Rusty Comes Home by Ruskin Bond

Author:Ruskin Bond
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184750607
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

The Trouble With Jinns

ONE-ARMED JIMMY finally got married that winter. Jimmy was a friend of mine. He had lost his right arm when he was a young man of twenty-five. The story of how he lost his good right arm is a little difficult to believe, but I swear that it is absolutely true. For, I was in Delhi those days, and it had happened right before my eyes.

To begin with, Jimmy was (and presumably still is) a jinn. Now a jinn isn’t really a human like us. A jinn is a spirit creature from another world who has assumed, for a lifetime, the physical aspect of a human being. Jimmy was a true jinn and he had the jinn’s gift of being able to elongate his arm at will. Most jinns (I am told) can stretch their arms to a distance of twenty or thirty feet. Jimmy could attain forty feet. His arm would move through space or up walls or along the ground like a beautiful gliding serpent. I have seen him stretched out beneath a mango tree, helping himself to ripe mangoes from the top of the tree. He loved mangoes. He was a natural glutton and it was probably his gluttony that first led him to misuse his peculiar gifts.

Jimmy always told me how he had been particularly good at basketball in school. He was always clever enough not to lengthen his arm too much because he did not want anyone to know that he was a jinn. In the boxing ring too he generally won his fights. His opponents never seemed to get past his amazing reach. He just kept tapping them on the nose until they retired from the ring, bloody and bewildered.

But during the half-term examinations one of his classmates stumbled on Jimmy’s secret. The class had been set a particularly difficult algebra paper but Jimmy’s friend had managed to cover a couple of sheets with correct answers and was about to forge ahead on another sheet when he noticed someone’s hand on his desk. When he looked up there was no one beside him. He looked at the boy sitting directly behind. No, he was engrossed in his question paper and had his hands to himself. Meanwhile, the hand on his desk had grasped his answer sheets and was cautiously moving off. Following its descent, this boy found that it was attached to an arm of amazing length and pliability. This moved stealthily down the desk and slithered across the floor, shrinking all the while, until it was restored to its normal length. Its owner was of course one who had never been any good at algebra. And that was Jimmy, of course.

The poor chap had to write out his answers a second time but after the exam he went straight up to Jimmy, told him that he didn’t like his game and threatened to expose him. Jimmy begged him not to let anyone know, assured him that he couldn’t really help himself, and offered to be of service to that fellow whenever he wished.

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