DUST ON MOUNTAIN: COLLECTED STORIES (85 page)

‘Yes, but you weren’t there,’ I complained. ‘And we took a close look at everyone—including the bearded lady!’

‘Oh, I was there all right,’ said Grandfather. ‘I was sitting just behind you. But you were too absorbed in the circus and the performers to notice the audience. I was that smart-looking Englishman in suit and tie, sitting between the maharaja and the nuns. I thought I’d just be myself for a change!’

A
part from being our Scoutmaster, Mr Oliver was also our maths teacher, a subject in which I had some difficulty in obtaining pass marks. Sometimes I scraped through, usually I got something like twenty or thirty out of a hundred.

‘Failed again, Bond,’ Mr Oliver would say. ‘What will you do when you grow up?’

‘Become a Scoutmaster, sir.’

‘Scoutmasters don’t get paid. It’s an honorary job. But you could become a cook. That would suit you.’ He hadn’t forgotten our Scout camp, when I had been the camp’s cook.

If Mr Oliver was in a good mood, he’d give me grace marks, passing me by a mark or two. He wasn’t a hard man, but he seldom smiled. He was very dark, thin, stooped (from a distance he looked like a question mark), and balding. He was about forty, still a bachelor, and it was said that he had been unlucky in love—that the girl he was going to marry had jilted him at the last moment, had run away with a sailor while he was waiting at the church, ready for the wedding ceremony. No wonder he always had such a sorrowful look.

Mr Oliver did have one inseparable companion—a Dachshund, a snappy little ‘sausage’ of a dog, who looked upon the human race and especially small boys with a certain disdain and frequent hostility. We called him Hitler. He was impervious to overtures of friendship, and if you tried to pat or stroke him, he would do his best to bite your fingers—or your shin or ankle. However, he was devoted to Mr Oliver and followed him everywhere, except into the classroom; this our headmaster would not allow.

You remember that old nursery rhyme:

Mary had a little lamb
,

Its fleece was white as snow
,

And everywhere that Mary went

The lamb was sure to go
.

Well, we made up our own version of the rhyme, and I must confess to having had a hand in its composition. It went like this:

Olly had a little dog
,

’twas never out of sight
,

And everyone that Olly met

The dog was sure to bite
!

He followed Mr Oliver about the school grounds. He followed him when he took a walk through the pines, to the Brockhurst tennis courts. He followed him into town and home again. Mr Oliver had no other friend, no other companion. The dog slept at the foot of Mr Oliver’s bed. He did not sit at the breakfast table, but he had buttered toast for breakfast and soup and crackers for dinner. Mr Oliver had to take his lunch in the dining hall with the staff and boys, but he had an arrangement with one of the bearers whereby a plate of dal, rice and chapattis made its way to Mr Oliver’s quarters and his well-fed pet.

And then tragedy struck.

Mr Oliver and Hitler were returning to school after their evening walk through the pines. It was dusk, and the light was fading fast. Out of the shadows of the trees emerged a lean and hungry panther. It pounced on the hapless dog, flung him across the road, seized him between its powerful jaws, and made off with its victim into the darkness of the forest.

Mr Oliver, untouched, was frozen into immobility for at least a minute. Then he began calling for help. Some bystanders who had witnessed the incident began shouting, too. Mr Oliver ran into the forest, but there was no sign of dog or panther.

Mr Oliver appeared to be a broken man. He went about his duties with a poker face, but we could all tell that he was grieving for his lost companion. In the classroom he was listless, indifferent to whether or not we followed his calculations on the blackboard. In times of personal loss, the Highest Common Factor made no sense.

Mr Oliver was not to be seen on his evening walk. He stayed in his room, playing cards with himself. He played with his food, pushing most of it aside; there were no chapattis to send home.

‘Olly needs another pet,’ said Bimal, wise in the ways of adults.

‘Or a wife,’ said Tata, who thought on those lines.

‘He’s too old. Over forty.’

‘A pet is best,’ I said. ‘What about a parrot?’

‘You can’t take a parrot for a walk,’ said Bimal. ‘Olly wants someone to walk beside him.’

‘A cat, maybe …’

‘Hitler hated cats. A cat would be an insult to Hitler’s memory.’

‘He needs another Dachshund. But there aren’t any around here.’

