The Best of Ruskin Bond (12 page)

N
ow that Thanh is dead, I suppose it is not too treacherous of me to write about him. He was only a year older than I. He died in Paris, in his twenty-second year, and Pravin wrote to me from London and told me about it. I will get more details from Pravin when he returns to India next month; just now I only know that Thanh is dead.

It is supposed to be in very bad taste to discuss a person behind his back; and to discuss a dead person behind his back is most unfair, for he cannot even retaliate. But Thanh had this very weakness of criticizing absent people, and it cannot hurt him now if I do a little to expose his colossal Ego.

Thanh was a fraud all right, but no one knew it. He had beautiful round eyes, a flashing smile, and a sweet voice, and everyone said he was a charming person. He was certainly charming, but I have found that charming people are seldom sincere. I think I was the only person who came anywhere near to being his friend, for he had cultivated a special loneliness of his own, and it was difficult to intrude on it.

I met him in London in the summer of ‘54. I was trying to become a writer, while I worked part-time at a number of different jobs. I had been two years in London, and was longing for the hills and rivers of India. Thanh was Vietnamese. His family was well-to-do, and though the Communists had taken their home-town of Hanoi, most of the family was in France, well-established in the restaurant business. Thanh did not suffer from the same financial distress as other students whose homes were in Northern Vietnam. He wasn’t studying anything in particular, but practised assiduously on the piano, though the only thing he could play fairly well was Chopin’s Funeral March.

My friend Pravin, a happy-go-lucky, very friendly Gujarati boy, introduced me to Thanh. Pravin, like a good Indian, thought all Asians were superior people, but he didn’t know Thanh well enough to know that Thanh didn’t like being an Asian.

At first, Thanh was glad to meet me. He said he had for a long time been wanting to make friends with an Englishman, a real Englishman, not one who was a Pole or a Cockney or a Jew; he was most anxious to improve his English and talk like Mr Glendenning of the BBC. Pravin, knowing that I had been born and bred in India, that my parents had been born and bred in India, suppressed his laughter with some difficulty. But Thanh was soon disillusioned. My accent was anything but English. It was a pronounced
chi-chi
accent.

‘You speak like an Indian!’ exclaimed Thanh, horrified. ‘Are you an Indian?’

‘He’s Welsh,’ said Pravin with a wink.

Thanh was slightly mollified. Being Welsh was the next best thing to being English. Only he disapproved of the Welsh for speaking with an Indian accent.

Later, when Pravin had gone, and I was sitting in Thanh’s room, drinking Chinese tea, he confided in me that he disliked Indians.

‘Isn’t Pravin your friend?’ I asked.

‘I don’t trust him,’ he said. ‘I have to be friendly, but I don’t trust him at all. I don’t trust any Indians.’

‘What’s wrong with them?’

‘They are too inquisitive,’ complained Thanh. ‘No sooner have you met one of them than he is asking you who your father is, and what your job is, and how much money have you got in the Bank?’

I laughed, and tried to explain that in India inquisitiveness is a sign of a desire for friendship, and that he should feel flattered when asked such personal questions. I protested that I was an Indian myself, and he said if that was so, he wouldn’t trust me either.

But he seemed to like me, and often invited me to his rooms. He could make some wonderful Chinese and French dishes. When we had eaten, he would sit down at his second-hand piano and play Chopin. He always complained that I didn’t listen properly.

He complained of my untidiness and my unwarranted self-confidence. It was true that I appeared most confident when I was not very sure of myself. I boasted of an intimate knowledge of London’s geography, but I was an expert at losing my way and then blaming it on someone else.

‘You are a useless person,’ said Thanh, while with chopsticks I stuffed my mouth with delicious pork and fried rice. ‘You cannot find your way anywhere. You cannot speak English properly. You do not know any people except Indians. How are you going to be a writer?’

‘If I am as bad as all that,’ I said, ‘why do you remain my friend?’

‘I want to study your stupidity,’ he said.

