DUST ON MOUNTAIN: COLLECTED STORIES (74 page)

Dhuki’s hand moved swiftly, like a conjurer making a pass. He did not actually push the major. He appeared merely to tap him once on the bottom. I caught a glimpse of my stepfather’s boots as he disappeared into the well. I couldn’t help thinking of
Alice in Wonderland
, of Alice disappearing down the rabbit hole.

There was a tremendous splash and the pigeons flew up, circling the well thrice before settling on the roof of the bungalow.

By lunchtime—or tiffin, as we called it then—Dhuki had the well covered over with the wooden planks.

‘The major will be pleased,’ said my mother when she came home. ‘It will be quite ready by evening, won’t it, Dhuki?’

By evening the well had been completely bricked over. It was the fastest bit of work Dhuki had ever done.

Over the next few weeks, my mother’s concern changed to anxiety, her anxiety to melancholy, and her melancholy to resignation. By being gay and high-spirited myself, I hope I did something to cheer her up. She had written to the colonel of the regiment and had been informed that the major had gone home on leave a fortnight previously. Somewhere, in the vastness of India, the major had disappeared.

It was easy enough to disappear and never be found. After seven months had passed without the major turning up, it was presumed that one of two things must have happened. Either he had been murdered on the train and his corpse flung into a river; or, he had run away with a tribal girl and was living in some remote corner of the country.

Life had to carry on for the rest of us. The rains were over and the guava season was approaching.

My mother was receiving visits from a colonel of His Majesty’s 32nd Foot. He was an elderly, easy-going, seemingly absentminded man, who didn’t get in the way at all but left slabs of chocolate lying around the house.

‘A good sahib,’ observed Dhuki as I stood beside him behind the bougainvillea, watching the colonel saunter up the veranda steps. ‘See how well he wears his sola topi! It covers his head completely.’

‘He’s bald underneath,’ I said.

‘No matter. I think he will be all right.’

‘And if he isn’t,’ I said, ‘we can always open up the well again.’

Dhuki dropped the nozzle of the hose pipe and water gushed out over our feet. But he recovered quickly and taking me by the hand led me across to the old well now surmounted by a three-tiered cement platform which looked rather like a wedding cake.

‘We must not forget our old well,’ he said. ‘Let us make it beautiful, baba. Some flower pots, perhaps.’

And together we fetched pots and decorated the covered well with ferns and geraniums. Everyone congratulated Dhuki on the fine job he’d done. My only regret was that the pigeons had gone away.

E
arly to bed and early to rise makes a crow healthy, wealthy and wise.

They say it’s true for humans too. I’m not so sure about that. But for crows it’s a must.

I’m always up at the crack of dawn, often the first crow to break the night’s silence with a lusty caw. My friends and relatives, who roost in the same tree, grumble a bit and mutter to themselves, but they are soon cawing just as loudly. Long before the sun is up, we set off on the day’s work.

We do not pause even for the morning wash. Later in the day, if it’s hot and muggy, I might take a dip in some human’s bath water; but early in the morning we like to be up and about before everyone else. This is the time when trash cans and refuse dumps are overflowing with goodies, and we like to sift through them before the dustmen arrive in their disposal trucks.

Not that we are afraid of a famine in refuse. As human beings multiply, so does their rubbish.

Only yesterday I rescued an old typewriter ribbon from the dustbin, just before it was emptied. What a waste that would have been! I had no use for it myself, but I gave it to one of my cousins who got married recently, and she tells me it’s just right for her nest, the one she’s building on a telegraph pole. It helps her bind the twigs together, she says.

My own preference is for toothbrushes. They’re just a hobby, really, like stamp-collecting with humans. I have a small but select collection which I keep in a hole in the garden wall. Don’t ask me how many I’ve got—crows don’t believe there’s any point in counting beyond
two
—but I know there’s more than
one
, that there’s a whole lot of them in fact, because there isn’t anyone living on this road who hasn’t lost a toothbrush to me at some time or another.

