The Realm of Imagination

by Ruskin Bond

  Was I really going to make my first pot? I sat down on the low stool in front of the wheel, placed the stick between two spokes, and twirled it as if I were stirring a cauldron. The wheel blurred as it gained speed. My mind was spinning, too.

  I put down the stick and removed my bangles, two at a time, and placed them on the side. Then I took the clay from Dadu and threw it on the center of the wheel, as I had seen him do so many times. I cupped the gray mound in both hands and pushed it to the center. The wheel spun faster. My elbows flapped like chicken wings as I wrestled with the clay.

  Dadu placed his hands over mine. “You must control it, Tara. Feed it, but don’t let it escape,” he said.

  And so I did. I pushed back against the clay, splashing it with water and willing it to behave. Soon I worked my thumb from the top down the middle to create a mouth, coaxing the sides up in a gentle curve. At last, as the wheel slowed to a stop, I pulled a string under the base of my pot and set it aside to rest.

  “Do you feel better now?” said Dadu as I rinsed my hands.

  Not much. I had thrown my rage on the wheel with the clay, but there was still plenty left. I told Dadu everything. About Ma, and Biren, and Didi’s spine that was as weak as wet mud. And then I asked, “Are we dirty, Dadu? We are poor, I know, but are we dirty?”

  Dadu sighed. “Ma’s fears are as rusty as her bones, Tara. You cannot change her now. But it doesn’t matter. We are all made from the same clay. Some of us are fat and hollow, some of us have cracks in our sides, and some of us are beautiful but only for show. The longer we are burnt in the kiln, the stronger we become. The best pots are those that are used every day and keep the water cool in the summertime.”

  That was nice to hear, and poetic and all, but I still stung. I seethed the next day, and the day after that, and when my pot was finally burnt and ready, it looked flushed and dark with anger. That afternoon, I took it to the riverbank, lifted it high, and dashed it to pieces on the rocks.

  The next morning I dawdled toward Didi’s house as rain pummeled my umbrella. My mother had gone on about how a job was a job, that money did not grow on trees, and did I think I was born a princess, and other such gems I had heard so often they passed by my ears like the whine of a mosquito.

  Didi opened the door and sucked me in like a whirlpool. Her hair was undone, her eyes wild. “Thank goodness you’re here, Tara. I think Ma’s had a stroke. I can’t reach Dr. Ghoshal on the phone. I have to fetch him from his clinic. Watch her, please, O.K.?” Didi moved as she spoke, sandals on, sari tucked up against the rain, umbrella unrolled.

  I could only nod as she ran out. A stroke had hit me, too, a lightning bolt of guilt. I had poured my feelings into the pot and broken it by the river. Perhaps I was a witch, with smoke coiling from my fingertips and poison in my spit. Had I wished the stroke upon Ma?

  The house was quiet. I heard a moan from the room to my left and tiptoed to the door. The woman on the bed was neither fat nor hollow, I thought, remembering Dadu’s words. She did not have cracks on her side, nor was she beautiful. She was very old, her body so slight it barely showed under the sheet. She moaned again, her tongue peeping between her lips like a lizard’s.

  Then she opened her eyes and saw me. She croaked: something about the prayer room.

  “It’s O.K., I’m not going in there,” I said. “Didi will be back any minute.”

  “Room … water … please.”

  I had to double-check. “You want me to go into the prayer room and get you the holy water. Is that it?”

  She could not nod, but her eyes moved. I understood.

  After I had fed her a few sips, she grabbed my hand and would not let go. We stayed that way even when Didi returned with Dr. Ghoshal.

  When it came time for Ma to go to the hospital, her wizened fingers clung to mine, as if they were joined in prayer. Did she know who I was, or rather, what I was? Or when death crossed her threshold and danced on her pillow, had the biggest fear of all washed away the rest? Did it matter? I decided not.

  After they had left, I went to the riverbank and salvaged the broken shards of my pot. I crumbled them and soaked them in water until they turned to sludge. Then I mixed in some more clay and made another pot. I thought of music and sunshine and feasts and colors as I shaped it. When it had cooled, I filled it with flowers and took it to the hospital.

