Time Stops At Shamli & Other Stories by Ruskin Bond

Author:Ruskin Bond [Bond, Ruskin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Classics, Contemporary, Culture, Fiction, India, Short Stories
ISBN: 9788184754650
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2000-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

Going Home

The train came panting through the forest and into the flat brown plain. The engine whistled piercingly, and a few cows moved off the track. In a swaying third-class compartment two men played cards; a women held a baby to an exposed breast; a Sikh labourer, wearing brief pants, lay asleep on an upper bunk, snoring fitfully; an elderly unshaven man chewed the last of his pan and spat the red juice out of the window. A small boy, mischief in his eyes, jingled a bag of coins in front of an anxious farmer.

Daya Ram, the farmer, was going home; home to his rice fields, his buffalo and his wife. A brother had died recently, and Daya Ram had taken the ashes to Hardwar to immerse them in the holy waters of the Ganga, and now he was on the train to Dehra and soon he would be home. He was looking anxious because he had just remembered his wife’s admonition about being careful with money; ten rupees was what he had left with him, and it was all in the bag the boy held.

‘Let me have it now,’ said Daya Ram, ‘before the money falls out.’ He made a grab at the little bag that contained his coins, notes and railway ticket, but the boy shrieked with delight and leapt out of the way.

Daya Ram stroked his moustache; it was a long drooping moustache that lent a certain sadness to his somewhat kind and foolish face. He reflected that it was his own fault for having started the game; the child had been sulky and morose, and, to cheer him up, Daya Ram had begun jingling his money. Now the boy was jingling the money, right in front of the open window.

‘Come now, give it back,’ pleaded Daya Ram, ‘or I shall tell your mother.’

The boy’s mother had her back to them, and it was a large back, almost as forbidding as her front. But the boy was enjoying his game and would not give up the bag; he was exploiting to the full Daya Ram’s easy-going tolerant nature, and kept bobbing up and down on the seat, waving the bag in the poor man’s face.

Suddenly the boy’s mother, who had been engrossed in conversation with another woman, turned and saw what was happening. She walloped the boy over the head and the suddenness of the blow (it was more of a thump than a slap) made him fall back against the window, and the cloth bag fell from his hand on to the railway embankment outside.

Now Daya Ram’s first impulse was to leap out of the moving train. But when someone shouted, ‘Pull the alarm cord!’ he decided on this course of action. He plunged for the alarm cord, but just at that moment someone else shouted, ‘Don’t pull the cord!’ and Daya Ram who usually listened to others, stood in suspended animation, waiting for further directions.

‘Too many people are stopping trains every day all over India,’

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