The Kitemaker: Stories by Ruskin Bond Page A

and left my room. The girl’s dress was billowing in the breeze, her pigtails flying about. When she saw me approaching, she stopped swinging and stared at me. I stopped a little distance away.
    ‘Who are you?’ she asked.
    ‘A ghost,’ I replied.
    ‘You look like one,’ she said.
    I decided to take this as a compliment, as I was determined to make friends. I did not smile at her because some children dislike adults who smile at them all the time.
    ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
    ‘Kiran,’ she said. ‘I’m ten.’
    ‘You are getting old.’
    ‘Well, we all have to grow old one day. Aren’t you coming any closer?’
    ‘May I?’ I asked.
    ‘You may. You can push the swing.’
    One pigtail lay across the girl’s chest, the other behind her shoulder. She had a serious face and obviously felt she had responsibilities. She seemed to be in a hurry to grow up, and I suppose she had no time for anyone who treated her as a child. I pushed the swing until it went higher and higher and then I stopped pushing so that she came lower each time and we could talk.
    ‘Tell me about the people who live here,’ I said.
    ‘There is Heera,’ she said. ‘He’s the gardener. He’s nearly a hundred. You can see him behind the hedges in the garden. You can’t see him unless you look hard. He tells me stories, a new story every day. He’s much better than the people in the hotel and so is Daya Ram.’
    ‘Yes, I met Daya Ram.’
    ‘He’s my bodyguard. He brings me nice things from the kitchen when no one is looking.’
    ‘You don’t stay here?’
    ‘No, I live in another house. You can’t see it from here. My father is the manager of the factory.’
    ‘Aren’t there any other children to play with?’ I asked.
    ‘I don’t know any,’ she said.
    ‘And the people staying here?’
    ‘Oh, they.’ Apparently Kiran didn’t think much of the hotel guests. ‘Miss Deeds is funny when she’s drunk. And Mr Lin is the strangest.’
    ‘And what about the manager, Mr Dayal?’
    ‘He’s mean. And he gets frightened of the slightest things. But Mrs Dayal is nice. She lets me take flowers home. But she doesn’t talk much.’
    I was fascinated by Kiran’s ruthless summing up of the guests. I brought the swing to a standstill and asked, ‘And what do you think of me?’
    ‘I don’t know as yet,’ said Kiran quite seriously. ‘I’ll think about you.’
    As I came back to the hotel, I heard the sound of a piano in one of the front rooms. I didn’t know enough about music to be able to recognize the piece but it had sweetness and melody though it was played with some hesitancy. As I came nearer, the sweetness deserted the music, probably because the piano was out of tune.
    The person at the piano had distinctive Mongolian features and so I presumed he was Mr Lin. He hadn’t seen me enter the room and I stood beside the curtains of the door, watching him play. He had full round lips and high, slanting cheekbones. His eyes were large and round and full of melancholy. His long, slender fingers hardly touched the keys.
    I came nearer and then he looked up at me, without any show of surprise or displeasure, and kept on playing.
    ‘What are you playing?’ I asked.
    ‘Chopin,’ he said.
    ‘Oh, yes. It’s nice but the piano is fighting it.’
    ‘I know. This piano belonged to one of Kipling’s aunts. It hasn’t been tuned since the last century.’
    ‘Do you live here?’
    ‘No, I come from Calcutta,’ he answered readily. ‘I have some business here with the sugarcane people, actually, though I am not a businessman.’ He was playing softly all the time so that our conversation was not lost in the music. ‘I don’t know anything about business. But I have to do something.’
    ‘Where did you learn to play the piano?’
    ‘In Singapore. A French lady taught me. She had great hopes of my becoming a concert pianist when I grew up. I would have toured Europe and America.’
    ‘Why didn’t you?’
    ‘We