  Ma’s door was open, waiting for me.

  Author’s Note The caste system organized Hindu society into four social classes based on occupation—Brahmins (priesthood), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (commoners, including farmers and traders), and Shudras (serfs, those who served the first three classes). A fifth caste arose over time, comprising those Shudras who performed the most unwanted menial jobs—butchers, leather workers, garbage collectors, those who cremated the dead, and those who cleaned places such as toilets, drains, and streets. They became perceived as unclean because of their work, which in turn caused the other castes to deem them untouchables (Pariahs), both literally and socially. Although the Bhagavad Gita, one of Hinduism’s holy texts, states that the nature of a man is what determines his caste, over time the system became hardened and hereditary. Fortunately, the caste system is fading in importance in modern India, especially in urban areas among younger and more educated people.

  White Mice

  by Ruskin Bond

  Illustrated by Michael Chesworth

  Granny should never have entrusted my Uncle Ken with the job of taking me to the station and putting me on the train for Delhi. He got me to the station all right, but then proceeded to put me on the wrong train!

  I was nine or ten at the time and I’d been spending part of my winter holidays with my grandparents in Dehra. Now it was time to go back to my parents in Delhi before joining school again.

  “Just make sure that Ruskin gets into the right compartment, Kenneth,” Gran said to her only son, then thirty, unmarried, and unemployed. “And make sure he has a berth to himself and a thermos of drinking water.”

  Uncle Ken carried out his instructions to the letter. He even bought me a bar of chocolate, consuming most of it himself while telling me how to pass my exams without too much study. (I’ll tell you the secret someday.) The train pulled out of the station, and we waved fond good-byes to each other.

  An hour and two small stations later, I discovered to my horror that I was not on the train to Delhi but on the night express to Lucknow, over 300 miles in the opposite direction. Someone in the compartment suggested that I get down at the next station; another said it would not be wise for a small boy to get off the train at a strange place in the middle of the night. “Wait till we get to Lucknow,” advised a third passenger, “then send a telegram to your parents.”

  Early next morning the train steamed into Lucknow. One of the passengers kindly took me to the stationmaster’s office. “Mr. P. K. Ghosh, Stationmaster” said the sign over his door. When my predicament had been explained to him, Mr. Ghosh looked down at me through his bifocals and said, “Yes, yes, we must send a telegram to your parents.”

  “I don’t have their address as yet,” I said. “They were to meet me in Delhi. You’d better send a telegram to my grandfather in Dehra.”

  “Done, done,” said Mr. Ghosh, who was in the habit of repeating certain words. “And meanwhile, I’ll take you home and introduce you to my family.”

  Mr. Ghosh’s house was just behind the station. He had his cook bring me a cup of sweet, milky tea and two large rasgullas, syrupy Indian sweetmeats.

  “You like rasgullas, I hope, I hope?”

  “Oh yes, sir, “ I said. “Thank you very much.”

  “Now let me show you my family.”

  He took me by the hand and led me to a boarded-up veranda at the back of the house. Here I was amazed to find a miniature railway, complete with station, railway bungalows, and signal boxes. Next to it was a miniature fairground with swings, a roundabout, and a Ferris wheel. Cavorting on the roundabout and Ferris wheel were fif
teen to twenty white mice! Another dozen or so mice were running in and out of tunnels and climbing onto a toy train. Mr. Ghosh pressed a button, and the little train, crowded with white mice, left the station and went rattling off to the far corner of the veranda.

  “My hobby for many years,” said Mr. Ghosh. “What do you think of it, think of it?”

  “I like the train, sir.”

  “But not the mice?”

  “There are an awful lot of them, sir. They must consume a great many rasgullas!”

  “No, no, I don’t give them rasgullas,” snapped Mr. Ghosh, a little annoyed. “Just railway biscuits, broken up. These old station biscuits are just the thing for them. Some of our biscuits haven’t been touched for years. Too hard for our teeth. Rasgullas are for you and me! Now I’ll leave you here while I return to the office and send a telegram to your grandfather. These newfangled telephones never work properly!”

