Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories Read online

  ‘Oh,’ she said, a little breathlessly.

  ‘Would you care to go to England?’ ‘I want to go everywhere,’ she said, ‘To America and Africa and Japan and Honolulu.’

  ‘Maybe you will,’ I said. ‘I’m going everywhere, and no one can stop me . . . But what is it you want? What did you come for?’

  ‘I want some flowers but I can’t reach them.’ She waved her hand towards the garden. ‘That tree, see?’

  The coral tree stood in front of the house surrounded by pools of water and broken, fallen blossoms. The branches of the tree were thick with the scarlet, pea-shaped flowers.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Just let me get ready.’

  The tree was easy to climb, and I made myself comfortable on one of the lower branches, smiling down at the serious upturned face of the girl.

  ‘I’ll throw them down to you,’ I said.

  I bent a branch but the wood was young and green, and I had to twist it several times before it snapped.

  ‘I’m not sure that I ought to do this,’ I said, as I dropped the flowering branch to the girl.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said.

  ‘Well, if you’re ready to speak up for me —’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  I felt a sudden nostalgic longing for childhood and an urge to remain behind in my grandfather’s house with its tangled memories and ghosts of yesteryear. But I was the only one left, and what could I do except climb coral and jack-fruit trees?

  ‘Have you many friends?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Who is the best?’

  ‘The cook. He lets me stay in the kitchen, which is more interest- ing than the house. And I like to watch him cooking. And he gives me things to eat, and tells me stories . . .’

  ‘And who is your second best friend?’

  She inclined her head to one side, and thought very hard.

  ‘I’ll make you the second best,’ she said.

  I sprinkled coral-blossoms over her head. ‘That’s very kind of you. I’m happy to be your second best.’

  A tonga-bell sounded at the gate, and I looked out from the tree and said, ‘It’s come for me. I have to go now.’

  I climbed down.

  ‘Will you help me with my suitcases?’ I asked, as we walked together towards the verandah. ‘There is no one here to help me. I am the last to go. Not because I want to go, but because I have to.’

  I sat down on the cot and packed a few last things in a suitcase. All the doors of the house were locked. On my way to the station I would leave the keys with the caretaker. I had already given instruc- tions to an agent to try and sell the house. There was nothing more to be done.

  We walked in silence to the waiting tonga, thinking and wondering about each other.

  ‘Take me to the station.’ I said to the tonga-driver.

  The girl stood at the side of the path, on the damp red earth, gazing at me.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I hope I shall see you again.’

  ‘I’ll see you in London,’ she said. ‘Or America or Japan. I want to go everywhere.’

  ‘I’m sure you will,’ I said. ‘And perhaps I’ll come back and we’ll meet again in this garden. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?’

  She nodded and smiled. We knew it was an important moment. The tonga-driver spoke to his pony, and the carriage set off down the gravel-path, rattling a little. The girl and I waved to each other.

  In the girl’s hand was a sprig of coral blossom. As she waved, the blossoms fell apart and danced lightly in the breeze.

  ‘Goodbye!’ I called.

  ‘Goodbye,’ called the girl.

  The ribbon had come loose from her pigtail and lay on the ground with the coral blossoms.

  ‘I’m going everywhere,’ I said to myself, ‘and no one can stop me.’ And she was fresh and clean like the rain and the red earth.

  The Photograph

  I was ten years old. My grandmother sat on the string bed, under the mango tree. It was late summer and there were sunflowers in the garden and a warm wind in the trees. My grandmother was knitting a woolen scarf for the winter months. She was very old, dressed in a plain white sari; her eyes were not very strong now, but her fingers moved quickly with the needles, and the needles kept clicking all afternoon. Grandmother had white hair, but there were very few wrinkles on her skin.

