Rusty Comes Home Read online

  Where had they sheltered, I wondered, as the wind tore at them and fire fell from the sky.

  I touched the cold stones, half expecting to find in them some traces of the warmth of human contact. I listened, waiting for some ancient echo, some returning wave of sound, that would bring me nearer to the spirits of the dead lovers; but there was only the wind coughing in the lovely pines.

  I thought I heard voices in the wind; and perhaps I did. For isn’t the wind the voice of the undying dead?

  The Last Time I Saw Delhi

  I’D HAD THIS old and faded negative with me for a number of years and had never bothered to make a print from it. It was a picture of my father, mother and me. I was just two years old then, and we’d gone on a picnic that day.

  I hadn’t kept many family pictures and this negative was yellow and spotted with damp.

  Then last week, when I was visiting my mother in hospital in Delhi, while she awaited her operation, I remembered the negative and decided I’d make a print for my mother.

  So here’s the picture, and I am taking it to show my mother who lies in the Lady Hardinge Hospital, awaiting the removal of her left breast.

  It is early February and the day is cold and windy. The sun is out, though, and I cheer up as I sit in the back of a stuffy, little taxi taking me through the suburbs of Greater New Delhi.

  I’d arrived in Delhi two days back; my mother’s letter informing me of her operation had also requested me to meet her soon. I had kept my distance from her all these years, for I’d always felt that she was very preoccupied with her four sons and two daughters—I felt like an outsider whenever I visited her large family. After she divorced my father, she had married again, but had been widowed after a few years. Then she had married yet again, and since then had been busy in domestic bliss. Despite all this, she had been in touch with me—regardless of my constant travel and change of residence. I, on the other hand, used to respond with a Christmas card every year. We weren’t close, but we weren’t distant either.

  On either side of the road that my taxi sails through are the houses of well-to-do Punjabis, who came to Delhi as refugees in 1947 and now make up more than half the capital’s population. Industrious, flashy, go-ahead people. Thirty years ago, fields extended on either side of this road as far as the eye could see. The Ridge, an outcrop of the Aravallis, was scrub jungle, in which the black buck roamed. Feroz Shah’s fourteenth-century hunting lodge stood here in splendid isolation. It is still here, hidden by petrol pumps and lost in the sounds of buses, cars, trucks and scooter-rickshaws. The peacock has fled the forest, the black buck is extinct. Only the jackal remains. When, a thousand years from now, the last human has left this contaminated planet for some other star, the jackal and the crow will remain, to survive for years on all the refuse we leave behind.

  It is difficult to find the right entrance to the hospital, because for about a mile along the Panchkuian Road the pavement has been obliterated by tea shops, furniture shops, and piles of accumulated junk. A public hydrant stands near the gate, and dirty water runs across the road.

  My mother is in a small ward. It is a warm and sunny room. A nurse, a dark pretty girl from the South, is attending to my mother. She says, ‘In a minute,’ and proceeds to make an entry on a chart.

  My mother gives me a wan smile and beckons me to come nearer. Her cheeks are slightly flushed, possibly due to fever, otherwise she looks her normal self. I find it hard to believe that the operation she will have tomorrow will only give her, at the most, another year’s lease of life.

  ‘How do you feel?’ I ask.

  ‘All right. They say they will operate in the morning. They’ve stopped my smoking.’

  ‘Can you drink? Your rum, I mean?’

  ‘No. Not until a few days after the operation.’

  She has a fair amount of grey in her hair, natural enough at sixty-four. Otherwise she hasn’t changed much; the same small chin and mouth, and lively brown eyes. Her father’s face, not her mother’s.

  The nurse has left us. I produce the photograph and hand it to my mother.

  ‘The negative was lying with me all these years. I had it printed yesterday.’

  ‘I can’t see without my glasses.’

  The glasses are lying on the locker near her bed. I hand them to her. She puts them on and studies the photograph.

  ‘Your father was always very fond of you.’

