When Darkness Falls and Other Stories Page 8

  A few weeks later, the ghost took possession of the moneylender’s daughter, with whom he was deeply in love. Seeing his daughter go out of her right senses, the moneylender sent for the highly esteemed idiot and offered him a great sum of money if he would cure his daughter. But remembering the ghost’s warning, the idiot refused to go. The moneylender was enraged and sent his henchmen to bring the idiot to him by force; and the idiot, having no means of resisting, was dragged along to the rich man’s house.

  As soon as the ghost saw his old companion he cried out in a rage: ‘Idiot, why have you broken our agreement and come here? Now I will have to break your neck!’

  But the idiot, whose reputation for wisdom had actually served to make him wiser, said, ‘Brother ghost, I have not come to trouble you, but to tell you a terrible piece of news. Old friend and protector, we must leave this city soon. You see, SHE has come here—my dreaded wife, the shrew!—to torment us both, and to drag us back to the village. She is on the road to this house and will be here in a few minutes!’

  When the ghost heard this, he cried out: ‘Oh no, oh no! If she has come, then we must go! Bhum bho, bhum bho, we go, we go!’

  And breaking down the walls and doors of the house, the ghost gathered himself up into a little whirlwind and went scurrying out of the city, to look for a vacant peepul tree.

  The moneylender, delighted that his daughter had been freed of the evil influence, embraced the idiot and showered presents on him. And in due course, concluded Bibiji, the idiot married the moneylender’s beautiful daughter, inherited his father-in-law’s wealth and became the richest and most successful moneylender in the city.

  Living Without Money

  When I was in my twenties, there were a number of us who lived without electric light—not because there was no electricity, but because no one had paid their bills.

  Dehra was going through a slump in those days, and there wasn’t much work for anyone—least of all for my neighbour, Suresh Mathur, income-tax lawyer, who was broke for two reasons. To begin with, clients were a rarity, as those with taxable incomes were few and far between; apart from that, when he did get work, he was slow and half-hearted about getting it done. This was because he seldom got up before eleven in the morning, and by the time he took a bus down from Rajpur and reached his own small office, or the Income Tax Office a little further on, it was lunchtime and all the tax officials were out. Suresh would then repair to the Royal Café for a beer or two (often at my expense) and this would stretch into a gin and tonic, after which he would stagger up to his first-floor office and collapse on the sofa for an afternoon nap. He would wake up at six, after the income-tax office had closed.

  I occupied two rooms next to his office, and we were on friendly terms, sharing an enthusiasm for the humorous works of P.G. Wodehouse. I think he modelled himself on Bertie Wooster, for he would often turn up wearing mauve or yellow socks or a pink shirt and a bright green tie—enough to make anyone in his company feel quite liverish. But unlike Bertie Wooster, he did not have a Jeeves to look after him and get him out of various scrapes with creditors, bookmakers or clients who felt he’d let them down. I was a bit wary of Suresh, as he was in the habit of borrowing lavishly from all his friends, conveniently forgetting to return the amounts. I wasn’t well off and could ill afford the company of a spendthrift friend.

  Looking back, I am amazed at the number of people who were quite broke. There was William Matheson, a Swiss journalist, whose remittances from Zurich never seemed to turn up; my landlady, whose husband had deserted her two years previously; Mr Madan, who dealt in second-hand cars which no one wanted; the owner of the corner restaurant, who sat in solitary splendour surrounded by empty tables; and the proprietor of the Ideal Book Depot, who was selling off his stock of books so he could convert his depot into a department store. We complain that few people buy or read books today, but I can assure you that there were even fewer customers in the fifties and sixties. It seemed only doctors, dentists and the proprietors of English schools were making money.

  Suresh had an advantage over the rest of us—he owned an old bungalow, inherited from his father, up at Rajpur in the foothills, where he lived alone with an old manservant. And owning a property gave him some standing with his creditors. The grounds boasted of a mango and lichee orchard, and these he gave out on contract every year. The proceeds helped him to pay his office rent in town, with a little left over to give small amounts on account to the owner of the Royal Café.

