DUST ON MOUNTAIN: COLLECTED STORIES (54 page)

But by early morning the clouds had passed, and the day turned out to be even hotter than the previous one. Soon we were all red and raw from sunburn. By midday even Mr Muggeridge was silent. No one had the energy to talk.

Then my father whispered, ‘Can you hear a plane, lad?’

I listened carefully, and above the hiss of the waves I heard what sounded like the distant drone of a plane; it must have been very far away, because we could not see it. Perhaps it was flying into the sun, and the glare was too much for our sore eyes; or perhaps we’d just imagined the sound.

Then the Dutchman who’d lost his memory thought he saw land, and kept pointing towards the horizon and saying, ‘That’s Batavia, I told you we were close to shore!’ No one else saw anything. So my father and I weren’t the only ones imagining things.

Said my father, ‘It only goes to show that a man can see what he wants to see, even if there’s nothing to be seen!’

The sharks were still with us. Mr Muggeridge began to resent them. He took off one of his shoes and hurled it at the nearest shark; but the big fish ignored the shoe and swam on after us.

‘Now, if your leg had been in that shoe, Mr Muggeridge, the shark might have accepted it,’ observed my father.

‘Don’t throw your shoes away,’ said the captain. ‘We might land on a deserted coastline and have to walk hundreds of miles!’

A light breeze sprang up that evening, and the dinghy moved more swiftly on the choppy water.

‘At last we’re moving forward,’ said the captain.

‘In circles,’ said Mr Muggeridge.

But the breeze was refreshing; it cooled our burning limbs, and helped us to get some sleep. In the middle of the night I woke up feeling very hungry.

‘Are you all right?’ asked my father, who had been awake all the time.

‘Just hungry,’ I said.

‘And what would you like to eat?’

‘Oranges!’

He laughed. ‘No oranges on board. But I kept a piece of my chocolate for you. And there’s a little water, if you’re thirsty.’ I kept the chocolate in my mouth for a long time, trying to make it last. Then I sipped a little water.

‘Aren’t you hungry?’ I asked.

‘Ravenous! I could eat a whole turkey. When we get to Bombay or Madras or Colombo, or wherever it is we get to, we’ll go to the best restaurant in town and eat like—like—’

‘Like shipwrecked sailors!’ I said.

‘Exactly.’

‘Do you think we’ll ever get to land, Dad?’

‘I’m sure we will. You’re not afraid, are you?’

‘No. Not as long as you’re with me.’

Next morning, to everyone’s delight, we saw seagulls. This was a sure sign that land couldn’t be far away; but a dinghy could take days to drift a distance of thirty or forty miles. The birds wheeled noisily above the dinghy. Their cries were the first familiar sounds we had heard for three days and three nights, apart from the wind and the sea and our own weary voices.

The sharks had disappeared, and that too was an encouraging sign. They didn’t like the oil slicks that were appearing in the water.

But presently the gulls left us, and we feared we were drifting away from land.

‘Circles,’ repeated Mr Muggeridge. ‘Circles.’

We had sufficient food and water for another week at sea; but no one even wanted to think about spending another week at sea.

The sun was a ball of fire. Our water ration wasn’t sufficient to quench our thirst. By noon, we were without much hope or energy.

My father had his pipe in his mouth. He didn’t have any tobacco, but he liked holding the pipe between his teeth. He said it prevented his mouth from getting too dry.

The sharks came back.

Mr Muggeridge removed his other shoe and threw it at them.

‘Nothing like a lovely wet English summer,’ he mumbled.

I fell asleep in the well of the dinghy, my father’s large handkerchief spread over my face. The yellow spots on the cloth seemed to grow into enormous revolving suns.

When I woke up, I found a huge shadow hanging over us. At first I thought it was a cloud. But it was a shifting shadow. My father took the handkerchief from my face and said, ‘You can wake up now, lad. We’ll be home and dry soon.’

A fishing boat was beside us, and the shadow came from its wide, flapping sail. A number of bronzed, smiling, chattering fishermen—Burmese, as we discovered later—were gazing down at us from the deck of their boat. A few days later my father and I were in Bombay.

