Tales of Fosterganj Read online

  Buddhoo was doubled up with laughter. ‘The tail’s no use,’ he said. ‘Nothing in the tail!’

  Sunil flung the tail away in disgust.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Catch a lizard by its tail—make a wish, it cannot fail!’

  ‘Is that true?’ asked Sunil, who had a superstitious streak.

  ‘Nursery rhyme from Brazil,’ I said.

  The lizard had disappeared, but a white-bearded patriarch was looking at us from over the wall.

  ‘You need a net,’ he said. ‘Catching them by hand isn’t easy. Too slippery.’

  We thanked him for his advice; said we’d go looking for a net.

  ‘Maybe a bedsheet will do,’ Sunil said.

  The patriarch smiled, stroked his flowing white beard, and asked: ‘But what will you do with these lizards? Put them in a zoo?’

  ‘It’s their oil we want,’ said Sunil, and made a sales pitch for the miraculous properties of saande-ka-tel.

  ‘Oh, that,’ said the patriarch, looking amused. ‘It will irritate the membranes and cause some inflammation. I know—I’m a nature therapist. All superstition, my friends. You’ll get the same effect, even better, with machine oil. Try sewing-machine oil. At least it’s harmless. Leave the poor lizards alone.’

  And the barefoot mendicant hitched up his dhoti, gave us a friendly wave, and disappeared in the monsoon mist.

  Tremors in the Night

  Not to be discouraged, we left the ghost town and continued our journey upriver, as far as the bus would take us. The road ended at Uttarkashi, for the simple reason that the bridge over the Bhagirathi had been washed away in a flash flood. The glaciers had been melting, and that, combined with torrential rain in the upper reaches, had brought torrents of muddy water rushing down the swollen river. Anything that came in its way vanished downstream.

  We spent the night in a pilgrim shelter, built on a rocky ledge overlooking the river. All night we could hear the water roaring past below us. After a while, we became used to the unchanging sound; it became like a deep silence, and made our sleep deeper. Sometime before dawn, however, a sudden tremor had us trembling out of our cots.

  ‘Earthquake!’ shouted Sunil, making for the doorway and banging into the wall instead.

  ‘Don’t panic,’ I said, feeling panicky.

  ‘It will pass,’ said Buddhoo.

  The tremor did pass, but not before everyone in the shelter had rushed outside. There was the sound of rocks falling, and everyone rushed back again. ‘Landslide!’ someone shouted. Was it safer outside or inside? No one could be sure.

  ‘It will pass,’ said Buddhoo again, and went to sleep.

  Sunil began singing at the top of his voice: ‘Pyarkiya to darnakya—Why be afraid when we have loved’. I doubt Sunil had ever been in love, but it was a rousing song with which to meet death.

  ‘Chup, beta!’ admonished an old lady on her last pilgrimage to the abode of the gods. ‘Say your prayers instead.’

  The room fell silent. Outside, a dog started howling. Other dogs followed his example. No serenade this, but a mournful anticipation of things to come; for birds and beasts are more sensitive to the earth’s tremors and inner convulsions than humans, who are no longer sensitive to nature’s warnings.

  A couple of jackals joined the chorus. Then a bird, probably a nightjar, set up a monotonous croak. I looked at my watch. It was 4 a.m, a little too early for birds to be greeting the break of day. But suddenly there was a twittering and cawing and chattering as all the birds in the vicinity passed on the message that something was amiss.

  There was a rush of air and a window banged open.

  The mountain shuddered. The building shook, rocked to and fro.

  People began screaming and making for the door.

  The door was flung open, but only a few escaped into the darkness.

  Across the length of the room a chasm opened up. The lady saying her prayers fell into it. So did one or two others. Then the room and the people in it—those who were on the other side of the chasm—suddenly vanished.

  There was the roar of falling masonry as half the building slid down the side of the mountain.

  We were left dangling in space.

  ‘Let’s get out of here quickly!’ shouted Sunil.

