DUST ON MOUNTAIN: COLLECTED STORIES (2 page)

I remained standing on my bed, trembling with fear and revulsion.

He laughed at me, showing his teeth, and I blushed and said, ‘Get out!’

I would not, could not, touch or approach the hat or hatstand. I sat on the bed and longed for my father to come home.

A mosquito passed close by me and sang in my ear. Half-heartedly, I clutched at it and missed; and it disappeared behind the dressing-table.

That mosquito, I reasoned, gave the malaria to my father. And now it was trying to give it to me!

The next-door lady walked through the compound and smiled thinly from outside the window. I glared back at her.

The sweeper boy passed with the bucket, and grinned. I turned away.

In bed at night, with the lights on, I tried reading. But even books could not quell my anxiety.

The sweeper boy moved about the house, bolting doors, fastening windows. He asked me if I had any orders.

I shook my head.

He skipped across to the electric switch, turned off the light, and slipped into his quarters. Outside, inside, all was dark; only one shaft of light squeezed in through a crack in the sweeper boy’s door, and then that too went out.

I began to wish I had stayed with the neighbours. The darkness worried me—silent and close—silent, as if in suspense.

Once a bat flew flat against the window, falling to the ground outside; once an owl hooted. Sometimes a dog barked. And I tautened as a jackal howled hideously in the jungle behind the bungalow. But nothing could break the overall stillness, the night’s silence …

Only a dry puff of wind …

It rustled in the trees, and put me in mind of a snake slithering over dry leaves and twigs. I remembered a tale I had been told not long ago, of a sleeping boy who had been bitten by a cobra.

I would not, could not, sleep. I longed for my father …

The shutters rattled, the doors creaked. It was a night for ghosts.

Ghosts!

God, why did I have to think of them?

My God! There, standing by the bathroom door …

My father! My father dead from the malaria, and come to see me!

I threw myself at the switch. The room lit up. I sank down on the bed in complete exhaustion, the sweat soaking my nightclothes.

It was not my father I had seen. It was his dressing gown hanging on the bathroom door. It had not been taken with him to the hospital.

I turned off the light.

The hush outside seemed deeper, nearer. I remembered the centipede, the bat, thought of the cobra and the sleeping boy; pulled the sheet tight over my head. If I could see nothing, well then, nothing could see me.

A thunderclap shattered the brooding stillness.

A streak of lightning forked across the sky, so close that even through the sheet I saw a tree and the opposite house silhouetted against the flashing canvas of gold.

I dived deeper beneath the bedclothes, gathered the pillow about my ears.

But at the next thunderclap, louder this time, louder than I had ever heard, I leapt from my bed. I could not stand it. I fled, blundering into the sweeper boy’s room.

The boy sat on the bare floor.

‘What is happening?’ he asked.

The lightning flashed, and his teeth and eyes flashed with it. Then he was a blur in the darkness.

‘I am afraid,’ I said.

I moved towards him and my hand touched a cold shoulder.

‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘I too am afraid.’

I sat down, my back against the wall; beside the untouchable, the outcaste … and the thunder and lightning ceased, and the rain came down, swishing and drumming on the corrugated roof.

‘The rainy season has started,’ observed the sweeper boy, turning to me. His smile played with the darkness, and then he laughed. And I laughed too, but feebly.

But I was happy and safe. The scent of the wet earth blew in through the skylight and the rain fell harder.

This was my first short story, written when I was sixteen.

T
he night had been hot, the rain frequent, and I slept on the veranda instead of in the house. I was in my twenties and I had begun to earn a living and felt I had certain responsibilities. In a short while a tonga would take me to a railway station, and from there a train would take me to Bombay, and then a ship would take me to England. There would be work, interviews, a job, a different kind of life; so many things that this small bungalow of my grandfather’s would be remembered fitfully, in rare moments of reflection.

When I awoke on the veranda I saw a grey morning, smelt the rain on the red earth, and remembered that I had to go away. A girl was standing on the veranda porch, looking at me very seriously. When I saw her, I sat up in bed with a start.

