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

Amritsar Express, when I saw Mr Khushal, handcuffed to a policeman.
    I hadn’t recognized him at first—a paunchy gentleman with a lot of grey in his beard and a certain arrogant amusement in his manner. It was only when I came closer, and we were almost face to face, that I recognized my old Hindi teacher.
    Startled, I stopped and stared. And he stared back at me, a glimmer of recognition in his eyes. It was over twenty years since I’d last seen him, standing jauntily before the classroom blackboard, and now here he was tethered to a policeman and looking as jaunty as ever...
    ‘Good—good evening, sir,’ I stammered, in my best public school manner. (You must always respect your teacher, no matter what the circumstances.)
    Mr Khushal’s face lit up with pleasure. ‘So you remember me! It’s nice to see you again, my boy.’
    Forgetting that his right hand was shackled to the policeman’s left, I made as if to shake hands. Mr Khushal thoughtfully took my right hand in his left and gave it a rough squeeze. A faint odour of cloves and cinnamon reached me, and I remembered how he had always been redolent of spices when standing beside my desk, watching me agonize over my Hindi–English translation.
    He had joined the school in 1948, not long after the Partition. Until then there had been no Hindi teacher; we’d been taught Urdu and French. Then came a ruling that Hindi was to be a compulsory subject, and at the age of sixteen I found myself struggling with a new script. When Mr Khushal joined the staff (on the recommendation of a local official), there was no one else in the school who knew Hindi, or who could assess Mr Khushal’s abilities as a teacher...
    And now once again he stood before me, only this time he was in the custody of the law.
    I was still recovering from the shock when the train drew in, and everyone on the platform began making a rush for the compartment doors. As the policeman elbowed his way through the crowd, I kept close behind him and his charge, and as a result I managed to get into the same third-class compartment. I found a seat right opposite Mr Khushal. He did not seem to be the least bit embarrassed by the handcuffs, or by the stares of his fellow passengers. Rather, it was the policeman who looked unhappy and ill at ease.
    As the train got under way, I offered Mr Khushal one of the parathas made for me by my Ferozepur landlady. He accepted it with alacrity. I offered one to the constable as well, but although he looked at it with undisguised longing, he felt duty-bound to decline.
    ‘Why have they arrested you, sir?’ I asked. ‘Is it very serious?’
    ‘A trivial matter,’ said Mr Khushal. ‘Nothing to worry about. I shall be at liberty soon.’
    ‘But what did you
do
?’
    Mr Khushal leant forward. ‘Nothing to be ashamed of,’ he said in a confiding tone. ‘Even a great teacher like Socrates fell foul of the law.’
    ‘You mean—one of your pupils—made a complaint?’
    ‘And why should one of my pupils make a complaint?’ Mr Khushal looked offended. ‘They were the beneficiaries—it was for
them
.’ He noticed that I looked mystified, and decided to come straight to the point: ‘It was simply a question of false certificates.’
    ‘Oh,’ I said, feeling deflated. Public school boys are always prone to jump to the wrong conclusions...
    ‘
Your
certificates, sir?’
    ‘Of course not. Nothing wrong with my certificates—I had them printed in Lahore, in 1946.’
    ‘With age comes respectability,’ I remarked. ‘In that case, whose...?’
    ‘Why, the matriculation certificates I’ve been providing all these years to the poor idiots who would never have got through on their own!’
    ‘You mean you gave them your own certificates?’
    ‘That’s right. And if it hadn’t been for so many printing mistakes, no one would have been any wiser. You can’t find a good press these days, that’s the trouble... It was a public service, my boy, I hope you