by Ruskin Bond
Prem looked at Astley in bewilderment.
‘But who is that—lying there?’
‘It was you. Only the husk now, the empty shell. This is the real you, standing here beside me.’
‘You came for me?’
‘I couldn’t come until you were ready. As for me, I left my shell a long time ago. But you were determined to hang on, keeping this house together. Are you ready now?’
‘And the house?’
‘Others will live in it. But come, it’s time to go fishing …’
Astley took Prem by the arm, and they walked through the dappled sunlight under the deodars and finally left that place forever.
A Job Well Done
Dhuki, the gardener, was clearing up the weeds that grew in profusion around the old disused well. He was an old man, skinny and bent and spindly legged but he had always been like that. His strength lay in his wrists and in his long, tendril-like fingers. He looked as frail as a petunia but he had the tenacity of a vine.
‘Are you going to cover the well?’ I asked. I was eight, and a great favourite of Dhuki’s. He had been the gardener long before my birth, had worked for my father until my father died and now worked for my mother and stepfather.
‘I must cover it, I suppose,’ said Dhuki. ‘That’s what the Major Sahib wants. He’ll be back any day and if he finds the well still uncovered he’ll get into one of his raging fits and I’ll be looking for another job!’
The ‘Major Sahib’ was my stepfather, Major Summerskill. A tall, hearty, back-slapping man, who liked polo and pig-sticking. He was quite unlike my father. My father had always given me books to read. The major said I would become a dreamer if I read too much and took the books away. I hated him and did not think much of my mother for marrying him.
‘The boy’s too soft,’ I heard him tell my mother. ‘I must see that he gets riding lessons.’
But before the riding lessons could be arranged the major’s regiment was ordered to Peshawar. Trouble was expected from some of the frontier tribes. He was away for about two months. Before leaving, he had left strict instructions for Dhuki to cover up the old well.
‘Too damned dangerous having an open well in the middle of the garden,’ my stepfather had said. ‘Make sure that it’s completely covered by the time I get back.’
Dhuki was loath to cover up the old well. It had been there for over fifty years, long before the house had been built. In its walls lived a colony of pigeons. Their soft cooing filled the garden with a lovely sound. And during the hot, dry summer months, when taps ran dry, the well was always a dependable source of water. The bhisti still used it, filling his goatskin bag with the cool clear water and sprinkling the paths around the house to keep the dust down.
Dhuki pleaded with my mother to let him leave the well uncovered.
‘What will happen to the pigeons?’ he asked.
‘Oh, surely they can find another well,’ said my mother. ‘Do close it up soon, Dhuki. I don’t want the sahib to come back and find that you haven’t done anything about it.’
My mother seemed just a little bit afraid of the major. How can we be afraid of those we love? It was a question that puzzled me then and puzzles me still.
The major’s absence made life pleasant again. I returned to my books, spent long hours in my favourite banyan tree, ate buckets of mangoes and dawdled in the garden talking to Dhuki.
Neither he nor I were looking forward to the major’s return. Dhuki had stayed on after my mother’s second marriage only out of loyalty to her and affection for me. He had really been my father’s man. But my mother had always appeared deceptively frail and helpless and most men, Major Summerskill included, felt protective towards her. She liked people who did things for her.
‘Your father liked this well,’ said Dhuki. ‘He would often sit here in the evenings with a book in which he made drawings of birds and flowers and insects.’
I remembered those drawings and I remembered how they had all been thrown away by the major when he had moved into the house. Dhuki knew about it too. I didn’t keep much from him.
‘It’s a sad business closing this well,’ said Dhuki again. ‘Only a fool or a drunkard is likely to fall into it.’
But he had made his preparations. Planks of sal wood, bricks and cement were neatly piled up around the well.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Dhuki. ‘Tomorrow I will do it. Not today. Let the birds remain for one more day. In the morning, baba, you can help me drive the birds from the well.’
