Tales of Fosterganj Page 9

  I hate being locked into rooms. Once, as a small boy, I broke an expensive vase, and as punishment my grandmother locked me in the bathroom. I tried kicking the door open, and when that didn’t work, I got hold of a water jug, smashed open a window, and climbed out; only to receive further punishment, by way of being sent to bed without any dinner.

  And now I did more or less the same thing, but I waited for an hour or two, to give the gardener time to retire for the night. Then I unlatched the window—no need to break any glass—and peered out into the night.

  The moon was a melon, just coming up over the next mountain. There was a vegetable patch just below the window. A cluster of cucumbers stood out in the mellow light. As I did not want to be encumbered with things to carry, I abandoned my travel bag and its meager contents; I would survive without pyjamas and a tattered old sweater. I climbed out on the window ledge and dropped into the vegetable patch, avoiding the cucumbers but pitching forward into a clump of nettles.

  The nettles stung me viciously on the hands and face, and I cursed in my best Hindustani. The European languages have their strengths, but for the purposes of cursing out loud you can’t beat some of the Indian languages for range and originality.

  It took about twenty minutes for the pain of the nettle stings to subside, and by then my linguistic abilities were exhausted. But the nettles had given greater urgency to my flight, and I was soon on the motor road, trudging along at a good pace. I was beginning to feel like a character in a John Buchan novel, always on the move and often in the wrong direction. All my life had been a little like that. But I wouldn’t have known any other way to live.

  I knew I had to go downhill, because that was the way to the river. After walking for an hour, I was hoping someone would come along and give me a lift. But there would be few travellers at that late hour. Jackals bayed, and an owl made enquiring sounds, but that was all…

  And then I heard the approach of heavy vehicles—not one, but several—and a convoy of army trucks came down the road, their headlights penetrating the gloom and leaving no corner of the road in shadow.

  I left the road and stood behind a walnut tree until they had passed. I had no intention of taking a lift in an army truck; I could end up at some high-altitude border post, abandoned there in sub-zero temperatures.

  So I returned to the road only when the last truck had gone round the bend, then continued to tramp along the highway, sore of foot but strong of heart. Harry Lauder would have approved.

  Something else was coming down the road. Another truck. An old one, rattling away and groaning as it changed gear on a sudden incline. The army wouldn’t be using an old wreck. So I stood in the middle of the road and waved it to a stop. An elderly Sardarji, older than the truck, looked out of his cabin window and asked me where I was headed.

  ‘Anywhere,’ I said. ‘Wherever you’re going.’

  ‘Herbertpur,’ he said. ‘Get in the back.’

  Herbertpur was a small township near the Timli Pass, on the old route to Dehradun. Herbert had been a tea-planter back in the 1860s or thereabouts. The family had died out, but the name remained.

  I would have liked to sit up front, but Sardarji already had a companion, his assistant, about half my age and fair of face, who showed no signs of making way for me. So I made my way to the back of the truck and climbed into its open body, expecting to find it loaded with farm produce. Instead, I found myself landing in the midst of a herd of goats.

  There must have been about twenty of them, all crammed into the back of the truck. Before I could get out, the truck started, and I found myself a fellow traveller with a party of goats destined for a butcher’s shop in Herbertpur.

  I must say they tried to make me welcome. As the truck lurched along the winding road, we were thrown about a good deal, and I found myself in close contact with those friendly but highly odorous creatures.

  Why do we eat them, I wonder. There can be nothing tougher than the meat of a muscular mountain goat. We should instead use them as weapons of offence, driving herds of goats into enemy territory, where they will soon consume every bit of greenery—grass, crops, leaves—in a matter of minutes. Sometimes I wonder why the Great Mathematician created the goat; hardly one of nature’s balancing factors.

  But I was the intruder, I had no right to any of their space. So I could not complain when a kid mistook me for its mother and snuggled up to me, searching for an udder. When I thrust it away, a billy goat got annoyed and started butting me on the rump. Fortunately for me, two female goats came to my rescue, coming between me and the aggressive male.

