DUST ON MOUNTAIN: COLLECTED STORIES

BOOK: DUST ON MOUNTAIN: COLLECTED STORIES
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Ruskin Bond wrote his first short story, ‘Untouchable’, at the age of sixteen in 1950. Since then he has written over a hundred stories, including the classics ‘A Face in the Dark’, ‘The Kitemaker’, ‘The Tunnel’, ‘The Room of Many Colours’, ‘Dust on the Mountain’ and ‘Time Stops at Shamli’. This volume brings together the best of all the short fiction Ruskin Bond has ever written.

 

 

‘[Ruskin Bond’s stories] bring to life the special flavours of life in the hills…strengthen[s] the “Rudyardian thesis” that the smell of the Himalayas, if it once creeps into the blood of a man, he will return to the hills again and again and will love to live and die among them.’–
Tribune

 

 

‘[Ruskin Bond] is a writer who has, with intense depth and sensitivity, absorbed the essence of the culturally syncretic Indian society.’–
Telegraph

 

 

A comprehensive
    selection from
six decades of short
              fiction by
     India’s best-loved
contemporary author

 

Cover photograph by Tommy Oshima

Cover design by Chandan Crasta

PENGUIN BOOKS
DUST ON THE MOUNTAIN:
COLLECTED STORIES

 

Ruskin Bond’s first novel,
The Room on the Roof
, written when he was seventeen, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written several novellas (including
Vagrants in the Valley, A Flight of Pigeons
and
Delhi Is Not Far
), essays, poems and children’s books, many of which have been published by Penguin India. He has also written over 500 short stories and articles that have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993 and the Padma Shri in 1999.

Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, and grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun, Delhi and Shimla. As a young man, he spent four years in the Channel Islands and London. He returned to India in 1955 and has never left the country since. He now lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his adopted family.

BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

 

Fiction

The Room on the Roof & Vagrants in the Valley

The Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories

Time Stops at Shamli and Other Stories

Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra

A Season of Ghosts

When Darkness Falls and Other Stories

A Flight of Pigeons

Delhi Is Not Far

A Face in the Dark and Other Hauntings

The Sensualist

A Handful of Nuts

 

Non-fiction

Rain in the Mountains

Scenes from a Writer’s Life

The Lamp Is Lit

The Little Book of Comfort

Landour Days

Notes from a Small Room

 

Anthologies

Dust on the Mountain: Collected Stories

The Best of Ruskin Bond

Friends in Small Places

Indian Ghost Stories (ed.)

Indian Railway Stories (ed.)

Classical Indian Love Stories and Lyrics (ed.)

Tales of the Open Road

Ruskin Bond’s Book of Nature

Ruskin Bond’s Book of Humour

A Town Called Dehra

 

Poetry

Ruskin Bond’s Book of Verse

Dust on the Mountain

COLLECTED STORIES

 

 

 

 

 

Ruskin Bond

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Group (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

 

First published in
Viking as Complete Short Stories and Novels
by Penguin Books India 1996

Published as
Collected Fiction
in Penguin Books 1999

This edition published by Penguin Books India 2009

 

 

Copyright © Ruskin Bond 1996, 1999, 2009

 

 

All rights reserved

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

ISBN: 978-0-14306-712-2

 

This digital edition published in 2011.

e-ISBN: 978-81-8475-158-1

 

This e-book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above-mentioned publisher of this e-book.

Contents

 

Copyright

Untouchable

The Coral Tree

Going Home

The Daffodil Case

The Eyes Have It

The Night Train at Deoli

The Woman on Platform No. 8

The Thief

The Photograph

The Window

The Boy Who Broke the Bank

Most Beautiful

The Haunted Bicycle

The Fight

A Rupee Goes a Long Way

Faraway Places

How Far Is the River?

