Small Towns, Big Stories Read online

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, why keep listening to that wretched clock? Time must have a stop.

  Walking along the pavement with a jaunty air, hat at an angle, humming an old tune, was Colonel Jolly, recently retired. He was on his way to the bank to collect his pension, and he enjoyed walking into town, nodding or waving to acquaintances, stopping occasionally to buy a paper or an ice cream, for he was still a boy as far as ice creams went. He was enjoying his retirement; his sons were settled abroad, his wife was at home baking a cake for his evening tea. He was in love with life and he hadn’t a care in the world.

  As he passed below the tall apartment building, something came between him and the sun, blocking out his vision. He had no idea what it was that struck him, bringing about a total eclipse. One moment he was striding along, at peace with the world; the next, he was flat on the pavement, buried beneath a mountain of flesh that had struck him like a comet.

  Both the Colonel and Rani Ma were rushed to the nearest hospital. The Colonel’s neck and spine had been shattered and he died without recovering consciousness. Rani Ma took some time to recover; but, thanks to her fall, having been cushioned by the poor Colonel, recover she did, retiring to a farmhouse on the outskirts of town.

  Colonel Jolly, lover of life, had lost his to a cruel blow of fate. Rani Ma, who hated living, survived into a grumpy old age.

  She is still waiting for the clock to strike thirteen.

  THE HORSESHOE

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Rakesh, when he was a small boy, touching the huge horseshoe that stood on my desk.

  ‘It’s a horseshoe,’ I said, ‘I keep it for luck.’

  ‘But it’s so big! It must have been a very big horse. Like a dinosaur!’

  ‘Not a dinosaur, but an English carthorse. They are not very tall, but they are sturdy animals, used to pull carts and ploughs. And they have big feet. This is a carthorse’s shoe. About four times bigger than the shoes of the little hill ponies we see in Mussoorie.’

  ‘Are there any carthorses in India?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. You’ll find them on farms in England or France.’

  ‘Then how did you get it, Dada?’

  ‘Miss Bean gave it to me.’

  And then I told him about Miss Bean, the old English lady who had grown up in Mussoorie, and who lived in Maplewood Cottage when I came to live there in 1963.

  Yes, it’s exactly fifty years since I came to live in the hill station, renting the little cottage that stood on its own on the edge of a maple and oak forest. Rakesh wasn’t born then.

  Miss Bean was in her eighties, the ‘last surviving Bean’ as she described herself. Her parents, brother and sister were all buried in the Camel’s Back Cemetery. She received a tiny pension and lived in a small room full of bric-a-brac, bits of furniture rescued from her old home, and paintings done by her late mother. I was on my own then, living on sardines, baked beans and other tinned stuff. Sometimes I shared my simple meals with her.

  She told me stories of Mussoorie’s early days—the balls and fancy dress parties at Hakman’s and the Savoy; the scandals that erupted from time to time; houses that were said to be haunted; friends who had gone away or gone to their Maker; her father’s military exploits.

  I had noticed the big horseshoe on the mantelpiece, and asked her how she came by it. ‘My father brought it out from England,’ she said. ‘It was supposed to bring us luck. But the good luck ran out long ago… You can have it, if you like it.’ And she presented me with the horseshoe.

  Well, it’s been with me all these years, going almost unnoticed most of the time, except when a visitor notices it and comments on its size.

  Miss Bean passed away in her sleep, while I was still at Maplewood. Prem came to work for me, and brought his wife and three-month old Rakesh from the village to live with us. They stayed for the rest of my long sojourn in the hills.

  Rakesh is now forty. He and his pretty wife Beena have three school-going children. The horseshoe is still reclining on my desk.

  Beena was asking me about it this morning. ‘Did it really bring you good luck?’

  ‘We make our own luck,’ I said. ‘But that horseshoe has been with us all these years, and it always reminds me of its former owner, a little old lady who didn’t have much luck, but who enjoyed living and stood alone, without complaining. It’s courage, not luck that takes us through to the end of the road.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Almost all my early stories, novellas and essays made their first appearance in different periodicals and anthologies, both Indian and international. I would like to acknowledge these publications in the order in which the stories in this book are published. If a piece is appearing in the book for the first time I have not mentioned it in the acknowledgements below.

  ‘The Big Race’: The Road to the Bazaar, Rupa Publications; ‘Up the Spiral Staircase’: the Christian Science Monitor; ‘A Long Walk for Bina’: A Long Walk for Bina, Rupa Publications; ‘When the Guavas are Ripe’: The Road to the Bazaar, Rupa Publications; ‘The Night Train at Deoli’: The Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories, Penguin India; ‘The Visitor’: The Road to the Bazaar, Rupa Publications; ‘Of Rivers and Pilgrims’: the Christian Science Monitor; ‘A Good Place for Trees’: School Magazine, N. S. W., Australia; ‘Time Stops at Shamli’: Dust on the Mountain, Penguin India; ‘Bus Stop, Pipalnagar’: The Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories, Penguin India; ‘The Funeral’, ‘Some Hill Station Ghosts’: Roads to Mussoorie, Rupa Publications; ‘A Hill Station’s Vintage Murders’: Strange Men, Strange Places, Rupa Publications; ‘Kipling’s Simla’: Strange Men, Strange Places, Rupa Publications; ‘Grandfather’s Earthquake’: Strange Men, Strange Places, Rupa Publications; ‘Voting at Barlowganj’: Blackwood’s Magazine; ‘A Magic Oil’: Tales of Fosterganj, Aleph Book Company; ‘The Tail of the Lizard’: Tales of Fosterganj, Aleph Book Company.

  R. B.