That was why he never made any real friends. He loved to work out your faults and examine your imperfections. There was no such thing as a real friend, he said. He had looked everywhere, but he could not find the perfect friend.

‘What is your idea of a perfect friend?’ I asked him. ‘Does he have to speak perfect English?’

But sarcasm was only wasted on Thanh—he admitted that perfect English was one of the requisites of a perfect friend!

Sometimes, in moments of deep gloom, he would tell me that he did not have long to live.

‘There is a pain in my chest,’ he complained. ‘There is something ticking there all the time. Can you hear it?’

He would bare his bony chest for me, and I would put my ear to the offending spot; but I could never hear any ticking.

‘Visit the hospital,’ I advised. ‘They’ll give you an X-ray and a proper check-up.’

‘I have had X-rays,’ he lied. ‘They never show anything.’

Then he would talk of killing himself. This was his theme song: he had no friends, he was a failure as a musician, there was no other career open to him, he hadn’t seen his family for five years, and he couldn’t go back to Indo-China because of the Communists. He magnified his own troubles and minimized other people’s troubles. When I was in hospital with an old acquaintance, amoebic dysentery, Pravin came to see me every day. Thanh, who was not very busy, came only once and never again. He said the hospital ward depressed him.

‘You need a holiday,’ I told him when I was out of hospital. ‘Why don’t you join the students’ union and work on a farm for a week or two? That should toughen you up.’

To my surprise, the idea appealed to him, and he got ready for the trip. Suddenly, he became suffused with goodwill towards all mankind. As evidence of his trust in me, he gave me the key of his room to keep (though he would have been secretly delighted if I had stolen his piano and chopsticks, giving him the excuse to say ‘never trust an Indian or an Anglo-Indian’), and introduced me to a girl called Vu-Phuong, a small, very pretty Annamite girl, who was studying at the Polytechnic. Miss Vu, Thanh told me, had to leave her lodgings next week, and would I find somewhere else for her to stay? I was an experienced hand at finding bed-sitting rooms, having changed my own abode five times in six months (that sweet, nomadic London life!). As I found Miss Vu very attractive, I told her I would get her a room, one not far from my own, in case she needed any further assistance.

Later, in confidence, Thanh asked me not to be too friendly with Vu-Phuong, as she was not to be trusted.

But as soon as he left for the farm, I went round to see Vu in her new lodgings, which were one tube-station away from my own. She seemed glad to see me, and as she too could make French and Chinese dishes, I accepted her invitation to lunch. We had chicken noodles, soya sauce, and fried rice. I did the washing-up. Vu said: ‘Do you play cards, Ruskin?’ She had a sweet, gentle voice, that brought out all the gallantry in a man. I began to feel protective, and hovered about her like a devoted cocker spaniel.

‘I’m not much of a card-player,’ I said.

‘Never mind, I’ll tell your fortune with them.’

She made me shuffle the cards; then scattered them about on the bed in different patterns. I would be very rich, she said; I would travel a lot, and I would reach the age of forty. I told her I was comforted to know it.

The month was June, and Hampstead Heath was only ten minutes walk from the house. Boys flew kites from the hill, and little painted boats scurried about on the ponds. We sat down on the grass, on the slope of the hill, and I held Vu’s hand.

For three days I ate with Vu, and we told each other our fortunes, and lay on the grass on Hampstead Heath, and on the fourth day I said, ‘Vu, I would like to marry you.’

‘I will think about it,’ she said.

Thanh came back on the sixth day and said, ‘You know, Ruskin, I have been doing some thinking, and Vu is not such a bad girl after all. I will ask her to marry me. That is what I need—a wife!’

‘Why didn’t you think of it before?’ I said. ‘When will you ask her?’

‘Tonight,’ he said. ‘I will corne to see you afterwards, and tell you if I have been successful.’