Tribute to a Dead Friend

The Trouble with Jinns

Time Stops at Shamli

The Crooked Tree

The Flute Player

Chachi’s Funeral

The Man Who Was Kipling

The Girl from Copenhagen

Hanging at the Mango Tope

A Tiger in the House

All Creatures Great and Small

Calypso Christmas

Bhabiji’s House

Masterji

As Time Goes By

Death of a Familiar

Dead Man’s Gift

The Most Potent Medicine of All

The Story of Madhu

My First Love

The Kitemaker

The Prospect of Flowers

Sita and the River

The Tunnel

The Leopard

Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

Coming Home to Dehra

My Father’s Trees in Dehra

The Room of Many Colours

The Last Tonga Ride

The Tiger in the Tunnel

A Face in the Dark

Binya Passes By

He Said It with Arsenic

Whispering in the Dark

Escape from Java

The Last Time I Saw Delhi

A Guardian Angel

Love Is a Sad Song

Listen to the Wind

The Garlands on His Brow

His Neighbour’s Wife

The Monkeys

A Case for Inspector Lal

Panther’s Moon

The Good Old Days

Death of the Trees

Miss Bun and Others

The Funeral

The Last Truck Ride

Dust on the Mountain

Would Astley Return?

A Job Well Done

A Crow for All Seasons

The Playing Fields of Simla

The Wind on Haunted Hill

From Small Beginnings

When Darkness Falls

Whistling in the Dark

Something in the Water

Wilson’s Bridge

On Fairy Hill

Reunion at the Regal

Grandfather Fights an Ostrich

Grandfather’s Many Faces

Here Comes Mr Oliver

Susanna’s Seven Husbands

What’s Your Dream?

Eyes of the Cat

The Cherry Tree

When You Can’t Climb Trees Any More

A Love of Long Ago

Untouchable

 

T
he sweeper boy splashed water over the
khus
matting that hung in the doorway and for a while the air was cooled.

I sat on the edge of my bed, staring out of the open window, brooding upon the dusty road shimmering in the noon-day heat. A car passed and the dust rose in billowing clouds.

Across the road lived the people who were supposed to look after me while my father lay in hospital with malaria. I was supposed to stay with them, sleep with them. But except for meals, I kept away. I did not like them and they did not like me.

For a week, longer probably, I was going to live alone in the red-brick bungalow on the outskirts of the town, on the fringe of the jungle. At night the sweeper boy would keep guard, sleeping in the kitchen. Apart from him, I had no company; only the neighbours’ children, and I did not like them and they did not like me.

Their mother said, ‘Don’t play with the sweeper boy, he is unclean. Don’t touch him. Remember, he is a servant. You must come and play with my boys.’

Well, I did not intend playing with the sweeper boy … but neither did I intend playing with her children. I was going to sit on my bed all week and wait for my father to come home.

Sweeper boy … all day he pattered up and down between the house and the water-tank, with the bucket clanging against his knees.

Back and forth, with a wide, friendly smile.

I frowned at him.

He was about my age, ten. He had short-cropped hair, very white teeth, and muddy feet, hands, and face. All he wore was an old pair of khaki shorts; the rest of his body was bare, burnt a deep brown.

At every trip to the water tank he bathed, and returned dripping and glistening from head to toe.

I dripped with sweat.

It was supposedly below my station to bathe at the tank, where the gardener, water carrier, cooks, ayahs, sweepers, and their children all collected. I was the son of a ‘sahib’ and convention ruled that I did not play with servant children.

But I was just as determined not to play with the other sahibs’ children, for I did not like them and they did not like me.

I watched the flies buzzing against the windowpane, the lizards scuttling across the rafters, the wind scattering petals of scorched, long-dead flowers.

The sweeper boy smiled and saluted in play. I avoided his eyes and said, ‘Go away.’

He went into the kitchen.

I rose and crossed the room, and lifted my sun helmet off the hatstand.

A centipede ran down the wall, across the floor.

I screamed and jumped on the bed, shouting for help.

The sweeper boy darted in. He saw me on the bed, the centipede on the floor; and picking a large book off the shelf, slammed it down on the repulsive insect.

BOOK: DUST ON MOUNTAIN: COLLECTED STORIES
6.27Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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