DUST ON MOUNTAIN: COLLECTED STORIES (70 page)

Padre Lal’s voice droned on through the funeral service and then the coffin was lowered—down, deep down. The boy was surprised at how far down it seemed to go! Was that other, better world down in the depths of the earth? How could anyone, even a Samson, push his way back to the surface again? Superman did it in comics but his father was a gentle soul who wouldn’t fight too hard against the earth and the grass and the roots of tiny trees. Or perhaps he’d grow into a tree and escape that way! ‘If ever I’m put away like this,’ thought the boy, ‘I’ll get into the root of a plant and then I’ll become a flower and then maybe a bird will come and carry my seed away … I’ll get out somehow!’

A few more words from the padre and then some of those present threw handfuls of earth over the coffin before moving away.

Slowly, in twos and threes, the mourners departed. The mist swallowed them up. They did not see the boy behind the wall. They were getting hungry.

He stood there until they had all gone. Then he noticed that the gardeners or caretakers were filling in the grave. He did not know whether to go forward or not. He was a little afraid. And it was too late now. The grave was almost covered.

He turned and walked away from the cemetery. The road stretched ahead of him, empty, swathed in mist. He was alone. What had his father said to him once? ‘The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone.’

Well, he was alone, but at the moment he did not feel very strong.

For a moment he thought his father was beside him, that they were together on one of their long walks. Instinctively he put out his hand, expecting his father’s warm, comforting touch. But there was nothing there, nothing, no one …

He clenched his fists and pushed them deep down into his pockets. He lowered his head so that no one would see his tears. There were people in the mist but he did not want to go near them for they had put his father away.

‘He’ll find a way out,’ the boy said fiercely to himself. ‘He’ll get out somehow!’

A
horn blared, shattering the silence of the mountains, and a truck came round the bend in the road. A herd of goats scattered to left and right.

The goatherds cursed as a cloud of dust enveloped them, and then the truck had left them behind and was rattling along the stony, unpaved hill road.

At the wheel of the truck, stroking his grey moustache, sat Pritam Singh, a turbaned Sikh. It was his own truck. He did not allow anyone else to drive it. Every day he made two trips to the limestone quarries, carrying truckloads of limestone back to the depot at the bottom of the hill. He was paid by the trip, and he was always anxious to get in two trips every day.

Sitting beside him was Nathu, his cleaner boy.

Nathu was a sturdy boy, with a round, cheerful face. It was difficult to guess his age. He might have been twelve or he might have been fifteen—he did not know himself, since no one in his village had troubled to record his birthday—but the hard life he led probably made him look older than his years. He belonged to the hills, but his village was far away, on the next range.

Last year the potato crop had failed. As a result there was no money for salt, sugar, soap and flour—and Nathu’s parents and small brothers and sisters couldn’t live entirely on the onions and artichokes which were about the only crops that had survived the drought. There had been no rain that summer. So Nathu waved goodbye to his people and came down to the town in the valley to look for work. Someone directed him to the limestone depot. He was too young to work at the quarries, breaking stones and loading them on the trucks; but Pritam Singh, one of the older drivers, was looking for someone to clean and look after his truck. Nathu looked like a bright, strong boy, and he was taken on—at ten rupees a day.

That had been six months ago, and now Nathu was an experienced hand at looking after trucks, riding in them and even sleeping in them. He got on well with Pritam Singh, the grizzled, fifty-year-old Sikh, who had well-to-do sons in the Punjab, but whose sturdy independence kept him on the road in his battered old truck.

Pritam Singh pressed hard on his horn. Now there was no one on the road—no animals, no humans—but Pritam was fond of his horn and liked blowing it. It was music to his ears.

‘One more year on this road,’ said Pritam. ‘Then I’ll sell my truck and retire.’

‘Who will buy this truck?’ said Nathu. ‘It will retire before you do.’

‘Don’t be cheeky, boy. She’s only twenty years old—there’s still a few years left in her!’ And as though to prove it, he blew his horn again. Its strident sound echoed and re-echoed down the mountain gorge. A pair of wild fowls, disturbed by the noise, flew out from the bushes and glided across the road in front of the truck.

