DUST ON MOUNTAIN: COLLECTED STORIES

by Ruskin Bond

  Shortly after Somi had matriculated, Dal and his family left town, and I did not see him again, until after I returned from England. Then he was in Air Force uniform, tall, slim, very handsome, completely unrecognizable as the chubby little boy who had played with me in the pool. Three weeks after this meeting I heard that he had been killed in an air crash. Sweet Dal … I feel you are close to me now … I want to remember you exactly as you were when we first met. Here is my diary for 1951 (this diary formed the nucleus of my first novel, The Room on the Roof), when I was sixteen and you thirteen or fourteen:

  September 7: ‘Do you like elephants?’ Somi asked me.

  ‘Yes, when they are tame.’

  ‘That’s all right, then. Daljit!’ he called. ‘You can come up. Ruskin likes elephants.’

  Dal is not exactly an elephant. He is one of us.

  He is fat, oh, yes he is fat, but it is his good nature that is so like an elephant’s. His fatness is not grotesque or awkward; it is a very pleasant plumpness, and nothing could suit him better. If Dal were thin he would be a failure.

  His eyes are bright and round, full of mischievousness and a sort of grumpy gaiety.

  And what of the pool?

  I looked for it, after an interval of more than thirty years, but couldn’t find it. I found the ravine, and the bed of shingle, but there was no water. The stream had changed its course, just as we had changed ours.

  I turned away in disappointment, and with a dull ache in my heart. It was cruel of the pool to disappear; it was the cruelty of time. But I hadn’t gone far when I heard the sound of rushing water, and the shouting of children; and pushing my way through the jungle, I found another stream and another pool and about half-a-dozen children splashing about in the water.

  They did not see me, and I kept in the shadow of the trees and watched them play. But I didn’t really see them. I was seeing Somi and Daljit and the lazy old buffaloes, and I stood there for almost an hour, a disembodied spirit, romping again in the shallows of our secret pool. Nothing had really changed. Time is like that.

  Death of a Familiar

  When I learnt from a mutual acquaintance that my friend Sunil had been killed, I could not help feeling a little surprised, even shocked. Had Sunil killed somebody, it would not have surprised me in the least; he did not greatly value the lives of others. But for him to have been the victim was a sad reflection of his rapid decline.

  He was twenty-one at the time of his death. Two friends of his had killed him, stabbing him several times with their knives. Their motive was said to have been revenge. Apparently he had seduced their wives. They had invited him to a bar in Meerut, had plied him with country liquor, and had then accompanied him out into the cold air of a December night. It was drizzling a little. Near the bridge over the canal, one of his companions seized him from behind, while the other plunged a knife first into his stomach and then into his chest. When Sunil slumped forward, the other friend stabbed him in the back. A passing cyclist saw the little group, heard a cry and a groan, saw a blade flash in the light from his lamp. He pedalled furiously into town, burst into the kotwali and roused the sergeant on duty. Accompanied by two constables, they ran to the bridge but found the area deserted. It was only as the rising sun drew an open wound across the sky that they found Sunil’s body on the canal bank, his head and shoulders on the sand, his legs in running water.

  The bar keeper was able to describe Sunil’s companions, and they were arrested that same morning in their homes. They had not found time to get rid of their blood-soaked clothes. As they were not known to me, I took very little interest in the proceedings against them; but I understand that they have appealed against their sentences of life imprisonment.

  I was in Delhi at the time of the murder, and it was almost a year since I had last seen Sunil. We had both lived in Shahganj and had left the place for jobs; I to work in a newspaper office, he in a paper factory owned by an uncle. It had been hoped that he would in time acquire a sense of responsibility and some stability of character. But I had known Sunil for over two years, and in that time it had been made abundantly clear that he had not been born to fit in with the conventions. And as for character, his had the stability of a grasshopper. He was forever in search of new adventures and sensations, and this appetite of his for every novelty led him into some awkward situations.

