, but give my head a massage. My brain is not functioning well these days. In my latest book I have killed three people in one chapter, and still it is dull.’

  ‘Well, finish it soon,’said Deep Chand, beginning the ritual of the head-massage. ‘Then you can clear your debts. When you have paid your debts you will leave Pipalnagar, won’t you?’

  I could not answer because he had started thumping my skull with his hard, communicative fingers, tugging at the roots of my hair, and squeezing my temples with the palms of his hands. No one gave a better massage than Deep Chand. Had his income been greater, he could have shifted his trade to another locality and made a decent living. Here, in our Mohalla, his principal customers were shopkeepers, truck drivers, labourers from the railway station. He charged only two rupees for a hair-cut; in other places it was three rupees.

  While Deep Chand ran his fingers through my hair, exerting a gentle pressure on my temples, I made a mental inventory of all the people who owed me money and to whom I was in debt.

  The amounts I had loaned out—to various bazaar acquaintances—were small compared to the amounts I owed others.

  There was my landlord, Seth Govind Ram, who was in fact the landlord of half Pipalnagar and the proprietor of the dancing-girls—they did everything but dance—living in
a dormitory near the bus stop; I owed him six months’ rent. Sixty rupees.

  He does not bother me just now, but in six months’ time he will be after my blood, and I will have to pay up somehow.

  Seth Govind Ram possesses a bank, a paunch and, allegedly, a mistress. The bank and the paunch are both conspicuous landmarks in Pipalnagar. Few people have seen his mistress. She is kept hidden away in an enormous Rajput-style house outside the city, and continues to be a challenge to my imagination.

  Seth Govind Ram is a prominent member of the municipality. Publicly, he is a staunch supporter of the ruling party; privately, he supports all parties with occasional contributions towards their funds. He owns most of the buildings in the Pipalnagar Mohalla; and though he is always promising to pull them down and build new ones, he finds it more profitable to leave them as they are.

  Three

  My efforts at making a fortune were many and varied. I had, for three days, kept a vegetable stall; invested in an imaginary tea-shop; and even tried my hand as a palmist.

  This last venture was a failure, not because I was a poor palmist—I had intuition enough to be able to guess what a man or woman would be happy to know—but because prospective customers were few in Pipalnagar. My friends and neighbours had grown far too cynical of the future to expect any bonuses.

  ‘When a child is born,’ asserted Deep Chand, ‘his fists are clenched. They have been clenched for so long that little creases form on his palms. That is the only meaning in our lines. What have they to do with our future?’

  I agreed with Deep Chand, but I thought fortune-telling might be an easy way of making money. Others did it, from saffron-robed sadhus to BAs and BComs, and did it fairly successfully, so that I felt I should try it too. It did not take me long to read a book on the subject, and to hang a board from my balcony, announcing my profession. That I did not succeed was probably due to the fact that I was too well-known in Pipalnagar. Half the Mohalla thought it was a joke; the other half, quite understandably, didn’t believe in my genuineness.

  The vegetable stall was more exciting. Down the road, near the clock tower, a widow kept a grocery store. She sold rice, spices, pulses, almost everything except meat and vegetables. The widow did not think vegetables were worth the risk of an initial investment, but she was determined to try them out, and persuaded me to put up the money.

  I found it difficult to refuse. She was a strong woman, amplebosomed, known to fight in public with any man who tried to get the better of her. But she was a persuasive saleswoman, too, and soon had me conjuring up visions of a vegetable stall of my own full of succulent fruits and fresh green vegetables.

  Full it was, from beginning to end. I didn’t sell a single cabbage or cauliflower or salad leaf. Before the vegetables went bad, I gave them away to Deep Chand, Pitamber, and other friends. The widow had insisted that I charge ten paise per kilo more than others charged, a disastrous thing to do in Pipalnagar, where the question of preferring quality to quantity did not arise. She said that for the extra ten paise customers would get cleaner and greener vegetables. She was wrong. Customers wanted them cleaner and greener and cheaper.

  Still, it had been exciting on the first morning, getting up at five (I hadn’t done this for years) and walking down to the vegetable market near the railway station, haggling with the wholesalers, piling the vegetables into baskets, and leading the coolie back to the bazaar with a proprietorial air.

  The railway station, half a mile from the bus stop, had always attracted me. As a child I had been fascinated by trains (as I suppose most children are), and waved to the passengers as the trains flew through the fields, and was always delighted when one of them waved back to me. I had wondered about the people in the carriages—where they were going, and why . . . Trains had meant romance, escape into another world.

  ‘What you should do,’ advised Deep Chand, while he lathered my face with soap—(there were several reasons why I did not shave myself; laziness, the desire to gossip, the fact that Deep Chand used his razor as an artist uses a brush)—’What you should do, is marry a wealthy woman. It would solve all your problems. She would be only too happy to possess a young man of sexual accomplishments. You could then do your writing at leisure, with slaves to fan you and press your legs.’