Pritam Singh’s thoughts went to his dinner.

‘Haven’t had a good meal for days,’ he grumbled.

‘Haven’t had a good meal for weeks,’ said Nathu, although he looked quite well-fed.

‘Tomorrow I’ll give you dinner,’ said Pritam. ‘Tandoori chicken and pilaf rice.’

‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ said Nathu.

Pritam Singh sounded his horn again before slowing down. The road had become narrow and precipitous, and trotting ahead of them was a train of mules.

As the horn blared, one mule ran forward, one ran backwards. One went uphill, one went downhill. Soon there were mules all over the place.

‘You can never tell with mules,’ said Pritam, after he had left them behind.

The hills were bare and dry. Much of the forest had long since disappeared; just a few scraggy old oaks still grew on the steep hillside. This particular range was rich in limestone, and the hills were scarred by quarrying.

‘Are your hills as bare as these?’ asked Pritam.

‘No, they have not started blasting there as yet,’ said Nathu. ‘We still have a few trees. And there is a walnut tree in front of our house, which gives us two baskets of walnuts every year.’

‘And do you have water?’

‘There is a stream at the bottom of the hill. But for the fields, we have to depend on the rainfall. And there was no rain last year.’

‘It will rain soon,’ said Pritam. ‘I can smell rain. It is coming from the north.’

‘It will settle the dust.’

The dust was everywhere. The truck was full of it. The leaves of the shrubs and the few trees were thick with it. Nathu could feel the dust near his eyelids and on his lips.

As they approached the quarries, the dust increased—but it was a different kind of dust now, whiter, stinging the eyes, irritating the nostrils—limestone dust, hanging in the air.

The blasting was in progress.

Pritam Singh brought the truck to a halt.

‘Let’s wait a bit,’ he said.

They sat in silence, staring through the windscreen at the scarred cliffs about a hundred yards down the road. There were no signs of life around them.

Suddenly, the hillside blossomed outwards, followed by a sharp crack of explosives. Earth and rock hurtled down the hillside.

Nathu watched in awe as shrubs and small trees were flung into the air. It always frightened him—not so much the sight of the rocks bursting asunder, but the trees being flung aside and destroyed. He thought of his own trees at home—the walnut, the pines—and wondered if one day they would suffer the same fate, and whether the mountains would all become a desert like this particular range. No trees, no grass, no water—only the choking dust of the limestone quarries.

Pritam Singh pressed hard on his horn again, to let the people at the site know he was coming. Soon they were parked outside a small shed, where the contractor and the overseer were sipping cups of tea. A short distance away some labourers were hammering at chunks of rock, breaking them up into manageable blocks. A pile of stones stood ready for loading, while the rock that had just been blasted lay scattered about the hillside.

‘Come and have a cup of tea,’ called out the contractor.

‘Get on with the loading,’ said Pritam. ‘I can’t hang about all afternoon. There’s another trip to make—and it gets dark early these days.’

But he sat down on a bench and ordered two cups of tea from the stall owner. The overseer strolled over to the group of labourers and told them to start loading. Nathu let down the grid at the back of the truck.

Nathu stood back while the men loaded the truck with limestone rocks. He was glad that he was chubby: thin people seemed to feel the cold much more—like the contractor, a skinny fellow who was shivering in his expensive overcoat.

To keep himself warm, Nathu began helping the labourers with the loading.

‘Don’t expect to be paid for that,’ said the contractor, for whom every extra paisa spent was a paisa off his profits.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Nathu, ‘I don’t work for contractors. I work for Pritam Singh.’

‘That’s right,’ called out Pritam. ‘And mind what you say to Nathu—he’s nobody’s servant!’

It took them almost an hour to fill the truck with stones. The contractor wasn’t happy until there was no space left for a single stone. Then four of the six labourers climbed on the pile of stones. They would ride back to the depot on the truck. The contractor, his overseer and the others would follow by jeep.

‘Let’s go!’ said Pritam, getting behind the steering wheel. ‘I want to be back here and then home by eight o’clock. I’m going to a marriage party tonight!’

