DUST ON MOUNTAIN: COLLECTED STORIES (72 page)

In September the town began to empty. The taps were running dry or giving out just a trickle of muddy water. A thick mist lay over the mountain for days on end, but there was no rain. When the mists cleared, an autumn wind came whispering through the deodars.

At the end of the month the manager of the Picture Palace gave everyone a week’s notice, a week’s pay, and announced that the cinema would be closing for the winter.

IV

Bali said, ‘I’m going to Delhi to find work. I’ll come back next summer. What about you, Bisnu, why don’t you come with me? It’s easier to find work in Delhi.’

‘I’m staying with Chittru,’ said Bisnu. ‘We may work at the quarries.’

‘I like the big towns,’ said Bali. ‘I like shops and people and lots of noise. I will never go back to my village. There is no money there, no fun.’

Bali made a bundle of his things and set out for the bus stand. Bisnu bought himself a pair of cheap shoes, for his old ones had fallen to pieces. With what was left of his money, he sent another money order home. Then he and Chittru set out for the limestone quarries, an eight-mile walk from Mussoorie.

They knew they were nearing the quarries when they saw clouds of limestone dust hanging in the air. The dust hid the next mountain from view. When they did see the mountain, they found that the top of it was missing—blasted away by dynamite to enable the quarries to get at the rich strata of limestone rock below the surface.

The skeletons of a few trees remained on the lower slopes. Almost everything else had gone—grass, flowers, shrubs, birds, butterflies, grasshoppers, ladybirds … A rock lizard popped its head out of a crevice to look at the intruders. Then, like some prehistoric survivor, it scuttled back into its underground shelter.

‘I used to come here when I was small,’ announced Chittru cheerfully.

‘Were the quarries here then?’

‘Oh, no. My friends and I—we used to come for the strawberries. They grew all over this mountain. Wild strawberries, but very tasty.’

‘Where are they now?’ asked Bisnu, looking around at the devastated hillside.

‘All gone,’ said Chittru. ‘Maybe there are some on the next mountain.’

Even as they approached the quarries, a blast shook the hillside. Chittru pulled Bisnu under an overhanging rock to avoid the shower of stones that pelted down on the road. As the dust enveloped them, Bisnu had a fit of coughing. When the air cleared a little, they saw the limestone dump ahead of them.

Chittru, who was older and bigger than Bisnu, was immediately taken on as a labourer; but the quarry foreman took one look at Bisnu and said, ‘You’re too small. You won’t be able to break stones or lift those heavy rocks and load them into the trucks. Be off, boy. Find something else to do.’

He was offered a job in the labourers’ canteen, but he’d had enough of making tea and washing dishes. He was about to turn round and walk back to Mussoorie when he felt a heavy hand descend on his shoulder. He looked up to find a grey-bearded, turbanned Sikh looking down at him in some amusement.

‘I need a cleaner for my truck,’ he said. ‘The work is easy, but the hours are long!’

Bisnu responded immediately to the man’s gruff but jovial manner.

‘What will you pay?’ he asked.

‘Fifteen rupees a day, and you’ll get food and a bed at the depot.’

‘As long as I don’t have to cook the food,’ said Bisnu.

The truck driver laughed. ‘You might prefer to do so, once you’ve tasted the depot food. Are you coming on my truck? Make up your mind.’

‘I’m your man,’ said Bisnu; and waving goodbye to Chittru, he followed the Sikh to his truck.

V

A horn blared, shattering the silence of the mountains, and the truck came round a 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 bumpy, unmetalled road to the quarries.

At the wheel of the truck, stroking his grey moustache with one hand, sat Pritam Singh. It was his own truck. He had never allowed anyone else to drive it. Every day he made two trips to the 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 Bisnu, his new cleaner. In less than a month Bisnu had become an experienced hand at looking after trucks, riding in them, and even sleeping in them. He got on well with Pritam, the grizzled, fifty-year-old Sikh, who boasted of two well-off sons—one a farmer in Punjab, the other a wine merchant in far-off London. He could have gone to live with either of them, but his sturdy independence kept him on the road in his battered old truck.

Pritam pressed hard on his horn. Now there was no one on the road—neither beast nor man—but Pritam was fond of the sound of his horn and liked blowing it. He boasted that it was the loudest horn in northern India. Although it struck terror into the hearts of all who heard it—for it was louder than the trumpeting of an elephant—it was music to Pritam’s ears.

Pritam treated Bisnu as an equal and a friendly banter had grown between them during their many trips together.

‘One more year on this bone-breaking road,’ said Pritam, ‘and then I’ll sell my truck and retire.’

‘But who will buy such a shaky old truck?’ asked Bisnu. ‘It will retire before you do!’

‘Now don’t be insulting, boy. She’s only twenty years old—there are still a few years left in her!’ And as though to prove it he blew the horn again. Its strident sound echoed and re-echoed down the mountain gorge. A pair of wildfowl burst from the bushes and fled to more silent regions.

Pritam’s thoughts went to his dinner.

‘Haven’t had a good meal for days.’

‘Haven’t had a good meal for weeks,’ said Bisnu, although in fact he looked much healthier than when he had worked at the cinema’s tea stall.

‘Tonight I’ll give you a dinner in a good hotel. Tandoori chicken and rice pilaf.’

He sounded his horn again as though to put a seal on his promise. Then he slowed down, because 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, another ran backward. One went uphill, another went downhill. Soon there were mules all over the place. Pritam cursed the mules and the mule drivers cursed Pritam; but he had soon left them far behind.

Along this range, all the hills were bare and dry. Most of the forest had long since disappeared.