  ‘Not a bad idea,’ I said, ‘but where does one find such a woman? I expect Seth Govind Ram has a wife in addition to a mistress, but I have never seen her; and the Seth doesn’t look as though he is going to die.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to be a widow. Find a young woman who is married to a fat and important millionaire. She will support you.’

  Deep Chand was a married man himself, with several children. I had never bothered to count them.

  His children, and others, give one the impression that in Pipalnagar children outnumber adults five to one. This is really the case, I suppose. The census tells us that one in four of our population is in the age-group of five to fifteen years. They swarm over the narrow streets, appearing to belong to one vast family—a race of pot-bellied little men, half-naked, dusty, quarrelling and laughing and crying and having so little in common with the race of adults who have brought them into the world.

  On either side of my room there are families each with about a dozen members—each family living in a room a little bigger than mine, which is used for cooking, eating, sleeping and loving. The men work in the sugar factory and bring home about fifty rupees a month. The older children attend the Pipalnagar High School, and come home only for their food. The younger ones are in and out all day, their pockets full of stones and marbles and small coins.

  Tagore wrote: ‘Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.’

  ‘I wonder why God ever bothered to make men, when he had the whole wide beautiful world to himself,’ I said. ‘Why did he find it necessary to share it with others?’

  ‘Perhaps he felt lonely,’ said Suraj.

  At noon, when the shadows shift and cross the road, a band of children rush down the empty, silent street, shouting and waving their satchels. They have been at their desks from early morning, and now, despite the hot sun, they will have their fling while their elders sleep on string charpais beneath leafy neem trees.

  On the soft sand near the river-bed boys wrestle or play leapfrog. At alley-corners, where tall buildings shade narrow passages, the favourite game is gulli-danda.

  The gulli—small piece of wood, about four inches long, sharpened to a point at each end—is struck with the danda, a short stout stick. A player is allowed three hits, and his score is the distance, in danda lengths, he hits the gulli.

  Boys who are experts at this game send the gulli flying far down the road; sometimes into a shop or through a window-pane, resulting in commotion, loud invective, and a dash for cover.

  A game for both children and young men is kabbadi. It is a game that calls for good control of the breath and much agility. It is also known by such names as hootoo-too, kho-kho, and atyapatya. As it is essentially a village game, Pitamber excels at it. He is the Pipalnagar kho-kho champion.

  The game is played by two teams, consisting of eight or nine members each, facing each other across a dividing line. Each side in turn sends out one of its players into the opponents’ area. This person has to keep on saying ‘kabbadi, kabbadi’ or ‘kho, kho’ while holding his breath. If he returns to his side after touching an opponent, that opponent is ‘dead’ and out of the game. If, however, he is caught by an opponent and cannot struggle back to his side while holding his breath, he is ‘dead’.

  Pitamber, who is a wrestler, and knows all the holds, is particularly adept at capturing an opponent. He took me to his village where all the boys were long-limbed and sun-browned, erect and at the same time relaxed. There is a sense of vitality and confidence in Pitamber’s village, which I have not seen in Pipalnagar.

  In Pipalnagar there is not exactly despair, but resignation, an indifference to both living and dying. The town is
almost truly reflected in the Pipalnagar Home, where in an open courtyard surrounded by mud walls a score of mental patients wander about, listless and bored. A man jabbers excitedly, but most of the inmates are quiet, sad and resentful—resentful because we do not try to understand their beautiful insane world.

  *

  Aziz visits me occasionally for a loan of two or three rupees, which he returns in kind, whenever I visit his junk shop. He is a Muslim boy of eighteen. He lives in a small room behind the junk shop.

  The shop has mud walls and a tin roof. The walls are always in danger of being washed away during the monsoon, and the roof of sailing away during a dust-storm. The rain comes in, anyway, and the floor is awash most of the time; bound copies of old English magazines gather mildew, and the pots and pans and spare parts grow rusty. Aziz, at eighteen, is beginning to collect dust and age and disease.

  But he is an optimistic soul, even though there is nothing for him to be optimistic about, and he is always asking me when I intend keeping my vow of going to Delhi to make my fortune. I am to keep an eye out for a favourable shop-site near Chandni Chowk where he can open a more up-to-date junk shop. He is saving towards this end; but what he saves trickles away in paying for his wife’s upkeep at the Home.

  Four

  I was walking through the fields beyond the railway tracks, when I saw someone lying on the footpath, his head and body hidden by the ripening wheat. The wheat was shaking where he lay, and as I came nearer I saw that one of his legs kept twitching convulsively.

  Thinking that perhaps it was a case of robbery with violence, I prepared to run; but then, cursing myself for being a shallow coward, I approached the agitated person.

  He was a youth of about eighteen, and he appeared to be in the throes of a violent fit.