Small Towns, Big Stories Read online

  In my room I was battling against the elements, for the door would not close, and the rain swept into the room and soaked my cot. When finally I succeeded in closing the door, I discovered that the roof was leaking and the water was trickling down the walls, running through the dusty design I had made with my feet. I placed tins and mugs in strategic positions and, satisfied that everything was now under control, sat on the cot to watch the rooftops through my windows.

  There was a loud banging on the door. It flew open, and there was Suraj standing on the threshold, drenched. Coming in, he began to dry himself while I made desperate efforts to close the door again.

  ‘Let’s make some tea,’ he said.

  Glasses of hot, sweet milky tea on a rainy day…it was enough to make me feel fresh and full of optimism. We sat on the cot, enjoying the brew.

  ‘One day, I’ll write a book,’ I said. ‘Not just a thriller, but a real book, about real people. Perhaps about you and me and Pipalnagar. And then we’ll be famous and our troubles will be over and new troubles will begin. I don’t mind problems as long as they are new. While you’re studying, I’ll write my book. I’ll start tonight. It is an auspicious time, the first night of the monsoon.’

  A tree must have fallen across the wires somewhere, because the lights would not come on. So I lit a small oil lamp, and while it spluttered in the steamy darkness Suraj opened his book and, with one hand on the book, the other playing with his toe—this helped him to concentrate!—he began to study. I took the inkpot down from the shelf, and finding it empty, added a little rainwater to it from one of the mugs. I sat down beside Suraj and began to write, but the pen was no good and made blotches all over the paper. And, although I was full of writing just then, I didn’t really know what I wanted to say.

  So I went out and began pacing up and down the road. There I found Pitamber, a little drunk, very merry, and prancing about in the middle of the road.

  ‘What are you dancing for?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m happy, so I’m dancing,’ said Pitamber.

  ‘And why are you happy?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I’m dancing,’ he said.

  The rain stopped and the neem trees gave out a strong, sweet smell.

  XII

  Flowers in Pipalnagar—did they exist? As a child I knew a garden in Lucknow where there were beds of phlox and petunias and another garden where only roses grew. In the fields around Pipalnagar was thorn apple—a yellow buttercup nestling among thorn leaves. But in Pipalnagar Bazaar there were no flowers except one—a marigold growing out of a crack on my balcony. I had removed the plaster from the base of the plant, and filled in a little earth which I watered every morning. The plant was healthy, and sometimes it produced a small orange marigold.

  Sometimes Suraj plucked a flower and kept it in his tray, among the combs, buttons and scent bottles. Sometimes he gave the flower to a passing child, once to a small boy who immediately tore it to shreds. Suraj was back on his rounds, as his exams were over.

  Whenever he was tired of going from house to house, Suraj would sit beneath a shady banyan or peepul tree, put his tray aside, and take out his flute. The haunting notes travelled down the road in the afternoon stillness, drawing children to him. They would sit beside him and be very quiet when he played, because there was something melancholic and appealing about the tune. Suraj sometimes made flutes out of pieces of bamboo, but he never sold them. He would give them to the children he liked. He would sell almost anything, but not flutes.

  Suraj sometimes played the flute at night, when he lay awake, unable to sleep; but even though I slept, I could hear the music in my dreams. Sometimes he took his flute with him to the crooked tree and played for the benefit of the birds. The parrots made harsh noises in response and flew away. Once, when Suraj was playing his flute to a small group of children, he had a fit. The flute fell from his hands. And he began to roll about in the dust on the roadside. The children became frightened and ran away, but they did not stay away for long. The next time they heard the flute, they came to listen as usual.

  XIII

  It was Lord Krishna’s birthday, and the rain came down as heavily as it is said to have done on the day he was born. Krishna is the best beloved of all the gods. Young mothers laugh or weep as they read or hear the pranks of his boyhood; young men pray to be as tall and as strong as Krishna was when he killed King Kamsa’s elephant and wrestlers; young girls dream of a lover as daring as Krishna to carry them off in a war chariot; grown men envy the wisdom and statesmanship with which he managed the affairs of his kingdom.

  The rain came so unexpectedly that it took everyone by surprise. In seconds, people were drenched, and within minutes, the streets were flooded. The temple tank overflowed, the railway lines disappeared, and the old wall near the bus stop shivered and silently fell—the sound of its collapse drowned in the downpour. A naked young man with a dancing bear cavorted in the middle of the vegetable market. Pitamber’s rickshaw churned through the floodwater while he sang lustily as he worked.