  If a lawyer could be hard up, what chance had a journalist? And yet William Matheson had everything going for him when he came out to India as an assistant to Von Hesseltein, a correspondent for some of the German papers. Von Hesseltein passed on some of his assignments to William, and for a time all went well. William lived with Von Hesseltein and his family, and was also friendly with Suresh, often paying for the drinks at the Royal Café. Then William committed the folly (if not the sin) of sleeping with Von Hesseltein’s wife. He justified this indiscretion by telling us that Von Hesseltein was sleeping with the malai-wala, a strapping young man in his twenties who was a great advertisement for the invigorating qualities of malai. William obviously felt that Von Hesseltein’s wife was getting a raw deal. But Von Hesseltein was not the understanding sort. He threw William out of the house and stopped giving him work.

  William hired an old typewriter and set himself up as a correspondent in his own right, living and working from a room in the Doon Guest House. He bombarded the Swiss and German papers with his articles, but there were very few takers. No one then was really interested in India’s five-year plans, or Corbusier’s Chandigarh, or the Bhakra-Nangal Dam. Book publishing in India was confined to textbooks, otherwise William might have published a vivid account of his experiences in the French Foreign Legion. After two or three rums at the Royal Café he would regale us with tales of his exploits in the Legion, before and after the siege of Dien-Bien-Phu. Some of his stories had the ring of truth, others (particularly his sexual exploits) were obviously tall tales; but never the less I was happy to pay for the beer or coffee in order to hear him spin them out.

  I was living off my own literary endeavours, selling stories and articles to the Indian papers (about half a dozen scattered throughout the country), with the occasional sale of a story to the BBC or Young Elizabethan, a children’s magazine published in the UK. In those days there was a greater market for essays and short fiction, so my early stories found a home more easily then than they do today.

  Those were glorious days for Ruskin Bond, unknown freelance writer. I was realizing my dream of living by my pen, and I was doing it from a small town in north India, having turned my back on both London and New Delhi. I had no ambitions to be a great writer, or even a famous one, or even a rich one. All I wanted to do was write. And I wanted a few readers and the occasional cheque so that I could carry on living my dream.

  The cheques came along in their own desultory way—fifty rupees from the Weekly, or thirty-five from The Statesman or the same from Sport and Pastime, and so on—just enough to get by and to be the envy of Suresh Mathur, William Matheson and a few others, professional people who felt that I had no business earning more than they did. Suresh even declared that I should have been paying tax, and offered to represent me, his other clients having gone elsewhere.

  Colonel Wilkie did not earn anything either. He lived on a small pension in a corner room of the White House Hotel. His wife had left him some years before, presumably because of his drinking, but he claimed to have left her because of her obsession with moving the furniture: it seems she was always shifting things about, changing rooms, throwing out perfectly sound tables and chairs and replacing them with fancy stuff picked up here and there. If he took a liking to a particular easy chair and showed signs of settling down in it, it would disappear the next day to be replaced by something horribly ugly and uncomfortable.

  ‘It was a form of mental torture,’ said Colonel Wilkie, confiding in me over
a glass of beer on the White House veranda. ‘The sitting room was cluttered with all sorts of ornamental junk and flimsy side tables, and I was constantly falling over the damn things. It was like a minefield! And the mines were never in the same place. You’ve noticed that I walk with a limp?’

  ‘First World War?’ I ventured. ‘Wounded at Ypres? Or was it Flanders?’

  ‘Nothing of the sort,’ snorted the Colonel. ‘I did get one or two flesh wounds but they were nothing as compared to the damage inflicted on me by those damned shifting tables and chairs. Fell over a coffee table and dislocated my shoulder. Then broke an ankle negotiating a stool that was in the wrong place. Bookshelf fell on me. Tripped on a rolled-up carpet. Hit by a curtain rod. Would you have put up with it?’

