A Season of Ghosts by Ruskin Bond

Author:Ruskin Bond
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9788184754292
Publisher: Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Published: 2016-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

V

Keemat Lal remembered the girl in the road. He did not usually have a good memory for children, and so he was surprised at himself for remembering the girl so distinctly. If the dog had been given to her by the Rani, it would naturally find its way back to its previous owner’s house from time to time. He would speak to the girl. She seemed an odd little creature, and might be able to help him.

He paused in his ascent of the slope, and wiped his brow. He found the sun surprisingly warm for February—or was it that he was accumulating more surplus flesh? Sant Ram was already at the top of the slope, waiting for his chief to catch up. The impertinence of the man!

‘You wait outside,’ said Keemat, who sometimes felt self-conscious in his constable’s presence. ‘I don’t want to alarm the butcher.’ He felt the excuse was somewhat lame, but could not think of a better one. No one could possibly have been alarmed to see Sant Ram, who would do almost any favour in exchange for a glass of tea—unlike more hardened policemen who might have expected something more substantial.

The butcher was still out on his rounds, but his wife—a broad fair woman with great spreading hips like the trunk of a banyan tree—offered to send her small son after him. Keemat Lal said he would wait, and the boy, half-naked but oblivious to the cold, scampered up the hillside in search of his father.

The butcher’s wife did not offer the Inspector a seat, because she knew he would not take it. His prestige would suffer. Instead he paced up and down the yard, his progress continually interrupted by a rooster and a number of cackling hens.

Sitting in the sun on a string charpoy was a young woman in her early twenties. She was stitching some cotton garments. Keemat Lal could not help noticing her. She was exquisitely fair and her cheeks were pink, and she had that rare northern beauty which one reads about in fairy tales or Urdu poetry. And Keemat, who was very rarely poetic, murmured a couplet from Hafiz:

‘Look not upon the dimple of her chin,

Danger lurks there!… ’

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