  By the time we reached Herbertpur it was two in the morning, and I was feeling like a serving of rogan josh or mutton keema, two dishes that I resolved to avoid if ever I saw a menu again.

  When I scrambled out of that truck, I was smelling to high heaven. The goats were bleating, as though they missed me. I thanked Sardarji for the lift, and he offered to take me further—all the way to Saharanpur. The goats, he said, would soon be unloaded, and replaced by a pair of buffaloes.

  I decided to walk.

  There was a small canal running by the side of the road.

  There was just one thing I wanted in life. A bath.

  I jumped into the canal, clothes and all, and wallowed there until daylight.

  Rubies in the Dust

  I was back in Fosterganj that same evening, but I waited near the pool until it was dark before returning to my room. My clothes were in a mess, and I must have looked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon or an explorer who had lost his way in the jungle. After another bath, this time with good old Lifebuoy soap, I changed into my last pair of pyjamas, and slept all through the night and most of the next day, only emerging from my room because hunger had overcome lassitude. Hassan fed me on buns, biscuits and boiled eggs while I gave him an edited account of my excursion. He did not ask any questions, simply told me to avoid areas which were in any way under surveillance. Sage advice.

  Over the next week, nothing much happened, except that the days grew shorter and the nights longer and I needed a razai at night.

  I inspected all the flowerpots, emptying them one by one, just in case the marble players had switched the hiding place of the gemstones. The children watched me with some amusement, and I had to pretend that I was simply repotting the geraniums and begonias. It was the season for begonias; they flamed scarlet and red and bright orange, challenging the autumn hues of dahlias and chrysanthemums. Early October was a good time for flowers in Fosterganj. Vishaal’s wife had created a patch of garden in front of the bank; the post office verandah had been brightened up; and even Foster’s broken-down cottage was surrounded by cosmos gone wild.

  I searched the ravine below the bakery, in case the gems had been thrown down from my window. I found broken bottles, cricket balls, old slippers, chicken bones, the detritus that accumulates on the fringes of human habitations; but nothing resembling jewellery.

  And then one morning, as I was returning from a walk in the woods, I encountered the poor woman who was sweeping the road. This chore was usually carried out by her husband, but he had been ill for some time and she had taken over his duties. She was a sturdy woman, plain-looking, and dressed in a faded sari. Even when sweeping the road she had a certain dignity—an effortless, no-fuss dignity that few of us possess.

  When I approached, she was holding something up to the light. And when she saw me, she held it out on her palm, and asked, ‘What is this stone, Babuji? It was lying here in the dust. It is very pretty, is it not?’

  I looked closely at the stone. It was not a pebble, but a ruby, of that I was certain.

  ‘Is it valuable?’ she asked. ‘Can I keep it?’

  ‘It may be worth something,’ I said. ‘But don’t show it to everyone. Just keep it carefully. You found it, you keep it.’

  ‘Finder’s keepers’, the philosophy of my school days. And whom did it belong to, anyway? Who were the rightful owners of those stones? Th
ere was no way of telling.

  And what was their real worth? We put an artificial value on pretty pebbles found in remote places. Just bits of crystals, poor substitutes for marbles. Innocent children know their true worth. Nothing more than the dust at their feet.

  The good lady tied the stone in a corner of her sari and lumbered off, happy with her find. And I hoped she’d find more. Better in her hands than in the hands of princes.

  Sunil Is Back

  Out of the blue, Sunil arrived. There he was, lean and languid, sitting on the bakery steps, waiting for me to return from my walk.

  ‘I thought you’d joined the army,’ I said.

  ‘They wouldn’t take me. I couldn’t pass the physical. You have to be an acrobat to do some of those things, like climbing ropes or swinging from trees like Tarzan.’

  ‘All out of date,’ I said. ‘They need less brawn and more brain.’