My father sold his rare stamps for over a thousand rupees, and we were able to live in a comfortable hotel. Mr Muggeridge was flown back to England. Later we got a postcard from him saying the English rain was awful!

‘And what about us?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t we going back to England?’

‘Not yet,’ said my father. ‘You’ll be going to a boarding school in Simla, until the war’s over.’

‘But why should I leave you?’ I asked.

‘Because I’ve joined the RAF,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, I’m being posted to Delhi. I’ll be able to come up to see you sometimes.’

A week later I was on a small train which went chugging up the steep mountain track to Simla. Several Indian, Anglo-Indian and English children tumbled around in the compartment. I felt quite out of place among them, as though I had grown out of their pranks. But I wasn’t unhappy. I knew my father would be coming to see me soon. He’d promised me some books, a pair of roller skates, and a cricket bat, just as soon as he got his first month’s pay.

Meanwhile, I had the jade sea horse which Sono had given me.

And I have it with me today.

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 maternal grandparents. I remembered my grandmother quite well, because a large part of my childhood had been spent in her house in Dehra after she had been widowed; but although everyone said she was fond of me, I remembered her as a stern, somewhat aloof person, of whom I was a little afraid.

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, we got talking about my grandparents, and I remembered the negative and decided I’d make a print for my mother.

When I got the photograph and saw my grandmother’s face for the first time in twenty-five years, I was immediately struck by my resemblance to her. I have, like her, lived a rather spartan life, happy with my one room, just as she was content to live in a room of her own while the rest of the family took over the house! And like her, I have lived tidily. But I did not know the physical resemblance was so close—the fair hair, the heavy build, the wide forehead. She looks more like me than my mother!

In the photograph she is seated on her favourite chair, at the top of the veranda steps, and Grandfather stands behind her in the shadows thrown by a large mango tree which is not in the picture. I can tell it was a mango tree because of the pattern the leaves make on the wall. Grandfather was a slim, trim man, with a drooping moustache that was fashionable in the 1920s. By all accounts he had a mischievous sense of humour, although he looks unwell in the picture. He appears to have been quite swarthy. No wonder he was so successful in dressing up ‘native’ style and passing himself off as a street vendor. My mother tells me he even took my grandmother in on one occasion, and sold her a basketful of bad oranges. His character was in strong contrast to my grandmother’s rather forbidding personality and Victorian sense of propriety; but they made a good match.

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 August and the day is hot and sultry. It rained during the night, but now the sun is out and the sweat oozes through my shirt as I sit in the back of a stuffy little taxi taking me through the suburbs of Greater New Delhi.

On either side of the road 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.

I find my mother in a small ward. It is a cool, dark room, and a ceiling fan whirrs pleasantly overhead. 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, due possibly 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 on life.

I sit at the foot of her bed. This is my third visit since I flew back from Jersey, using up all my savings in the process; and I will leave after the operation, not to fly away again, but to return to the hills which have always called me back.

‘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 fifty-four. Otherwise she hasn’t changed much; the same small chin and mouth, 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 grandmother was always very fond of you.’

‘It was hard to tell. She wasn’t a soft woman.’

‘It was her money that got you to Jersey, when you finished school. It wasn’t much, just enough for the ticket.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

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

‘You know very well that I’ve never cared a damn about money. My 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. My 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 now it is raining outside, 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.’

‘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. Rather, 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.

I
can still picture the little Dilaram Bazaar as I first saw it twenty years ago. Hanging on the hem of Aunt Mariam’s sari, I had followed her along the sunlit length of the dusty road and up the wooden staircase to her rooms above the barber’s shop.

There were a number of children playing on the road and they all stared at me. They must have wondered what my dark, black-haired aunt was doing with a strange child who was fairer than most. She did not bother to explain my presence and it was several weeks before the bazaar people learned something of my origins.

Aunt Mariam, my mother’s younger sister, was at that time about thirty. She came from a family of Christian converts, originally Muslims of Rampur. My mother had married an Englishman who died while I was still a baby. She herself was not a strong woman and fought a losing battle with tuberculosis while bringing me up.