  I had come home after playing cricket on the maidan. I had taken my meal, and now I was rummaging in a box of old books and family heirlooms that had just that day been brought out of the attic by my mother. Nothing in the box interested me very much, except for a book with colourful pictures of birds and butterflies. I was going through the book, looking at the pictures, when I found a small photograph between the pages. It was a faded picture, a little yellow and foggy; it was a picture of a girl standing against a wall, and behind the wall there was nothing but sky; but from the other side a pair of hands reached up, as though someone was going to climb the wall. There were flowers growing near the girl, but I couldn’t tell what they were; there was a creeper too, but it was just a creeper.

  I ran out into the garden. ‘Granny!’ I shouted. ‘Look at this picture! I found it in the box of old things. Whose picture is it?’

  I jumped on the bed beside my grandmother, and she wallopped me on the bottom and said, ‘Now I’ve lost count of my stitches, and the next time you do that I’ll make you finish the scarf yourself.’

  Granny was always threatening to teach me how to knit, which I thought was a disgraceful thing for a boy to do; it was a good deter- rent for keeping me out of mischief. Once I had torn the drawing- room curtains, and Granny had put a needle and thread in my hand and made me stitch the curtain together, even though I made long, two-inch stitches, which had to be taken out by my mother and done again.

  She took the photograph from my hand, and we both stared at it for quite a long time. The girl had long, loose hair, and she wore a long dress that nearly covered her ankles, and sleeves that reached her wrists, and there were a lot of bangles on her hands; but, despite all this drapery, the girl appeared to be full of freedom and move- ment; she stood with her legs apart and her hands on her hips, and she had a wide, almost devilish smile on her face.

  ‘Whose picture is it?’ I asked.

  ‘A little girl’s, of course,’ said Grandmother. ‘Can’t you tell?’

  ‘Yes, but did you know the girl?’

  ‘Yes, I knew her,’ said Granny, ‘but she was a very wicked girl and I shouldn’t tell you about her. But I’ll tell you about the photograph. It was taken in your grandfather’s house, about sixty years ago and that’s the garden wall, and over the wall there was a road going to town.’

  ‘Whose hands are they,’ I asked, ‘coming up from the other side?’ Grandmother squinted and looked closely at the picture, and shook her head. ‘It’s the first time I noticed,’ she said. ‘That must have been been the sweeper boy’s. Or maybe they were your grandfather’s.’

  ‘They don’t look like grandfather’s hands,’ I said. ‘His hands are all bony.’

  ‘Yes, but this was sixty years ago.’

  ‘Didn’t he climb up the wall, after the photo?’

  ‘No, nobody climbed up. At least, I don’t remember.’

  ‘And you remember well, Granny.’

  ‘Yes, I remember . . . I remember what is not in the photograph. It was a spring day, and there was cool breeze blowing, nothing like this. Those flowers at the girl’s feet, they were marigolds, and the Bougainvillaea creeper, it was a mass of purple. You cannot see these colours in the photo, and even if you could, as nowadays, you wouldn’t be able to smell the flowers or feel the breeze.’

  ‘And what about the girl?’I said. ‘Tell me about the girl.’

  ‘Well, she was a wicked girl,’ said Granny. ‘You don’t know the trouble they had getting her into those fine clothes she’s wearing.’

  ‘I think they are terrible clothes,’ I said.


  ‘So did she. Most of the time, she hardly wore a thing. She used to go swimming in a muddy pool with a lot of ruffianly boys, and ride on the backs of buffaloes. No boy ever teased her, though, because she could kick and scratch and pull his hair out!’

  ‘She looks like it too,’ I said. ‘You can tell by the way she’s smiling. At any moment something’s going to happen.’

  ‘Something did happen,’ said Granny. ‘Her mother wouldn’t let her take off the clothes afterwards, so she went swimming in them, and lay for half-an-hour in the mud.’

  I laughed heartily and Grandmother laughed too.

  ‘Who was the girl?’ I said. ‘You must tell me who she was.’ ‘No, that wouldn’t do,’ said Grandmother. ‘I won’t tell you.’

  I knew the girl in the photo was really Grandmother, but I pre- tended I didn’t know. I knew, because Grandmother still smiled in the same way, even though she didn’t have as many teeth.