On the day my stepfather was expected back, my mother hired a tonga and went to the bazaar to do some shopping. Only a few people had cars in those days. Even colonels went about in tongas. Now, a clerk finds it beneath his dignity to sit in one.
As the major was not expected before evening, I decided I would make full use of my last free morning. I took all my favourite books and stored them away in an outhouse where I could come for them from time to time. Then, my pockets bursting with mangoes, I climbed up the banyan tree. It was the darkest and coolest place on a hot day in June.
From behind the screen of leaves that concealed me, I could see Dhuki moving about near the well. He appeared to be most unwilling to get on with the job of covering it up.
‘Baba!’ he called several times. But I did not feel like stirring from the banyan tree. Dhuki grasped a long plank of wood and placed it across one end of the well. He started hammering. From my vantage point in the banyan tree, he looked very bent and old.
A jingle of tonga bells and the squeak of unoiled wheels told me that a tonga was coming in at the gate. It was too early for my mother to be back. I peered through the thick, waxy leaves of the tree and nearly fell off my branch in surprise. It was my stepfather, the major! He had arrived earlier than expected.
I did not come down from the tree. I had no intention of confronting my stepfather until my mother returned.
The major had climbed down from the tonga and was watching his luggage being carried on to the veranda. He was red in the face and the ends of his handlebar moustache were stiff with Brilliantine. Dhuki approached with a half-hearted salaam.
‘Ah, so there you are, you old scoundrel!’ exclaimed the major, trying to sound friendly and jocular. ‘More jungle than garden, from what I can see. You’re getting too old for this sort of work, Dhuki. Time to retire! And where’s the memsahib?’
‘Gone to the bazaar,’ said Dhuki.
‘And the boy?’
Dhuki shrugged. ‘I have not seen the boy today, sahib.’
‘Damn!’ said the major. ‘A fine homecoming, this. Well, wake up the cook boy and tell him to get some sodas.’
‘Cook boy’s gone away,’ said Dhuki.
‘Well, I’ll be double damned,’ said the major.
The tonga went away and the major started pacing up and down the garden path. Then he saw Dhuki’s unfinished work at the well. He grew purple in the face, strode across to the well, and started ranting at the old gardener.
Dhuki began making excuses. He said something about a shortage of bricks, the sickness of a niece, unsatisfactory cement, unfavourable weather, unfavourable gods. When none of this seemed to satisfy the major, Dhuki began mumbling about something bubbling up from the bottom of the well and pointed down into its depths. The major stepped on to the low parapet and looked down. Dhuki kept pointing. The major leant over a little.
Dhuki’s hand moved swiftly, like a conjurer making a pass. He did not actually push the major. He appeared merely to tap him once on the bottom. I caught a glimpse of my stepfather’s boots as he disappeared into the well. I couldn’t help thinking of Alice in Wonderland, of Alice disappearing down the rabbit hole.
There was a tremendous splash and the pigeons flew up, circling the well thrice before settling on the roof of the bungalow.
By lunchtime—or tiffin, as we called it then—Dhuki had the well covered over with the wooden planks.
‘The major will be pleased,’ said my mother when she
came home. ‘It will be quite ready by evening, won’t it, Dhuki?’
By evening the well had been completely bricked over. It was the fastest bit of work Dhuki had ever done.
Over the next few weeks, my mother’s concern changed to anxiety, her anxiety to melancholy, and her melancholy to resignation. By being gay and high-spirited myself, I hope I did something to cheer her up. She had written to the colonel of the regiment and had been informed that the major had gone home on leave a fortnight previously. Somewhere, in the vastness of India, the major had disappeared.
It was easy enough to disappear and never be found. After seven months had passed without the major turning up, it was presumed that one of two things must have happened. Either he had been murdered on the train and his corpse flung into a river; or, he had run away with a tribal girl and was living in some remote corner of the country.
Life had to carry on for the rest of us. The rains were over and the guava season was approaching.
My mother was receiving visits from a colonel of His Majesty’s 32nd Foot. He was an elderly, easy-going, seemingly absentminded man, who didn’t get in the way at all but left slabs of chocolate lying around the house.