  Grandfather telegrammed back that he would arrive that evening. In the meantime I helped feed the white mice with railway biscuits, then watched Mr. Ghosh operate the toy train. Some of the mice rode the train, some played on the swings and the roundabout, some climbed in and out of Mr. Ghosh’s pockets and ran up and down his uniform. By the time Grandfather arrived, I had consumed about a dozen rasgullas and fallen asleep in a huge armchair in Mr. Ghosh’s living room. I woke up to find the stationmaster busily showing Grandfather his little railway colony of white mice. Grandfather, being a retired railwayman, was more interested in the toy train, but he said polite things about the mice, commending their pink eyes and pretty little feet. Mr. Ghosh beamed with pleasure and sent out for more rasgullas.

  Late that night, when Grandfather and I had settled into the compartment of a normal train, Mr. Ghosh came to the window to say good-bye. As the train began moving, he thrust a cardboard box into my hands and said, “A present for you and your grandfather!”

  More rasgullas, I thought. But when the train was underway and I had lifted the lid of the box, I found two white mice asleep on a bed of cotton wool.

  Back in Dehra, I kept the white mice in their box; I had plans for them. Uncle Ken had spent most of the day skulking in the guava orchard, too embarrassed to face me. Granny had given him a good lecture on how to be a responsible adult. But I was thirsty for revenge! After dinner I slipped into my uncle’s room and released the mice under his bedsheet.

  An hour later we all had to leap from our beds when Uncle Ken dashed out of his room, screaming that something soft and furry was running about inside his pajamas.

  “Well, off with the pajamas!” said Grandfather, giving me a wink. (He had a good idea of what had happened.)

  After Uncle Ken had done a tap dance, one white mouse finally emerged from the bottom of his pajamas; but the other had run up his jacket sleeve. It suddenly popped out beneath my uncle’s chin. Uncle Ken grew hysterical. Convinced that his room was full of mice, pink, white, and brown, he locked himself inside the storeroom and slept on an old sofa.

  Next day Grandfather took me to the station and put me on the train to Delhi. It was the right train this time.

  “I’ll look after the white mice,” he said.

  Grandfather grew quite fond of the mice and even wrote to Mr. Ghosh, asking if he could spare another pair. But Mr. Ghosh, we learned later, had been transferred to another part of the country and had taken his family with him.

  Note Born in India in 1934, acclaimed author Ruskin Bond has written many stories and poems for Cricket.

  Old Cricket Says

  It’s sometimes called the “rock we eat.” You might even have sprinkled some on your eggs this morning. What is it? Sodium chloride — ordinary table salt! You need to have the right amount of salt in your diet to stay healthy. Wild animals do, too, and, as Jack D. Remington (Grandpa Jack to his friends) told me in a recent letter, they will do some surprising things to get the salt they crave.

  “I remember years ago backpacking into the Wallowa Mountains of Northeastern Oregon with Grandma Betty. On our first night, we made the mistake of leaving our packs against the trunk of a tree while we slept. In the morning, Grandma discovered that a porcupine, in his need for salt, had chewed both her shoulder straps in two! Backpacking up a steep trail is hard work, and when you work hard, you sweat. The sweat dries and leaves a residue of salt. So, when you hike into porcupine country, hang your pack high in a tree!

  “When I was studying wild animals in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, I had the use of an old log cabin. It had a rickety table and chair, a bed spring with no mattress, a wood stove, but no indoor plumbing.

  “One night while I was trying to sleep I heard a strange noise. Scritch-scritch-scritch. It was dark, so I couldn’t see what was making the sound. My flashlight revealed nothing, not even a mouse. Scritch-scritch-scritch. Loud! I got out of bed and crept to where there used to be a door (I believe some previous ‘renter’ had broken it up for firewood). Scritch-scritch. It sounded like it was coming from the outhouse. Flashlight in hand, I sneaked up to the outhouse and looked in. There, sitting inside the hole, was a porcupine, chewing on the edge of the seat! All I could see was his head as he scritched with his teeth on the salty wood. I doubled up on the ground laughing! What a way to get salt in your diet!”