We crows living in the jackfruit tree have this stretch of road to ourselves, but so that we don’t quarrel or have misunderstandings we’ve shared the houses out. I picked the bungalow with the orchard at the back. After all, I don’t eat rubbish and throwaways all the time. Just occasionally I like a ripe guava or the soft flesh of a papaya. And sometimes I like the odd beetle as an
hors d’oeuvre
. Those humans in the bungalow should be grateful to me for keeping down the population of fruit-eating beetles, and even for recycling their refuse; but no, humans are never grateful. No sooner do I settle in one of their guava trees than stones are whizzing past me. So I return to the dustbin on the back veranda steps. They don’t mind my being there.

One of my cousins shares the bungalow with me, but he’s a lazy fellow and I have to do most of the foraging. Sometimes I get him to lend me a claw, but most of the time he’s preening his feathers and trying to look handsome for a pretty young thing who lives in the banyan tree at the next turning.

When he’s in the mood he can be invaluable, as he proved recently when I was having some difficulty getting at the dog’s food on the veranda.

This dog who is fussed over so much by the humans I’ve adopted is a great big fellow, a mastiff who pretends to a pedigree going back to the time of Genghis Khan—he likes to pretend one of his ancestors was the great Khan’s watchdog—but, as often happens in famous families, animal or human, there is a falling off in quality over a period of time, and this huge fellow—Tiger, they call him—is a case in point. All brawn and no brain. Many’s the time I’ve removed a juicy bone from his plate or helped myself to pickings from under his nose.

But of late he’s been growing canny and selfish. He doesn’t like to share any more. And the other day I was almost in his jaws when he took a sudden lunge at me. Snap went his great teeth; but all he got was one of my tail feathers. He spat it out in disgust. Who wants crow’s meat, anyway?

All the same, I thought, I’d better not be too careless. It’s not for nothing that a crow’s IQ is way above that of all other birds. And it’s higher than a dog’s, I bet.

I woke Cousin Slow from his midday siesta and said, ‘Hey, Slow, we’ve got a problem. If you want any of that delicious tripe today, you’ve got to lend a claw—or a beak. That dog’s getting snappier day by day.’

Slow opened one eye and said, ‘Well, if you insist. But you know how I hate getting into a scuffle. It’s bad for the gloss on my feathers.’

‘I don’t insist,’ I said politely, ‘but I’m not foraging for both of us today. It’s every crow for himself.’

‘Okay, okay, I’m coming,’ said Slow, and with barely a flap he dropped down from the tree to the wall.

‘What’s the strategy?’ I asked.

‘Simple. We’ll just give him the old one-two.’

We flew across to the veranda. Tiger had just started his meal. He was a fast, greedy eater who made horrible slurping sounds while he guzzled his food. We had to move fast if we wanted to get something before the meal was over.

I sidled up to Tiger and wished him good afternoon.

He kept on gobbling—but quicker now.

Slow came up from behind and gave him a quick peck near the tail—a sensitive spot—and, as Tiger swung round, snarling, I moved in quickly and snatched up several tidbits.

Tiger went for me, and I flew freestyle for the garden wall. The dish was untended, so Slow helped himself to as many scraps as he could stuff in his mouth.

He joined me on the garden wall, and we sat there feasting, while Tiger barked himself hoarse below.

‘Go catch a cat,’ said Slow, who is given to slang. ‘You’re in the wrong league, big boy.’

The great sage Pratyasataka—ever heard of him? I guess not—once said, ‘Nothing can improve a crow.’

Like most human sages, he wasn’t very clear in his thinking, so that there has been some misunderstanding about what he meant. Humans like to think that what he really meant was that crows were so bad as to be beyond improvement. But we crows know better. We interpret the saying as meaning that the crow is so perfect that no improvement is possible.

It’s not that we aren’t human—what I mean is, there are times when we fall from our high standards and do rather foolish things. Like at lunch time the other day.

Sometimes, when the table is laid in the bungalow, and before the family enters the dining room, I nip in through the open window and make a quick foray among the dishes. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to pick up a sausage or a slice of toast, or even a pat of butter, making off before someone enters and throws a bread knife at me. But on this occasion, just as I was reaching for the toast, a thin slouching fellow—Junior Sahib they call him—entered suddenly and shouted at me. I was so startled that I leapt across the table seeking shelter. Something flew at me, and in an effort to dodge the missile I put my head through a circular object and then found it wouldn’t come off.

It wasn’t safe to hang around there, so I flew out the window with this dashed ring still round my neck.

