Time Stops At Shamli & Other Stories Read online

  Ruskin Bond

  TIME STOPS AT SHAMLI AND OTHER STORIES

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Introduction

  The Funeral

  The Room of Many Colours

  Time Stops at Shamli

  Most Beautiful

  The Last Truck Ride

  The Fight

  The Tunnel

  The Summer Season

  Going Home

  Masterji

  Listen to the Wind

  The Haunted Bicycle

  Dead Man’s Gift

  Whispering in the Dark

  He Said it with Arsenic

  The Most Potent Medicine of All

  Hanging at the Mango-Tope

  Eyes of the Cat

  A Crow for All Seasons

  A Tiger in the House

  Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  TIME STOPS AT SHAMLI AND OTHER STORIES

  Ruskin Bond’s first novel, The Room on the Roof, written when he was seventeen, received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written a number of novellas, essays, poems and children’s books, many of which have been published by Penguin. He has also written over 500 short stories and articles that have appeared in magazines and anthologies. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993, the Padma Shri in 1999 and the Padma Bhushan in 2014.

  Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, and grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun, New Delhi and Shimla. As a young man, he spent four years in the Channel Islands and London. He returned to India in 1955. He now lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his adopted family.

  Dedicated

  to the memory of

  my Grandfather,

  William Dudley Clerke

  Introduction

  Some say the real India is to be found in its villages; others would like to think that India is best represented by its big cities and industrial centres. For me, India has always been an atmosphere, an emotional more than a geographical entity; but if I have to transpose this rather nebulous concept into something more concrete, then I would say that India is really to be found in its small towns.

  Small-town India—that’s my India. The India of Shamli and Shahganj, Panipat and Pipalkoti, Alwar and Ambala and Alleppey, Kalka and Kasauli and Kolar Goldfields, and thousands of others along the rivers, along the coasts, straddling the mountains or breaking up the monotony of scrub and desert. Taken together, they set the cities at naught. They are the heart of India, an untapped source of vast human potential, largely ignored except when elections come round.

  I suppose I’m prejudiced, being a small-town boy myself. My bio-data simply reads: Born in Kasauli, small boy in Jamnagar, bigger boy in Dehra Dun, schoolboy in Simla, sundry adventures in Agra, Ambala and Rishikesh, and now holed up in Mussoorie! Dihli dur ast . . . . Delhi is a far cry. And Bombay, where have you been all my life? Have I missed something very precious? Have I, in choosing the dusty lanes of Roorkee or Shahjahanpur, missed out on the sights of Calcutta and Madras, or lost my last chance to lean against the leaning tower of Pisa or savour the aromas of the Venetian canals? If I have, so be it. Our own aromas are sufficiently interesting. I will continue to write of the residents of Gali Ram Rai and other mohallas, and leave it to more restless souls to sing the praises of five-star cuisine and the fascinating world of airports after dark.

  Small towns don’t change in the way that cities change. It is still possible to find the old landmarks and sometimes the old people. There is a timelessness about small-town and cantonment India that I have tried to capture in a story like ‘Time Stops at Shamli’. It begins like ‘The Night Train at Deoli’ in my earlier collection, but this time I step off the train, explore the place, discover a boarding-house inhabited by a number of lonely individuals living in a time capsule like my own, meet an old love, and discover a few things about myself before continuing my journey. We are all ships that pass in the night.

  ‘The Funeral’ is the most recent story in this collection. It describes an incident that is as fresh in my mind today as it was almost fifty years ago. When it comes to loving and living and dying, there is no such thing as being modern and fashionable. Some things will never change. For it isn’t time that’s passing by, my friend; it is you and I.

  Growing up isn’t painful all the time. In ‘The Room of Many Colours’ I describe the magical childhood I experienced before my father’s death. The anguish I have often felt at the rapid disappearance of our forest and animal wealth is expressed in ‘Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright’ in which I identify with the tiger, a loner in a rapidly changing environment. The empathy I have for birds and animals even extends to the world of the crow. In ‘A Crow for All Seasons’ I became a crow—and great fun it was too.

  Occasionally I have indulged myself in the ghost story, of which there are two or three examples in this collection (as there were in the earlier collection). Ghosts are intangibles and can mean different things to different people, and one of these days I must devote a separate book to them. An early practitioner of the form, who had some influence on me, was Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), one of the most neglected writers in this genre. As a freelancer in America he was so badly paid that he frequently slept in the streets; he went to Japan and finally found recognition there for his superb stories of the supernatural. In an essay on ghost stories he wrote: ‘The ghostly always represents some shadow of truth. The ghost story has always happened in our dreams and reminds us of forgotten ex- periences, imaginative and emotional . . . .’ Hence its appeal.

  I have nearly always enjoyed myself in my writing. And if some of that enjoyment has been conveyed to the reader, then I have achieved what I set out to do, and no prizes are solicited.

  Mussoorie

  1 April 1989

  Ruskin Bond

  The Funeral

  ‘I don’t think he should go,’ said Aunt M.

