The Kitemaker: Stories Read Online Free Page A

holding paper and pencil. She has got expert at using her pencil now and draws some wonderful animals like camels, elephants, dragons with many heads—cobras—rain clouds shedding buckets of water—tigers with long grass around them—horses with manes and wolves and foxes with bushy hair. Sometimes you can’t see much of the animals because there is too much grass covering them or too much hair on the foxes and wolves and too much mane on the horses’ necks—or too much rain from the clouds. All this decoration is made up by a sort of heavy scribbling of lines, but through it all one can see some very good shapes of animals, elephants and ostriches and other things. I will send you some.
    Well, Ruskin, I hope this finds you well. With fond love from us all. Write again soon. Ever your loving daddy . . .
    *
    It was about two weeks after receiving this letter that I was given the news of my father’s death. Those frequent bouts of malaria had undermined his health, and a severe attack of jaundice did the rest. A kind but inept teacher, Mr Murtough, was given the unenviable task of breaking the news to me. He mumbled something about God needing my father more than I did, and of course I knew what had happened and broke down and had to be taken to the infirmary, where I remained for a couple of days. It never made any sense to me why God should have needed my father more than I did, unless of course He envied my father’s stamp collection. If God was Love, why did He have to break up the only loving relationship I’d known so far? What would happen to me now, I wondered . . . would I live with Calcutta Granny or some other relative or be put away in an orphanage?
    Mr Priestley saw me in his office and said I’d be going to my mother when school closed. He said he’d been told that I had kept my father’s letters and that if I wished to put them in his safe keeping he’d see that they were not lost. I handed them over—all except the one I’ve reproduced here.
    The day before we broke up for the school holidays, I went to Mr Priestley and asked for my letters. ‘What letters?’ He looked bemused, irritated. He’d had a trying day. ‘My father’s letters,’ I told him. ‘You said you’d keep them for me.’ ‘Did I? Don’t remember. Why should I want to keep your father’s letters?’ ‘I don’t know, sir. You put them in your drawer.’ He opened the drawer, shut it. ‘None of your letters here. I’m very busy now, Bond. If I find any of your letters, I’ll give them to you.’ I was dismissed from his presence.
    I never saw those letters again. And I’m glad to say I did not see Mr Priestley again. All he’d given me was a lifelong aversion to violin players.

Untouchable
    T he sweeper boy splashed water over the
khus
matting that hung in the doorway and for a while the air was cooled.
    I sat on the edge of my bed, staring out of the open window, brooding upon the dusty road shimmering in the noon-day heat. A car passed and the dust rose in billowing clouds.
    Across the road lived the people who were supposed to look after me while my father lay in hospital with malaria. I was supposed to stay with them, sleep with them. But except for meals, I kept away. I did not like them and they did not like me.
    For a week, longer probably, I was going to live alone in the red-brick bungalow on the outskirts of the town, on the fringe of the jungle. At night the sweeper boy would keep guard, sleeping in the kitchen. Apart from him, I had no company; only the neighbours’ children, and I did not like them and they did not like me.
    Their mother said, ‘Don’t play with the sweeper boy, he is unclean. Don’t touch him. Remember, he is a servant. You must come and play with my boys.’
    Well, I did not intend playing with the sweeper boy . . . but neither did I intend playing with her children. I was going to sit on my bed all week and wait for my father to come home.
    Sweeper boy . . . all day