She was a small, dark girl, her eyes big and black, her pigtails tied up in a bright red ribbon; and she was fresh and clean like the rain and the red earth.

She stood looking at me, and she was very serious.

‘Hello,’ I said, smiling, trying to put her at ease.

But the girl was businesslike. She acknowledged my greeting with a brief nod.

‘Can I do anything for you?’ I asked, stretching my limbs. ‘Do you stay near here?’

She nodded again.

‘With your parents?

With great assurance she said, ‘Yes. But I can stay on my own.’

‘You’re like me,’ I said, and for a while I forgot about being an old man of twenty. ‘I like to do things on my own. I’m going away today.’

‘Oh,’ she said, a little breathlessly.

‘Would you care to go to England?’

‘I want to go everywhere,’ she said, ‘to America and Africa and Japan and Honolulu.’

‘Maybe you will,’ I said. ‘I’m going everywhere, and no one can stop me … But what is it you want? What did you come for?’

‘I want some flowers but I can’t reach them.’ She waved her hand towards the garden. ‘That tree, see?’

The coral tree stood in front of the house surrounded by pools of water and broken, fallen blossoms. The branches of the tree were thick with the scarlet, pea-shaped flowers.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Just let me get ready.’

The tree was easy to climb, and I made myself comfortable on one of the lower branches, smiling down at the serious upturned face of the girl.

‘I’ll throw them down to you,’ I said.

I bent a branch but the wood was young and green, and I had to twist it several times before it snapped.

‘I’m not sure that I ought to do this,’ I said, as I dropped the flowering branch to the girl.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said.

‘Well, if you’re ready to speak up for me—’

‘Don’t worry.’

I felt a sudden nostalgic longing for childhood and an urge to remain behind in my grandfather’s house with its tangled memories and ghosts of yesteryear. But I was the only one left, and what could I do except climb coral and jackfruit trees?

‘Have you many friends?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Who is the best?’

‘The cook. He lets me stay in the kitchen, which is more interesting than the house. And I like to watch him cooking. And he gives me things to eat, and tells me stories …’

‘And who is your second best friend?’

She inclined her head to one side, and thought very hard.

‘I’ll make you the second best,’ she said.

I sprinkled coral blossoms over her head. ‘That’s very kind of you. I’m happy to be your second best.’

A tonga bell sounded at the gate, and I looked out from the tree and said, ‘It’s come for me. I have to go now.’

I climbed down.

‘Will you help me with my suitcases?’ I asked, as we walked together towards the veranda. ‘There is no one here to help me. I am the last to go. Not because I want to go, but because I have to.’

I sat down on the cot and packed a few last things in a suitcase. All the doors of the house were locked. On my way to the station I would leave the keys with the caretaker. I had already given instructions to an agent to try and sell the house. There was nothing more to be done.

We walked in silence to the waiting tonga, thinking and wondering about each other.

‘Take me to the station,’ I said to the tonga driver.

The girl stood at the side of the path, on the damp red earth, gazing at me.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I hope I shall see you again.’

‘I’ll see you in London,’ she said, ‘or America or Japan. I want to go everywhere.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ I said. ‘And perhaps I’ll come back and we’ll meet again in this garden. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?’

She nodded and smiled. We knew it was an important moment.

The tonga driver spoke to his pony, and the carriage set off down the gravel path, rattling a little. The girl and I waved to each other.

In the girl’s hand was a sprig of coral blossom. As she waved, the blossoms fell apart and danced lightly in the breeze.

‘Goodbye!’ I called.

‘Goodbye!’ called the girl.

The ribbon had come loose from her pigtail and lay on the ground with the coral blossoms.

‘I’m going everywhere,’ I said to myself, ‘and no one can stop me.’

And she was fresh and clean like the rain and the red earth.

T
he train came panting through the forest and into the flat brown plain. The engine whistled piercingly, and a few cows moved off the track. In a swaying third-class compartment two men played cards; a woman held a baby to an exposed breast; a Sikh labourer, wearing brief pants, lay asleep on an upper bunk, snoring fitfully; an elderly unshaven man chewed the last of his pan and spat the red juice out of the window. A small boy, mischief in his eyes, jingled a bag of coins in front of an anxious farmer.

