Friends In Small Places Read online

  Ruskin Bond’s Unforgettable People

  FRIENDS IN SMALL PLACES

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Introduction

  Masterji

  Keemat Lal

  Kishan Singh

  Dukhi and the Maharani

  My Father and I

  My Mother

  Uncle Ken

  Bansi and the Ayah

  Bhabiji and Her Family

  Uncle Bill—He Said it With Arsenic

  Prem

  Binya

  His Neighbour’s Wife

  Kishen Again

  Somi and Rusty

  The Lafunga

  The Kitemaker

  The Box Man

  Pipalnagar’s People

  The Sensualist

  Miss Bun and Others

  HH

  The Old Lama

  Sitaram

  Footnotes

  Keemat Lal

  Kishan Singh

  Dukhi and the Maharani

  My Mother

  Uncle Ken

  Bansi and the Ayah

  Bhabiji and Her Family

  Prem

  Binya

  Kishen Again

  Somi and Rusty

  The Lafunga

  Pipalnagar’s People

  The Sensualist

  HH

  Sitaram

  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  FRIENDS IN SMALL PLACES

  Born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, in 1934, Ruskin Bond grew up in Jamnagar (Gujarat), Dehra Dun and Shimla. His first novel, Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written over three hundred short stories, essays and novellas (including Vagrants in the Valley and A Flight of Pigeons) and more than thirty books for children. He has also published two volumes of autobiography, Scenes from a Writer’s Life, which describes his formative years growing up in Anglo-India, and The Lamp Is Lit, a collection of essays and episodes from his journal. In 1992 he received the Sahitya Akademi award for English writing in India. He was awarded the Padma Shree in 1999.

  Ruskin Bond lives with his adopted family in Mussoorie.

  ALSO BY RUSKIN BOND

  Penguin

  The Room on the Roof, Vagrants in the Valley

  Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra

  The Night Train at Deoli

  Time Stops at Shamli

  Rain in the Mountains

  Strangers in the Night

  Scenes from a Writer’s Life

  The Lamp Is Lit

  Delhi Is Not Far: The Best of Ruskin Bond

  The Penguin Book of Indian Ghost Stories (ed.)

  The Penguin Book of Indian Railway Stories (ed.)

  The Penguin Book of Indian Love Stories and Lyrics (ed.)

  Collected Fiction

  A Season of Ghosts

  Viking

  Ruskin Bond’s Treasury of Stories for Children

  Puffin

  Panther’s Moon and Other Stories

  Room on the Roof

  Introduction

  Meet some of the people I can never forget. Not because they were of great importance or stature but because their individuality made them stand out from the commonplace. It was not money or success but pride in themselves that set them apart. People like my Granny, or my father, or the old kitemaker, or the wayside station’s khilasi, or the epileptic boy who sold trinkets for a living.

  I’ve been writing stories of one kind or another for nearly fifty years and, along the way, it has always been the people I’ve known and met who have given me these stories—friends, lovers, relatives, chance acquaintances, strangers, or other people’s friends and relatives. No two persons are alike, although I do believe each of us has a double somewhere. I know I have. There was this lady who came up to me the other day and exclaimed, ‘How nice to see you after all these years! But why did you abandon me on the platform at Zurich just after our engagement had been announced?’ I hastened to assure her that I had never been to Zurich in my life, and made a quick getaway before she decided I would do instead of my double.

  Somerset Maugham liked writing stories about the people he met. So did Maupassant and Chekhov. That’s why their stories are never dull. They wrote about real people.

  I find most people interesting. The dull ones are those whose lives are a little too orderly, or who are forever boasting of the ease with which they have succeeded in life. Such people can be a little suspect. I used to envy —, who did everything just right, both as a boy and as a man; he never seemed to fail at anything he undertook. When we were Boy Scouts, he could tie all the knots, and I couldn’t tie one. And when he was fifty he was still good at tying knots. He bought a rope and hanged himself—as neatly as he had done everything else in life.