‘A good sahib,’ observed Dhuki as I stood beside him behind the bougainvillea, watching the colonel saunter up the veranda steps. ‘See how well he wears his sola topi! It covers his head completely.’
‘He’s bald underneath,’ I said.
‘No matter. I think he will be all right.’
‘And if he isn’t,’ I said, ‘we can always open up the well again.’
Dhuki dropped the nozzle of the hose pipe and water gushed out over our feet. But he recovered quickly and taking me by the hand led me across to the old well now surmounted by a three-tiered cement platform which looked rather like a wedding cake.
‘We must not forget our old well,’ he said. ‘Let us make it beautiful, baba. Some flower pots, perhaps.’
And together we fetched pots and decorated the covered well with ferns and geraniums. Everyone congratulated Dhuki on the fine job he’d done. My only regret was that the pigeons had gone away.
A Crow for All Seasons
Early to bed and early to rise makes a crow healthy, wealthy and wise.
They say it’s true for humans too. I’m not so sure about that. But for crows it’s a must.
I’m always up at the crack of dawn, often the first crow to break the night’s silence with a lusty caw. My friends and relatives, who roost in the same tree, grumble a bit and mutter to themselves, but they are soon cawing just as loudly. Long before the sun is up, we set off on the day’s work.
We do not pause even for the morning wash. Later in the day, if it’s hot and muggy, I might take a dip in some human’s bath water; but early in the morning we like to be up and about before everyone else. This is the time when trash cans and refuse dumps are overflowing with goodies, and we like to sift through them before the dustmen arrive in their disposal trucks.
Not that we are afraid of a famine in refuse. As human beings multiply, so does their rubbish.
Only yesterday I rescued an old typewriter ribbon from the dustbin, just before it was emptied. What a waste that would have been! I had no use for it myself, but I gave it to one of my cousins who got married recently, and she tells me it’s just right for her nest, the one she’s building on a telegraph pole. It helps her bind the twigs together, she says.
My own preference is for toothbrushes. They’re just a hobby, really, like stamp-collecting with humans. I have a small but select collection which I keep in a hole in the garden wall. Don’t ask me how many I’ve got—crows don’t believe there’s any point in counting beyond two—but I know there’s more than one, that there’s a whole lot of them in fact, because there isn’t anyone living on this road who hasn’t lost a toothbrush to me at some time or another.
We crows living in the jackfruit tree have this stretch of road to ourselves, but so that we don’t quarrel or have misunderstandings we’ve shared the houses out. I picked the bungalow with the orchard at the back. After all, I don’t eat rubbish and throwaways all the time. Just occasionally I like a ripe guava or the soft flesh of a papaya. And sometimes I like the odd beetle as an hors d’oeuvre. Those humans in the bungalow should be grateful to me for keeping down the population of fruit-eating beetles, and even for recycling their refuse; but no, humans are never grateful. No sooner do I settle in one of their guava trees than stones are whizzing past me. So I return to the dustbin on the back veranda steps. They don’t mind my being there.
One of my cousins shares the bungalow with me, but he’s a lazy fellow and I have to do most of the foraging. Sometimes I get him to lend me a claw, but most of the time he’s preening his feathers and trying to look handsome for a pretty young thing who lives in the banyan tree at the next turning.
When he’s in the mood he can be invaluable, as he proved recently when I was having some difficulty getting at the dog’s food on the veranda.
This dog who is fussed over so much by the humans I’ve adopted is a great big fellow, a mastiff who pretends to a pedigree going back to the time of Genghis Khan—he likes to pretend one of his ancestors was the great Khan’s watchdog—but, as often happens in famous families, animal or human, there is a falling off in quality over a period of time, and this huge fellow—Tiger, they call him—is a case in point. All brawn and no brain. Many’s the time I’ve removed a juicy bone from his plate or helped myself to pickings from under his nose.
