The Very Best of Ruskin Bond, the Writer on the Hill: Selected Fiction and Non-Fiction Read Online Free PDF Page A

said. ‘I will have to look for it.’
    ‘I will come at seven,’ said Kamal, strapping on his tray. ‘Don’t worry. I know how to cook!’
    He ran down the steps and made for the bazaar. I began to look for the oil stove, found it at the bottom of my tin trunk, and then discovered I hadn’t any pots or pans or dishes. Finally, I borrowed these from Deep Chand, the barber.
    Kamal brought a chicken for our dinner. This was a costly luxury in Shahganj, to be taken only two or three times a year. He had bought the bird for three rupees, which was cheap, considering it was not too skinny. While Kamal set about roasting it, I went down to the bazaar and procured a bottle of beer on credit, and this served as an appetizer.
    ‘We are having an expensive meal,’ I observed. ‘Three rupees for the chicken and three rupees for the beer. But I wish we could do it more often.’
    ‘We should do it at least once a month,’ said Kamal. ‘It should be possible if we work hard.’
    ‘You know how to work. You work from morning to night.’
    ‘But you are a writer, Rusty. That is different. You have to wait for a mood.’
    ‘Oh, I’m not a genius that I can afford the luxury of moods. No, I’m just lazy, that’s all.’
    ‘Perhaps you are writing the wrong things.’
    ‘I know I am. But I don’t know how I can write anything else.’
    ‘Have you tried?’
    ‘Yes, but there is no money in it. I wish I could make a living in some other way. Even if I repaired cycles, I would make more money.’
    ‘Then why not repair cycles?’
    ‘No, I will not repair cycles. I would rather be a bad writer than a good repairer of cycles. But let us not think of work. There is time enough for work. I want to know more about you.’
    Kamal did not know if his parents were alive or dead. He had lost them, literally, when he was six. It happened at the Amritsar railroad station, where trains coming across the border disgorged thousands of refugees, or pulled into the station half empty, drenched with blood and littered with corpses.
    Kamal and his parents were lucky to escape the massacre. Had they travelled on an earlier train (they had tried desperately to get into one), they might well have been killed; but circumstances favoured them then, only to trick them later.
    Kamal was clinging to his mother’s sari, while she remained close to her husband, who was elbowing his way through the frightened, bewildered throng of refugees. Glancing over his shoulder at a woman who lay on the ground, wailing and beating her breasts, Kamal collided with a burly Sikh and lost his grip on his mother’s sari.
    The Sikh had a long curved sword at his waist; and Kamal stared up at him in awe and fascination—at his long hair, which had fallen loose, and his wild black beard, and the bloodstains on his white shirt. The Sikh pushed him out of the way and when Kamal looked around for his mother, she was not to be seen. She was hidden from him by a mass of restless bodies, pushed in different directions. He could hear her calling, ‘Kamal, where are you, Kamal?’ He tried to force his way through the crowd, in the direction of the voice, but he was carried the other way...
    At night, when the platform was empty, he was still searching for his mother. Eventually, some soldiers took him away. They looked for his parents, but without success, and finally, they sent Kamal to a refugee camp. From there he went to an orphanage. But when he was eight, and felt himself a man, he ran away.
    He worked for some time as a helper in a tea shop; but, when he started getting epileptic fits, the shopkeeper asked him to leave, and he found himself on the streets, begging for a living. He begged for a year, moving from one town to another, and ended up finally at Shahganj. By then he was twelve and too old to beg; but he had saved some money, and with it he bought a small stock of combs, buttons, cheap perfumes and bangles; and, converting himself into a mobile shop, went