  Yes, life is full of surprises. And so are people, in their different ways.

  And here I’d like to mention and pay tribute to some of the people who do not appear in the stories that follow.

  I remember Mr Jones. He was only a junior master at my school in Shimla, where most of his colleagues looked upon him with a certain amusement tinged with disdain, for he was one of those rare people at the time—a teacher who did not believe in corporal punishment and who refused to administer it. Fifty years ago, flogging was still the order of the day, specially in boarding schools. ‘Six of the best’ with a stout malacca cane was the punishment meted out to those who broke the rules. What was good for Tom Brown at Rugby was good for R. Bond and Singh in Class VII at B.C.S. Most teachers, even some prefects, were expected to cane the boys under their care or command, and many of them did so with sadistic enthusiasm. Not so Mr Jones. He refused to cane anyone. As a result he was considered soft and old-fashioned although he was really ahead of his time. And his principled stand resulted in a loss of seniority and the chance of rising to any heights in the school hierarchy. Then, as now, if you bucked the system, you were made to pay for it.

  Not that this bothered Mr Jones. A simple Welshman who had fought in the trenches during the First World War, ‘Taffy’ Jones had seen real suffering at first-hand and saw no merit in inflicting pain on anyone—least of all on a schoolboy. It made no sense to him. A bachelor all his life, he kept pigeons and a mongrel dog, scorning fancy breeds. As his room was tucked away in a remote corner of the school estate, no one could object to his pets.

  On holidays, I would call on him to borrow books. He had a complete set of Dickens, and lent the volumes to me one at a time, until (over a period of two school terms), I had gone through the entire works, from Sketches by Boz to Our Mutual Friend. Reading became my religion; authorship my goal.

  Intellectual nourishment and stimulation are important to a budding writer; but so is physical nourishment. And living on my own in London when I was in my late teens, I soon grew very thin indeed. Subsisting on a diet of beans on toast in coffee bars, I was a prime candidate for malnutrition and lost all vision in my right eye. My own efforts at cooking were limited to boiling eggs. One day I shall write a best-selling cookbook. Fifty Different Ways to Boil an Egg and Other Disasters.

  You can imagine how glad I was to get back to India, even if it was only to a rented room in Dehra Dun. Here my landlady, Mrs Singh, did at least cook for me, apart from telling me wonderful stories of the supernatural. For breakfast she gave me stuffed mooli (radish) parathas, with a variety of home-made pickles, shalgam (turnip) pickle being my favourite. She also made an excellent kanji (spiced carrot water), which seemed to help my little grey cells work overtime. English literature was all very well; but I needed Indian cooking to help creat
e it. Those two years in Dehra, struggling to establish myself as a writer on Mrs Singh’s kanji and the occasional fifty-rupee money order, were probably the most memorable of my life.

  I was young, I was courteous, I was on my own, and I looked vulnerable. My friends’ mothers, wives, cousins, sisters, aunts, all wanted to keep me from starving.

  And still do.

  Although I am well spoilt by Prem and his family, who have nurtured me for twenty-five years, there are other good souls who see to it that I do not fade from view: Ganesh Saili and his patient wife and good-hearted daughters; Maya and Victor Banerjee, who spoil me with bacon rashers and liver paté; Reeta and Jeet, who stuff me with various kinds of fish, including (I suspect) a goldfish; Nandu Jauhar, who grows the most delicious mushrooms, in the Savoy ballroom; Upendra Arora, who believes that authors are at their best after a good breakfast; Bill Aitken and H.H. Maharani Sahiba of Jind, who stimulate in more ways than one; and the Japanese lady who sent me a food parcel, having read somewhere that the wolf was at my door.

  Now she knows that I was the wolf.

  All these good people, and many others whom I shall thank in person, have contributed to my welfare and seen to it that I am no longer the scrawny, underfed young writer of yesteryear.

  I take this opportunity to thank them. May they prosper and continue in their generous ways.