  ‘No,’ I had to admit.

  ‘Had to leave her, of course. She went off to England. Send her an allowance. Half my pension! All spent on furniture!’

  The Colonel told me that the final straw had come when his favourite spring bed had suddenly been replaced by a bed made up of hard wooden slats. It was sheer torture trying to sleep on it, and he had left his house and moved into the White House Hotel as a permanent guest.

  Now he had gone to the other extreme and wouldn’t allow anyone to touch or tidy up anything in his room. There were beer-stains on the tablecloth, cobwebs on his family pictures, dust on his books, empty medicine bottles on his dressing table and mice nesting in his old, discarded boots.

  I didn’t see much of the room because we usually sat out on the veranda, waited upon by one of the hotel bearers, who came over with bottles of beer that I dutifully paid for, the Colonel having exhausted his credit. I suppose he was in his late sixties then. He never went anywhere, not even for a walk in the compound. He blamed this inactivity on his gout, but it was really inertia and an unwillingness to leave the precincts of the bar, where he could cadge the occasional drink from a sympathetic guest.

  Colonel Wilkie had given up on life. I suppose he could have gone off to England, but he would have been more miserable there, with no one to buy him a drink (since he wasn’t likely to reciprocate), and the possibility of his wife turning up again to rearrange the furniture.

  No one arranged my furniture. I didn’t have any, except for my bed and an old dining table which served as my writing desk. My landlady was Dehra’s first lady shopkeeper. She was a very large woman with poor eyesight and high blood pressure. But she gave me an excellent breakfast—stuffed parathas with shalgam pickle, which sustained me through most of the day. In the evenings I ate at a dhaba near the Orient Cinema, a little way down the road.

  The Orient was one of Dehra’s older cinemas, started in the 1930s by a Parsi, Mr Gazder, who had since passed on. Over the entrance it had a couple of eye-catching frescoes of dancers, created by Sudhir Khastgir, the Doon School’s art master. The cinema, where as a boy I saw Abbot and Costello comedies, and classics such as Key Largo and The Maltese Falcon, switched over to Hindi movies in the 1950s and later to soft porn—films with exotic titles such as Dark Blue Nights and Bedroom Follies, purported to be foreign but actually made down south.

  Some of my younger friends, from Karanpur and the Dilaram Bazaar, occasionally accompanied me to the pictures and often invited me to their homes. These boys were, in fact, far more hospitable than people like Suresh Mathur or William Matheson, who were always cash-strapped. In the Dilaram area there were Narinder and Sahib Singh, whose mothers were always feeding me. And in Karanpur there was Sudheer, whose father owned a small press from which he issued a newspaper called The Frontier Mail. I would occasionally help with the paper, correcting proofs and editing contributions; it was valuable experience.

  Apart from a mutual liking, these youngsters admired me because I’d made a name for myself at the age of twenty-one—barely two or three years older than they were—something my older friends (Suresh and William and others) couldn’t quite come to terms with.

  All the same, after two years of freelancing in Dehra, I found that my income remained static and I wasn’t really making much headway as an author. One novel published in England hadn’t really put me on the literary map. I was discontented with myself. There I was, stagnating in the Doon, supplementing my income with English tuitions and correcting proofs for The Frontier Mail! I could probably have continued in this mode for several years, and might even have been a better writer for it, but a job in Delhi beckoned, and I thought it might be to my advantage to make a move.

  So I packed my bags (all my belongings fit quite easily into two suitcases) and took an early morning bus to Delhi, promising my young friends that I would come back with my fortune made! The Dilaram boys, ever loyal, remained in touch with me, and even turned up in Delhi from time to time, but I had no news of Suresh or William or the Colonel—and it was to be three years before I found myself in Dehra again.