  He was a product of Partition, of the frontier provinces, of Anglo-Indian public schools, of films Indian and American, of medieval India, knights in armour, hippies, drugs, sex magazines and the subtropical Terai. Had he lived in the time of the Moguls, he might have governed a province with saturnine and spectacular success. Being born into the twentieth century, he was but a juvenile delinquent.

  It must be said to his credit that he was a delinquent of charm and originality. I realized this when I first saw him, sitting on the wall of the football stadium, his long legs—looking even longer and thinner because of the tight trousers he wore—dangling over the wall, his chappals trailing in the dust of the road, while his white bush-shirt lay open, unbuttoned, showing his smooth brown chest. He had a smile on his long face, which, with its high cheekbones, gave his cheeks a cavernous look, an impression of unrequited hunger.

  We were both watching the wrestling. Two practice bouts were in progress—one between two thin, undernourished boys, and the other between the master of the akhara and a bearded Sikh who drove trucks for a living. They struggled in the soft mud of the wrestling pit, their well-oiled bodies glistening in the sunlight that filtered through a massive banyan tree. I had been standing near the akhara for a few minutes when I became conscious of the young man’s gaze. When I turned round to look at him, he smiled satanically.

  ‘Are you a wrestler, too?’ he asked.

  ‘Do I look like one?’ I countered.

  ‘No, you look more like an athlete,’ he said. ‘I mean a long-distance runner. Very thin.’

  ‘I’m a writer. Like long-distance runners most writers are very thin.’

  ‘You’re an Anglo-Indian, aren’t you?’

  ‘My family history is very complicated, otherwise I’d be delighted to give you all the details.’

  ‘You could pass for a European, you know. You’re quite fair. But you have an Indian accent.’

  ‘An Indian accent is very similar to a Welsh accent,’ I observed. ‘I might pass for Welsh, but not many people in India have met Welshmen!’

  He chuckled at my answer, then stared at me speculatively. ‘I say,’ he said at length, as though an idea of great weight and importance had occurred to him. ‘Do you have any magazines with pictures of dames?’

  ‘Well, I may have some old Playboys. You can have them if you like.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, getting down from the wall. ‘I’ll come and fetch them. This wresting is boring, anyway.’

  He slipped his hand into mine (a custom of no special significance), and began whistling snatches of Hindi film tunes and the latest American hits.

  I was living at the time in a small flat above the town’s main shopping centre. Below me there were shops, restaurants and a cinema. Behind the building lay a junkyard littered with the framework of vintage cars and broken-down tongas. I was paying thirty rupees a month for my two rooms, and sixty to the Punjabi restaurant where I took my meals. My earnings as a freelance writer were something like a hundred and fifty rupees a month, sufficient to enable me to make both ends meet, provided I remained in the backwater that was Shahganj.

  Sunil (I had learnt his name during our walk from the stadium) made himself at home in my flat as soon as he entered it. He went through all my magazines, books and photographs with the thoroughness of an executor of a will. In India, it is customary for people to try and find out all there is to know about you, and Sunil went through the formalities with considerable thoroughness. While he spoke, his roving eyes made a mental inventory of all my belongings. These were few—a typewriter, a small radio and a cupboard full of books and clothes, besides
the furniture that went with the flat. I had no valuables. Was he disappointed? I could not be sure. He wore good clothes and spoke fluent English, but good clothes and good English are no criteria for honesty. He was a little too glib to inspire confidence. Apparently, he was still at college. His father owned a cloth shop—a strict man who did not give his son much spending money.

  But Sunil was not seriously interested in money, as I was shortly to discover. He was interested in experience, and searched for it in various directions.

  ‘You have a nice view,’ he said, leaning over my balcony and looking up and down the street. ‘You can see everyone on parade. Girls! They’re becoming quite modern now. Short hair and small blouses. Tight salwars. Maxis, minis. Falsies. Do you like girls?’

  ‘Well …’ I began, but he did not really expect an answer to his question.

