Tales of Fosterganj

by Ruskin Bond

I didn’t quite know why I was attracted to the place—but it was quaint, isolated, a forgotten corner of an otherwise changing hill town; and I had always been attracted to forgotten corners.

She was less than beautiful but more than pretty, if you know what I mean.

He called me ‘Uncle’, although I was only some fifteen or sixteen years older than him. Call a tiger ‘Uncle’, and he won’t harm you; or so the forest-dwellers say. Not quite how it works out with people approaching middle age.

In creating this world, God showed that he was a great mathematician; but in creating man, he got his algebra wrong. Puffed up with self-importance, we are in fact the most dispensable of all his creatures.

When God, the great mathematician, discovered that in making man he had overdone things a bit, he created the bedbug to even things out.

The fleas had got into our clothes, the bugs were feasting on our blood. When the world as we know it comes to an end, these will be the ultimate survivors.

I have always been drawn to decadent, decaying, forgotten places—Fosterganj

Across the length of the room a chasm opened up. The lady saying her prayers fell into it.

The smile spread slowly across her face, like the sun chasing away a shadow, but it also lit up the scar on her cheek.

‘Nobody. It passed into the Receiver’s hand. It’s still there, if you want to look at it. Full of squatters and the ghost of old Kapoor. You can see him in the early hours, wandering about with a can of petrol, trying to set fire to the place.’

The rains were over, and a rainbow arched across the valley, linking Fosterganj to the Mussoorie ridge.

recalled the old proverb: ‘In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.’ But I’d always thought the antithetical was true, and a more likely outcome, in the country of the blind, would be the one-eyed man being stoned to death. How dare he be different.

The nettles stung me viciously on the hands and face, and I cursed in my best Hindustani. The European languages have their strengths, but for the purposes of cursing out loud you can’t beat some of the Indian languages for range and originality.

But I was the intruder, I had no right to any of their space.

And what was their real worth? We put an artificial value on pretty pebbles found in remote places. Just bits of crystals, poor substitutes for marbles. Innocent children know their true worth. Nothing more than the dust at their feet.

If, like Sunil, you have a tendency to pick pockets, that tendency will always be there, even if one day you become a big corporate boss. If, like Foster, you have spent most of your life living on the edge of financial disaster, you will always be living on the edge. If, like Hassan, you are a single-minded baker of bread and maker of children, you won’t stop doing either. If, likeVishaal, you are obsessed with leopards, you won’t stop looking for them. And if, like me, you are something of a dreamer, you won’t stop dreaming.