‘Any dog will do. We’ll ask Chippu to get us a pup.’

Chippu ran the tuck shop. He lived in the Chotta Simla bazaar, and occasionally we would ask him to bring us tops or marbles or comics or little things that we couldn’t get in school. Five of us Boy Scouts contributed a rupee each, and we gave Chippu five rupees and asked him to get us a pup. ‘A good breed,’ we told him. ‘Not a mongrel.’

The next evening Chippu turned up with a pup that seemed to be a combination of at least five different breeds—all good ones, no doubt. One ear lay flat, the other stood upright. It was spotted like a Dalmatian, but it had the legs of a Spaniel and the tail of a Pomeranian. It was quite fluffy and playful, and the tail wagged a lot, which was more than Hitler’s ever did.

‘It’s quite pretty,’ said Tata. ‘Must be a female.’

‘He may not want a female,’ said Bimal.

‘Let’s give it a try,’ I said.

During our play hour, before the bell rang for supper, we left the pup on the steps outside Mr Oliver’s front door. Then we knocked, and sped into the hibiscus bushes that lined the pathway.

Mr Oliver opened the door. He looked down at the pup with an expressionless face. The pup began to paw at Mr Oliver’s shoes, loosening one of his laces in the process.

‘Away with you!’ muttered Mr Oliver. ‘Buzz off!’ And he pushed the pup away, gently but firmly.

After a break of ten minutes we tried again, but the result was much the same. We now had a playful pup on our hands, and Chippu had gone home for the night. We would have to conceal it in the dormitory.

At first we hid it in Bimal’s locker, but it began yapping and struggling to get out. Tata took it into the shower room, but it wouldn’t stay there either. It began running around the dormitory, playing with socks, shoes, slippers and anything else it could get hold of.

‘Watch out!’ hissed one of the boys. ‘Here’s Ma Fisher!’

Mrs Fisher, the headmaster’s wife, was on her nightly rounds, checking to make sure we were all in bed and not up to some nocturnal mischief.

I grabbed the pup and hid it under my blankets. It was quiet there, happy to nibble at my toes. When Ma Fisher had gone, I let the pup loose again, and for the rest of the night it had the freedom of the dormitory.

At the crack of dawn, before first light, Bimal and I sped out of the dormitory in our pyjamas, taking the pup with us. We banged hard on Mr Oliver’s door, and kept knocking until we heard footsteps approaching. As soon as the door opened just a bit (for Mr Oliver, being a cautious man, did not open it all at once) we pushed the pup inside and ran for our lives.

Mr Oliver came to class as usual, but there was no pup with him. Three or four days passed, and still no sign of the pup! Had he passed it on to someone else, or simply let it wander off on its own?

‘Here comes Olly!’ called Bimal, from our vantage point near the school bell.

Mr Oliver was setting out for his evening walk. He was carrying a stout walnut-wood walking stick—to keep panthers at bay, no doubt. He looked neither left nor right, and if he noticed us watching him, he gave no sign of it. But then, scurrying behind him, came the pup! The creature of many good breeds was accompanying Mr Oliver on his walk. It had been well brushed and was wearing a bright red collar. Like Mr Oliver it took no notice of us, but scampered along beside its new master.

Mr Oliver and the pup were soon inseparable companions, and my friends and I were quite pleased with ourselves. Mr Oliver gave absolutely no indication that he knew where the pup had come from, but when the end-of-term exams were over, and Bimal and I were sure we had failed our maths paper, we were surprised to find that we had passed after all—with grace marks!

‘Good old Olly!’ said Bimal. ‘So he knew all the time.’

Tata, of course, did not need grace marks; he was a whiz at maths. But Bimal and I decided we would thank Mr Oliver for his kindness.

‘Nothing to thank me for,’ said Mr Oliver brusquely. ‘I’ve seen enough of you two in junior school. It’s high time you went up to the senior school—and God help you there!’

L
ocally the tomb was known as ‘the grave of the seven times married one’.

You’d be forgiven for thinking it was Bluebeard’s grave; he was reputed to have killed several wives in turn because they showed undue curiosity about a locked room. But this was the tomb of Susanna Anna-Maria Yeates, and the inscription (most of it in Latin) stated that she was mourned by all who had benefited from her generosity, her beneficiaries having included various schools, orphanages and the church across the road. There was no sign of any other grave in the vicinity and presumably her husbands had been interred in the old Rajpur graveyard, below the Delhi Ridge.

