Collected Short Stories Page 9

  ‘You need a holiday,’ I told him when I was out of hospital. ‘Why don’t you join the students’ union and work on a farm for a week or two? That should toughen you up.’

  To my surprise, the idea appealed to him and he got ready for the trip. Suddenly, he became suffused with goodwill towards all mankind. As evidence of his trust in me, he gave me the key of his room to keep (though he would have been secretly delighted if I had stolen his piano and chopsticks, giving him the excuse to say ‘never trust an Indian or an Anglo-Indian’), and introduced me to a girl called Vu-Phuong, a small, very pretty Annamite girl who was studying at the Polytechnic. Miss Vu, Thanh told me, had to leave her lodgings next week and would I find somewhere else for her to stay? I was an experienced hand at finding bed-sitting-rooms, having changed my own abode five times in six months (that sweet, nomadic London life!). As I found Miss Vu very attractive, I told her I would get her a room, one not far from my own, in case she needed any further assistance.

  Later, in confidence, Thanh asked me not to be too friendly with Vu-Phuong as she was not to be trusted.

  But as soon as he left for the farm, I went round to see Vu in her new lodgings which were one tube station away from my own. She seemed glad to see me and as she too could make French and Chinese dishes I accepted her invitation to lunch. We had chicken noodles, soya sauce and fried rice. I did the washing up. Vu said: ‘Do you play cards, Ruskin?’ She had a sweet, gentle voice that brought out all the gallantry in a man. I began to feel protective and hovered about her like a devoted cocker spaniel.

  ‘I’m not much of a card player,’ I said.

  ‘Never mind, I’ll tell your fortune with them.’

  She made me shuffle the cards. Then scattered them about on the bed in different patterns. I would be very rich, she said. I would travel a lot and I would reach the age of forty. I told her I was comforted to know it.

  The month was June and Hampstead Heath was only ten minutes’ walk from the house. Boys flew kites from the hill and little painted boats scurried about on the ponds. We sat down on the grass, on the slope of the hill, and I held Vu’s hand.

  For three days I ate with Vu and we told each other our fortunes and lay on the grass on Hampstead Heath and on the fourth day I said, ‘Vu, I would like to marry you.’

  ‘I will think about it,’ she said.

  Thanh came back on the sixth day and said, ‘You know, Ruskin, I have been doing some thinking and Vu is not such a bad girl after all. I will ask her to marry me. That is what I need—a wife!’

  ‘Why didn’t you think of it before?’ I said. ‘When will you ask her?’

  ‘Tonight,’ he said. ‘I will come to see you afterwards and tell you if I have been successful.’

  I shrugged my shoulders resignedly and waited. Thanh left me at six in the evening and I waited for him till ten o’clock, all the time feeling a little sorry for him. More disillusionmnent for Thanh! Poor Thanh . . .

  He came in at ten o’clock, his face beaming. He slapped me on the back and said I was his best friend.

  ‘Did you ask her?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. She said she would think about it. That is the same as “yes”.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ I said, unfortunately for both of us. ‘She told me the same thing.’

  Thanh looked at me as though I had just stabbed him in the back. Et tu Ruskin was what his expression said.

  We took a taxi and sped across to Vu’s rooms. The uncertain nature of her replies was too much for both of us. Without a definite answer neither of us would have been able to sleep that night.

  Vu was not at home. The landlady met us at the door and told us that Vu had gone to the theatre with an Indian gentleman.

  Thanh gave me a long, contemptuous look.

  ‘Never trust an Indian,’ he said.

  ‘Never trust a woman,’ I replied.

  At twelve o’clock I woke Pravin. Whenever I could not sleep, I went to Pravin. He knew the remedy for all ailments. As on previous occasions, he went to the cupboard and produced a bottle of Cognac. We got drunk. He was seventeen and I was nineteen and we were both quite decadent.

  Three weeks later I returned to India. Thanh went to Paris to help in his sister’s restaurant. I did not hear of Vu-Phuong again.