  Wading through knee-deep water down the road, I saw the roadside vendors salvaging whatever they could. Plastic toys, cabbages and utensils floated away and were seized by urchins. The water had risen to the level of the shop fronts and the floors were awash. Deep Chand and Ramu, with the help of a customer, were using buckets to bail the water out of their shop. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun and the sun came out. The water began to find an outlet, flooding other low-lying areas, and a paper boat came sailing between my legs.

  Next morning, the morning on which the result of Suraj’s examinations was due, I rose early—the first time I ever got up before Suraj—and went down to the news agency. A small crowd of students had gathered at the bus stop, joking with each other and hiding their nervousness with a show of indifference. There were not many passengers on the first bus, and there was a mad grab for newspapers as the bundle landed with a thud on the pavement. Within half-an-hour, the newsboy had sold all his copies. It was the best day of the year for him.

  I went through the columns relating to Pipalnagar, but I couldn’t find Suraj’s roll number on the list of successful candidates. I had the number on a slip of paper, and I looked at it again to make sure I had compared it correctly with the others; then I went through the newspaper once more. When I returned to the room, Suraj was sitting on the doorstep. I didn’t have to tell him he had failed—he knew by the look on my face. I sat down beside him, and we said nothing for some time.

  ‘Never mind,’ Suraj said eventually. ‘I will pass next time.’

  I realized I was more depressed than he was and that he was trying to console me.

  ‘If only you’d had more time,’ I said.

  ‘I have a year. And you will have time to finish your book, and then we can go away together. Another year of Pipalnagar won’t be so bad. As long as I have your friendship almost everything can be tolerated.’

  He stood up, the tray hanging from his shoulders. ‘Is there anything you’d like to buy?’

  XIV

  Another year of Pipalnagar! But it was not to be. A short time later, I received a letter from the editor of a newspaper, calling me to Delhi for an interview. My friends insisted that I should go. Such an opportunity would not come again.

  But I needed a shirt. The few I possessed were either frayed at the collar or torn at the shoulders. I hadn’t been able to afford a new shirt for over a year, and I couldn’t afford one now. Struggling writers weren’t expected to dress well, but I felt in order to get the job I would need both a haircut and a clean shirt.

  Where was I to go to get a shirt? Suraj generally wore an old red-striped T-shirt; he washed it every second evening, and by morning it was dry and ready to wear again; but it was tight even on him. He did not have another. Besides, I needed something white, something respectable!

  I went to Deep Chand who had a collection of shirts. He was only too glad to lend me one. But they were all brightly coloured—pinks
, purples and magentas… No editor was going to be impressed by a young writer in a pink shirt. They looked fine on Deep Chand, but he had no need to look respectable.

  Finally, Pitamber came to my rescue. He didn’t bother with shirts himself, except in winter, but he was able to borrow a clean white shirt from a guard at the jail, who’d got it from the relative of a convict in exchange for certain favours.

  ‘This shirt will make you look respectable,’ said Pitamber. ‘To be respectable—what an adventure!’

  XV

  Freedom. The moment the bus was out of Pipalnagar, and the fields opened out on all sides, I knew that I was free, that I had always been free. Only my own weakness, hesitation, and the habits that had grown around me had held me back. All I had to do was sit in a bus and go somewhere.

  I sat near the open window of the bus and let the cool breeze from the fields play against my face. Herons and snipe waded among the lotus roots in flat green ponds. Blue jays swooped around telegraph poles. Children jumped naked into the canals that wound through the fields. Because I was happy, it seemed to me that everyone else was happy—the driver, the conductor, the passengers, the farmers in the fields and those driving bullock carts. When two women behind me started quarrelling over their seats, I helped to placate them. Then I took a small girl on my knee and pointed out camels, buffaloes, vultures and pariah dogs.

  Six hours later, the bus crossed the bridge over the swollen Yamuna River, passed under the walls of the great Red Fort built by a Mughal emperor, and entered the old city of Delhi. I found it strange to be in a city again, after several years in Pipalnagar. It was a little frightening too. I felt like a stranger. No one was interested in me.

  In Pipalnagar, people wanted to know each other, or at least to know about one another. In Delhi, no one cared who you were or where you came from, like big cities almost everywhere. It was prosperous but without a heart.

  After a day and a night of loneliness, I found myself wishing that Suraj had accompanied me; wishing that I was back in Pipalnagar. But when the job was offered to me—at a starting salary of three hundred rupees per month, a princely sum compared to what I had been making on my own—I did not have the courage to refuse it. After accepting the job—which was to commence in a week’s time—I spent the day wandering through the bazaars, down the wide, shady roads of the capital, resting under the jamun trees, and thinking all the time what I would do in the months to come.

