The Ruskin Bond Mini Bus Page 5

  We were soon on the glacier. And we remained on it for a long time. For every two steps forward, we slid one step backward. Our progress was slow and awkward. Sometimes, after advancing several yards across the ice at a steep incline, one of us would slip back and the others would have to slither down to help him up. At one particularly difficult spot, I dropped our water bottle and, grabbing at it, lost my footing, fell full-length and went sliding some twenty feet down the ice-slope.

  I had sprained my wrist and hurt my knee, and was to prove a liability for the rest of the trek.

  Kamal tied his handkerchief round my hand, and Anil took charge of the water-bottle, which we had filled with ice. Using my good hand to grab Bisnu's legs whenever I slipped, I struggled on behind the others.

  It was almost noon, and we were quite famished, when we put our feet on grass again. And then we had another steep climb, clutching at roots and grasses, before we reached the path that Bisnu had spoken about. It was little more than a goat-track, but it took us round the mountain and brought us within sight of the dak bungalow.

  "I could eat a whole chicken," said Kamal.

  "I could eat two," I said.

  "I could eat a Snowman," said Bisnu.

  "And I could eat the chowkidar," said Anil.

  Fortunately for the chowkidar, he had anticipated our hunger; and when we staggered into the bungalow late in the afternoon, we found a meal waiting for us. True, there was 110 chicken—but, so ravenous did we feel, that even the lowly onion tasted delicious!

  We had Bisnu to thank for getting us back successfully. He had brought us over mountain and glacier with all the skill and confidence of a boy who had the Himalayas in his blood.

  We took our time getting back to Kapkote; fished in the Sarayu river; bathed with the village boys we had seen on our way up; collected straw-berries and ferns and wild flowers; and finally said good-bye to Bisnu.

  Anil wanted to take Bisnu along with us, but the boy's parents refused to let him go, saying that he was too young for the life of a city; but we were of the opinion that Bisnu could have taught the city boys a few things.

  "Never mind," said Kamal. "We'll go on another trip next year, and we'll take you with us, Bisnu. We'll write and let you know our plans."

  This promise made Bisnu happy, and he saw us off at the bus stop, shouldering our bedding to the end. Then he skimmed up the trunk of a fir tree to have a better view of us leaving, and we saw him waving to us from the tree as our bus went round the bend from Kapkote, and the hills were left behind and the plains stretched out below.

  The Last Truck Ride

  [Twice a day Pritam Singh takes his battered, old truck on the narrow, mountainous roads, to the limestone quarry. He is in the habit of driving fast. The brakes of his truck are in good condition. What happens when a stray mule suddenly appears on the road?]

  horn blared, shattering the silence of the mountains, and a truck came round the bend in the road. A herd of goats scattered to left and right.

  The goat-herds cursed as a cloud of dust enveloped them, and then the truck had left them behind and was rattling along the stony, unpaved hill road.

  At the wheel of the truck, stroking his gray moustache, sat Pritam Singh, a turbaned Sikh. It was his own truck. He did not allow anyone else to drive it. Everyday he made two trips to the limestone quarries, carrying truckloads of limestone back to the depot at the bottom of the hill. He was paid by the trip, and he was always anxious to get in two trips everyday.

  Sitting beside him was Nathu, his cleaner-boy. Nathu was a sturdy boy, with a round cheerful face. It was difficult to guess his age. He might have been twelve or he might have been fifteen—he did not know himself, since no one in his village had troubled to record his birthday—but the hard life he led probably made him look older than his years. He belonged to the hills, but his village was far away, on the next range.

  Last year the potato crop had failed. As a result there was no money for salt, sugar, soap and flour—and Nathu's parents, and small brothers and sisters couldn't live entirely on the onions and artichokes which were about the only crops that had survived the drought. There had been no rain that summer. So Nathu waved good-bye to his people and came down to the town in the valley to look for work. Someone directed him to the limestone depot. He was too young to work at the quarries, breaking stones and loading them on the trucks; but Pritam Singh, one of the older drivers, was looking for someone to clean and look after his truck. Nathu looked like a bright, strong boy, and he was taken on—at ten rupees a day.