  ‘I know. At times I feel that he still watches over me, and I find that thought quite comforting.’

  ‘It was his legacy of books which got you to Jersey, when you finished school, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The only person who ever left you anything. I’m afraid I’ve nothing to leave you.’

  ‘You know very well that I’ve never cared a damn about money. Father taught me to write. That was inheritance enough.’

  ‘And what did I teach you?’

  ‘I’m not sure . . . Perhaps you taught me how to enjoy myself now and then.’

  She looked pleased at this. ‘Yes, I’ve enjoyed myself between troubles. But your father didn’t know how to enjoy himself. That’s why we quarrelled so much. And finally separated.’

  ‘He was much older than you.’

  ‘You’ve always blamed me for leaving him, haven’t you?’ ‘I was very small at the time. You left us suddenly. Father had to look after me, and it wasn’t easy for him. He was very sick. Naturally I blamed you.’

  ‘He wouldn’t let me take you away.’

  ‘Because you were going to marry someone else.’

  I break off; we have been over this before. I am not here as my father’s advocate, and the time for recrimination has passed.

  And quite suddenly, a winter shower comes down on the city, and the scent of wet earth comes through the open doors, overpowering the odour of medicines and disinfectants. The dark-eyed nurse comes in again and informs me that the doctor will soon be on his rounds. I can come again in the evening, or early morning before the operation.

  ‘Come in the evening,’ says my mother. ‘The others will be here then.’

  ‘I haven’t come to see the others,’ I say rather crossly. What is the matter with me?

  ‘They are looking forward to seeing you.’ ‘They’ being my stepfather and half-brothers.

  ‘I’ll be seeing them in the morning.’

  ‘As you like . . .’

  And then I am on the road again, standing on the pavement, on the fringe of a chaotic rush of traffic, in which it appears that every vehicle is doing its best to overtake its neighbour. The blare of horns can be heard in the corridors of the hospital, but everyone is conditioned to the noise and pays no attention to it. Perhaps, the sick and the dying are heartened by the thought that people are still well enough to feel reckless, indifferent to each other’s safety! In Delhi there is a feverish desire to be first in line, the first to get anything . . . This is probably because no one ever gets round to dealing with second-comers.

  When I hail a scooter-rickshaw and it stops a short distance away, someone elbows his way past me and gets in first. This epitomizes the philosophy and outlook of the Delhiwallah.

  So I stand on the pavement waiting for another scooter, which doesn’t come. In Delhi, to be second in the race is to be last.

  I walk all the way back to my small hotel, with a foreboding of having seen my mother for the last time.

  From Small Beginnings

  ON THE FIRST clear September day, towards the end of the rains, I visited the pine-knoll, my place of peace and power.

  Mussoorie . . . never ever thought that this would be the place where I’d finally settle down.

  After my mother passed away (soon after her operation), I returned to Dehra, and life went back to its routine ways. Not for very long though, for, one day I received a legal notice informing me about a house in Mussoorie that I had inherited. I had inherited it from Uncle Ken (of all people). I was shocked, to say the least. I had had no
idea that Uncle Ken had come back to India from England, and worse still, hadn’t known about his whereabouts or his death until now. I was restless with curiosity. Had Uncle Ken cared for me so much as to leave behind a house—his house— for me? Why hadn’t he contacted me all these years? Mussoorie wasn’t far from Dehra, after all.

  Plagued by these questions I set out to take a look at this inheritance of mine. It did not disappoint—it was a charming little cottage on the slope of a hill, and had a splendid view.

  I pondered on my next course of action. It would probably be easy for me to sell off the cottage to someone and forget about it. But would that be Uncle Ken’s wish? Perhaps he had been fond of his house and had wanted it to be occupied by someone who was family. And I was the only living member of our family in India. I didn’t want to leave Dehra; many of the best years of my life had been spent in Dehra. However, this house in Mussoorie gave me the perfect opportunity and reason to finally settle down, put my roots down, for I’d always been lured by the hills ever since my schooldays in Simla. Yes, I’d make that cottage in Mussoorie my permanent residence. So, here I was—in Mussoorie.