I shrugged my shoulders resignedly, and waited. Thanh left me at six in the evening, and I waited for him till ten o’clock, all the time feeling a little sorry for him. More disillusionment for Thanh! Poor Thanh. . . .

He came in at ten o’clock, his face beaming. He slapped me on the back and said I was his best friend.

‘Did you ask her?’ I said.

‘Yes. She said she would think about it. That is the same as “yes”.’

‘It isn’t,’ I said, unfortunately for both of us. ‘She told me the same thing.’

Thanh looked at me as though I had just stabbed him in the back.
Et
tu
Ruskin, was what his expression said.

We took a taxi and sped across to Vu’s rooms. The uncertain nature of her replies was too much for both of us; without a definite answer, neither of us would have been able to sleep that night.

Vu was not at home. The landlady met us at the door, and told us that Vu had gone to the theatre with an Indian gentleman.

Thanh gave me a long, contemptuous look.

‘Never trust an Indian,’ he said.

‘Never trust a woman,’ I replied.

At twelve o’clock I woke Pravin. Whenever I could not sleep, I went to Pravin. He knew the remedy for all ailments. As on previous occasions, he went to the cupboard and produced a bottle of Cognac. We got drunk. He was seventeen and I was nineteen, and we were both quite decadent.

Three weeks later I returned to India. Thanh went to Paris, to help in his sister’s restaurant. I did not hear of Vu-Phuong again.

And now, a year later, there is the letter from Pravin. All he can tell me is that Thanh died of some unknown disease. I wonder if it had anything to do with the ticking in his chest, or with his vague threats of suicide. I doubt if I will ever know. And I will never know how much I hated Thanh, and how much I loved him, or if there was any difference between hating and loving him.

D
huki, the gardener, was clearing up the weeds that grew in profusion around the old disused well. He was an old man, skinny and bent and spindly-legged; but he had always been like that; his strength lay in his wrists and in his long, tendril-like fingers. He looked as frail as a petunia, but he had the tenacity of a vine.

‘Are you going to cover the well?’ I asked. I was eight, a great favourite of Dhuki. He had been the gardener long before my birth; had worked for my father, until my father died, and now worked for my mother and stepfather.

‘I must cover it, I suppose,’ said Dhuki. ‘That’s what the Major sahib wants. He’ll be back any day, and if he finds the well still uncovered he’ll get into one of his raging fits and I’ll be looking for another job!’

The ‘Major sahib’ was my stepfather, Major Summerskill. A tall, hearty, back-slapping man, who liked polo and pig-sticking. He was quite unlike my father. My father had always given me books to read. The Major said I would become a dreamer if I read too much, and took the books away. I hated him; and did not think much of my mother for marrying him.

‘The boy’s too soft,’ I heard him tell my mother. ‘I must see that he gets riding lessons.’

But, before the riding lessons could be arranged, the Major’s regiment was ordered to Peshawar. Trouble was expected from some of the frontier tribes. He was away for about two months. Before leaving, he had left strict instructions for Dhuki to cover up the old well.

‘Too damned dangerous having an open well in the middle of the garden,’ my stepfather had said. ‘Make sure that it’s completely covered by the time I get back.’

Dhuki was loth to cover up the old well. It had been there for over fifty years long before the house had been built. In its walls lived a colony of pigeons. Their soft cooing filled the garden with a lovely sound. And during the hot, dry, summer months, when taps ran dry, the well was always a dependable source of water. The bhisti still used it, filling his goatskin bag with the cool clear water and sprinkling the paths around the house to keep the dust down.

Dhuki pleaded with my mother to let him leave the well uncovered.

‘What will happen to the pigeons?’ he asked.

‘Oh, surely they can find another well,’ said my mother. ‘Do close it up soon, Dhuki. I don’t want the Sahib to come back and find that you haven’t done anything about it.’

My mother seemed just a little bit afraid of the Major. How can we be afraid of those we love? It was a question that puzzled me then, and puzzles me still.