  Delhi in the 1960s wasn’t really my sort of place. The refugee influx from Pakistan had resulted in many far-flung residential complexes springing up in arid areas where there was no form of entertainment or cultural activity. To obtain a book I had to travel all the way from Rajouri Gardens to Connaught Place (forty-five minutes in a bus); and if I wanted to meet a like-minded friend, it was another forty minutes by Delhi Transport to the Civil Lines in Old Delhi.

  How I longed for Dehra’s little Royal Café, and those idle hours with Suresh Mathur and Co. How I missed my bicycle-riding friends from the Dilaram Bazaar. And Dehra’s little bookshops, and the lichee trees, and my lamp-lit room above my landlady’s homely provision store.

  I longed to return, but I’d taken up a job with a relief agency and they were paying me quite well. I felt I had to stick it out for a couple of years before making another bid for freedom, the sort of freedom that only successful freelancing could bring me. My time in Delhi was not a creative period; I travelled without absorbing much; I was writing project reports instead of stories.

  When, after three and a half years, I did revisit my old home town, I took a room at the White House Hotel. Colonel Wilkie was missing. He had died of cirrhosis the previous year, and had been given a simple burial by those who knew him. A few weeks after the funeral his wife turned up and went through his effects, selling most of his few possessions to the local kabadi-wala. She hadn’t liked the location of his grave and had wanted to shift it, in the manner of her furniture, but the local padre had refused. She had gone off in a huff, without paying for a tombstone, so the Colonel’s grave remained unmarked.

  William had left the Doon. According to reliable reports, he had inherited his father’s wealth back in Switzerland, and was now married to a beauty from Guatemala who was working her way through his fortune. I had a feeling he’d turn up again some day, asking me for a small loan.

  Good old Suresh had also had a stroke of luck, although I suppose it should really be attributed to good management on his part. The year after I’d gone away he had sold his Rajpur house to a middle-aged widowed princess; he had then struck up a close friendship with her and a year later they were married. When I met him in the Royal Café, I told him he’d made a smart move, a remark which seemed to offend him: he assured me that he was genuinely in love with the princess. And he paid for the beer and told me that the house was up for sale again! Apparently they were thinking of moving to Delhi.

  Everyone was moving out of Dehra, including my Dilaram Bazaar friends. Dehra was a place where you could get by, but there were no career prospects for young men, no ‘further education’ (whatever that meant), and no real business opportunities. It was a good place to go to school, but after graduating, many chose to seek their fortune elsewhere. Only the odd fellow like me came back—briefly.

  I wanted to live in Dehra again, and I thought seriously about it; but I kept putting it off. And when eventually, I’d had enough of Delhi, I looked for a retreat in the hills, where I could write and be myself and even fall in love from time to time.

  So here I am, forty years on, perched on a hilltop ov
erlooking the valley where I grew up and grew into a writer. And sometimes I go down to the valley, not to look up old friends (for all of them have gone their different ways) but simply to try and recapture the feel of the place as I knew it.

  It has changed, of course, as places must over a period of time. A small garden town has grown into a large town without gardens. Not quite a city, although it comes close to being one, with its congested roads, polluting traffic and overburdened civic structure. A few lichee orchards remain but most have been replaced by housing estates. Here and there a shopkeeper recognizes me. Some of the old buildings are still here, with peepal trees growing out of the walls. The great maidan has shrunk, encroached upon by bus stands, motor workshops, and a clutter of makeshift structures. There are people everywhere. The population has gone from 50,000 in 1950 to over 700,000 at the coming of the millennium. There are pockets of prosperity; there is money to be made in the marketplace; but the unemployed and the unemployable will soon by vying for standing room.

  But here’s a quiet corner. A nice old building with a patch of grass in front … Ah, it’s the old White House Hotel! A bit run-down now, like the rest of us survivors from that era, but I can still find lodging for the night … And in the morning I shall sit on the veranda where a frond of bougainvillaea trails, and write this little memoir.

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