Daya Ram, the farmer, was going home; home to his rice fields, his buffalo and his wife. A brother had died recently, and Daya Ram had taken the ashes to Hardwar to immerse them in the holy waters of the Ganga, and now he was on the train to Dehra and soon he would be home. He was looking anxious because he had just remembered his wife’s admonition about being careful with money. Ten rupees was what he had left with him, and it was all in the bag the boy held.

‘Let me have it now,’ said Daya Ram, ‘before the money falls out.’ He made a grab at the little bag that contained his coins, notes and railway ticket, but the boy shrieked with delight and leapt out of the way.

Daya Ram stroked his moustache; it was a long drooping moustache that lent a certain sadness to his somewhat kind and foolish face. He reflected that it was his own fault for having started the game. The child had been sulky and morose, and to cheer him up Daya Ram had begun jingling his money. Now the boy was jingling the money, right in front of the open window.

‘Come now, give it back,’ pleaded Daya Ram, ‘or I shall tell your mother.’

The boy’s mother had her back to them, and it was a large back, almost as forbidding as her front. But the boy was enjoying his game and would not give up the bag. He was exploiting to the full Daya Ram’s easy-going tolerant nature, and kept bobbing up and down on the seat, waving the bag in the poor man’s face.

Suddenly the boy’s mother, who had been engrossed in conversation with another woman, turned and saw what was happening. She walloped the boy over the head and the suddenness of the blow (it was more of a thump than a slap) made him fall back against the window, and the cloth bag fell from his hand on to the railway embankment outside.

Now Daya Ram’s first impulse was to leap out of the moving train. But when someone shouted, ‘Pull the alarm cord!’ he decided on this course of action. He plunged for the alarm cord, but just at the moment someone else shouted, ‘Don’t pull the cord!’ and Daya Ram who usually listened to others, stood in suspended animation, waiting for further directions.

‘Too many people are stopping trains every day all over India,’ said one of the card players, who wore large thick-rimmed spectacles over a pair of tiny humourless eyes, and was obviously a post office counter-clerk. ‘You people are becoming a menace to the railways.’

‘Exactly,’ said the other card player. ‘You stop the train on the most trifling excuses. What is your trouble?’

‘My money has fallen out,’ said Daya Ram.

‘Why didn’t you say so!’ exclaimed the clerk, jumping up. ‘Stop the train!’

‘Sit down,’ said his companion, ‘it’s too late now. The train cannot wait here until he walks half a mile back down the line. How much did you lose?’ he asked Daya Ram.

‘Ten rupees.’

‘And you have no more?’

Daya Ram shook his head.

‘Then you had better leave the train at the next station and go back for it.’

The next station, Harrawala, was about ten miles from the spot where the money had fallen. Daya Ram got down from the train and started back along the railway track. He was a well-built man, with strong legs and a dark, burnished skin. He wore a vest and dhoti, and had a red cloth tied round his head. He walked with long, easy steps, but the ground had been scorched by the burning sun, and it was not long before his feet were smarting. His eyes too were unaccustomed to the glare of the plains, and he held a hand up over them, or looked at the ground. The sun was high in the sky, beating down on his bare arms and legs. Soon his body was running with sweat, his vest was soaked through and sticking to his skin.

There were no trees anywhere near the lines, which ran straight to the hazy blue horizon. There were fields in the distance, and cows grazed on short grass, but there were no humans in sight. After an hour’s walk, Daya Ram felt thirsty; his tongue was furred, his gums dry, his lips like parchment. When he saw a buffalo wallowing in a muddy pool, he hurried to the spot and drank thirstily of the stagnant water.

Still, his pace did not slacken. He knew of only one way to walk, and that was at this steady long pace. At the end of another hour he felt sure he had passed the place where the bag had fallen. He had been inspecting the embankment very closely, and now he felt discouraged and dispirited. But still he walked on. He was worried more by the thought of his wife’s attitude than by the loss of the money or the problem of the next meal.