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

‘No, we still have some trees,’ said Bisnu. ‘Nobody has started blasting the hills as yet. In front of our house there is a walnut tree which gives us two baskets of walnuts every year. And there is an apricot tree. But it was a bad year for fruit. There was no rain. And the stream is too far away.’

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

‘It will settle the dust.’

Dust was everywhere. The truck was full of it. The leaves of the shrubs and the few trees were thick with it. Bisnu could feel the dust under his eyelids and in his mouth. And as they approached the quarries, the dust increased. But it was a different kind of dust now—whiter, stinging the eyes, irritating the nostrils.

They had been blasting all morning.

‘Let’s wait here,’ said Pritam, bringing the truck to a halt.

They sat in silence, staring through the windscreen at the scarred cliffs a little distance down the road. There was a sharp crack of explosives and the hillside blossomed outwards. Earth and rocks hurtled down the mountain.

Bisnu 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, as the trees being flung aside and destroyed. He thought of the trees at home—the walnut, the chestnuts, 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 mines and quarries.

VI

Pritam pressed hard on his horn again, to let the people at the site know that he was approaching. He parked outside a small shed where the contractor and the foreman were sipping cups of tea. A short distance away, some labourers, Chittru among them, were hammering at chunks of rock, breaking them up into manageable pieces. 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.

‘I can’t hang about all day,’ said Pritam. ‘There’s another trip to make—and the days are getting shorter. I don’t want to be driving by night.’

But he sat down on a bench and ordered two cups of tea from the stall. The foreman strolled over to the group of labourers and told them to start loading. Bisnu let down the grid at the back of the truck. Then, to keep himself warm, he began helping Chittru and the men with the loading.

‘Don’t expect to be paid for helping,’ said Sharma, the contractor, for whom every rupee spent was a rupee off his profits.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Bisnu. ‘I don’t work for contractors, I work for friends.’

‘That’s right,’ called out Pritam. ‘Mind what you say to Bisnu—he’s no one’s servant!’

Sharma wasn’t happy until there was no space left for a single stone. Then Bisnu had his cup of tea and three of the men climbed on the pile of stones in the open truck.

‘All right, let’s go!’ said Pritam. ‘I want to finish early today—Bisnu and I are having a big dinner!’

Bisnu jumped in beside Pritam, banging the door shut. It never closed properly unless it was slammed really hard. But it opened at a touch.

‘This truck is held together with sticking plaster,’ joked Pritam. He was in good spirits. He started the engine, and blew his horn just as he passed the foreman and the contractor.

‘They are deaf in one ear from the blasting,’ said Pritam. ‘I’ll make them deaf in the other ear!’

The labourers were singing as the truck swung round the sharp bends of the winding road. The door beside Bisnu rattled on its hinges. He was feeling quite dizzy.

‘Not too fast,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ said Pritam. ‘And since when did you become nervous about my driving?’

‘It’s just today,’ said Bisnu uneasily. ‘It’s a feeling, that’s all.’

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

‘I suppose so,’ said Bisnu.

Pritam was feeling young, exhilarated. He drove faster.

As they swung round a bend, Bisnu 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 usually like that on this narrow mountain road.

After a few more hairpin bends, the road descended steeply to the valley. Just then a stray mule ran into the middle of the road. Pritam swung the steering wheel over to the right to avoid the mule, but here the road turned sharply to the left. The truck went over the edge.

As it tipped over, hanging for a few seconds on the edge of the cliff, the labourers leapt from the back of the truck. It pitched forward, and as it struck a rock outcrop, the loose door burst open. Bisnu was thrown out.

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 scraggly old oak tree. But for the tree, the truck would have plunged several hundred feet down to the bottom of the gorge.

Two of the labourers sat on the hillside, stunned and badly shaken. The third man had picked himself up and was running back to the quarry for help.

Bisnu had landed in a bed of nettles. He was smarting all over, but he wasn’t really hurt; the nettles had broken his fall.

His first impulse was to get up and run back to the road. Then he realized that Pritam was still in the truck.

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

There was no answer.

VII

When Bisnu saw Pritam’s arm and half his body jutting out of the open door of the truck, he feared the worst. It was a strange position, half in and half out. Bisnu was about to turn away and climb back up the hill, when he noticed that Pritam had opened a bloodied and swollen eye. It looked straight up at Bisnu.

‘Are you alive?’ whispered Bisnu, 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 the truck, and another hour to get him to the hospital in the next big town. He had broken bones and fractured ribs and a dislocated shoulder. But the doctors said he was repairable—which was more than could be said for the truck.

‘So the truck’s finished,’ said Pritam, between groans when Bisnu came to see him after a couple of days. ‘Now I’ll have to go home and live with my son. And what about you, boy? I can get you a job on a friend’s truck.’

‘No,’ said Bisnu, ‘I’ll be going home soon.’

‘And what will you do at home?’

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

They were silent for some time.

‘There is something to be said for growing things,’ said Pritam. ‘But for that tree, the truck would have finished up at the foot of the mountain, 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, and I won’t forget the dinner you promised me, either.’

It snowed during Bisnu’s last night at the quarries. He slept on the floor with Chittru, in a large shed meant for the labourers. The wind blew the snowflakes in at the entrance; it whistled down the deserted mountain pass. In the morning Bisnu opened his eyes to a world of dazzling whiteness. The snow was piled high against the walls of the shed, and they had some difficulty getting out.

Bisnu joined Chittru at the tea stall, drank a glass of hot sweet tea, and ate two stale buns. He said goodbye to Chittru and set out on the long march home. The road would be closed to traffic because of the heavy snow, and he would have to walk all the way.