Nathu jumped in beside him, banging his door shut. It never closed properly unless it was slammed really hard. But it opened at a touch. Pritam always joked that his truck was held together with Sellotape.

He was in good spirits. He started his engine, blew his horn and burst into a song as the truck started out on the return journey.

The labourers were singing too, as the truck swung round the sharp bends of the winding mountain road. Nathu was feeling quite dizzy. The door beside him rattled on its hinges.

‘Not so fast,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ said Pritam, ‘and since when did you become nervous about fast driving?’

‘Since today,’ said Nathu.

‘And what’s wrong with today?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just that kind of day, I suppose.’

‘You are getting old,’ said Pritam. ‘That’s your trouble.’

‘Just wait till you get to be my age,’ said Nathu.

‘No more cheek,’ said Pritam, and stepped on the accelerator and drove faster.

As they swung round a bend, Nathu looked out of his window. All he saw was the sky above and the valley below. They were very near the edge. But it was always like that on this narrow road.

After a few more hairpin bends, the road started descending steeply to the valley.

‘I’ll just test the brakes,’ said Pritam, and jammed down on them so suddenly that one of the labourers almost fell off at the back. They called out in protest.

‘Hang on!’ shouted Pritam. ‘You’re nearly home!’

‘Don’t try any short cuts,’ said Nathu.

Just then a stray mule appeared in the middle of the road. Pritam swung the steering wheel over to his right; but the road turned left, and the truck went straight over the edge.

As it tipped over, hanging for a few seconds on the edge of the cliff, the labourers leapt off the back of the truck.

The truck pitched forward, and as it struck a rock outcrop, the door near Nathu burst open. He was thrown out.

Then the truck hurtled forward, bouncing over the rocks, turning over on its side and rolling over twice before coming to rest against the trunk of a scraggy old oak tree. Had it missed the tree, the truck would have plunged a few hundred feet down to the bottom of the gorge.

Two labourers sat on the hillside, stunned and badly shaken. The other two had picked themselves up and were running back to the quarry for help.

Nathu had landed on a bed of nettles. He was smarting all over, but he wasn’t really hurt.

His first impulse was to get up and run back with the labourers. Then he realized that Pritam was still in the truck. If he wasn’t dead, he would certainly be badly injured.

Nathu skidded down the steep slope, calling out ‘Pritam, Pritam, are you all right?’

There was no answer.

Then he saw Pritam’s arm and half his body jutting out of the open door of the truck. It was a strange position to be in, half in and half out. When Nathu came nearer, he saw Pritam was jammed in the driver’s seat, held there by the steering wheel which was pressed hard against his chest. Nathu thought he was dead. But as he was about to turn away and clamber back up the hill, he saw Pritam open one blackened swollen eye. It looked straight up at Nathu.

‘Are you alive?’ whispered Nathu, terrified.

‘What do you think?’ muttered Pritam.

He closed his eye again.

When the contractor and his men arrived, it took them almost an hour to get Pritam Singh out of the wreckage of his truck, and another hour to get him to a hospital in the town. He had a broken collarbone, a dislocated shoulder and several fractured ribs. But the doctors said he was repairable—which was more than could be said for his truck.

‘The truck’s finished,’ said Pritam, when Nathu came to see him a few days later. ‘Now I’ll have to go home and live with my sons. But you can get work on another truck.’

‘No,’ said Nathu. ‘I’m going home too.’

‘And what will you do there?’

‘I’ll work on the land. It’s better to grow things on the land than to blast things out of it.’

They were silent for some time.

‘Do you know something?’ said Pritam finally. ‘But for that tree, the truck would have ended up at the bottom of the hill and I wouldn’t be here, all bandaged up and talking to you. It was the tree that saved me. Remember that, boy.’

‘I’ll remember,’ said Nathu.

I

Winter came and went, without so much as a drizzle. The hillside was brown all summer and the fields were bare. The old plough that was dragged over the hard ground by Bisnu’s lean oxen made hardly any impression. Still, Bisnu kept his seeds ready for sowing. A good monsoon, and there would be plenty of maize and rice to see the family through the next winter.