  RUSKIN BOND

  Landour, Mussoorie

  December 2000

  Masterji

  I was strolling along the platform, waiting for the arrival of the Amritsar Express, when I saw Mr Khushal, handcuffed to a policeman.

  I hadn’t recognized him at first—a paunchy gentleman with a lot of grey in his beard and a certain arrogant amusement in his manner. It was only when I came closer, and we were almost face to face, that I recognized my old Hindi teacher.

  Startled, I stopped and stared. And he stared back at me, a glimmer of recognition in his eyes. It was over twenty years since I’d last seen him, standing jauntily before the classroom blackboard, and now here he was tethered to a policeman and looking as jaunty as ever . . .

  ‘Good—good evening, sir,’ I stammered, in my best public school manner. (You must always respect your teacher, no matter what the circumstances.)

  Mr Khushal’s face lit up with pleasure. ‘So you remember me! It’s nice to see you again, my boy.’

  Forgetting that his right hand was shackled to the policeman’s left, I made as if to shake hands. Mr Khushal thoughtfully took my right hand in his left and gave it a rough squeeze. A faint odour of cloves and cinnamon reached me, and I remembered how he had always been redolent of spices when standing beside my desk, watching me agonize over my Hindi-English translation.

  He had joined the school in 1948, not long after the Partition. Until then there had been no Hindi teacher; we’d been taught Urdu and French. Then came a ruling that Hindi was to be a compulsory subject, and at the age of sixteen I found myself struggling with a new script. When Mr Khushal joined the staff (on the recommendation of a local official), there was no one else in the school who knew Hindi, or who could assess Mr Khushal’s abilities as a teacher . . .

  And now once again he stood before me, only this time he was in the custody of the law.

  I was still recovering from the shock when the train drew in, and everyone on the platform began making a rush for the compartment doors. As the policeman elbowed his way through the crowd, I kept close behind him and his charge, and as a result I managed to get into the same third-class compartment. I found a seat right opposite Mr Khushal. He did not seem to be the least bit embarrassed by the handcuffs, or by the stares of his fellow-passengers. Rather, it was the policeman who looked unhappy and ill at ease.

  As the train got under way, I offered Mr Khushal one of the parathas made for me by my Ferozepur landlady. He accepted it with alacrity. I offered one to the constable as well, but although he looked at it with undisguised longing, he felt duty-bound to decline.

  ‘Why have they arrested you, sir?’ I asked. ‘Is it very serious?’

  ‘A trivial matter,’ said Mr Khushal. ‘Nothing to worry about. I shall be at liberty soon.’

  ‘But what did you do?’

  Mr Khushal leant forward. ‘Nothing to be ashamed of,’ he said in a confiding tone. ‘Even a great teacher like Socrates fell foul of the law.’

  ‘You mean—one of your pupil’s—made a complaint?’

  ‘And why should one of my pupils make a complaint?’ Mr Khushal looked offended. ‘They were the beneficiaries—it was for them.’ He noticed that I looked mystified, and decided to come straight to the point, ‘It was simply a question of false certificates.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, feeling deflated. Public school boys are always prone to jump to the wrong conclusions . . .

  ‘Your certificates, sir?’

  ‘Of course not. Nothing wrong with my certificates—I had them printed in Lahore, in 1946.’

  ‘With age comes respectability,’ I remarked. ‘In that case, whose . . .?’

  ‘Why, the matriculation certificates I’ve been providing all these years to the poor idiots who would never have got through on their own!’

  ‘You mean you gave them your own certificates?’

  ‘That’s right. And if it hadn’t been for so many printing mistakes, no one would have been any wiser. You can’t find a good press these days, that’s the trouble . . . It was a public service, my boy, I hope you appreciate that . . . It isn’t fair to hold a boy back in life simply because he can’t get through some puny exam . . . Mind you, I don’t give my certificates to anyone. They come to me only after they have failed two or three times.’

  ‘And I suppose you charge something?’