The Major’s absence made life pleasant again. I returned to my books, spent long hours in my favourite banyan tree, ate buckets of mangoes, and dawdled in the garden talking to Dhuki.

Neither he nor I were looking forward to the Major’s return. Dhuki had stayed on after my mother’s second marriage only out of loyalty to her and affection for me; he had really been my father’s man. But my mother had always appeared deceptively frail and helpless, and most men, Major Summerskill included, felt protective towards her. She liked people who did things for her.

‘Your father liked this well,’ said Dhuki. ‘He would often sit here in the evenings, with a book in which he made drawings of birds and flowers and insects.’

I remembered those drawings, and I remembered how they had all been thrown away by the Major when he had moved into the house. Dhuki knew about it too. I didn’t keep much from him.

‘It’s a sad business closing this well,’ said Dhuki again. ‘Only a fool or a drunkard is likely to fall into it.’

But he had made his preparations. Planks of salwood, bricks and cement were neatly piled up around the well.

‘Tomorrow,’ said Dhuki. ‘Tomorrow I will do it. Not today. Let the birds remain for one more day. In the morning, baba, you can help me drive the birds from the well.’

On the day my stepfather was expected back, my mother hired a tonga and went to the bazaar to do some shopping. Only a few people had cars in those days. Even colonels went about in tongas. Now, a clerk finds it beneath his dignity to sit in one.

As the Major was not expected before evening, I decided I would make full use of my last free morning: I took all my favourite books and stored them away in an outhouse, where I could come for them from time to time. Then, my pockets bursting with mangoes, I climbed into the banyan tree. It was the darkest and coolest place on a hot day in June.

From behind the screen of leaves that concealed me, I could see Dhuki moving about near the well. He appeared to be most unwilling to get on with the job of covering it up.

‘Baba!’ he called, several times; but I did not feel like stirring from the banyan tree. Dhuki grasped a long plank of wood and placed it across one end of the well. He started hammering. From my vantage point in the banyan tree, he looked very bent and old.

A jingle of tonga bells and the squeak of unoiled wheels told me that a tonga was coming in at the gate. It was too early for my mother to be back. I peered through the thick, waxy leaves of the tree, and nearly fell off my branch in surprise. It was my stepfather, the Major! He had arrived earlier than expected.

I did not come down from the tree. I had no intention of confronting my stepfather until my mother returned.

The Major had climbed down from the tonga and was watching his luggage being carried onto the veranda. He was red in the face and the ends of his handlebar moustache were stiff with brilliantine. Dhuki approached with a half-hearted salaam.

‘Ah, so there you are, you old scoundrel!’ exclaimed the Major, trying to sound friendly and jocular. ‘More jungle than garden, from what I can see. You’re getting too old for this sort of work, Dhuki. Time to retire! And where’s the memsahib?’

‘Gone to the bazaar,’ said Dhuki.

‘And the boy?’

Dhuki shrugged. ‘I have not seen the boy, today, Sahib.’

‘Damn!’ said the Major. ‘A fine homecoming, this. Well, wake up the cook-boy and tell him to get some sodas.’

‘Cook-boy’s gone away,’ said Dhuki.

‘Well, I’ll be double-damned,’ said the Major.

The tonga went away, and the Major started pacing up and down the garden path. Then he saw Dhuki’s unfinished work at the well. He grew purple in the face, strode across to the well, and started ranting at the old gardener.

Dhuki began making excuses. He said something about a shortage of bricks; the sickness of a niece; unsatisfactory cement; unfavourable weather; unfavourable gods. When none of this seemed to satisfy the Major, Dhuki began mumbling about something bubbling up from the bottom of the well, and pointed down into its depths. The Major stepped onto the low parapet and looked down. Dhuki kept pointing. The Major leant over a little.

Dhuki’s hand moved swiftly, like a conjurer’s 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 lunch-time—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 several months had passed without the Major turning up, it was presumed that one of two things must had 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, easygoing, seemingly absent-minded 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 bougainvillaea, 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.