I was still in my teens when I first saw the ruins of what had once been a spacious and handsome mansion. Desolate and silent, its well-laid paths were overgrown with weeds, and its flower beds had disappeared under a growth of thorny jungle. The two-storeyed house had looked across the Grand Trunk Road. Now abandoned, feared and shunned, it stood encircled in mystery, reputedly the home of evil spirits.

Outside the gate, along the Grand Trunk Road, thousands of vehicles sped by—cars, trucks, buses, tractors, bullock carts—but few noticed the old mansion or its mausoleum, set back as they were from the main road, hidden by mango, neem and peepul trees. One old and massive peepul tree grew out of the ruins of the house, strangling it much as its owner was said to have strangled one of her dispensable paramours.

As a much-married person with a quaint habit of disposing of her husbands whenever she tired of them, Susanna’s malignant spirit was said to haunt the deserted garden. I had examined the tomb, I had gazed upon the ruins, I had scrambled through shrubbery and overgrown rose bushes, but I had not encountered the spirit of this mysterious woman. Perhaps, at the time, I was too pure and innocent to be targeted by malignant spirits. For malignant she must have been, if the stories about her were true.

The vaults of the ruined mansion were rumoured to contain a buried treasure—the amassed wealth of the lady Susanna. But no one dared go down there, for the vaults were said to be occupied by a family of cobras, traditional guardians of buried treasure. Had she really been a woman of great wealth, and could treasure still be buried there? I put these questions to Naushad, the furniture maker, who had lived in the vicinity all his life, and whose father had made the furniture and fittings for this and other great houses in Old Delhi.

‘Lady Susanna, as she was known, was much sought after for her wealth,’ recalled Naushad. ‘She was no miser, either. She spent freely, reigning in state in her palatial home, with many horses and carriages at her disposal. Every evening she rode through the Roshanara Gardens, the cynosure of all eyes, for she was beautiful as well as wealthy. Yes, all men sought her favours, and she could choose from the best of them. Many were fortune hunters. She did not discourage them. Some found favour for a time, but she soon tired of them. None of her husbands enjoyed her wealth for very long!

‘Today no one enters those ruins, where once there was mirth and laughter. She was a zamindari lady, the owner of much land, and she administered her estate with a strong hand. She was kind if rents were paid when they fell due, but terrible if someone failed to pay.

‘Well, over fifty years have gone by since she was laid to rest, but still men speak of her with awe. Her spirit is restless, and it is said that she often visits the scenes of her former splendour. She has been seen walking through this gate, or riding in the gardens, or driving in her phaeton down the Rajpur road.’

‘And what happened to all those husbands?’ I asked.

‘Most of them died mysterious deaths. Even the doctors were baffled. Tomkins Sahib drank too much. The lady soon tired of him. A drunken husband is a burdensome creature, she was heard to say. He would eventually have drunk himself to death, but she was an impatient woman and was anxious to replace him. You see those datura bushes growing wild in the grounds? They have always done well here.’

‘Belladonna?’ I suggested.

‘That’s right, huzoor. Introduced in the whisky-soda, it put him to sleep forever.’

‘She was quite humane in her way.’

‘Oh, very humane, sir. She hated to see anyone suffer. One sahib, I don’t know his name, drowned in the tank behind the house, where the water lilies grew. But she made sure he was half-dead before he fell in. She had large, powerful hands, they said.’

‘Why did she bother to marry them? Couldn’t she just have had men friends?’

‘Not in those days, huzoor. Respectable society would not have tolerated it. Neither in India nor in the West would it have been permitted.’

‘She was born out of her time,’ I remarked.

‘True, sir. And remember, most of them were fortune hunters. So we need not waste too much pity on them.’

‘She did not waste any.’

‘She was without pity. Especially when she found out what they were really after. Snakes had a better chance of survival.’

‘How did the other husbands take their leave of this world?’

‘Well, the Colonel Sahib shot himself while cleaning his rifle. Purely an accident, huzoor. Although some say she had loaded his gun without his knowledge. Such was her reputation by now that she was suspected even when innocent. But she bought her way out of trouble. It was easy enough, if you were wealthy.’