Khushwant Singh Best Indian Short Stories Volume 2

by Khushwant Singh

  Datta’s heart began to race and to compose himself he let a whole minute pass without answering. Then he put aside the scissors in his hand with slow deliberation and reached out to take the neatly wrapped package lying in a corner.

  ‘Ah, it is ready!’ the customer exclaimed with childish delight, at the same time mumbling flattering tributes to Datta for his promptness and so on. He spread his arms wide with dramatic exuberance to receive the photograph as if it was actually a long-lost person he was greeting.

  But Datta took his time removing the wrapper from the frame. The customer waited impatiently, filling in the time showering more praises on his worshipful master who was to adorn the wall of his home.

  Datta finally revealed the glittering frame and held it towards him. The customer seemed visibly struck by its grandeur and fell silent like one who had entered the inner sanctum of a temple.

  Datta held his breath and watched the man’s expression. With every second that passed he was losing his nerve and thought that in another moment he would betray the big hoax he had played.

  Suddenly he saw the customer straighten, the reverential look and benevolent expression vanished from his face.

  ‘What have you done?’ he demanded, indignantly. For Datta the moment seemed familiar for he had already gone through it a thousand times night and day since he splashed the white paint on the original photograph. Several times he had rehearsed his piece precisely for this occasion. But before he could open his mouth the customer shouted with tremendous authority in his bearing, ‘Now, don’t deny it! I clearly remember asking for a cut mount with an oval shape. This is square. Look!’

  NINE

  Woman at the Window

  R.K. LAXMAN

  Ambi moved about in the kitchen humming a tune softly. Along with it the noises of a dropped spoon, jostled cups and splashing water blended like a quiet accompaniment and kept me pleasantly dangling between sleep and wakefulness.

  It was still dark outside. But on the opposite wall of my bedroom there was a bright square patch of light like a cutout. It came from the powerful floodlights which were switched on every day after dark for security reasons at the project site about half a kilometre away from my shack.

  I groped for my watch under the pillow and held it up to catch the light. It was four in the morning. There was still another four hours to go for breakfast. I usually left for work at about eight in the morning after having a toast or two and a cup of coffee. But to prepare even so little, if Ambi had his way, he would be up at one in the morning to potter around in the kitchen.

  ‘What is it that you keep humming all the time, Ambi?’ I asked him casually one day, just to make conversation as I sipped my coffee. There was no morning paper to rustle or any other company except Ambi. He was a talkative fellow and, being starved for company, would at any time gladly fill the void whenever I was in a mood to listen to him, and sometimes even when I was not.

  ‘Devi Stotram: a song in praise of the great goddess Devi.’ He chanted a couple of verses with no particular care for the melody and explained the meaning. ‘Believe me, no evil will cross your path if you repeat the slokas in the morning and before going to bed at night. You know, I was only fifteen when I bought a rogue elephant to its knees. That is the power these verses have.’

  ‘It was an old temple elephant in our village. One morning the fellow suddenly went crazy and stamped all over the banana plantation, uprooted the trees, levelled four shops selling flowers and coconuts, and created havoc. Everybody, of course, ran away. But not Ambi.’

  He thumped his chest. But instead of completing the elephant episode, he wandered off to explain to me about the banana position of his village; annual yield per acre and so on.

  I interrupted him: ‘You said you brought the elephant to its knees. How?’

  ‘How?’ he repeated with a wondering look as if I had put a silly question. ‘Like this,’ he said. Picking up an old broomstick from a corner, he sprang like a deer twice in the air and then with the swiftness of lightning he hit the floor with it. Still keeping an alert eye on the tip of the stick, he spoke, ‘The quick of the beast’s third toe-nail. It has a deadly effect on the animal. But, of course, I was chanting Devi Stotram all the while.’

  ‘Come on, Ambi. What really happened?’ I asked, falling completely for the vivid narration.

  ‘The elephant was paralysed. That’s all. A fraction of error in hitting the right spot on the toe would have meant my death. Raja had to be dragged away with the help of ropes. The whole village gathered to haul him away. Later, of course, I revived the poor creature by using the juice of the leaves of a creeper which grows only in our village and nowhere else in the whole world…’

  He stopped talking abruptly, cocked his ears and exclaimed, ‘Oh, the jeep!’ A jeep was sent down to pick me up every morning to take me to the construction site.

  I was a junior auditor working for a private construction company which was at that time engaged in building some complicated structure on the river bed not very far from my shack. It was a government undertaking and the idea – as far as I could understand with my limited knowledge of these things – seemed to be to coax the river to flow at a higher level to irrigate the lands. My job was only to check the various bills, vouchers, indents for material and so on, and certify them as genuine. But I had neither the power nor the courage to question any of the bills submitted by a host of construction engineers, foremen, subcontractors or even the watch-and-ward. They were all weather-beaten men who seemed to have taken birth from the very granite stones and concrete boulders lying about there. And yet an auditor’s blessing, however insignificant, like mine, appeared essential to smooth their path to dig up, pile drive and blast away.