  That had been six months ago, and now Nathu was an experienced hand at looking after trucks, riding in them and even sleeping in them. He got on well with Pritam Singh, the grizzled, fifty-year-old Sikh, who had well-to-do sons in the Punjab, but whose sturdy ii dependence kept him on the road in his battered old truck.

  Pritam Singh pressed hard on his horn. Now there was no one on the road—no animals, no humans—but Pritam was fond of his horn and liked blowing it. It was music to his ears.

  'One more year on this road,' said Pritam. 'Then I'll sell my truck and retire.'

  'Who will buy this truck? said Nathu. 'It will retire before you do.' 'Don't be cheeky, boy. She's only twenty-years-old—there are still a few years left in her! And as though to prove it, he blew his horn again. Its strident sound echoed and re-echoed down the mountain gorge. A pair of wild fowl, disturbed by the noise, flew out from the bushes and glided across the road in front of the truck.

  Pritam Singh's thoughts went to his dinner.

  'Haven't had a good meal for days,' he grumbled.

  'Haven't had a good meal for weeks,' said Nathu, although he looked quite well-fed.

  'Tomorrow I'll give you dinner,' said Pritam. 'Tandoori chicken and pilaf rice.'

  'I'll believe it when I see it,' said Nathu.

  Pritam Singh sounded his horn again before slowing down. The road had become narrow and precipitous, and trotting ahead of them was a train of mules. As the horn blared, one mule ran forward, one ran backwards. One went uphill, one went downhill. Soon there were mules all over the place.

  'You can never tell with mules,' said Pritam, after he had left them behind.

  The hills were bare and dry. Much of the forest had long since disappeared. Just a few scraggy old oaks still grew on the steep hillside. This particular range was rich in limestone, and the hills were scarred by quarrying.

  'Are your hills as bare as these?' asked Pritam.

  'No, they have not started blasting there as yet,' said Nathu.

  'We still have a few trees. And there is a walnut tree in front of our house, which gives us two baskets of walnuts every year'.

  'And do you have water?'

  'There is a stream at the bottom of the hill. But for the fields, we have to depend on the rainfall. And there was no rain last year.'

  'It will rain soon.' said Pritam. 'I can smell rain. It is coming from the north.'

  'It will settle the dust.'

  The dust was everywhere. The truck was full of it. The leaves of the shrubs and the few trees were thick with it. Nathu could feel the dust near his eyelids and on his lips. As they approached the quarries, the dust increased—but it was a different kind of dust new—whiter, stinging the eyes, irritating the nostrils—limestone dust, hanging in the air.

  The blasting was in progress.

  Pritam Singh brought the truck to a halt.

  'Let's wait a bit,' he said.

  They sat in silence, staring through the windscreen at the scarred cliffs about a hundred yards down the road. There was no sign of life around them.

  Suddenly, the hillside blossomed outwards, followed by a sharp crack of explosives. Earth and rock hurtled down the hillside.

  Nathu watched in awe as shrubs and small trees were flung into the air. It always frightened him—not so much the sight of the rocks bursting asunder, but the trees being flung aside and destroyed. He thought of his own trees at home—the walnut, the pines—
and wondered if one day they would suffer the same fate, and whether the mountains would all become a desert like this particular range. No trees, no grass, no water—only the choking dust of the limestone quarries.

  Pritam Singh pressed hard on his horn again, to let the people at the site know he was coming. Soon they were parked outside a small shed, where the contractor and the overseer were sipping cups of tea. A short distance away some labourers were hammering at chunks of rock, breaking them up into manageable blocks. A pile of stones stood ready for loading, while the rock that had just been blasted lay scattered about the hillside.

  'Come and have a cup of tea,' called out the contractor.

  'Get on with the loading,' said Pritam. 'I can't hang about all afternoon. There's another trip to make—and it gets dark early these days.'

  But he sat down on a bench and ordered two cups of tea from the stall-owner. The overseer strolled over to the group of labourers and told them to start loading. Nathu let down the grid at the back of the truck.