  ‘Only if they can pay. There’s no fixed sum. Whatever they like to give me. I’ve never been greedy in these matters, and you know I am not unkind . . .’

  Which is true enough, I thought, looking out of the carriage window at the green fields of Moga and remembering the half-yearly Hindi exam when I had stared blankly at the question paper, knowing that I was totally incapable of answering any of it. Mr Khushal had come walking down the line of desks and stopped at mine, breathing cloves all over me. ‘Come on, boy, why haven’t you started?’

  ‘Can’t do it, sir,’ I’d said. ‘It’s too difficult.’

  ‘Never mind,’ he’d urged in a whisper. ‘Do something. Copy it out, copy it out!’

  And so, to pass the time, I’d copied out the entire paper, word for word. And a fortnight later, when the results were out, I found I had passed!

  ‘But, sir,’ I had stammered, approaching Mr Khushal when I found him alone, ‘I never answered the paper. I couldn’t translate the passage. All I did was copy it out!’

  ‘That’s why I gave you pass marks,’ he’d answered imperturbably. ‘You have such a neat handwriting. If ever you do learn Hindi, my boy, you’ll write a beautiful script!’

  And remembering that moment, I was now filled with compassion for my old teacher; and leaning across, I placed my hand on his knee and said, ‘Sir, if they convict you, I hope it won’t be for long. And when you come out, if you happen to be in Delhi or Ferozepur, please look me up. You see, I’m still rather hopeless at Hindi, and perhaps you could give me tuition. I’d be glad to pay . . .’

  Mr Khushal threw back his head and laughed, and the entire compartment shook with his laughter.

  ‘Teach you Hindi!’ he cried. ‘My dear boy, what gave you the idea that I ever knew any Hindi?’

  ‘But, sir—if not Hindi, what were you teaching us all the time at school?’

  ‘Punjabi!’ he shouted, and everyone jumped in their seats. ‘Pure Punjabi! But how were you to know the difference?’

  Keemat Lal*

  I met Inspector Keemat Lal about two years ago, while I was living in the hot, dusty town of Shahpur in the plains of northern India.

  Keemat Lal had charge of the local police station. He was a heavily built man, slow and r
ather ponderous, and inclined to be lazy; but, like most lazy people, he was intelligent. He was also a failure. He had remained an inspector for a number of years, and had given up all hope of further promotion. His luck was against him, he said. He should never have been a policeman. He had been born under the sign of Capricorn and should really have gone into the restaurant business but now it was too late to do anything about it.

  The Inspector and I had little in common. He was nearing forty, and I was twenty-five. But both of us spoke English, and in Shahpur there were very few people who did. In addition, we were both fond of beer. There were no places of entertainment in Shahpur. The searing heat, the dust that came whirling up from the east, the mosquitoes (almost as numerous as the flies), and the general monotony gave one a thirst for something more substantial than stale lemonade.

  My house was on the outskirts of the town, where we were not often disturbed. On two or three evenings in the week, just as the sun was going down and making it possible for one to emerge from the khas-cooled confines of a dark, high-ceilinged bedroom, Inspector Keemat Lal would appear on the veranda steps, mopping the sweat from his face with a small towel, which he used instead of a handkerchief. My only servant, excited at the prospect of serving an inspector of police, would hurry out with glasses, a bucket of ice and several bottles of the best Indian beer.

  One evening, after we had overtaken our fourth bottle, I said, ‘You must have had some interesting cases in your career, Inspector.’

  ‘Most of them were rather dull,’ he said. ‘At least the successful ones were. The sensational cases usually went unsolved—otherwise I might have been a superintendent by now. I suppose you are talking of murder cases. Do you remember the shooting of the minister of the interior? I was on that one, but it was a political murder and we never solved it.’

  ‘Tell me about a case you solved,’ I said. ‘An interesting one.’ When I saw him looking uncomfortable, I added, ‘You don’t have to worry, Inspector. I’m a very discreet person, in spite of all the beer I consume.’