Acclaimed author of The Dollmakers’ Island, Anu Kumar brings a treat for the readers of Unboxed Writers in the form of an unpublished novella that will be carried in nine parts. Here is a brief introduction. Three generations of a family have maintained a hotel that suddenly finds itself close to a new boundary line when India and Pakistan are partitioned. And as guests become witness to the  drama that plays out on the border, little do they realize the drama unfolding within the hotel precincts itself : a grandfather who is a war veteran, a love affair, a friendship with a British officer who himself turns strangely senile; a disinterested father who develops a maniacal obsession with the hotel and then the narrator grandson whose love for melodrama has tragic consequences. In this surreal story, real life borders mingle with borders between what is real and what could be almost so.

This is part two of the long tale…

Mr Robertson’s Story

There was one ghost who came back every summer. Like an old, tired out ghost, Robertson was one who refused to give up his old haunts. He was one  of  grandfather’s friends in the army. Now, a retired old bachelor,  he spent his days as  living off his various friends, scattered in various parts of his adopted country.  Robertson had served in Her Majesty’s Army for almost all his working life and now retired, he also realised that he had invested in nothing much – there was his luxurious moustache thick like the gorse that grew by the river, his friends and the suitcase he lugged around with him everywhere.

There is nobody back home, dear boy, he told me once, his hands nursing yet another drink and with tears so heavy in his eyes that you held your breath waiting for them to fall. My friends are my home now. Robertson drank heavily, wept a lot and went for walks by himself,  which, my grandfather said, would help  him sort out his thoughts for himself. He is writing his autobiography, grandfather whispered as if it were an important secret.  And I  never told grandfather what I thought. That Robertson was too old, that he would have so much to write that he would die before crossing page 10.

But grandfather would wink as he said this. And I knew  I was not to take him seriously. And yet he took me aside on more than one occasion. Robertson has to be taken special care of, you understand. He is getting old and he has been a good friend.

Over the years, I  began to resent this arrangement as Robertson’s escort cum caretaker.  Every summer term when I returned from boarding school, Robertson was there before me. I began to feel that it was he, who more than me was a permanent fixture in the house, and that I was a passing guest. Or that I had been transformed into one  of the elusive ghosts of my childhood. Perhaps Robertson scented my resentment and that was why one day on my last evening before I returned to school, he invited me to accompany him on his long, lonely walks up, down the driveway. These days he did not venture very far. There was the arthritis that troubled him. Besides the village had changed. The children and the younger generation did not leave alone the white sahibs any more,  instead they sidled up to us, insidiously, as we walked, hands outstretched for money.

So that evening, as I helped  Robertson walk down the driveway, to the gate and back again, it was he who said first. “Your grandfather is a fine gentleman, my boy. I shall sorely miss him.”

Why, I asked, gently grabbing  his walking stick when he showed signs of lurching into the flowerbeds. “Are you thinking of moving too..?”

“God forbid,” he laughed, “Nothing to go home to.” His one hand pressed heavily on my shoulder almost as if he were pressing me onto the ground.

“Mr Robertson..”

“Its okay, laddie, no need to feel sorry for me. I do feel sorry for your grandfather though.”

 I looked back at the hotel,  the lights were just coming on in the porch and in the corridors, and the light of the setting sun caught  the pale blue walls giving it  a chaste marble look. Perhaps it was time,  the thought struck me, the walls had a change of colour. Marble was the in-thing, expensive but still readily available. Instead I replied, “Oh, grandad, I think he is doing okay.”

“Has he done anything about Martha?” He asked me, and I saw his yellowing eyes turn to  me, as feverish as a rabid dog’s. His dementia embarrassed me, and I tried to nudge him back to coherence by groping once more for his stick. The yellowness in his eyes dissolved,  in degrees. But it stayed everywhere else, on the mottled skin of his hands, in the last remaining strands of his hair and in the dying sunlight that flashed a last goodbye as it struck his  dentures. 

I was to learn on my next visit home that Robertson had died, within a week of ending his holidays with my grandfather. I did not want my grandfather to grieve much. But he had been cooped up in his study ever since the news reached him. I found him, sitting scrunched up in his favourite armchair, staring at an unlit fireplace. “You are not to grieve much, dadaji,” I told him after sitting with him in respectable silence for a while. He was too far gone, not really his old self for a while.

“One of your ghosts, eh?” He looked up at me with his wry smile. I drew in a sharp sigh of relief. Grandfather had done with his grieving. Now as was typical with him, as a soldier and a businessman, he was shelving it away, moving on to fall in step with line.

He had become a ghost towards the end. A mummy really? I remembered my last walk with him. Talked strange things, obviously from the past. That’s the surest sign of…

Leave him now. He’s gone. Grandfather had got up and was adjusting the sword he always carried in the sheath that hung from his waist. He picked up his turban, and stood before the mirror, driving back with impatience the few strands of hair that kept trailing out  of the front of his turban as soon as he had placed it on his head. My grandfather’s bald head looked back at me. For a moment, I was reminded of the headless bulbs that stood all down the driveway but I quelled these thoughts in a disciplined manner. Yet I knew he was getting old. Robertson had been one of his last good friends. With each of their passing, grandfather had appeared much diminished, as if the story of his life, written by each of his friends, was losing its threads all too quickly, in too rambling a fashion.

“Who’s Martha, granddad?” I asked then.

I remember watching my grandfather’s closely. He turned around, the turban now firm on his head, his kohl rimmed eyes looking unblinkingly ahead, and the moustache turned up in defiance. The old scoot. So he was trying to tell you about my girlfriends. We laughed together, mine, shaky and embarrassed, his, an expression of his robust, hearty self.

Anu Kumar’s latest book is The Dollmakers’ Island. (http://www.flipkart.com/dollmakers-island-anu-kumar-book-8190939130) More about her on Story Wallahs.