  Nathu stood back while the men loaded the truck with limestone rocks. He was glad that he was chubby: thin people seemed to feel the cold much more—like the contractor, a skinny fellow who was shivering in his expensive overcoat.

  To keep himself warm, Nathu began helping the labourers with the loading.

  'Don't expect to be paid for that,' said the contractor, for whom every extra paise spent was a paisa off his profits.

  'Don't worry,' said Nadhu, 'I don't work for contractors. I work for Pritam Singh.'

  'That's right,' called out Pritam. 'And mind what you say to Nathu—he's nobody's servant!'

  It took them almost an hour to fill the truck with stones. The contractor wasn't happy until there was no space left for a single stone. Then four of the six labourers climbed on the pile of stones. They would ride back to the depot on the truck. The contractor, his overseer, and the others would follow by jeep. 'Let's go!' said Pritam, getting behind the steering wheel. 'I want to be back here and then home by eight o'clock. I'm going to a marriage party tonight!'

  Nathu jumped in beside him, banging his door shut. It never opened at a touch. Pritam always joked that his truck was held together with Sellotape.

  He was in good spirits. He started his engine, blew his horn, and burst into a song as the truck started out on the return journey.

  The labourers were singing too, as the truck swung round the sharp bends of the winding mountain road. Nathu was feeling quite dizzy. The door beside him rattled on its hinges.

  'Not so fast,' he said.

  'Oh,' said Pritam, 'And since when did you become nervous about fast driving?'

  'Since today,' said Nathu.

  'And what's wrong with today?'

  'I don't know. It's just that kind of day, I suppose.'

  'You are getting old,' said Pritam. That's your trouble.'

  'Just wait till you get to be my age,' said Nathu.

  'No more cheek,' said Pritam, and stepped on the accelerator and drove faster.

  As they swung round a bend, Nathu looked out of his window.

  All he saw was the sky above and the valley below.

  They were very near the edge. But it was always like that on this narrow road.

  After a few more hairpin bends, the road started descending steeply to the valley.

  'I'll just test the brakes,' said Pritam and jammed down on them so suddenly that one of the labourers almost fell off at the back.

  They called out in protest.

  'Hang on!' shouted Pritam. 'You're nearly home!'

  'Don't try any short cuts,' said Nathu.

  Just then a stray mule appeared in the middle of the road. Pritam swung the steering wheel over to his right; but the road turned left, and the truck went straight over the edge.

  As it tipped over, hanging for a few seconds on the edge of the cliff, the labourers leapt from the back of the truck.

  'The truck pitched forward, bouncing over the rocks, turning over on its side and rolling over twice before coming to rest against the trunk of a scraggy old oak tree. Had it missed the tree, the truck would have plunged a few hundred feet down to the bottom of the gorge.

  Two labourers sat on the hillside, stunned and badly shaken.

  The other two had picked themselves up and were running back to the quarry for help.

  Nathu had landed in a bed of nettles. He was smarting all over, but he wasn't really hurt.

  His first impulse was to get up and run back with the labourers. Then he realized that Pritam was still in the truck. If he wasn't dead, he would certainly be badly injured.

  Nathu skidded down the steep slope, calling out, 'Pritam, Pritam, are you all right?

  There was no answer.

  Then he saw Pritam's arm and half his body jutting out of the open door of the truck. It was a strange position to be in, half in and half out. When Nathu came nearer, he saw Pritam was jammed in the driver's seat, held there by the steering wheel which was pressed hard against his chest. Nathu thought he was dead. But as he was about to turn away and clamber back up the hill, he saw Pritam open one blackened swollen eye. It looked straight up at Nathu.

  'Are you alive?' whispered Nathu, terrified.

  'What do you think?' muttered Pritam.

  He closed his eye again.

  When the contractor and his men arrived, it took them almost an hour to get him to a hospital in the town. He had a broken collarbone, a dislocated shoulder, and several fractured ribs. But the doctors said he was repairable—which was more than could be said for his truck.

  'The truck's finished,' said Pritam, when Nathu came to see him a few days later. 'Now 'I'll have to go home and live with my sons. But you can get work on another truck.'

  'No,' said Nathu. 'I'm gong home too.'

  'And what will you do there?'

