DUST ON MOUNTAIN: COLLECTED STORIES
Read DUST ON MOUNTAIN: COLLECTED STORIES Online
Authors: RUSKIN BOND
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
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.
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
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.
The Most Potent Medicine of All
When You Can’t Climb Trees Any More
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.