Collected Short Stories Read online

  Outline for a story.

  Someone lives in a small hut near a spring, within sound of running water. He never leaves the place, except to walk into the town for books, post, and supplies. ‘Don’t you ever get bored here?’ I ask. ‘Do you never wish to leave?’ ‘No,’ he replies, and tells me of his experience in the desert, when for two days and two nights (the limit of human endurance in regard to thirst), he went without water. On the second night, half dead, lying in the open beneath the stars, he dreamt of just such a spring in the mountains, and it was as though it gave him spiritual sustenance. So later, when he was fully recovered, he went in search of the spring (which he was sure existed), and found it while hiking in the Himalayas. He knew that as long as he remained by the spring he would never feel unsafe; it was where his guardian spirit lived . . .

  And so I feel safe near my own spring, my own mountain, for this is where my guardian spirit lives too.

  April 16

  Visited the Tibetan shop and bought a small brass vase encrusted with pretty stones.

  I’d no intention of buying anything, but the girl smiled at me as I passed, and then I just had to go in; and once in, I couldn’t just stand there, a fatuous grin on my face.

  I had to buy something. And a vase is always a good thing to buy. If you don’t like it, you can give it away.

  If she smiles at me every time I pass, I shall probably build up a collection of vases.

  She isn’t a girl, really; she’s probably about thirty. I suppose she has a husband who smuggles Chinese goods in from Nepal, while her children—‘charity cases’—go to one of the posh public schools. But she’s fresh and pretty, and then, of course, I don’t have many young women smiling at me these days. I shall be forty-three next month.

  April 17

  Miss Bun still smiles at me, even though I frown at her when we pass.

  This afternoon she brought me samosas and a rose.

  ‘Where’s your brother?’ I asked gruffly. ‘He has more to talk about.’

  ‘He’s busy in the bakery. See, I’ve brought you a rose.’

  ‘How much did it cost?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s a present.’

  ‘Thanks. I didn’t know you grew roses.’

  ‘I don’t. It’s from the school garden.’

  ‘Well, thank you anyway. You actually stole something on my behalf!’

  ‘Where shall I put it?’

  I found my new vase, filled it with fresh water, placed the rose in it and set it down on my dressing table.

  ‘It leaks,’ remarked Miss Bun.

  ‘My vase?’ I was incredulous.

  ‘See, the water’s spreading all over your nice table.’

  She was right, of course. Water from the bottom of the vase was running across the varnished wood of great-grandmother’s old rosewood dressing table. The stain, I felt sure, would be permanent.

  ‘But it’s a new vase!’ I protested.

  ‘Someone must have cheated you. Why did you buy it without looking properly?’

  ‘Well, you see, I didn’t buy it actually. Someone gave it to me as a present.’

  I fumed inwardly, vowing never again to visit the brassware shop. Never trust a smiling woman! I prefer Miss Bun’s scowl.

  ‘Do you want the vase?’ she asks.

  ‘No. Take it away.’

  She places the rose on my pillow, throws the water out of the window and drops the vase into her cloth shopping bag.

  ‘What will you do with it?’ I ask.

  ‘I’ll seal the leak with flour,’ she says.

  April 21

  A clear fresh morning after a week of intermittent rain. And what a morning for birds! Three doves courting, a cuckoo calling, a bunch of minas squabbling, and a pair of king crows doing Swedish exercises.

  I find myself doing exercises of an original nature, devised by

  Master Bun. These consist of various contortions of the limbs which, he says, are good for my sex drive.

  ‘But I don’t want a sex drive,’ I tell him. ‘I want something that will take my mind off sex.’

  So he gives me another set of exercises which consist mostly of deep breathing.

  ‘Try holding your breath for five minutes,’ he suggests.

  ‘I know of someone who committed suicide by doing just that.’

  ‘Then hold it for two minutes.’

  I take a deep breath and last only a minute.

  ‘No good,’ he says. ‘You have to relax more.’

  ‘Well, I am tired of trying to relax. It doesn’t work this way. What I need is a good meal.’

  And Prem obliges by serving up my favourite kofta curry and rice. Satiated, I have no problem in relaxing for the rest of the afternoon.

  April 28

  Master Bun wears a troubled expression.

  ‘It’s about my sister,’ he says.