  ‘He’s too small,’ concurred Aunt B. ‘He’ll get upset and probably throw a tantrum. And you know Padre Lal doesn’t like having children at funerals.’

  The boy said nothing. He sat in the darkest corner of the darkened room, his face revealing nothing of what he thought and felt. His father’s coffin lay in the next room, the lid fastened forever over the tired, wistful countenance of the man who had meant so much to the boy. Nobody else had mattered—neither uncles nor aunts nor fond grandparents; least of all the mother who was hundreds of miles away with another husband. He hadn’t seen her since he was four—that was just over five years ago—and he did not remember her very well.

  The house was full of people—friends, relatives, neighbours. Some had tried to fuss over him but had been discouraged by his silence, the absence of tears. The more understanding of them had kept their distance.

  Scattered words of condolence passed back and forth like dragonflies on the wind. ‘Such a tragedy!’. . . . ‘Only forty’ . . . . ‘No one realized how serious it was’. . . . ‘Devoted to the child’. . . .

  It seemed to the boy that everyone who mattered in the hill- station was present. And for the first time they had the run of the house; for his father had not been a sociable man. Books, music, flowers and his stamp collection had been his main preoccupations, apart from the boy.

  A small hearse, drawn by a hill pony, was led in at the gate, and several able-bodied men lifted the coffin and manoeuvred it into the carriage. The crowd drifted away. The cemetery was about a mile down the road, and those who did not have cars would have to walk the distance.

  The boy stared through a wind
ow at the small procession passing through the gate. He’d been forgotten for the moment—left in care of the servants, who were the only ones to stay behind. Outside, it was misty. The mist had crept up the valley and settled like a damp towel on the face of the mountain. Everyone was wet, although it hadn’t rained.

  The boy waited until everyone had gone, and then he left the room and went out on the verandah. The gardener, who had been sitting in a bed of nasturtiums, looked up and asked the boy if he needed anything; but the boy shook his head and retreated indoors. The gardener, looking aggrieved because of the damage done to the flower-beds by the mourners, shambled off to his quarters. The sahib’s death meant that he would be out of job very soon. The house would pass into other hands, the boy would go to an orphanage. There weren’t many people who kept gardeners these days. In the kitchen, the cook was busy preparing the only big meal ever served in the house. All those relatives, and the Padre too, would come back famished, ready for a sombre but nevertheless substantial meal. He too would be out of job soon; but cooks were always in demand.

  The boy slipped out of the house by a back-door and made his way into the lane through a gap in a thicket of dog-roses. When he reached the main road, he could see the mourners wending their way round the hill to the cemetery. He followed at a distance.

  It was the same road he had often taken with his father during their evening walks. The boy knew the name of almost every plant and wildflower that grew on the hillside. These, and various birds and insects, had been described and pointed out to him by his father.

  Looking northwards, he could see the higher ranges of the Himalayas and the eternal snows. The graves in the cemetery were so laid out that if their incumbents did happen to rise one day, the first thing they would see would be the glint of the sun on those snow-covered peaks. Possibly the site had been cho- sen for the view. But to the boy it did not seem as if anyone would be able to thrust aside those massive tombstones and rise from their graves to enjoy the view. Their rest seemed as eternal as the snows. It would take an earthquake to burst those stones asunder and thrust the coffins up from the earth. The boy wondered why people hadn’t made it easier for the dead to rise. They were so securely entombed that it appeared as though no one really wanted them to get out.

  ‘God has need of your father. . . .’ In those words a well- meaning missionary had tried to console him.

  And had God, in the same way, laid claim to the thousands of men, women and children who had been put to rest here in these neat and serried rows? What could he have wanted them for? Of what use are we to God when we are dead, wondered the boy.

  The cemetery gate stood open, but the boy leant against the old stone wall and stared down at the mourners as they shuffled about with the unease of a batsman about to face a very fast bowler. Only this bowler was invisible and would come up stealthily and from behind.

  Padre Lal’s voice droned on through the funeral service, and then the coffin was lowered—down, deep down—the boy was surprised at how far down it seemed to go! Was that other, better world down in the depths of the earth? How could anyone, even a Samson, push his way back to the surface again? Superman did it in comics, but his father was a gentle soul who wouldn’t fight too hard against the earth and the grass and the roots of tiny trees. Or perhaps he’d grow into a tree and escape that way! ‘If ever I’m put away like this,’ thought the boy, ‘I’ll get into the root of a plant and then I’ll become a flower and then maybe a bird will come and carry my seed away. . . . I’ll get out somehow!’

  A few more words from the Padre, and then some of those present threw handfuls of earth over the coffin before moving away.

  Slowly, in twos and threes, the mourners departed. The mist swallowed them up. They did not see the boy behind the wall. They were getting hungry.

  He stood there until they had all gone, then he noticed that the gardeners or caretakers were filling in the grave. He did not know whether to go forward or not. He was a little afraid. And it was too late now. The grave was almost covered.