  I tramped through late monsoon foliage—tall ferns, bushes festooned with flowering convolvulus—and crossed the stream by way of its little bridge of stones before climbing the steep hill to the pine slope.

  This is where I would write my stories. I could see everything from here—my cottage across the valley; behind and above me, the town and the bazaar, straddling the ridge; to the left, the high mountains and the twisting road to the source of the great river; below me, the little stream and the path to the village; the fields beyond; the wide valley below, and another range of hills and then the distant plains.

  Today, as I look around, I can even see Prem Singh in the garden, putting the mattresses out in the sun. From here he is just a speck on the far hill, but I know it is Prem by the way he stands. A man may have a hundred disguises, but in the end it is his posture that gives him away. Like my grandfather, who was a master of disguise and successfully roamed the bazaars as fruit-vendor or basketmaker. But we could always recognize him because of his pronounced slouch.

  Prem Singh doesn’t slouch, but he has this habit of looking up at the sky (regardless of whether it’s cloudy or clear), and at the moment he’s looking at the sky.

  Eight years with Prem. He was just a sixteen-year-old boy when I first saw him, and now he has a wife and child.

  I had been in the cottage for just over a year . . . He stood on the landing outside the kitchen door. A tall boy, dark, with good teeth and brown, deep-set eyes, dressed smartly in white drill—his only change of clothes. Looking for a job. I liked the look of him, but . . .

  ‘I already have someone working for me,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, sir. He is my uncle.’

  In the hills, everyone is a brother or an uncle.

  ‘You don’t want me to dismiss your uncle?’

  ‘No, sir. But he says you can find a job for me.’

  ‘I’ll try. I’ll make enquiries. Have you just come from your village?’

  ‘Yes. Yesterday I walked ten miles to Pauri. There I got a bus.’

  ‘Sit down. Your uncle will make some tea.’

  He sat down on the steps, removed his white keds, wriggled his toes. His feet were both long and broad, large feet but not ugly. He was unusually clean for a hill boy. And taller than most.

  ‘Do you smoke?’ I asked.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘It is true,’ said his uncle. ‘He does not smoke. All my nephews smoke but this one. He is a little peculiar, he does not smoke—neither bidi nor hookah.’

  ‘Do you drink?’

  ‘It makes me vomit.’

  ‘Do you take bhang?’

  ‘No, sahib.’

  ‘You have no vices. It’s unnatural.’

  ‘He is unnatural, sahib,’ said his uncle.

  ‘Does he chase girls?’

  ‘They chase him, sahib.’

  ‘So he left the village and came looking for a job.’ I looked at him. He grinned, then looked away and began rubbing his feet.

  ‘Your name is . . .?’

  ‘Prem Singh.’

  ‘All right, Prem, I will try to do something for you.’

  I did not see him for a couple of weeks. I forgot about finding him a job. But when I met him again, on the road to the bazaar, he told me that he had got a temporary job in the Survey, looking after the surveyor’s tents.

  ‘Next week we will be going to Rajasthan,’ he said.

  ‘It will be very hot. Have you been in the desert before?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘It is not like the hills. And it is far from home.’ ‘I know. But I have no choice in the matter. I have to collect some money in order to get married.’

  In his region there was a bride price, usually of two thousand rupees.

  ‘Do you have to get married so soon?’

  ‘I have only one brother and he is still very young. My mother is not well. She needs a daughter-in-law to help her in the fields and the house, and with the cows. We are a small family, so the work is greater.’

  Every family has its few terraced fields, narrow and stony, usually perched on a hillside above a stream or river. They grow rice, barley, maize, potatoes—just enough to live on. Even if their produce is sufficient for marketing, the absence of roads makes it difficult to get the produce to the market towns. There is no money to be earned in the villages, and money is needed for clothes, soap, medicines, and for recovering the family jewellery from the moneylenders. So the young men leave their villages to find work, and to find work they must go to the plains. The lucky ones get into the army. Others enter domestic service or take jobs in garages, hotels, wayside tea shops, schools . . .