Serviette or napkin rings, that’s what they are called. Quite unnecessary objects, but some humans—particularly the well-to-do sort—seem to like having them on their tables, holding bits of cloth in place. The cloth is used for wiping the mouth. Have you ever heard of such nonsense?

Anyway, there I was with a fat napkin ring round my neck, and as I perched on the wall trying to get it off, the entire human family gathered on their veranda to watch me.

There was the Colonel Sahib and his wife, the Memsahib; there was the scrawny Junior Sahib (worst of the lot); there was a mischievous boy (the Colonel Sahib’s grandson) known as the Baba; and there was the cook (who usually flung orange peels at me) and the gardener (who once tried to decapitate me with a spade), and the dog Tiger who, like most dogs, tries unsuccessfully to be human.

Today they weren’t cursing and shaking their fists at me; they were just standing and laughing their heads off. What’s so funny about a crow with its head stuck in a napkin ring?

Worse was to follow.

The noise had attracted the other crows in the area, and if there’s one thing crows detest, it’s a crow who doesn’t look like a crow.

They swooped low and dived on me, hammering at the wretched napkin ring, until they had knocked me off the wall and into a flower bed. Then six or seven toughs landed on me with every intention of finishing me off.

‘Hey, boys!’ I cawed. ‘This is me, Speedy! What are you trying to do—kill me?’

‘That’s right! You don’t look like Speedy to us. What have you done with him, hey?’

And they set upon me with even greater vigour.

‘You’re just like a bunch of lousy humans!’ I shouted. ‘You’re no better than them—this is just the way they carry on amongst themselves!’

That brought them to a halt. They stopped trying to peck me to pieces, and stood back, looking puzzled. The napkin ring had been shattered in the onslaught and had fallen to the ground.

‘Why, it’s Speedy!’ said one of the gang.

‘None other!’

‘Good old Speedy—what are you doing here? And where’s the guy we were hammering just now?’

There was no point in trying to explain things to them. Crows are like that. They’re all good pals—until one of them tries to look different. Then he could be just another bird.

‘He took off for Tibet,’ I said. ‘It was getting unhealthy for him around here.’

Summertime is here again. And although I’m a crow for all seasons, I must admit to a preference for the summer months.

Humans grow lazy and don’t pursue me with so much vigour. Garbage cans overflow. Food goes bad and is constantly being thrown away. Overripe fruit gets tastier by the minute. If fellows like me weren’t around to mop up all these unappreciated riches, how would humans manage?

There’s one character in the bungalow, the Junior Sahib, who will never appreciate our services, it seems. He simply hates crows. The small boy may throw stones at us occasionally, but then, he’s the sort who throws stones at almost anything. There’s nothing personal about it. He just throws stones on principle.

The Memsahib is probably the best of the lot. She often throws me scraps from the kitchen—onionskins, potato peels, crusts, and leftovers—and even when I nip in and make off with something not meant for me (like a jam tart or a cheese pakora) she is quite sporting about it. The Junior Sahib looks outraged, but the lady of the house says, ‘Well, we’ve all got to make a living somehow, and that’s how crows make theirs. It’s high time you thought of earning a living.’ Junior Sahib’s her nephew—that’s his occupation. He has never been known to work.

The Colonel Sahib has a sense of humor but it’s often directed at me. He thinks I’m a comedian.

He discovered I’d been making off with the occasional egg from the egg basket on the veranda, and one day, without my knowledge, he made a substitution.

Right on top of the pile I found a smooth round egg, and before anyone could shout ‘Crow!’ I’d made off with it. It was abnormally light. I put it down on the lawn and set about cracking it with my strong beak, but it would keep slipping away or bounding off into the bushes. Finally I got it between my feet and gave it a good hard whack. It burst open, to my utter astonishment there was nothing inside!

I looked up and saw the old man standing on the veranda, doubled up with laughter.

‘What are you laughing at?’ asked the Memsahib, coming out to see what it was all about.

‘It’s that ridiculous crow!’ guffawed the Colonel, pointing at me. ‘You know he’s been stealing our eggs. Well, I placed a ping pong ball on top of the pile, and he fell for it! He’s been struggling with that ball for twenty minutes! That will teach him a lesson.’