  We scrambled out of the door. In front of us, an empty void. I couldn’t see a thing. Then Buddhoo took me by the hand and led me away from the crumbling building and on to the rocky ledge above the river.

  The earth had stopped quaking, but the mountain had been shaken to its foundations, and rocks and trees were tumbling into the swollen river. The town was in darkness, the power station having shut down after the first tremor. Here and there a torch or lantern shone out of the darkness, and people could be heard wailing and shouting to each other as they roamed the streets in the rain. Somewhere a siren went off. It only seemed to add to the panic.

  At 5 a.m, the rain stopped and the sky lightened. At six it was daybreak. A little later the sun came up. A beautiful morning, except for the devastation below.

  The Mountains Are Moving

  ‘I think I’ll join the army,’ announced Sunil three days later, when we were back in Fosterganj. ‘Do you think they’ll take me?’

  Sunil had been impressed by the rescue work carried out by the army after the Uttarkashi earthquake.

  ‘Like a flash,’ I said. ‘Provided you keep your fingers out of the brigadier’s pockets.’

  ~

  In those early hours of the morning, confusion had prevailed in and around Uttarkashi. Houses had crumbled from the tremors and aftershocks, or been buried under the earth and rocks of a number of landslides. Survivors were wandering around in a daze. Many lay crushed or trapped under debris. It would take days, weeks for the town to recover.

  At first there were disorganized attempts at rescue, and Sunil, Buddhoo and I made clumsy attempts to extricate people from the ruins of their homes. A township built between two steep mountains, and teetering along the banks of a moody river, was always going to be at risk. It had happened before, it would happen again.

  A little girl, dusty but unhurt, ran to me and asked, ‘Will there be school today?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

  A small boy was looking for his mother; a mother was searching for her children; several men were digging in the rubble, trying to extricate friends or family members.

  And then a couple of army trucks arrived, and the rescue work moved more swiftly, took on a certain momentum. The jawans made all the difference. Many were rescued who would otherwise have perished.

  But the town presented a sad spectacle. A busy marketplace had vanished; a school building lay in ruins; a temple had been swallowed up by a gaping wound in the earth.

  On the road we met the bearded patriarch, the one we had encountered two days earlier.

  ‘Did you find your lizards?’ he asked.

  But we had forgotten about lizards.

  ‘What we need now are kitchen utensils,’ he said. ‘Then we can prepare some food for those who need it.’

  He was, it appeared, the head of a social service organization, and we followed him to his centre, a shed near the bus stand, and tried to make ourselves useful. A doctor and nurse were at work on the injured.

  I have no idea how many perished, or were badly injured in that earthquake, I was never any good at statistics. Old residents told me that the area was prone to such upheavals.

  ‘Men come and go,’ I said, ‘but the mountains remain.’

  ‘Not so,’ said an old-timer. ‘Out here, the mountains are still on the move.’

  ~

  As soon as the buses were running again, Sunil and I returned to Fosterganj. Buddhoo remained behind, having decided to join the patriarch’s aid centre. We missed his good-natured company, even his funny hare-teeth smile. He promised to meet us again. But till the time I left Fosterganj, we were still waiting for him to turn up. I wonder what became of him. Some of the moving fo
rces of our lives are meant to touch us briefly and then go their way.

  A Ghost Village

  On our way back, the bus broke down, as buses were in the habit of doing in those good old days. It was shake, rattle and roll for most of the journey, or at least part of the journey, until something gave way. Occasionally a bus went out of control and plunged over a cliff, taking everyone with it; a common enough occurrence on those hill roads.

  We were lucky. Our bus simply broke its axle and came to rest against a friendly deodar tree.

  So we were walking again.

  Sunil said he knew of a short cut, and as a result we got lost, just the two of us, everyone else having kept to the main road.

  We wandered over hill and dale, through a forest of oak and rhododendron, and then through some terraced fields (with nothing in them) and into a small village which appeared to be inhabited entirely by monkeys. An unfriendly lot of the short-tailed rhesus clan, baring their teeth at us, making guttural sounds and more or less telling us to be off.