  In Mussoorie the main attraction is the large number of schools which employ cooks and bearers. But the schools were full when Prem arrived. He’d been to the recruiting centre at Roorkee, hoping to get into the army; but they found a deformity in his right foot, the result of a bone broken when a landslip carried him away one dark monsoon night. He was lucky, he said, that it was only his foot and not his head that had been broken.

  He came to the house to inform his uncle about the job and to say goodbye. I thought, another nice person I probably won’t see again; another ship passing in the night, the friendly twinkle of its lights soon vanishing in the darkness. I said ‘Come again’, held his smile with mine so that I could remember him better, and returned to my study and my typewriter. The typewriter is the repository of a writer’s loneliness. It stares unsympathetically back at him every day, doing its best to be discouraging. Maybe I’ll go back to the old-fashioned quill pen and marble ink-stand; then I can feel like a real writer—Balzac or Dickens—scratching away into the endless reaches of the night . . . Of course, the days and nights are seemingly shorter than they need to be! They must be, otherwise why do we hurry so much and achieve so little, by the standards of the past . . .

  Prem went, disappeared into the vast faceless cities of the plains, and a year slipped by, or rather I did, and then there he was again, thinner and darker and still smiling and still looking for a job. I should have known that hill men don’t disappear altogether. The spirit-haunted rocks don’t let their people wander too far, lest they lose them forever.

  I was able to get him a job in the school. The Headmaster’s wife needed a cook. I wasn’t sure if Prem could cook very well but I sent him along and they said they’d give him a trial. Three days later the Headmaster’s wife met me on the road and started gushing all over me. She was the type who gushed.

  ‘We’re so grateful to you! Thank you for sending me that lovely boy. He’s so polite. And he cooks very well. A little too hot for my husband, but otherwise delicious—just delicious! He’s a real treasure—a lovely boy.’ And she gave me an arch look—the famous look which she used to captivate all the good-looking young prefects who became prefects, it was said, only if she ap
proved of them.

  I wasn’t sure that she didn’t want something more than a cook, and I only hoped that Prem would give every satisfaction.

  He looked cheerful enough when he came to see me on his off-day.

  ‘How are you getting on?’ I asked.

  ‘Lovely,’ he said, using his mistress’s favourite expression.

  ‘What do you mean—lovely? Do they like your work?’

  ‘The memsahib likes it. She strokes me on the cheek whenever she enters the kitchen. The sahib says nothing. He takes medicine after every meal.’

  ‘Did he always take medicine—or only now that you’re doing the cooking?’

  ‘I am not sure. I think he has always been sick.’

  He was sleeping in the Headmaster’s veranda and getting sixty rupees a month. A cook in Delhi got a hundred and sixty. And a cook in Paris or New York got ten times as much. I did not say as much to Prem. He might ask me to get him a job in New York. And that would be the last I saw of him! He, as a cook, might well get a job making curries off-Broadway; I, as a writer, wouldn’t get to first base. And only my Uncle Ken knew the secret of how to make a living without actually doing any work. But then, of course, he had three sisters. And each of them was married to a fairly prosperous husband. So Uncle Ken divided his year among them. Three months with Aunt Mabel in Nainital. Three months with Aunt Beryl in Kashmir. Three months with Aunt Emily in Lucknow. And three months with Grandmother who was his aunt, and who was always very fond of him. In this way he never overstayed his welcome. Uncle Ken had it worked out to perfection.

  But I had no sisters and I couldn’t live forever on the royalties of a single successful novel. So I had to write others. So I came to the hills.

  The hill men go to the plains to make a living. I had to come to the hills to try and make mine.

  ‘Prem,’ I said, ‘why don’t you work for me?’