  He followed me up the steps to my room and stretched himself out on the cot. He reminded me of a cat, sleek and utterly self-satisfied.

  ‘So what else happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, the colonel was a nice chap. He couldn’t enlist me, but he gave me a job in the mess room. You know, keeping the place tidy, polishing the silver, helping at the bar. It wasn’t hard work, and sometimes I was able to give myself a rum or a vodka on the quiet. Lots of silver trophies on the shelves. Very tempting, but you can’t do much with those things, they are mostly for show.’

  ‘What made you leave?’

  ‘Ivory. There were these elephant’s tusks mounted on the wall, you see. Huge tusks. They’d been there for years. The elephant had been shot by a colonel-shikari about fifty years ago, and the tusks put on display in the mess. All that ivory! Very tempting.’

  ‘You can’t just pocket elephant tusks.’

  ‘Not pocket them, but you can carry them off. And I knew how to get into that mess room in the middle of the night without anyone seeing me.’

  ‘So did you get away with them?’

  ‘Perfectly. I had a rug in which I hid the tusks, and I’d tied them up with a couple of good army belts. I took the bus down to Kotdwar without any problem. No one was going to miss those tusks—not for a day or two, anyway.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  ‘Things went wrong at the Kotdwar railway station. I was walking along the platform with the rug on my shoulder, looking for an empty compartment, when a luggage trolley bumped into me. I dropped the rug and it burst open. The tusks were there for all to see. A couple of railway police were coming down the platform, so I took off like lightning. Ran down the platform until it ended, then crossed the railway lines and hid in a sugarcane field. Later, I took a ride on a bullock-cart until I was well away from the town. Then I borrowed a bicycle and rode all the way to Najibabad.’

  ‘Where’s the cycle?’

  ‘Left it outside the police station just in case the owner came looking for it.’

  ‘Very thoughtful of you. So here you are.’

  He smiled at me. He was a rogue. But at least he’d stopped calling me uncle.

  ~

  It was only later that day—towards evening, in fact—that Sunil spotted the gramophone in a corner of my room.

  ‘What’s this you’ve got?’ he asked.

  ‘Mr Foster’s gramophone. It plays music.’

  ‘I know that. My grandfather has one. He plays old Saigal records.’

  ‘Well, this one has old English records. You won’t care for them. I bought the gramophone and the records came with it.’

  Sunil lost no time in placing the gramophone on the table, opening it, and putting a record on the turntable. But the table was stuck.

  ‘It’s fully wound,’ said Sunil. ‘There’s something jammed inside.’

  ‘It was all right when I went away. The kids must have been fooling around with it.’

  ‘Have you a screwdriver?’

  ‘No, but Hassan will have one. I’ll go and borrow it.’

  I left Sunil fiddling about with the gramophone, and went downstairs, and came back five minutes later with a small screwdriver. Sunil took it and began unscrewing the upper portion of the gramophone. He opened it up; revealing the springs, inner machinery, the emerald bracelet, garnet broach and sapphire ring.

  Sunil immediately slipped the ring on to a finger and said, ‘Very beautiful. Did it come with the gramophone?’

  Sapphires Are Unlucky

  ‘Sapphires are unlucky,’ I told him. ‘You have to be very special to wear a sapphire.’

  ‘I’m lucky,’ he said, holding his hands to the light and admiring the azure stone in its finely crafted ring. ‘It suits me, don’t you think? And where did all this treasure come from?’

  There was no point in making up a story. I told him how the jewels had come into my possession. Even as I did, I wondered who had put the jewellery in the gramophone. One of the children, I presumed—only a child would recognize the value of jewels but not of gemstones. I thought it best not to tell Sunil this. I did not mention the rubies, either. I did not want him hunting all over Fosterganj for them, and interrupting games of marbles to check if the children were playing with rubies.

  ‘Those two won’t be back,’ he said, referring to the palace boy and his mother. ‘They will be wanted for theft, arson and murder. But others may be after these pretty pebbles.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, and told him about my visitors in Chakrata.