  There were about fifteen houses in the village, and all of them were empty—except for the monkeys and a colony of field rats. Where were all the people?

  Going from house to house, we finally found an old couple barricaded inside a small hut on the outskirts of the village. They were happy to see us. They hadn’t seen another human for over a month.

  Prem Singh and his wife Chandni Devi were the only people still living in the village. The others had gone away—most of them to towns or cities in the plains, in search of employment, or to stay with friends or relatives; for there was nothing to sustain them in the village. The monkeys by day and the wild boars by night had ravaged the fields. Not a leaf, nor an edible root, remained. Prem Singh and his wife were living on their small store of rice and lentils. Even so, the wife made us tea and apologized that there was no milk or sugar.

  ‘We too will leave soon,’ she said. ‘We will go to our son in Ludhiana. He works in a factory there.’

  And that was what the others had done—gone wherever an earning member of the family had settled.

  As it was growing dark, and the couple had offered us the occupancy of a spare room, we decided to stay the night.

  An eerie silence enveloped the hillside. No dogs barked. They were no match for the monkeys. But we were comfortable on our charpais.

  Just before daybreak Sunil had to go outside to relieve himself. The nearest field would do, he said; they were all empty anyway. I was still asleep, dreaming of romantic encounters in a rose garden, when I was woken by shouts and a banging of the door, and Sunil rushed in bare-bottomed and out of breath.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, somewhat disoriented by this ridiculous interruption of my love dream.

  ‘A wild pig came after me!’ he gasped. ‘One of those with tusks. I got up just in time!’

  ‘But it got your pants, it seems,’ I said.

  When the sun came up, we both ventured into the field but there was no sign of a wild pig. By now the monkeys were up and about, and I had a feeling that they had made off with Sunil’s pants. Prem Singh came to the rescue by giving him an old pair of pyjamas, but they were much too tight and robbed Sunil of his usual jaunty ebullience. But he had to make to do with them.

  The whole situation had provided Prem Singh and his wife with much needed comic relief. In their hopeless predicament they could still find something to laugh at. Sunil invited them to visit his village, and we parted on friendly terms.

  And so we limped back to Fosterganj without any lizards, and Sunil without pants; but we had learnt something during the week’s events. Life in the hills and remote regions of the country was very different from life in the large towns and cities. And already the drift towards the cities had begun. Would the empty spaces be taken over again by the apes, reptiles and wild creatures? It was too early to tell, but the signs were there.

  Meanwhile, Sunil was still intent on joining the army, and no sooner were we back in Fosterganj than he was off to the recruiting centre in Lansdowne. Would they take him, I wondered. He wasn’t exactly army material. But then, neither was Beetle Bailey.

  Some People Don’t Age

  As usual, nothing was happening in Fosterganj. Even the earthquake had barely touched it. True, part of Foster’s old cottage had collapsed, but it was going to do that anyway. He simply moved into the remaining rooms without bothering about the damaged portion. In any case, there was no money for repairs.

  Passing that way a couple of times, I heard the strains of Sir Harry Lauder again. At least the gramophone was still intact!

  Hassan had a Murphy radio and had heard about the Uttarkashi earthquake and its aftermath, so he was relieved to see that I was back.

  There was a rumour going around that the Fairy Glen had been sold, and that it was going to be pulled down to make way for a grand hotel. I wondered what would happen to its occupants, the young-old boy and his equally intriguing mother. And would skeletons be turning up all over the place, now that it was to be dismantled? Or had I imagined that skeletal hand in the box-bed? In retrospect, it seemed more and more like a nightmare.

  I dropped in at the bank and asked Vishaal if the rumours were true.

  ‘There’s something going on,’ he admitted. ‘Nothing certain as yet, because there’s more than one owner—a claimant in Nepal, another in Calcutta and a third in Mauritius! But if they come to some agreement there’s a hotel group that’s interested.’

  ‘Who would want to come to Fosterganj?’ I mused.

  ‘Oh, you never know. They say the water here has healing properties.’

