DUST ON MOUNTAIN: COLLECTED STORIES (11 page)

I went into the house and wrapped the loaf of bread in a newspaper. Then I closed all the doors and windows.

The path to the river dropped steeply into the valley, then rose and went round the big mountain. It was frequently used by the villagers, woodcutters, milkmen, shepherds, mule drivers—but there were no villages beyond the mountain or near the river.

I passed a woodcutter and asked him how far it was to the river. He was a short, powerful man, with a creased and weathered face, and muscles that stood out in hard lumps.

‘Seven miles,’ he said. ‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I am going there,’ I said.

‘Alone?’

‘Of course.’

‘It will take you three hours to reach it, and then you have to come back. It will be getting dark, and it is not an easy road.’

‘But I’m a good walker,’ I said, though I had never walked further than the two miles between our house and my school. I left the woodcutter on the path, and continued down the hill.

It was a dizzy, winding path, and I slipped once or twice and slid into a bush or down a slope of slippery pine needles. The hill was covered with lush green ferns, the trees were entangled in creepers, and a great wild dahlia would suddenly rear its golden head from the leaves and ferns.

Soon I was in the valley, and the path straightened out and then began to rise. I met a girl who was coming from the opposite direction. She held a long curved knife with which she had been cutting grass, and there were rings in her nose and ears and her arms were covered with heavy bangles. The bangles made music when she moved her wrists. It was as though her hands spoke a language of their own.

‘How far is it to the river?’ I asked.

The girl had probably never been to the river, or she may have been thinking of another one, because she said, ‘Twenty miles,’ without any hesitation.

I laughed and ran down the path. A parrot screeched suddenly, flew low over my head, a flash of blue and green. It took the course of the path, and I followed its dipping flight, running until the path rose and the bird disappeared amongst the trees.

A trickle of water came down the hillside, and I stopped to drink. The water was cold and sharp but very refreshing. But I was soon thirsty again. The sun was striking the side of the hill, and the dusty path became hotter, the stones scorching my feet. I was sure I had covered half the distance: I had been walking for over an hour.

Presently, I saw another boy ahead of me driving a few goats down the path.

‘How far is the river?’ I asked.

The village boy smiled and said, ‘Oh, not far, just round the next hill and straight down.’

Feeling hungry, I unwrapped my loaf of bread and broke it in two, offering one half to the boy. We sat on the hillside and ate in silence.

When we had finished, we walked on together and began talking; and talking I did not notice the smarting of my feet and the heat of the sun, the distance I had covered and the distance I had yet to cover. But after some time my companion had to take another path, and once more I was on my own.

I missed the village boy; I looked up and down the mountain path but no one else was in sight. My own home was hidden from view by the side of the mountain, and there was no sign of the river. I began to feel discouraged. If someone had been with me, I would not have faltered; but alone, I was conscious of my fatigue and isolation.

But I had come more than half way, and I couldn’t turn back; I had to see the river. If I failed, I would always be a little ashamed of the experience. So I walked on, along the hot, dusty, stony path, past stone huts and terraced fields, until there were no more fields or huts, only forest and sun and loneliness. There were no men, and no sign of man’s influence—only trees and rocks and grass and small flowers—and silence …

The silence was impressive and a little frightening. There was no movement, except for the bending of grass beneath my feet, and the circling of a hawk against the blind blue of the sky.

Then, as I rounded a sharp bend, I heard the sound of water. I gasped with surprise and happiness, and began to run. I slipped and stumbled, but I kept on running, until I was able to plunge into the snow-cold mountain water.

And the water was blue and white and wonderful.

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 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 1954. 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 hometown 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, 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
chhi-chhi
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 you have 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 room. He could make some wonderful Chinese and French dishes. When we had eaten, he would sit down at his secondhand 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-sittingrooms, 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 come 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 disillusionmnent 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.