  Some of these people lived in the circuit house or transit camps in the village which was about ten kilometres from the work site. The workers had their makeshift mud huts on the river bank itself. They had to stay there till the project was completed. But mine was a short-term assignment and when it was over, I was asked to push off to do my auditing at some other place where my firm happened to have dealings.

  I was usually very busy with work during the day and I never felt the time pass. But I hated the evenings. The moment the sun disappeared behind the mountains, all activity on the river bank came to a dead stop. The steady drone of machinery suddenly ceased and everyone jumped into trucks and jeeps and drove away onto dust-ridden tracks. Then silence settled down over the whole area like a tired limb come to rest. The dark river, the golden afterglow in the sky, the early stars, the tiny sad-looking lamps in the workers’ huts and the whole poetic mood of the hour touched even my rather stubborn aesthetic responses. But before I could awaken fully to the magic of the hour it was all washed away in one sweep by the harsh floodlights switched on by the watchman, brilliantly illuminating the rusty hardware lying about in the open inside the barbed-wire fencing.

  Taking the route along the river, I walked back to my shack. Even from a distance I could spot Ambi sitting on the front step and reading a magazine. He was a voracious reader of movie magazines and had subscribed to a number of them. He always had a pile of backlog to work off but never actually could because of the arrival of fresh lots all the time.

  As I came up the steps, he declared, ‘Kanakapria’s brother was with me in school.’ He showed me Kanakapria sprawling seductively across the glossy centrefold of a magazine; a sexy dame nearly bursting out of the page with the curve of her front as well as her rear.

  There were only two rooms. One was the kitchen and the other was the bed-sitting room with a common bath at the back.

  ‘She makes lakhs and lakhs in the films,’ he said and added mischievously, ‘and also outside them.’

  I had no alternative way of spending the time except to recline in my canvas chair, nibble at biscuits, sip tea and listen to him. I was a captive audience. Even going out for a stroll at that hour was out of the question because it would be like walking in a s
nake pit with eyes bandaged.

  ‘Ragu, her brother, was dead against her joining films,’ he went on. ‘He was so opposed to it that he even toyed with the idea of poisoning the director to save his sister’s honour.’

  My attention was divided between the biographical sketch he was giving of Kanakapria and an old copy of Reader’s Digest left behind by some previous occupant of the room. However, I could not concentrate on the contents of the magazine for long and had to listen.

  A cinema unit appeared to have come to Ambi’s village in search of location shooting. The director had hired half a dozen buxom girls offering each fifty rupees just to carry mud pots on their heads and walk single file swaying their hips from the village well to a narrow lane a hundred metres away. Kanakapria was one of the girls picked for this scene. She managed to outshine the others by rolling her eyes coyly and giving a provocative forward thrust to her figure.

  The director was at once convinced that he had spotted a rare star. ‘He paid a thousand rupees to her for a solo act: drawing pots and pots of water from the well and pouring them over herself till her white sari stuck to her body becoming indistinguishable from her brown skin, while the director, the cameraman and various other hands carrying reflectors and equipment went round and round the well shooting her picture.

  ‘It was so successful, the following day he took her to a waterfall in the nearby hills and made her take a bath in it. A few days later when the unit left the village she followed it and never returned. We came to know of her only when she became a big star. She has built a huge mansion for herself in Madras. Her parents also left the village and joined her there.’

  ‘And what about Ragu, her brother? What became of him?’ I asked, expecting that the strong virtuous character would triumph in the end and restore the family honour. But Ambi made a deprecatory noise with his lips and said, ‘He joined her in Madras.’ And then Ambi went into the kitchen humming, to light the kitchen fire to prepare my dinner. I opened the old Reader’s Digest again and read all about how a tiny village in Africa conquered smallpox.

  As time went by, I began to look forward to Ambi’s stories in the evenings. He seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of subjects with an astonishing range from horticulture to glimpses into the private lives of ministers and officials, from native medicine to a journey on foot to Badrinath from Thanjavur. Of course, there was absolutely no way of checking his facts or knowledge of things. All the stories he recounted had an enriched flavour. He described any event, even the most obvious, with such verve, it took on the quality of having another dimension, like something extra added to the mundane colour, shape and substance of reality. It seemed to me so, perhaps, because he gave himself over in no small measure to the task of narration. He mimicked, jumped about, contorted his face, enacted, flailed his arms like a windmill, all to convey the atmosphere of a small tea stall at the foot of a hill or the impressions of a nasty old schoolmaster. When telling a story, he was anxious to preserve the tempo and effect. He would carefully build up the stories and would not like them to be ruined by interruptions even if he was factually wrong or his observations biased. I always sat listening with fascination to whatever he said; I had conferred the poetic licence on him for the excellence in entertaining me evening after evening tirelessly.

  It was not long before the subject turned to gods and religion. Then it slid down to beliefs, superstitions and astrology, and settled finally on devils and ghosts.

  ‘Do you know this place was a cremation ground twenty years ago?’ he said as an extension of the subject of occult mysteries and black magic which he had just dealt with. ‘This very hut is built on the brick platform on which the body is kept for ablution and performing of the last rites.’

  I had the courage of an unimaginative man no doubt, but this bit of news shook me somewhat and I reacted with a nervous involuntary guffaw.