  ‘Well, I certainly get diarrhoea pretty frequently.’

  ‘That’s because it’s pumped up from the dhobi ghat. Don’t drink the tap water. Drink the water from upstream.’

  ‘I walked upstream,’ I said, ‘and I arrived at the burning ghat.’

  ‘Oh, that. But it isn’t used much,’ said Vishaal. ‘Only one or two deaths a year in Fosterganj.’

  ‘They can put that in the brochure, when they build that hotel. But tell me—what will happen to those people living in the palace? They’re caretakers, aren’t they?

  ‘The boy and his mother? Poor relatives. They’ll be given some money. They’ll go away.’

  I thought it would be charitable on my part to warn the boy and his mother of the impending sale—if they did not know about it already. Quixotic rather than charitable. Or perhaps I just needed an excuse to see them again.

  But unwilling to meet skeleton or big black bird, I went there during the day.

  It was early September, and the monsoon was beginning to recede. While the foliage on the hillside was still quite lush, autumn hues were beginning to appear. The Virginia creepers, suspended from the oak trees, were turning red. Wild dahlias reared their heads from overhanging rocky outcrops. In the bank manager’s garden, chrysanthemums flounced around like haughty maharanis. In the grounds of Fairy Glen, the cosmos had spread all over the place and was just beginning to flower. In the late monsoon light, the old palace looked almost beautiful in its decadence; a pity it would have to go. We need these reminders of history, even though they be haunted, or too grand for their own good.

  The boy was out somewhere, but the mother—if, indeed, she was his mother—was at the back of the building, putting out clothes to dry. She smiled when she saw me. The smile spread slowly across her face, like the sun chasing away a shadow, but it also lit up the scar on her cheek.

  She asked me to sit down, offered me tea. I declined the tea but sat down on the steps, a bench and a couple of old chairs being festooned with garments.

  ‘At last I can dry some clothes. After so many days the sun has finally come out.’

  Although the boy usually spoke in English, she was obviously more at home in Hindi. She spoke it with a distinct Nepali lilt.

  ‘Well, you haven’t seen the sun for days,’ I said, ‘and I haven’t seen the dhobi for weeks. I’m down to my last shirt.’
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br />   She laughed. ‘You should get married.’

  It was my turn to laugh. ‘You mean marry a washerwoman? Wives don’t wash clothes anymore.’

  ‘But mothers do.’ And then she surprised me by adding, ‘Wives can also be mothers.’

  ‘There are washing machines now, in England and America,’ I said. ‘They’ll be here soon enough. Expensive, of course. But new things are always expensive. We’ll also have television soon.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Radio with pictures. It’s in Delhi already. A bit boring but it might catch on. Then you won’t have to go to the cinema.’

  ‘I don’t go to the cinema. Not since my husband died. He took me once—six or seven years ago. I forget the name of the film, but an actress called Madhubala was in it. She was very pretty.’

  ‘Just like you,’ I said.

  She looked away. ‘I’m not young.’

  ‘Some people don’t age. Your son—some say that he’s much older than he looks.’

  She did not reply, and just then the boy himself appeared, whistling cheerfully and bowing to me as he approached.

  ‘It is good to see you again,’ he said. ‘The last time you were here, you left in a hurry.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but that was a very creepy room you put me in. There was something in the box-bed. My imagination, probably.’

  ‘A skeleton, probably. Grandfather stored them all over the palace. He didn’t like burial grounds or cremations. And in the old days, if you were rich and powerful you could do as you liked.’

  ‘It’s the same today,’ I said. ‘Although not so openly. But I heard the property is being sold, to be pulled down—a hotel will come up. Did you know?’

  ‘If it’s true—’ a shadow crossed his face, and for a few seconds he looked much older. ‘If it’s true, then…’ He did not complete what he wanted to say.

  ‘If it happens,’ said his mother, ‘then we will have to leave. To Nepal, perhaps. Or to Nabha. I have a cousin there. We are Sirmauris on my mother’s side.’