  And now, a year later, there is the letter from Pravin. All he can tell me is that Thanh died of some unknown disease. I wonder if it had anything to do with the ticking in his chest or with his vague threats of suicide. I doubt if I will ever know. And I will never know how much I hated Thanh, and how much I loved him, or if there was any difference between hating and loving him.

  The Trouble with Jinns

  My friend Jimmy has only one arm. He lost the other when he was a young man of twenty-five. The story of how he lost his good right arm is a little difficult to believe, but I swear that it is absolutely true.

  To begin with, Jimmy was (and presumably still is) a Jinn. Now a Jinn isn’t really a human like us. A Jinn is a spirit creature from another world who has assumed, for a lifetime, the physical aspect of a human being. Jimmy was a true Jinn and he had the Jinn’s gift of being able to elongate his arm at will. Most Jinns can stretch their arms to a distance of twenty or thirty feet. Jimmy could attain forty feet. His arm would move through space or up walls or along the ground like a beautiful gliding serpent. I have seen him stretched out beneath a mango tree, helping himself to ripe mangoes from the top of the tree. He loved mangoes. He was a natural glutton and it was probably his gluttony that first led him to misuse his peculiar gifts.

  We were at school together at a hill station in northern India. Jimmy was particularly good at basketball. He was clever enough not to lengthen his arm too much because he did not want anyone to know that he was a Jinn. In the boxing ring he generally won his fights. His opponents never seemed to get past his amazing reach. He just kept tapping them on the nose until they retired from the ring bloody and bewildered.

  It was during the half-term examinations that I stumbled on Jimmy’s secret. We had been set a particularly difficult algebra paper but I had managed to cover a couple of sheets with correct answers and was about to forge ahead on another sheet when I noticed someone’s hand on my desk. At first I thought it was the invigilator’s. But when I looked up there was no one beside me. Could it be the boy sitting directly behind? No, he was engrossed in his question paper and had his hands to himself. Meanwhile, the hand on my desk had grasped my answer sheets and was cautiously moving off. Following its descent, I found that it was attached to an arm of amazing length and pliability. This moved stealthily down the desk and slithered across the floor, shrinking all the while, until it was restored to its normal length. Its owner was of course one who had never been any good at algebra.

  I had to write out my answers a second time but after the exam I went straight up to Jimmy, told him I didn’t like his game and threatened to expose him. He begged me not to let anyone know, assured me that he couldn’t really help himself, and offered to be of service to me whenever I wished. It was tempting to have Jimmy as my friend, for with his long reach he would obviously be useful. I agreed to overlook the matter of the pilfered papers and we became the best of pals.

  It did not take me long to discover that Jimmy’s gift was more of a nuisance than a constructive aid. That was because Jimmy had a second-rate mind and did not know how to make proper use of his powers. He seldom rose above the trivial. He used his long arm in the tuck shop, in the classroom, in the dormitory. And when we were allowed out to the cinema, he used it in the dark of the hall.

  Now the trouble with all Jinns is that they have a weakness for women with long black hair. The longer and blacker the hair, the better for Jinns. And should a Jinn manage to take possession of the woman he desires, she goes into a decline and her beauty decays. Everything about her is destroyed except for the beautiful long black hair.

  Jimmy was still too young to be able to take possession in this way, but he couldn’t resist tou
ching and stroking long black hair. The cinema was the best place for the indulgence of his whims. His arm would start stretching, his fingers would feel their way along the rows of seats, and his lengthening limb would slowly work its way along the aisle until it reached the back of the seat in which sat the object of his admiration. His hand would stroke the long black hair with great tenderness and if the girl felt anything and looked round, Jimmy’s hand would disappear behind the seat and lie there poised like the hood of a snake, ready to strike again.

