By Sarvajit Mukerji
I sometimes wonder if my writing is a mere joining of dots. During a recent trip to Landour and Mussoorie I picked up Stephen Alter’s engrossing novel Birdwatching. Each chapter begins with an epigraph describing a bird in the exact style of a bird field guide specifying species, plumage, habitat and call. One of the pleasures of reading the novel is decoding the correspondence between the narrative and the epigraph. Here I caught a reference to the Himalayan Whistling Thrush, also called the ‘Whistling Schoolboy’. And then I read Ganesh Saili’s evocative article ‘A Walk around the Upper Chakkar’. The write up describes a ramble up Landour’s famous walk, ruminating about the living, the absent, and the dead. The cottages, occupied and unoccupied, the oxidised plaques in St Paul’s Church, the names of cottages and lanes that evoke history, and eventually the cemetery keeping watch over mortality mark the article. The haunting call of the thrush, a winding mountain path, a phantom schoolboy—joining the dots I arrive at Bond’s ‘The Whistling Schoolboy’, a subtle meditation on mortality.
The setting of ‘The Whistling Schoolboy’ definitely recalls the Landour Chakkar—a winding deodar shaded mountain road flanked by a cemetery where one evening the narrator comes across a grave damaged by the collapsed retaining wall. He attempts to read the epitaph on the gravestone but can only decipher the date. Someone who died half a century ago was buried here. The ghost of Michael Dutta, cheerfully whistling and whizzing past on his cycle materialises. He is not the conventional spooky apparition, and nor does the narrator take him to be one. The musical whistling haunts him though, and he can hear it occasionally sometimes at hand and sometimes at a distance. In the morning, that musical whistle is echoed by the whistling thrush. That this is the spirit of Michael Dutta who died in a road accident while whizzing down the mountain road on his cycle is confirmed by old Miss Marley a retired school teacher.
Interestingly there is an interesting conversation which Ruskin Bond, then just a schoolboy, had with his father which he records in his autobiography Lone Fox Dancing. Aubrey Bond narrates Kipling’s ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’ to his son Ruskin. ‘They were ghosts, I suppose’ says little Ruskin after listening to the story. ‘Yes’ responds his father. ‘The lady was a ghost and so were the rickshaw pullers….’ ‘But he kept seeing the rickshaw too. ….How could the rickshaw become a ghost? It is not a living thing’’ responds his son. The same objection can apply to Michael Dutta’s bicycle too. But that is a minor point. The ghost appears once again several months later to warn the narrator off a damaged hill track and save him from falling into a chasm. Emerging from the heavy mist, the ghost waves the narrator away who then catches a glimpse of the damaged road and yawning chasm before him. The ghosts and spirits which appear in Bond’s writing are rarely malevolent.
Do ghosts exist? We exist in a material world, and everything that we encounter is material and embodied –nearly everything, and this is indicated by the song ‘’We Three’’ that appears twice in the short story: ‘We three,/We’re not alone,/We’re not even company–/My echo,/My shadow,/And me…’.This iconic refrain sung by The Ink Spots and then by Frank Sinatra which the narrator hums to himself as he walks in the growing gloom indicates that there are entities which exist and which lie within our everyday experience that don’t have a tangible physical presence, and yet we have no trouble accepting them. This idea is gently reinforced by the narrator’s musing: ‘We take our shadows for granted, don’t we? There they are, the uncomplaining companions of a lifetime, mute and helpless witnesses to our every act of commission or omission’. The liturgical ‘what we have done and in what we have failed to do’ and the absolution that the narrator seeks from his shadow imparts a shade of gravity to the narrative as does the graveyard scene which follows. The narrator picks up a shard of bone—part of a human skull—which crumbles into fragments in his hand. ‘Dust unto dust’. Almost immediately there comes the sound of someone whistling and the ghost appears. Decaying matter and living spirit are thus juxtaposed. The joyousness of the blithe spirit is reflected in the melodious song of the whistling thrush with a difference—the whistling schoolboy is heard in gathering gloom of the evening, while the thrush sings in sunlight.
The short story ends with another encounter with mortality. The narrator was saved from plunging into the chasm while walking home in a thick mist by the ghost. At the end of the story, he has just recovered from a debilitating bout of flu. Lying on his sickbed he would often hear the whistling beneath his window. Was it a summons, or was it to reassure him, he wonders? In the eternal struggle between matter and spirit, matter always appears to eventually triumph, but in this short story neither is death a closure and nor are ghosts the forlorn or menacing figures of conventional literature.
The story however ends on an ambiguous note. As the narrator gradually recovers, the whistling gradually fades away. And though he lingers often on the shadowy road winding past the cemetery in the gathering gloom, the whistler doesn’t appear again.
