Collected Short Stories Read online

‘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 a cool breeze blowing, nothing like this. Those flowers at the girl’s feet, they were marigolds, and the bougainvillea 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, but I pretended 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 knitting. 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 mina, a crow and at night, a pair of flying foxes. The squirrels were busy in the afternoons, the birds in the mornings and evenings, 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. I 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 schoolgirls; 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.

  ‘Hello,’ 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 particularly 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 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 uncomprehendingly at first, and then with increasing interest. And after some time she turned around 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 to know anything about me except that I wasn’t really a ghost—not the frightening sort anyway . . .

  She came up my steps nearly every day and joined me at the window. There was a lot of excitement to be had in our world, especially when the rains broke.

  At the first rumblings, women would rush outside to retrieve the washing from the clothesline and if there was a breeze, to chase a few garments across the compound. When the rains came, they 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 to 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 mina had been in a fight—with a crow perhaps—and the feathers had been knocked off its head. A bougainvillea 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 spoili
ng 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 windowsill 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 for ever, 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 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 bougainvillea.

  When the tonga was out of sight, I took the spray of bougainvillea 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.

  The Boy Who Broke the Bank

  Nathu grumbled to himself as he swept the steps of the Pipalnagar Bank, owned by Seth Govind Ram. He used the small broom hurriedly and carelessly, and the dust, after rising in a cloud above his head, settled down again on the steps. As Nathu was banging his pan against a dustbin, Sitaram, the washerman’s son, passed by.

  Sitaram was on his delivery round. He had a bundle of freshly pressed clothes balanced on his head.

  ‘Don’t raise such dust!’ he called out to Nathu. ‘Are you annoyed because they are still refusing to pay you an extra two rupees a month?’

  ‘I don’t wish to talk about it,’ complained the sweeper boy. ‘I haven’t even received my regular pay. And this is the twentieth of the month. Who would think a bank would hold up a poor man’s salary? As soon as I get my money, I’m off! Not another week do I work in this place.’ And Nathu banged the pan against the dustbin several times, just to emphasize his point and give himself confidence.

  ‘Well, I wish you luck,’ said Sitaram. ‘I’ll keep a lookout for any jobs that might suit you.’ And he plodded barefoot along the road, the big bundle of clothes hiding most of his head and shoulders.

  At the fourth home he visited, Sitaram heard the lady of the house mention that she was in need of a sweeper. Tying his bundle together, he said, ‘I know of a sweeper boy who’s looking for work. He can start from next month. He’s with the bank just now but they aren’t giving him his pay, and he wants to leave.’

  ‘Is that so?’ said Mrs Srivastava. ‘Well, tell him to come and see me tomorrow.’

  And Sitaram, glad that he had been of service to both a customer and his friend, hoisted his bag on his shoulders and went his way.

  Mrs Srivastava had to do some shopping. She gave instructions to the ayah about looking after the baby, and told the cook not to be late with the midday meal. Then she set out for the Pipalnagar marketplace, to make her customary tour of the cloth shops.

  A large, shady tamarind tree grew at one end of the bazaar, and it was here that Mrs Srivastava found her friend Mrs Bhushan sheltering from the heat. Mrs Bhushan was fanning herself with a large handkerchief. She complained of the summer which, she affirmed, was definitely the hottest in the history of Pipalnagar. She then showed Mrs Srivastava a sample of the cloth she was going to buy, and for five minutes they discussed its shade, texture and design. Having exhausted this topic, Mrs Srivastava said, ‘Do you know, my dear, that Seth Govind Ram’s bank can’t even pay its employees? Only this morning I heard a complaint from their sweeper, who hasn’t received his wages for over a month!’

  ‘Shocking!’ remarked Mrs Bhushan. ‘If they can’t pay the sweeper they must be in a bad way. None of the others could be getting paid either.’

  She left Mrs Srivastava at the tamarind tree and went in search of her husband, who was sitting in front of Kamal Kishore’s photographic shop, talking to the owner.

  ‘So there you are!’ cried Mrs Bhushan. ‘I’ve been looking for you for almost an hour. Where did you disappear?’

  ‘Nowhere,’ replied Mr Bhushan. ‘Had you remained stationary in one shop, I might have found you. But you go from one shop to another, like a bee in a flower garden.’

  ‘Don’t start grumbling. The heat is trying enough. I don’t know what’s happening to Pipalnagar. Even the bank’s about to go bankrupt.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Kamal Kishore, sitting up suddenly. ‘Which bank?’