  'I'll work on the land. It's better to grow things on the land than to blast things out of it.'

  They were silent for some time.

  'Do you know something?' said Pritam finally. 'But for that tree, the truck would have ended up at the bottom of the hill and I wouldn't be here, all bandaged up and talking to you. It was the tree that saved me. Remember that, boy.'

  I'll remember,' said Nathu.

  A Walk through Garhwal

  wake to what sounds like the din of a factory buzzer, but is in fact the music of a single vociferous cicada in the lime tree near my window.

  Through the open window, I focus on a pattern of small, glossy lime leaves; then through them I see the mountains, the Himalayas, striding away into an immensity of sky.

  "In a thousand ages of the gods I could not tell thee of the glories of Himachal". So confessed a Sanskrit poet at the dawn of Indian history and he came closer than anyone else to capturing the spell of the Himalayas. The sea has had Conrad and Stevenson and Masefield, but the mountains continue to defy the written word. We have climbed their highest peaks and crossed their most difficult passes, but still they keep their secrets and their reserve; they remain remote, mysterious, spirit-haunted.

  No wonder then, that the people who live on the mountain slopes in the mist-filled valleys of Garhwal, have long since learned humility, patience and a quiet resignation. Deep in the crouching mist lie their villages, while climbing the mountain slopes are forests of rhododendron, spruce and deodar, soughing in the wind from the ice-bound passes. Pale women plough, they laugh at the thunder as their men go down to the plains for work; for little grows on the beautiful mountains in the north wind.

  When I think of Manjari village in Garhwal I see a small river, a tributary of the Ganga, rushing along the bottom of a steep, rocky valley. On the banks of the river and on the terraced hills above, there are small fields of corn, barley, mustard, potatoes and onions. A few fruit trees grow near the village. Some hillsides are rugged and bare, just masses of quartz or granite. On hills exposed to wind, only grass and small shrubs are able to obtain a foothold.

  This landscape is typical of Garhwa
l, one of India's most northerly regions with its massive snow ranges bordering on Tibet. Although thinly populated it does not provide much of a living for its people. Most Garhwali cultivators are poor, some are very poor. "You have beautiful scenery," I observed after crossing the first range of hills.

  "Yes," said my friend, "but we cannot eat the scenery."

  And yet these are cheerful people, sturdy and with wonderful powers of endurance. Somehow they manage to wrest a precarious living from the unhelpful, calcinated soil. I am their guest for a few days.

  My friend Gajadhar has brought me to his home, to his village above the little Nayar river. We took a train into the foothills and then we took a bus and finally, made dizzy by the hairpin bends devised in the last century by a brilliantly diabolical road-engineer, we alighted at the small hill station of Lansdowne, chief recruiting centre for the Garhwal Regiment.

  Lansdowne is just over six thousand feet high. From there we walked, covering twenty-five miles between sunrise and sunset, until we came to Manjari village, clinging to the terraced slopes of a very proud, very permanent mountain.

  'And this is my fourth morning in the village.

  Other mornings I was woken by the throaty chuckles of the red-billed blue magpies, as they glided between oak trees and medlars; but today the cicada has drowned all bird song. It is a little out of season for cicadas but perhaps this sudden warm spell in late September has deceived him into thinking it is mating season again.

  Early though it is I am the last to get up. Gajadhar is exercising in the courtyard, going through an odd combination of Swedish exercises and yoga. He has a fine physique with the sturdy legs that most Garhwalis possess. I am sure he will realise his ambition of joining the Indian Army as a cadet. His younger brother Chakradhar, who is slim and fair with high cheek-bones, is milking the family's buffalo. Normally, he would be on his long walk to school, five miles distant; but this is a holiday, so he can stay at home and help with the household chores.

  His mother is lighting a fire. She is a handsome woman, even though her ears, weighed down by heavy silver earrings, have lost their natural shape. Garhwali women usually invest their savings in silver ornaments. And at the time of marriage it is the boy's parents who make a gift of land to the parents of an attractive girl; a dowry system in reverse. There are fewer women than men in the hills and their good looks and sturdy physique give them considerable status among the men-folk.