  ‘What about her?’ I ask, fearing the worst.

  ‘She has run away.’

  ‘That’s bad. On her own?’

  ‘No . . . With a professor.’

  ‘That should be all right. Professors are usually respectable people. Maths or English?’

  ‘I don’t know. He has a wife and children.’

  ‘Then obviously he hasn’t taken them along.’

  ‘He has taken her to Roorkee. My sister is an innocent girl.’

  ‘Well, there is a certain innocence about her,’ I say, recalling Nobokov’s Lolita. ‘Maybe the professor wants to adopt her.’

  ‘But she’s a virgin.’

  ‘Then she must be rescued! Why are you here, talking to me about it, when you should be rushing down to Roorkee?’

  ‘That’s why I’ve come. Can you lend me the bus fare?’

  ‘Better still, I’ll come with you. We must rescue the professor— sorry, I mean your sister!’

  May 1

  —Roorkee, to Roorkee, to find a sweet girl,

  Home again, home again, oh, what a whirl!

  We did everything except find Miss Bun. Our first evening in Roorkee we roamed the bazaar and the canal banks; the second day we did the rounds of the university, the regimental barracks and the headquarters of the Boys’ Brigade. We made inquiries from all the bakers in Roorkee (many of them known to Master Bun), but none of them had seen his sister. On the college campus we asked for the professor, but no one had heard of him either.

  Finally we bought platform tickets and sat down on a bench at the end of the railway platform and watched the arrival and departure of trains, and the people who got on and off; we saw no one who looked in the least like Miss Bun. Master Bun bought an astrological guide from the station bookstall and studied his sister’s horoscope to see if that might help, but it didn’t. At the same bookstall, hidden under a pile of pirated Harold Robbins novels, I found a book of mine that had been published ten years earlier. No one had bought it in all that time. I replaced it at the top of the pile. Never lose hope!

  On the third day we returned to Barlowganj and found Miss Bun at home.

  She had gone no further than Dehra’s Paltan Bazaar, it seemed, and had ditched the professor there, having first made him buy her three dress pieces, two pairs of sandals, a sandalwood hair brush, a bottle of scent, and a satchel for her school books.

  May 5

  And now it’s Mr Biggs’s turn to disappear.

  ‘Have you seen our Will?’ asks Mrs Biggs at my gate.

  ‘Not this morning, Mrs Biggs.’

  ‘I can’t find him anywhere. At breakfast he said he was going out for a walk, but nobody knows where he went, and he isn’t in the school compound, I’ve just inquired. He’s been gone over three hours!’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Biggs. He’ll turn up. Someone on the hillside must have asked him in for a cup of tea, and he’s sitting there talking about the crocodile he shot in Orissa.’

  But at lunchtime Mr Biggs hadn’t returned; and that was alarming, because Mr Biggs had never been known to miss his favourite egg cur
ry and pilaf.

  We organized a search. Prem and I walked the length of the Barlowganj bazaar and even lodged an unofficial report with Constable Ghanshyam. No one had seen him in the bazaar. Several members of the school staff combed the hillside without picking up the scent.

  Mid-afternoon, while giving my negative report to Mrs Biggs, I heard a loud thumping coming from the direction of her storeroom.

  ‘What’s all that noise downstairs?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably rats. I don’t hear anything.’

  I ran downstairs and opened the storeroom door, and there was Mr Biggs looking very dusty and very disgruntled. He wanted to know why the devil (the first time he’d taken the devil’s name in vain) Mrs Biggs had shut him up for hours. He’d gone into the storeroom in search of an old walking stick, and Mrs Biggs, seeing the door open, had promptly bolted it, failing to hear her husband’s cries for immediate release. But for Mr Bond’s presence of mind, he averred, he might have been discovered years later, a mere skeleton!

  The cook was still out hunting for him, so Mr Biggs had his egg curry cold. Still in a foul mood, he sat down and wrote a letter to his sister in Tunbridge Wells, asking her to send over a hearing aid for Mrs Biggs.

  Constable Ghanshyam turned up in the evening to inform me that Mr Biggs had last been seen at Rajpur in the foothills, in the company of several gypsies!

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘These old men get that way. One last fling, one last romantic escapade, one last tilt at the windmill. If you have a dream, Ghanshyam, don’t let them take it away from you.’