  I slept at the railway waiting room and all night long I heard the shunting and whistling of engines which conjured up visions of places with sweet names like Kumbakonam, Krishnagiri, Polonnarurawa. I dreamt of palm-fringed beaches and inland lagoons; of the echoing chambers of deserted cities, red sandstone and white marble; of temples in the sun; and elephants crossing wide, slow-moving rivers…

  XVI

  Pitamber was on the platform when the train steamed into the Pipalnagar station in the early hours of a damp September morning. I waved to him from the carriage window, and shouted that everything had gone well.

  But everything was not well here. When I got off the train, Pitamber told me that Suraj had been ill—that he’d had a fit on a lonely stretch of road the previous afternoon and had lain in the sun for over an hour. Pitamber had found him, suffering from heatstroke, and brought him home. When I saw him, he was sitting up on the string bed drinking hot tea. He looked pale and weak, but his smile was reassuring.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I will be all right.’

  ‘He was bad last night,’ said Pitamber. ‘He had a fever and kept talking, as in a dream. But what he says is true—he is better this morning.’

  ‘Thanks to Pitamber,’ said Suraj. ‘It is good to have friends.’

  ‘Come with me to Delhi, Suraj,’ I said. ‘I have got a job now. You can live with me and attend a school regularly.’

  ‘It is good for friends to help each other,’ said Suraj, ‘but only after I have passed my exam will I join you in Delhi. I made myself this promise. Poor Pipalnagar—nobody wants to stay here. Will you be sorry to leave?’

  ‘Yes, I will be sorry. A part of me will still be here.’

  XVII

  Deep Chand was happy to know that I was leaving. ‘I’ll follow you soon,’ he said. ‘There is money to be made in Delhi, cutting hair. Girls are keeping it short these days.’

  ‘But men are growing it long.’

  ‘True. So I shall open a barber shop for ladies and a beauty salon for men! Ramu can attend to the ladies.’

  Ramu winked at me in the mirror. He was still at the stage of teasing girls on their way to school or college.

  The snip of Deep Chand’s scissors made me sleepy, as I sat in his chair. His fingers beat a rhythmic tattoo on my scalp. It was my last haircut in Pipalnagar, and Deep Chand did not charge me for it. I promised to write as soon as I had settled down in Delhi.

  The next day when Suraj was stronger, I said, ‘Come, let us go for a walk and visit our crooked tree. Where is your flute, Suraj?’

  ‘I don’t know. Let us look for it.’

  We searched the room and our belongings for the flute but could not find it.

  ‘It must have been left on the roadside,’ said Suraj. ‘Never mind. I will make another.’

  I could picture the flute lying in the dust on the roadside and somehow this made me sad. But Suraj was full of high spirits as we walked across the railway lines and through the fields.

  ‘The rains are over,’ he said, kicking off his chappals and lying down on the grass. ‘You can smell the autumn in the air. Somehow, it makes me feel light-hearted. Yesterday I was sad, and tomorrow I might be sad again, but today I know that I am happy. I want to live on and on. One lifetime cannot satisfy my heart.’

  ‘A day in a lifetime,’ I said. ‘I’ll remember this day—the way the sun touches us, the way the grass bends, the smell of this leaf as I crush it…’

  XVIII

  Every morning at six the first bus arrives, and the passengers alight, looking sleepy and dishevelled and rather discouraged by their first sight of Pipalnagar. When they have gone their various ways, the bus is driven into the shed. Cows congregate at the dustbin and the pavement dwellers come to life, stretching their tired limbs on the hard stone steps. I carry the bucket up the steps to my room, and bathe for the last time on the open balcony. In the villages, the buffaloes are wallowing in green ponds while naked urchins sit astride them, scrubbing their backs, and a crow or water bird perches on their glistening necks. The parrots are busy in the crooked tree, and a slim green snake basks in the sun on our island near the brick kiln. In the hills, the mists have lifted and the distant mountains are fringed with snow.

  It is autumn, and the rains are over. The earth meets the sky in one broad, bold sweep.

  A land of thrusting hills. Terraced hills, wood-covered and windswept. Mountains where the gods speak gently to the lonely. Hills of green grass and grey rock, misty at dawn, hazy at noon, molten at sunset, where fierce, fresh torrents rush to the valleys below. A quiet land of fields and ponds, shaded by ancient trees and ringed with palms, where sacred rivers are touched by temples, where temples are touched by southern seas.

  This is the land I should write about. Pipalnagar should be forgotten. I should turn aside from it to sing instead of the splendours of exotic places.

  But only yesterdays are truly splendid… And there are other singers, sweeter than I, to sing of tomorrow. I can only write of today, of Pipalnagar, where I have lived and loved.

  THE FUNERAL

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

  ‘He’s too young,’ 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 ma
n 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 in 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 window 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 onto the veranda. 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 a 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 a job soon; but cooks were always in demand.