  ‘And you will get visitors here as well. I think we should go away for some time. Come to my village. Not the one near Rajpur. I mean my mother’s village in Bijnor, on the other side of the Ganga. It’s an out-of-the-way place, far from the main highways. Strangers won’t be welcome.’

  ‘Will I be welcome?’

  ‘With me, you will always be welcome.’

  ~

  I allowed Sunil to take over. I wasn’t really interested in the stones, they were more trouble than they were worth. All I wanted was a quiet life, a writing pad, books to read, flowers to gaze upon, and sometimes a little love, a little kiss… But Sunil was fascinated with the gems. Like a magpie, he was attracted to all that glittered.

  He transferred the jewels to a small tin suitcase, the kind that barbers and masseurs used to carry around. It was seldom out of his sight. He told me to pack a few things, but to leave my books and the gramophone behind; we did not want any heavy stuff with us.

  ‘You can’t carry a palace around,’ he said. ‘But you can carry the king’s jewels.’

  ‘Take that sapphire off,’ I said. ‘Unless it’s your birthstone, it will prove to be unlucky.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know my date of birth. So I can wear anything I like.’

  ‘It doesn’t suit you. It makes you look too prosperous.’

  ‘Seeing it, people won’t suspect that I’m after their pockets.’

  He had a point there. And he wasn’t going to change his ways.

  You have to accept people as they are, if you want to live with them. You can’t really change people. Only a chameleon can change colour, and then only in order to deceive you.

  If, like Sunil, you have a tendency to pick pockets, that tendency will always be there, even if one day you become a big corporate boss. If, like Foster, you have spent most of your life living on the edge of financial disaster, you will always be living on the edge. If, like Hassan, you are a single-minded baker of bread and maker of children, you won’t stop doing either. If, likeVishaal, you are obsessed with leopards, you won’t stop looking for them. And if, like me, you are something of a dreamer, you won’t stop dreaming.

  Ganga Takes All

  ‘Ganga-maiki jai!’

  The boat carrying pilgrims across the sacred river was ready to leave. Sunil and I scrambled down the river bank and tumbled into it. It was already overloaded, but we squeezed in amongst the pilgrims, mostly rural folk who had come to Hardwar to visit the temples and take home bottles of Ganga water—in much the same way that the faithful come
to Lourdes, in France, and carry away the healing waters of a sacred stream. People are the same everywhere.

  In those days there was no road bridge across the Ganga, and the train took one to Bijnor by a long and circuitous route. Sunil’s village was off the beaten track, some thirty miles from the nearest station. The easiest way to get there was to cross the river by boat and then take an ekka, or pony-cart, to get to the village.

  The boat was meant to take about a dozen people, but for a few rupees more the boatmen would usually take in more than the permitted number. When we set off, there must have been at least twenty in the boat—men, women and children.

  ‘Ganga-maiki jai!’ they chanted, as the two oarsmen swung into the current.

  For a time, all went well. In spite of its load, the boat made headway, being carried a little downstream but in the general direction of its landing place. Then halfway across the river, where the water was deep and strong, the boat began to wobble about and water slopped in over the sides.

  The singing stopped, and a few called out in dismay.

  There was little one could do, except urge the oarsmen on.

  They did their best, straining at the oars, the sweat pouring down their bare bodies. We made some progress, although we were now drifting with the current.

  ‘It doesn’t matter where we land,’ I said, ‘as long as we don’t take in water.’

  I had always been nervous in small boats. The fear of drowning had been with me since childhood: I’d seen a dhow go down off the Kathiawar coast, and bodies washed ashore the next day.

  ‘Ganga-maiki jai!’ called one or two hardy souls, and we were about two-thirds across the river when water began to fill the boat. The women screamed, the children cried out.

  ‘Don’t panic!’ I yelled, though filled with panic. ‘It’s not so deep here, we can get ashore.’

  The boat struck a sandbank, tipped over. We were in the water.