  ‘Come on, Granny,’ I said, ‘tell me, tell me.’

  But Grandmother shook her head and carried on with the knit- ting; and I held the photograph in my hand looking from it to my grandmother and back again, trying to find points in common between the old lady and the little pig-tailed girl. A lemon-coloured butterfly settled on the end of Grandmother’s knitting needle, and stayed there while the needles clicked away. I made a grab at the butterfly, and it flew off in a dipping flight and settled on a sunflower.

  ‘I wonder whose hands they were,’ whispered Grandmother to herself, with her head bowed, and her needles clicking away in the soft warm silence of that summer afternoon.

  The Window

  I came in the spring, and took the room on the roof. It was a long low building which housed several families; the roof was flat, except for my room and a chimney. I don’t know whose room owned the chimney, but my room owned the roof. And from the window of my room I owned the world.

  But only from the window.

  The banyan tree, just opposite, was mine, and its inhabitants my subjects. They were two squirrels, a few mynahs, a crow, and at night, a pair of flying-foxes. The squirrels were busy in the afternoon, the birds in the morning and evening, the foxes at night. I wasn’t very busy that year; not as busy as the inhabitants of the banyan tree.

  There was also a mango tree but that came later, in the summer, when I met Koki and the mangoes were ripe.

  At first, I was lonely in my room. But then I discovered the power of my window. It looked out on the banyan tree, on the garden, on the broad path that ran beside the building, and out over the roofs of other houses, over roads and fields, as far as the horizon. The path was not a very busy one, but it held variety: an ayah, with a baby in a pram; the postman, an event in himself; the fruit-seller, the toy-seller, calling their wares in high-pitched familiar cries; the rent- collector; a posse of cyclists; a long chain of school-girls; a lame beggar . . . all passed my way, the way of my window . . .

  In the early summer, a tonga came rattling and jingling down the path and stopped in front of the house. A girl and an elderly lady climbed down, and a servant unloaded their baggage. They went into the house and the tonga moved off, the horse snorting a little.

  The next morning the girl looked up from the garden and saw me at my window.

  She had long black hair that fell to her waist, tied with a single red ribbon: her eyes were black like her hair and just as shiny. She must have been about ten or eleven years old.

  ‘Hallo,’ I said with a friendly smile.

  She looked suspiciously at me, ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m a ghost.’

  She laughed, and her laugh had a gay, mocking quality: ‘You look like one!’

  I didn’t think her remark particulary flattering, but I had asked for it. I stopped smiling anyway: most children don’t like adults smiling at them all the time.

  ‘What have you got up there?’ she asked.

  ‘Magic,’ I said.

  She laughed again but this time without mockery. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said.

  ‘Why don’t you come up and see for yourself?’

  She hesitated a little but came round to the steps and began climbing them, slowly, cautiously. And when she entered the room, she brought in a magic of her own.

  ‘Where’s your magic?’ she asked, looking me in the eye.

  ‘Come here,’ I said, and I took her to the window, and showed her the world.

  She said nothing but stared out of the window uncomprehend- ingly at first, and then with increasing interest. And after some time she turned round and smiled at me, and we were friends.

  I only knew that her name was Koki, and that she had come with her aunt for the summer months; I didn’t need to know any more about her, and she didn’t need know anything about me except that I wasn’t really a ghost — not the frightening sort any way . . . She came up my steps nearly every day, and joined me at the win- dow. There was a lot of excitement to be had in our world, espe- cially when the rains broke.

  At the first rumblings, women would rush outside to retrieve the washing on the clothes-line and, if there was a breeze to chase a few garments across the compound. When the rain came, it came with a vengeance, making a bog of the garden and a river of the path.

  A cyclist would come riding furiously down the path, an elderly gentleman would be having difficulty with an umbrella, naked children would be frisking about in the rain. Sometimes Koki would run out on the roof, and shout and dance in the rain. And the rain would come through the open door and window of the room, flooding the floor and making an island of the bed.

  But the window was more fun than anything else. It gave us the power of detachment: we were deeply interested in the life around us, but we were not involved in it.