  Boo

  by Tom Brennan

  Illustrated by Alan Fore

  Boo liked to swim. He liked running through the ship’s grass-floored, ivy-clad passageways and playing the sports handball and pelota with other children. He enjoyed tending the crops and the way the rich, sweet smell from the liquid in the hydroponics vats clung to his clothes. But most of all he liked to swim in the secret places only he knew.

  Boo had earned his nickname with his sudden unexpected appearances: at two years old he had found an entrance to the ventilation system and disappeared overnight. His family searched but found nothing until they heard scratching from a ventilation grating. Instead of the expected rat they found Boo, grinning upside down from the duct, naked and filthy.

  Despite his family’s watchful gaze from then on, Boo found his way time and again into the heart of the spaceship, using the hidden arteries and veins that pumped gases and fluids through the great craft. Service ducts and vent shafts became his playgrounds; the unseen skeleton of the ship became his own private world.

  And, somehow, he always found his way back home.

  “Where do you go?” whispered Jan, the mayor’s daughter, who sat beside Boo in the packed schoolroom lit by flickering electric tubes.

  “Everywhere,” he told her. “Every deck and level.”

  Jan waited until Mrs. Williams turned her back to write on the board at the front of the room, then asked, “Aren’t you scared?”

  “Me? No, never.” Boo grinned at Jan, then remembered the rat in the forward deck.

  It had happened two years before: Boo had gone as far forward as he could, farther than ever before, using a service duct that became narrower and narrower. Flat on his stomach, sweating and thirsty, he had pushed on, eager to find what lay in the nose of the ship.

  Suddenly a rat had dropped from an unseen opening overhead and scuttled away from Boo, who pulled back and hit his head against the metal. The rat, desperate to escape, disappeared around a curve. Boo heard a sound like a water bottle being ripped open, and the rat’s remains spattered against the duct wall ahead.

  With his nose pinched tight against the smell, Boo inched forward and peered around the corner. The rat had run into a curtain of shimmering radiation that distorted Boo’s view of the duct beyond.

  Boo worked a loose button free from his shirt and threw it into the duct. The button sparkled before disintegrating in the microwave field.

  After that, Boo was more careful.

  “Dad, what’s in the front of the ship?” Boo had asked once at dinner as he sat at the scratched plastic kitchen table with his parents and brother. The family shared the same stocky build and long, dark hair and wore similar patched cotton tunics. �
��What’s through the big bulkhead doors?”

  Boo’s father scowled. “Nothing for you to see. They sealed the front up for a good reason. Eat your dinner.”

  “But there must be something …” Boo often pressed his ear to the massive metal doors and felt the hum of distant machinery. According to the old storytellers, all the doors leading to the bow had been sealed centuries before.

  “You stay away from there,” Boo’s father ordered. “Understand?”

  Boo toyed with his tofu and vegetables.

  “He won’t listen.” Boo’s brother grinned mischievously, revealing a missing front tooth.

  “We’re just worried for you.” His mother reached out and smoothed Boo’s wayward hair. “Nobody knows what happened up there.”

  Later, as he lay on his bunk listening to his brother’s snores, Boo thought about the giant spaceship he called home, an ancient, rotating, tapered metal spindle four kilometers long by one wide, with the hydrogen engines’ massive exhausts at the rear and the mysterious sealed sections at the front.

  In between lay Boo’s green world, a jungle of rich vegetation, home to three hundred people, with acres of verdant hydroponics vats, family cabins, schoolrooms, and recreation halls. Grass and ivy lined the corridors, green tendrils groping toward the overhead UV light tubes.

  No one knew the name of the ship; no one left the enclosed world alive. So Boo helped his father grow the community’s food, stuck to his schoolwork and play, and tried to forget about the hidden chambers beyond the doors. And while he worked the hydro vats, he tried to ignore the immense, jagged scar in the ship’s outer skin, sealed with concrete and scraps of metal, and the names of ancient crew members etched into the metal beside it.