  At college two or three years later, Jimmy’s first real victim succumbed to his attentions. She was a lecturer in economics, not very good-looking, but her hair, black and lustrous, reached almost to her knees. She usually kept it in plaits but Jimmy saw her one morning, just after she had taken a head bath, and her hair lay spread out on the cot on which she was reclining. Jimmy could no longer control himself. His spirit, the very essence of his personality, entered the woman’s body and the next day she was distraught, feverish and excited. She would not eat, went into a coma, and in a few days dwindled to a mere skeleton. When she died, she was nothing but skin and bone but her hair had lost none of its loveliness.

  I took pains to avoid Jimmy after this tragic event. I could not prove that he was the cause of the lady’s sad demise but in my own heart I was quite certain of it. For since meeting Jimmy, I had read a good deal about Jinns and knew their ways.

  We did not see each other for a few years. And then, holidaying in the hills last year, I found we were staying at the same hotel. I could not very well ignore him and after we had drunk a few beers together I began to feel that I had perhaps misjudged Jimmy and that he was not the irresponsible Jinn I had taken him for. Perhaps the college lecturer had died of some mysterious malady that attacks only college lecturers and Jimmy had nothing at all to do with it.

  We had decided to take our lunch and a few bottles of beer to a grassy knoll just below the main motor road. It was late afternoon and I had been sleeping off the effects of the beer when I woke to find Jimmy looking rather agitated.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘Up there, under the pine trees,’ he said. ‘Just above the road. Don’t you see them?’

  ‘I see two girls,’ I said. ‘So what?’

  ‘The one on the left. Haven’t you noticed her hair?’

  ‘Yes, it is very long and beautiful and—now look, Jimmy, you’d better get a grip on yourself!’ But already his hand was out of sight, his arm snaking up the hillside and across the road.

  Presently I saw the hand emerge from some bushes near the girls and then cautiously make its way to the girl with the black tresses. So absorbed was Jimmy in the pursuit of his favourite pastime that he failed to hear the blowing of a horn. Around the bend of the road came a speeding Mercedes-Benz truck.

  Jimmy saw the truck but there wasn’t time for him to shrink his arm back to normal. It lay right across the entire width of the road and when the truck had passed over it, it writhed and twisted like a mortally wounded python.

  By the time the truck driver and I could fetch a doctor, the arm (or what was left of it) had shrunk to its ordinary size. We took Jimmy to hospital where the doctors found it necessary to amputate. The truck driver, who kept insisting that the arm he ran over was at least thirty feet long, was arrested on a charge of drunken driving.

  Some weeks later I asked Jimmy, ‘Why are you so depressed? You still have one arm. Isn’t it gifted in the same way?’

  ‘I never tried to find out,’ he said, ‘and I’m not going to try now.’

  He is of course still a Jinn at heart and whenever he sees a girl with long black hair he must be terribly tempted to try out his one good arm and stroke her beautiful tresses. But he has learnt his lesson. It is better to be a human without any gifts than a Jinn or a genius with one too many.

  Time Stops at Shamli

  The Dehra Express usually drew into Shamli at about five o’clock in the morning at which time the station would be dimly lit and the jungle across the tracks would just be visible in the faint light of dawn. Shamli is a small station at the foot of the Siwalik hills and the Siwaliks lie at the foot of the Himalayas, which in turn lie at the feet of God.

  The station, I remember, had only one platform, an office for the stationmaster, and a waiting room. The platform boasted a tea stall, a fruit vendor, and a few stray dogs. Not much else was required because the train stopped at Shamli for only five minutes before rushing on into the forests.

  Why it stopped at Shamli, I never could tell. Nobody got off the train and nobody got on. There were never any coolies on the platform. But the train would stand there a full five minutes and the guard would blow his whistle and presently Shamli would be left behind and forgotten . . . until I passed that way again.

  I was paying my relations in Saharanpur an annual visit when the night train stopped at Shamli. I was thirty-six at the time and still single.

  On this particular journey, the train came into Shamli just as I awoke from a restless sleep. The third-class compartment was crowded beyond capacity and I had been sleeping in an upright position with my back to the lavatory door. Now someone was trying to get into the lavatory. He was obviously hard pressed for time.