  He turned and walked away from the cemetery. The road stretched ahead of him, empty, swathed in mist. He was alone. What had his father said to him once? ‘The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone.’

  Well, he was alone, but at the moment he did not feel very strong.

  For a moment he thought his father was beside him, that they were together on one of their long walks. Instinctively he put out his hand, expecting his father’s warm, comforting touch. But there was nothing there, nothing, no one. . . .

  He clenched his fists and pushed them deep down into his pockets. He lowered his head so that no one would see his tears. There were people in the mist, but he did not want to go near them, for they had put his father away.

  ‘He’ll find a way out,’ the boy said fiercely to himself. ‘He’ll get out somehow!’

  The Room of Many Colours

  Last week I wrote a story, and all the time I was writing it I thought it was a good story; but when it was finished and I had read it through, I found that there was something missing, that it didn’t ring true. So I tore it up. I wrote a poem, about an old man sleeping in the sun, and this was true, but it was finished quickly, and once again I was left with the problem of what to write next. And I remembered my father, who taught me to write; and I thought, why not write about my father, and about the trees we planted, and about the people I knew while growing up and about what happened on the way to growing up. . . .

  And so, like Alice, I must begin at the beginning, and in the beginning there was this red insect, just like a velvet button, which I found on the front lawn of the bungalow. The grass was still wet with overnight rain.

  I placed the insect on the palm of my hand and took it into the house to show my father.

  ‘Look, Dad,’ I said, ‘I haven’t seen an insect like this before. Where has it come from?’

  ‘Where did you find it?’ he asked.

  ‘On the grass.’

  ‘It must have come down from the sky,’ he said. ‘It must have come down with the rain.’

  Later he told me how the insect really happened but I preferred his first explanation. It was more fun to have it dropping from the sky.

  I was seven at the time, and my father was thirty-seven, but, right from the beginning, he made me feel that I was old enough to talk to him about everything—insects, people, trees, steam- engines, King George, comics, crocodiles, the Mahatma, the Viceroy, America, Mozambique and Timbuctoo. We took long walks together, explored old ruins, chased butterflies and waved to passing trains.

  My mother had gone away when I was four, and I had very dim memories of her. Most other children had their mothers with them, and I found it a bit strange that mine couldn’t stay. Whenever I asked my father why she’d gone, he’d say, ‘You’ll understand when you grow up.’ And if I asked him where she’d gone, he’d look troubled and say, ‘I really don’t know.’ This was the only question of mine to which he didn’t have an answer.

  But I was quite happy living alone with my father; I had never known any other kind of life.

  We were sitting on an old wall, looking out to sea at a couple of Arab dhows and a tramp steamer, when my father said, ‘Would you like to go to sea one day?’

  ‘Where does the sea go?’ I asked.

  ‘It goes everywhere.’

  ‘Does it go to the end of the world?’

  ‘It goes right round the world. It’s a round world.’

  ‘It can’t be.’

  ‘It is. But it’s so big, you can’t see the roundness. When a fly sits on a water-melon, it can’t see right round the melon, can it? The melon must seem quite flat to the fly. Well, in comparison to the world, we’re much, much smaller than the tiniest of insects.’

  ‘Have you been around the world?’ I asked.

  ‘No, only as far as England. That’s where your grandfather was born.’

  ‘And my grandmother?’

  ‘She came
to India from Norway when she was quite small. Norway is a cold land, with mountains and snow, and the sea cutting deep into the land. I was there as a boy. It’s very beautiful, and the people are good and work hard.’

  ‘I’d like to go there.’

  ‘You will, one day. When you are older, I’ll take you to Norway.’

  ‘Is it better than England?’ ‘It’s quite different.’

  ‘Is it better than India?’ ‘It’s quite different.’

  ‘Is India like England?’

  ‘No, it’s different.’

  ‘Well, what does “different” mean?’

  ‘It means things are not the same. It means people are different. It means the weather is different. It means trees and birds and insects are different.’

  ‘Are English crocodiles different from Indian crocodiles?’

  ‘They don’t have crocodiles in England.’

  ‘Oh, then it must be different.’

  ‘It would be a dull world if it was the same everywhere,’ said my father.

  He never lost patience with my endless questioning. If he wanted a rest, he would take out his pipe and spend a long time lighting it. If this took very long I’d find something else to do. But sometimes I’d wait patiently until the pipe was drawing, and then return to the attack.

  ‘Will we always be in India?’ I asked.

  ‘No, we’ll have to go away one day. You see, it’s hard to explain, but it isn’t really our country.’

  ‘Ayah says it belongs to the King of England, and the jewels in his crown were taken from India, and that when the Indians get their jewels back the King will lose India! But first they have to get the crown from the King, but this is very difficult, she says, because the crown is always on his head. He even sleeps wearing his crown!’

  Ayah was my nanny. She loved me deeply, and was always filling my head with strange and wonderful stories.

  My father did not comment on ayah’s views. All he said was, ‘We’ll have to go away some day.’