But of late he’s been growing canny and selfish. He doesn’t like to share any more. And the other day I was almost in his jaws when he took a sudden lunge at me. Snap went his great teeth; but all he got was one of my tail feathers. He spat it out in disgust. Who wants crow’s meat, anyway?
All the same, I thought, I’d better not be too careless. It’s not for nothing that a crow’s IQ is way above that of all other birds. And it’s higher than a dog’s, I bet.
I woke Cousin Slow from his midday siesta and said, ‘Hey, Slow, we’ve got a problem. If you want any of that delicious tripe today, you’ve got to lend a claw—or a beak. That dog’s getting snappier day by day.’
Slow opened one eye and said, ‘Well, if you insist. But you know how I hate getting into a scuffle. It’s bad for the gloss on my feathers.’
‘I don’t insist,’ I said politely, ‘but I’m not foraging for both of us today. It’s every crow for himself.’
‘Okay, okay, I’m coming,’ said Slow, and with barely a flap he dropped down from the tree to the wall.
‘What’s the strategy?’ I asked.
‘Simple. We’ll just give him the old one-two.’
We flew across to the veranda. Tiger had just started his meal. He was a fast, greedy eater who made horrible slurping sounds while he guzzled his food. We had to move fast if we wanted to get something before the meal was over.
I sidled up to Tiger and wished him good afternoon.
He kept on gobbling—but quicker now.
Slow came up from behind and gave him a quick peck near the tail—a sensitive spot—and, as Tiger swung round, snarling, I moved in quickly and snatched up several tidbits.
Tiger went for me, and I flew freestyle for the garden wall. The dish was untended, so Slow helped himself to as many scraps as he could stuff in his mouth.
He joined me on the garden wall, and we sat there feasting, while Tiger barked himself hoarse below.
‘Go catch a cat,’ said Slow, who is given to slang. ‘You’re in the wrong league, big boy.’
The great sage Pratyasataka—ever heard of him? I guess not—once said, ‘Nothing can improve a crow.’
Like most human sages, he wasn’t very clear in his thinking, so that there has been some misunderstanding about what he meant. Humans like to think that what he really meant was that crows were so bad as to be beyond improvement. But we crows know better. We interpret the saying as meaning that the crow is so perfect that no improvement is poss
ible.
It’s not that we aren’t human—what I mean is, there are times when we fall from our high standards and do rather foolish things. Like at lunch time the other day.
Sometimes, when the table is laid in the bungalow, and before the family enters the dining room, I nip in through the open window and make a quick foray among the dishes. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to pick up a sausage or a slice of toast, or even a pat of butter, making off before someone enters and throws a bread knife at me. But on this occasion, just as I was reaching for the toast, a thin slouching fellow—Junior Sahib they call him—entered suddenly and shouted at me. I was so startled that I leapt across the table seeking shelter. Something flew at me, and in an effort to dodge the missile I put my head through a circular object and then found it wouldn’t come off.
It wasn’t safe to hang around there, so I flew out the window with this dashed ring still round my neck.
Serviette or napkin rings, that’s what they are called. Quite unnecessary objects, but some humans—particularly the well-to-do sort—seem to like having them on their tables, holding bits of cloth in place. The cloth is used for wiping the mouth. Have you ever heard of such nonsense?
Anyway, there I was with a fat napkin ring round my neck, and as I perched on the wall trying to get it off, the entire human family gathered on their veranda to watch me.
There was the Colonel Sahib and his wife, the Memsahib; there was the scrawny Junior Sahib (worst of the lot); there was a mischievous boy (the Colonel Sahib’s grandson) known as the Baba; and there was the cook (who usually flung orange peels at me) and the gardener (who once tried to decapitate me with a spade), and the dog Tiger who, like most dogs, tries unsuccessfully to be human.
Today they weren’t cursing and shaking their fists at me; they were just standing and laughing their heads off. What’s so funny about a crow with its head stuck in a napkin ring?
Worse was to follow.
The noise had attracted the other crows in the area, and if there’s one thing crows detest, it’s a crow who doesn’t look like a crow.