  ‘What are little girls made of? That’s an English poem, isn’t it? “Sugar and spice and everything nice …” And I don’t remember the rest.’ He lowered his voice to a confidential undertone. ‘Have you had any girls?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘I had fun with a girl, you know, my cousin. She came to stay with us last summer. Then there’s a girl in college who’s stuck on me. But this is such a backward country. We can’t be seen together in public and I can’t invite her to my house. Can I bring her here some day?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know …’ I hadn’t lived in a small town like Shahganj for some time, and wasn’t sure if morals had changed along with the fashions.

  ‘Oh, not now,’ he said. ‘There’s no hurry. I’ll give you plenty of warning, don’t worry.’ He put an arm around my shoulders and looked at me with undisguised affection. ‘We are going to be great friends, you and I.’

  After that I began to receive almost daily visits from Sunil. His college classes got over at three in the afternoon, and though it was seldom that he attended them, he would stop at my place after putting in a brief appearance at the study hall. I could hardly blame him for neglecting his books: Shakespeare and Chaucer were prescribed for students who had but a rudimentary knowledge of modern English usage. Vast numbers of graduates were produced every year, and most of them became clerks or bus conductors or, perhaps, schoolteachers. But Sunil’s father wanted the best for his son. And in Shahganj that meant as many degrees as possible.

  Sunil would come stamping into my rooms, waking me from the siesta which had become a habit during summer afternoons. When he found that I did not relish being woken up, he would leave me to sleep while he took a bath under the tap. After making liberal use of my hair cream and aftershave lotion (he had just begun shaving, but used the lotion on his body), he would want to go to a picture or restaurant, and would sprinkle me with cold water so that I leapt off the bed.

  One afternoon he felt more than usually ebullient, and poured a whole bucket of water over me, soaking the sheets and mattress. I retaliated by flinging the water jug at his head. It missed him and shattered itself against the wall. Sunil then went berserk and started splashing water all over the room, while I threatened and shouted. When I tried restraining him by force, we rolled over on the ground, and I banged my head against the bedstead and almost lost consciousness. He was then full of contrition and massaged the lump on my head with hair cream and refused to borrow any money from me that day.

  Sunil’s ‘borrowing’ consisted of extracting a few rupees from my wallet, saying he needed the money for books or a tailor’s bill or a shopkeeper who was threatening him with violence, and then spending it on something quite different. Before long I gave up asking him to return anything, just as I had given up asking him to stop seeing me.

  Sunil was one of those people best loved from a distance. He was born with a special talent for trouble. I think it pleased his vanity when he was pursued by irate creditors, shopkeepers, brothers whose sisters he had insulted and husbands whose wives he had molested. My association with him did nothing to improve my own reputation in Shahganj.

  My landlady, a protective motherly Punjabi widow said: ‘Son, you are in bad company. Do you know that Sunil has already been expelled from one school for stealing, and from another for sexual offences?’

  ‘He’s only a boy,’ I said. ‘And he’s taking longer than most boys to grow up. He doesn’t realize the seriousness of what he does. He will learn as he grows older.’

  ‘If he grows older,’ said my landlady darkly. ‘Do you know that he nearly killed a man last year? When a fruit seller who had been cheated threatened to report Sunil to the police, he threw a brick at the man’s head. The poor man was in hospital for three weeks. If Sunil’s father did not have political influence, the boy would be in jail now, instead of climbing your stairs every afternoon.’

  Once again I suggested to Sunil that he come to see me less often.

  He looked hurt and offended. ‘Don’t you like me any more?’

  ‘I like you immensely. But I have work to do …’

  ‘I know. You think I am a crook. Well, I am a crook.’ He spoke with all the confidence of a young man who has never been hurt or disillusioned; he had romantic notions about swindlers and gangsters. ‘I’ll be a big crook one day, and people will be scared of me. But don’t worry, old boy, you’re my friend. I wouldn’t harm you in any way. In fact, I’ll protect you.’

  ‘Thank you, but I don’t require protection, I want to be left alone. I have work, and you are a worry and a distraction.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to leave you alone,’ he said, assuming the posture of a spoilt child. ‘Why should you be left alone? Who do you think you are? If we’re friends now, it’s your fault. I’m not going to buzz off just to suit your convenience.’