  ‘Why do you laugh like that? You don’t believe me?’

  ‘No, Ambi, I don’t,’ I said, rather vehemently, hoping to change the subject. But it only stoked his determination to plunge more deeply into it. He promised to fetch human bones and skulls from the premises that very moment to prove his point.

  ‘Skulls and bones, Ambi? I thought you said this house stood on a cremation ground,’ I retorted triumphantly.

  ‘That shows you have never heard of fuel thieves,’ he hit back without losing a second to think, and launched enthusiastically on an explanation of how at times of famine and pestilence when the death rate was high, thieves belonging to a particular tribe in the hills crept in and managed to put out the flames and took away the faggots for resale after carelessly burying the half-burnt bodies in the soft earth near the river. That is the reason why the place is strewn with half-charred bones and skulls. And that is also the reason why ghosts wander about helplessly at night in this place.’

  ‘Oh, there are ghosts too?’ I asked in a manner as if the whole thing was a joke although I felt a vague uneasiness deep inside me.

  ‘What do you expect? If a body is not properly laid to rest, according to its tradition and faith, its spirit cannot rest in peace.’ He was so matter of fact as though he was explaining how to obtain a passport.

  I felt somewhat relieved that his attention was shifting from the horrible subject. ‘Faith is very essential to human existence. What well-developed muscles are to a human body, faith is to the human spirit.’ He devoted the next quarter of an hour to singing praises of faith. Then he gave examples in which faith had played a vital part in human affairs.

  ‘My own grandmother saved me from being crushed to death by a falling tree. We were returning after visiting one of my uncles. There had been a heavy downpour the previous night and the earth had become loose and the roots had lost their grip and a tree began to fall just as we came under it. I was on this side and she was on that side, nearer the tree. She realized what was about to happen, and at once held out her hands and gripped the tree trunk and prevented its fall. She was eighty years old, mind you, and the tree was not a sapling either. It was an ancient mango tree about a hundred feet tall. She held it so firmly that passers-by who came to the rescue found it difficult to separate her from the tree and let it fall over to the other side of the road.’

  I was really impressed and exclaimed, ‘You would have both been crushed to death if your grandmother had not used her strength to the last fibre in her body…’

  This remark was a blunder, for he said, ‘No, it was not her physical strength but her pure spiritual strength. That is why I say that the spirit will continue to survive long after the physical body is burnt or buried.’

  He returned to the realm of ghosts again. ‘Only two days ago I saw it. It was after eleven at night. You were fast asleep already. I was cleaning the kitchen. Suddenly I saw someone standing at the window outside staring at me.’

  He saw my expression of horror and reassured me. ‘Don’t get scared if you happen to see it too one of these days. It is quite harmless. It is actually a woman. Poor thing must have been pregnant when she died for I could see clearly a child the size of a fully developed foetus clinging to her hips.’ Even the most imaginative horror-story writer could not have thought of this detail to freeze his readers. For the first time I felt my courage ebbing and a chilly sensation creeping upon me.

  ‘Weren’t you scared?’ I asked.

  ‘Me? Certainly not. All that I have to do is to repeat Devi Stotram. The poor woman dissolved into darkness even before I could prepare to chant it.’

  After hearing about the ghost, I clearly lost my nerve. However much I tried to overcome it, fear began to seize my guts. I kept the bedroom light on deep into the night, pretending to read. I was thankful to Ambi for he always slept close by just outside my bedroom door, which I kept open for cross-ventilation. I was glad that the security lights of the project area streamed into the room and fell on the wall.

  But all these did not help me as the days went by. I began to be increasingly sca
red of darkness. The very thought of night made me feel sick and depressed. Ambi, of course, continued to entertain me with his tales of bull worship and boat races and so on. But I could hardly concentrate on them dreading all the time that he would switch back to ghosts. I counted the days feverishly when I would finish the job and get away from that ghostly place.

  At last, one day a letter arrived from the head office asking me to move on to another area of operation. It also mentioned the precise date when I should report for duty at the other place. Psychologically this had a tonic effect on me and I jumped with joy.

  Within a short time the agitation in my mind subsided. My nerves mended so well that I could even look back on the past few weeks of torment with amusement and a secret sense of shame.

  My work began to gather momentum as the time for my departure neared, and I sat drafting notes, writing reports and signing away papers long after everyone had left. I would be so tired by the time I returned to my shack that I could hardly keep my eyes open after dinner. I retired early, to read a bit and drift into sleep gently, and woke up only when the sun came up and shone through the window.

  One night I was suddenly jolted out of my sleep. Ambi was fast asleep to the lullaby of his own rhythmic snoring near the door. I wondered what the time was and took out the watch and held it up as usual to catch the light from the project. But no light fell on the watch although on the wall there was the square patch of light keeping the room in a glow of twilight. I became curious and raised my head to look at the source of light far away by the river.

  A black, wispy form close to my cot completely blocked my view. In the faint light I could make out the shape of a woman, vague and undefined, with a hideously undeveloped body of a child perched on her hips. Four pairs of eyeballs stared at me.