  He looked puzzled, but went on to tell me that he was being transferred to Bareilly jail, where they keep those who have been found guilty but of unsound mind. It’s a reward, no doubt, for his services in getting the SP’s poems published.

  These journal entries date back some twenty years. What happened to Miss Bun? Well, she finally opened a beauty parlour in New Delhi, but I still can’t tell you where it is, or give you her name.

  Two or three years later, Mrs Biggs was laid to rest near her old friends in the Mussoorie cemetery. Rev. Biggs was flown home to Tunbridge Wells and his sister gave him a solid tombstone, so that he wasn’t tempted to get up and wander off somewhere, in search of crocodiles.

  A lot can happen in twenty years, and unfortunately not all of it gets recorded. ‘Little Raki’ is today a married man!

  The Funeral

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

  ‘He’s too small,’ 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 man 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 on 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 say 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 on 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.

  The boy slipped out of the house by a back door and made his way into the lane through a gap in a thicket of dog roses. When he reached the main road, he could see the mourners wending their way round the hill to the cemetery. He followed at a distance.

  It was the same road he had often taken with his father during their evening walks. The boy knew the name of almost every plant and wildflower that grew on the hillside. These, and various birds and insects, had been described and pointed out to him by his father.

  Looking northwards, he could see the higher ranges of the Himalayas and the eternal snows. The graves in the cemetery were so laid out that if their incumbents did happen to rise one day, the first thing they would see would be the glint of the sun on those snow-covered peaks. Possibly the site had been chosen for the view. But to the boy it did not seem as if anyone would be able to thrust aside those massive tombstones and rise from their graves to enjoy the view. Their rest seemed as eternal as the snows. It would take an earthquake to burst those stones asunder and thrust the coffins up from the earth. The boy wondered why people hadn’t made it easier for the dead to rise. They were so securely entombed that it appeared as though no one really wanted them to get out.

  ‘God has need of your father . . .’ With those words a well-meaning missionary had tried to console him.

  And had God, in the same way, laid claim to the thousands of men, women and children who had been put to rest here in these neat and serried rows? What could he have wanted them for? Of what use are we to God when we are dead, wondered the boy.

  The cemetery gate stood open but the boy leant against the old stone wall and stared down at the mourners as they shuffled about with the unease of a batsman about to face a very fast bowler. Only this bowler was invisible and would come up stealthily and from behind.

  Padre Lal’s voice droned on through the funeral service and then the coffin was lowered—down, deep down. The boy was surprised at how far down it seemed to go! Was that other, better world down in the depths of the earth? How could anyone, even a Samson, push his way back to the surface again? Superman did it in comics but his father was a gentle soul who wouldn’t fight too hard against the earth and the grass and the roots of tiny trees. Or perhaps he’d grow into a tree and escape that way! ‘If ever I’m put away like this,’ thought the boy, ‘I’ll get into the root of a plant and then I’ll become a flower and then maybe a bird will come and carry my seed away . . . I’ll get out somehow!’

  A few more words from the padre and then some of those present threw handfuls of earth over the coffin before moving away.

  Slowly, in twos and threes, the mourners departed. The mist swallowed them up. They did not see the boy behind the wall. They were getting hungry.

  He stood there until they had all gone.
Then he noticed that the gardeners or caretakers were filling in the grave. He did not know whether to go forward or not. He was a little afraid. And it was too late now. The grave was almost covered.

  He turned and walked away from the cemetery. The road stretched ahead of him, empty, swathed in mist. He was alone. What had his father said to him once? ‘The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone.’

  Well, he was alone, but at the moment he did not feel very strong.

  For a moment he thought his father was beside him, that they were together on one of their long walks. Instinctively he put out his hand, expecting his father’s warm, comforting touch. But there was nothing there, nothing, no one . . .

  He clenched his fists and pushed them deep down into his pockets. He lowered his head so that no one would see his tears. There were people in the mist but he did not want to go near them for they had put his father away.

  ‘He’ll find a way out,’ the boy said fiercely to himself. ‘He’ll get out somehow!’

  The Last Truck Ride

  A 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 goatherds 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 grey moustache, sat Pritam Singh, a turbaned Sikh. It was his own truck. He did not allow anyone else to drive it. Every day 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 every day.

  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.