  ‘Come less often, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ll come more often, you old snob! I know, you’re thinking of your reputation—as if you had any. Well, you don’t have to worry, mon ami—as they say in Hollywood. I’ll be very discreet, Daddyji!’

  Whenever I complained or became querulous, Sunil would call me daddy or uncle or sometimes mum, and make me feel more ridiculous. If he was in a good mood, he would use the Hindi word chacha (uncle). All it did was to make me feel much older than my twenty-five years.

  Sunil turned up one afternoon with blood streaming from his nose and from a gash across his forehead. He sat down at the foot of the bed and began dabbing his face with the bedsheet.

  ‘What have you done to yourself?’ I asked in some alarm.

  ‘Some fellows beat me up. There were three of them. They followed me on their cycles.’

  ‘Who were they?’ I asked, looking for iodine on the dressing table.

  ‘Just some fellows …’

  ‘They must have had a reason.’

  ‘Well, a sister of one of them had been talking to me.’

  ‘Well, that isn’t a reason, even in Shahganj. You must have said or done something to offend her.’

  ‘No, she likes me,’ he said, wincing as I dabbed iodine on his forehead. ‘We went to the guava orchard near my uncle’s farm.’

  ‘She went out there alone with you?’

  ‘Sure. I took her on my bike. They must have followed us. Anyway, we weren’t doing much except kissing and fooling around. But some people seem to think that’s worse than …’

  Both he and the other boys of Shahganj had grown up to look upon girls as strange, exotic animals, who must be seized at the first opportunity. Experimenting in sex was like playing a surreptitious game of marbles.

  Sunil produced a clasp knife from his pocket, opened it and held the blade against the flat of his hand.

  ‘Don’t worry, Uncle, I can look after myself. The next fellow who tries to interfere with me will get this in his guts.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘You will go to prison for ten years. Listen, I’m going up to Simla for a couple of weeks, just for a change. Why don’t you come with me? It will be a pleasant change from Shahganj, and in the meantime all this fuss will die down.’

&n
bsp; It was one of those invitations which I make so readily and instantly regret. As soon as I had made the suggestion, I realized that Sunil in Simla might be even more of a problem than Sunil in Shahganj. But it was too late for me to back out.

  ‘Simla! Why not? The college is closing for the summer holidays, and my father won’t mind my going with you. He believes you’re the only respectable friend I’ve got. Boy! We’ll have a good time in Simla.’

  ‘You’ll have to behave yourself there, if you want to come with me. No girls, Sunil.’

  ‘No girls, sir. I’ll be very good, Chachaji. Please take me to Simla.’

  ‘I think two hundred rupees should be enough for a fortnight for both of us,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, too much,’ said Sunil modestly.

  ‘And a week later we were actually in Simla, putting up at a moderately priced, middle-class hotel.

  Our first few days in the hill station were pleasant enough. We went for long walks, tired ourselves out and acquired enormous appetites. Sunil, in the hills for the first time in his life, declared that they were wonderful, and thanked me a score of times for bringing him along. He took a genuine interest in exploring remote valleys, forests and waterfalls, and seemed to be losing some of his self-centredness. I believe that mountains do affect one’s personality, if one can remain among them long enough; and if Sunil had grown up in the hills instead of in a refugee township, I have no doubt he would have been a completely different person.

  There was one small waterfall I rather liked. It was down a ravine, in a rather inaccessible spot, where very few people ever went. The water fell about thirty feet into a small pool. We bathed here on two occasions, and Sunil quite forgot the attractions of the town. And we would have visited the spot again had I not slipped and sprained my ankle. This accident confined me to the hotel balcony for several days, and I was afraid that Sunil, for want of companionship, would go in search of more mundane distractions. But though he went out often enough, he came back dusty and sunburnt; and the fact that he asked me for very little money was evidence enough of his fondness for the outdoors. Striding through forests of oak and pine, with all the world stretched out far below, was no doubt a new and exhilarating experience for him. But how long would it be before the spell was broken?