  ‘It is like a cinema,’ said Koki ‘The window is the screen, the world is the picture.’

  Soon the mangoes were ripe, and Koki was in the branches of the mango tree as often as she was in my room. From the window I had a good view of the tree, and we spoke to each other from the same height. We ate far too many mangoes, at least five a day.

  ‘Let’s make a garden on the roof,’ suggested Koki. She was full of ideas like this.

  ‘And how do you propose to do that?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s easy. We bring up mud and bricks and make the flower-beds. Then we plant the seeds. We’ll grow all sorts of flowers.’

  ‘The roof will fall in,’ I predicted.

  But it didn’t. We spent two days carrying buckets of mud up the steps to the roof and laying out the flower-beds. It was very hard work, but Koki did most of it. When the beds were ready, we had the opening ceremony. Apart from a few small plants collected from the garden below we had only one species of seeds — pumpkin . . .

  We planted the pumpkin-seeds in the mud, and felt proud of ourselves.

  But it rained heavily that night, and in the morning I discovered that everything — except the bricks — had been washed away.

  So we returned to the window.

  A mynah had been in a fight — with the crow perhaps — and the feathers had been knocked off its head. A bougainvillaea that had been climbing the wall had sent a long green shoot in through the window.

  Koki said, ‘Now we can’t shut the window without spoiling the creeper.’

  ‘Then we will never close the window,’ I said.

  And we let the creeper into the room.

  The rains passed, and an autumn wind came whispering through the branches of the banyan tree. There were red leaves on the ground, and the wind picked them up and blew them about, so that they looked like butterflies. I would watch the sun rise in the morning, the sky all red, until its first rays splashed the window-sill and crept up the walls of the room. And in the evening Koki and I watched the sun go down in a sea of fluffy clouds; sometimes the clouds were pink, and sometimes orange; they were always coloured clouds, framed in the window.

  ‘I’m going tomorrow,’ said Koki one evening.


  I was too surprised to say anything.

  ‘You stay here forever, don’t you?’ she said.

  I remained silent.

  ‘When I come again next year you will still be here, won’t you?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but the window will still be here.’

  ‘Oh, do be here next year,’ she said, ‘or someone will close the window!’

  In the morning the tonga was at the door, and the servant, the aunt and Koki were in it. Koki waved up to me at my window. Then the driver flicked the reins, the wheels of the carriage creaked and rattled, the bell jingled. Down the path went the tonga, down the path and through the gate, and all the time Koki waved; and from the gate I must have looked like a ghost, standing alone at the high window, amongst the bougainvillaea.

  When the tonga was out of sight I took the spray of bougainvillaea in my hand and pushed it out of the room. Then I closed the window. It would be opened only when the spring and Koki came again.

  Chachi’s Funeral

  Chachi died at 6 p.m. on Wednesday the 5th of April, and came to life again exactly twenty minutes later. This is how it happened.

  Chachi was, as a rule, a fairly tolerant, easy-going person, who waddled about the house without paying much attention to the swarms of small sons, daughters, nephews and nieces who poured in and out of the rooms. But she had taken a particular aversion to her ten-year old nephew, Sunil. She was a simple woman and could not understand Sunil. He was a little brighter than her own sons, more sensitive, and inclined to resent a scolding or a cuff across the head. He was better looking then her own children. All this, in addition to the fact that she resented having to cook for the boy while both his parents went out at office jobs, led her to grumble at him a little more than was really necessary.

  Sunil sensed his aunt’s jealousy and fanned its flames. He was a mischievous boy, and did little things to annoy her, like bursting paper-bags behind her while she dozed, or commenting on the width of her pyjamas when they were hung out to dry. On the evening of the 5th of April, he had been in particulary high spirits, and feeling hungry, entered the kitchen with the intention of help- ing himself to some honey. But the honey was on the top shelf, and Sunil wasn’t quite tall enough to grasp the bottle. He got his fingers to it but as he tilted it towards him, it fell to the ground with a crash.