  ‘Why the Pipalnagar Bank, of course. I hear they have stopped paying employees. Don’t tell me you have an account there, Mr Kishore?’

  ‘No, but my neighbour has!’ he exclaimed; and he called out over the low partition to the keeper of the barber shop next door. ‘Deep Chand, have you heard the latest? The Pipalnagar Bank is about to collapse. You better get your money out as soon as you can!’

  Deep Chand, who was cutting the hair of an elderly gentleman, was so startled that his hand shook and he nicked his customer’s right ear. The customer yelped in pain and distress: pain, because of the cut, and distress, because of the awful news he had just heard. With one side of his neck still unshaven, he sped across the road to the general merchant’s store where there was a telephone. He dialled Seth Govind Ram’s number. The Seth was not at home. Where was he, then? The Seth was holidaying in Kashmir. Oh, was that so? The elderly gentleman did not believe it. He hurried back to the barber’s shop and told Deep Chand: ‘The bird has flown! Seth Govind Ram has left town. Definitely, it means a collapse.’ And then he dashed out of the shop, making a beeline for his office and chequebook.

  The news spread through the bazaar with the rapidity of forest fire. At the general merchant’s it circulated amongst the customers, and then spread with them in various directions, to the betel seller, the tailor, the free vendor, the jeweller, the beggar sitting on the pavement.

  Old Ganpat, the beggar, had a crooked leg. He had been squatting on the pavement for years, calling for alms. In the evening someone would come with a barrow and take him away. He had never been known to walk. But now, on learning that the bank was about to collapse, Ganpat astonished everyone by leaping to his feet and actually running at top speed in the direction of the bank. It soon became known that he had a thousand rupees in savings!

  Men stood in groups at street corners discussing the situation. Pipalnagar seldom had a crisis, seldom or never had floods, earthquakes or drought; and the imminent crash of the Pipalnagar Bank set everyone talking and speculating and rushing about in a frenzy. Some boasted of their farsightedness, congratulating themselves on having already taken out their money, or on never having put any in; others speculated on the reasons for the crash, putting it all down to excesses indulged in by Seth Govind Ram. The Seth had fled the state, said one. He had fled the country, said another. He was hiding in Pipalnagar, said a third. He had hanged himself from the tamarind tree, said a fourth, and had been found that morning by the sweeper boy.

  By noon the small bank had gone through all its ready cash, and the harassed manager was in a dilemma. Emergency funds could only be obtained from another bank some thirty miles distant, and he wasn’t sure he could persuade the crowd to wait until then. And there was no way of contacting Seth Govind Ram on his houseboat in Kashmir.

  People were turned back from the c
ounters and told to return the following day. They did not like the sound of that. And so they gathered outside, on the steps of the bank, shouting, ‘Give us our money or we’ll break in!’ and ‘Fetch the Seth, we know he’s hiding in a safe deposit locker!’ Mischief makers who didn’t have a paisa in the bank joined the crowd and aggravated the mood. The manager stood at the door and tried to placate them. He declared that the bank had plenty of money but no immediate means of collecting it; he urged them to go home and come back the next day.

  ‘We want it now!’ chanted some of the crowd. ‘Now, now, now!’

  And a brick hurtled through the air and crashed through the plate glass window of the Pipalnagar Bank.

  Nathu arrived next morning to sweep the steps of the bank. He saw the refuse and the broken glass and the stones cluttering the steps. Raising his hands in a gesture of horror and disgust he cried: ‘Hooligans! Sons of donkeys! As though it isn’t bad enough to be paid late, it seems my work has also to be increased!’ He smote the steps with his broom scattering the refuse.

  ‘Good morning, Nathu,’ said the washerman’s boy, getting down from his bicycle. ‘Are you ready to take up a new job from the first of next month? You’ll have to I suppose, now that the bank is going out of business.’

  ‘How’s that?’ said Nathu.

  ‘Haven’t you heard? Well, you’d better wait here until half the population of Pipalnagar arrives to claim their money.’ And he waved cheerfully—he did not have a bank account—and sped away on his cycle.

  Nathu went back to sweeping the steps, muttering to himself. When he had finished his work, he sat down on the highest step, to await the arrival of the manager. He was determined to get his pay.

  ‘Who would have thought the bank would collapse!’ he said to himself, and looked thoughtfully into the distance. ‘I wonder how it could have happened . . .’

  Most Beautiful

  I don’t quite know why I found that particular town so heartless. Perhaps because of its crowded, claustrophobic atmosphere, its congested and insanitary lanes, its weary people . . . One day I found the children of the bazaar tormenting a deformed, retarded boy.