  ‘I’m sorry, brother,’ I said, moving as much as I could to one side.

  He stumbled into the closet without bothering to close the door. ‘Where are we now?’ I asked the man sitting beside me. He was smoking a strong aromatic beedi.

  ‘Shamli station,’ he said, rubbing the palm of a large calloused hand over the frosted glass of the window.

  I let the window down and stuck my head out. There was a cool breeze blowing down the platform, a breeze that whispered of autumn in the hills. As usual there was no activity except for the fruit vendor walking up and down the length of the train with his basket of mangoes balanced on his head. At the tea stall, a kettle was steaming, but there was no one to mind it. I rested my forehead on the window ledge and let the breeze play on my temples. I had been feeling sick and giddy but there was a wild sweetness in the wind that I found soothing.

  ‘Yes,’ I said to myself, ‘I wonder what happens in Shamli behind the station walls.’

  My fellow passenger offered me a beedi. He was a farmer, I think, on his way to Dehra. He had a long, untidy, sad moustache.

  We had been more than five minutes at the station. I looked up and down the platform, but nobody was getting on or off the train. Presently the guard came walking past our compartment.

  ‘What’s the delay?’ I asked him.

  ‘Some obstruction further down the line,’ he said.

  ‘Will we be here long?’

  ‘I don’t know what the trouble is. About half an hour at the least.’

  My neighbour shrugged and throwing the remains of his beedi out of the window, closed his eyes and immediately fell asleep. I moved restlessly in my seat and then the man came out of the lavatory, not so urgently now, and with obvious peace of mind. I closed the door for him.

  I stood up and stretched and this stretching of my limbs seemed to set in motion a stretching of the mind and I found myself thinking: ‘I am in no hurry to get to Saharanpur and I have always wanted to see Shamli behind the station walls. If I get down now, I can spend the day here. It will be better than sitting in this train for another hour. Then in the evening I can catch the next train home.’

  In those days I never had the patience to wait for second thoughts and so I began pulling my small suitcase out from under the seat.

  The farmer woke up and asked, ‘What are you doing, brother?’

  ‘I’m getting out,’ I said.

  He went to sleep again.

  It would have taken at least fifteen minutes to reach the door as people and their belongings cluttered up the passage. So I let my suitcase down from the window and followed it on to the platform.

  There was no one to collect my ticket at the barrier because there was obviously no point in keeping a ma
n there to collect tickets from passengers who never came. And anyway, I had a through-ticket to my destination which I would need in the evening.

  I went out of the station and came to Shamli.

  Outside the station there was a neem tree and under it stood a tonga. The pony was nibbling at the grass at the foot of the tree. The youth in the front seat was the only human in sight. There were no signs of inhabitants or habitation. I approached the tonga and the youth stared at me as though he couldn’t believe his eyes.

  ‘Where is Shamli?’ I asked.

  ‘Why, friend, this is Shamli,’ he said.

  I looked around again but couldn’t see any sign of life. A dusty road led past the station and disappeared into the forest.

  ‘Does anyone live here?’ I asked.

  ‘I live here,’ he said with an engaging smile. He looked an amiable, happy-go-lucky fellow. He wore a cotton tunic and dirty white pyjamas.

  ‘Where?’ I asked.

  ‘In my tonga, of course,’ he said. ‘I have had this pony five years now. I carry supplies to the hotel. But today the manager has not come to collect them. You are going to the hotel? I will take you.’

  ‘Oh, so there’s a hotel?’

  ‘Well, friend, it is called that. And there are a few houses too and some shops, but they are all about a mile from the station. If they were not a mile from here, I would be out of business.’

  I felt relieved but I still had the feeling of having walked into a town consisting of one station, one pony and one man.

  ‘You can take me,’ I said. ‘I’m staying till this evening.’

  He heaved my suitcase into the seat beside him and I climbed in at the back. He flicked the reins and slapped his pony on the buttocks and, with a roll and a lurch, the buggy moved off down the dusty forest road.

  ‘What brings you here?’ asked the youth.