Penguin Book Of Indian Ghost Stories (18 page)

Ruskin Bond

It seemed strange to be listening to the strains of “The Blue Danube” while gazing out at the pine-clad slopes of the Himalayas, worlds apart. And yet the music of the waltz seemed singularly appropriate. A light breeze hummed through the pines, and the branches seemed to move in time to the music. The record-player was new, but the records were old, picked up in a junk-shop behind the Mall.

Below the pines there were oaks, and one oak tree in particular caught my eye. It was the biggest of the lot and stood by itself on a little knoll below the cottage. The breeze was not strong enough to lift its heavy old branches, but
something
was moving, swinging gently from the tree, keeping time to the music of the waltz, dancing ….

It was someone hanging from the tree.

A rope oscillated in the breeze, the body turned slowly, turned this way and that, and I saw the face of a girl, her hair hanging loose, her eyes sightless, hands and feet limp; just turning, turning, while the waltz played on.

I turned off the player and ran downstairs.

Down the path through the trees, and on to the grassy knoll where the big oak stood.

A long-tailed magpie took fright and flew out from the branches, swooping low across the ravine. In the tree there was no one, nothing. A great branch extended half-way across the knoll, and it was possible for me to reach up and touch it. A girl could not have reached it without climbing the tree.

As I stood there, gazing up into the branches, someone spoke behind me.

‘What are you looking at?’

I swung round. A girl stood in the clearing, facing me. A girl of seventeen or eighteen; alive, healthy, with bright eyes and a tantalizing smile. She was lovely to look at. I hadn’t seen such a pretty girl in years.

‘You startled me,’ I said. ‘You came up so unexpectedly.’

‘Did you see anything—in the tree?’ she asked.

‘I thought I saw someone from my window. That’s why I came down. Did
you
see anything?’

‘No.’ She shook her head, the smile leaving her face for a moment. ‘I don’t see anything. But other people do—sometimes.’

‘What do they see?’

‘My sister.’

‘Your
sister?’

‘Yes. She hanged herself from this tree. It was many years ago. But sometimes you can see her hanging there.’

She spoke matter-of-factly: whatever had happened seemed very remote to her.

We both moved some distance away from the tree. Above the knoll, on a disused private tennis-court (a relic from the hill-station’s colonial past) was a small stone bench. She sat down on it: and, after a moment’s hesitation, I sat down beside her.

‘Do you live close by?’ I asked.

‘Further up the hill. My father has a small bakery.’

She told me her name—Hameeda. She had two younger brothers.

‘You must have been quite small when your sister died.’

‘Yes. But I remember her. She was pretty.’

‘Like you.’

She laughed in disbelief. ‘Oh, I am nothing to her. You should have seen my sister.’

‘Why did she kill herself?’

‘Because she did not want to live. That’s the only reason, no? She was to have been married but she loved someone else, someone who was not of her own community. It’s an old story and the end is always sad, isn’t it?’

‘Not always. But what happened to the boy—the one she loved? Did he kill himself too?’

‘No, he took a job in some other place. Jobs are not easy to get, are they?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never tried for one.’

‘Then what do you do?’

‘I write stories.’

‘Do people
buy
stories?’

‘Why not? If your father can sell bread, I can sell stories.’

‘People must have bread. They can live without stories.’

‘No, Hameeda, you’re wrong. People can’t live without stories.’

Hameeda! I couldn’t help loving her. Just loving her. No fierce desire or passion had taken hold of me. It wasn’t like that. I was happy just to look at her, watch her while she sat on the grass outside my cottage, her lips stained with the juice of wild bilberries. She chatted away—about her friends, her clothes, her favourite things.

‘Won’t your parents mind if you come here every day?’ I asked.

‘I have told them you are teaching me.’

‘Teaching you what?’

‘They, did not ask. You can tell me stories.’

So I told her stories.

It was midsummer.

The sun glinted on the ring she wore on her third finger: a translucent golden topaz, set in silver.

‘That’s a pretty ring,’ I remarked.

‘You wear it,’ she said, impulsively removing it from her hand. ‘It will give you good thoughts. It will help you to write better stories.’

She slipped it on to my little finger.

‘I’ll wear it for a few days,’ I said. ‘Then you must let me give it back to you.’

On a day that promised rain I took the path down to the stream at the bottom of the hill. There I found Hameeda gathering ferns from the shady places along the rocky ledges above the water.

‘What will you do with them?’ I asked.

‘This is a special kind of fern. You can cook it as a vegetable.’

‘It is tasty?’

‘No, but it is good for rheumatism.’

‘Do you suffer from rheumatism?’

‘Of course not. They are for my grandmother, she is very old.’

‘There are more ferns further upstream,’ I said.’ But we’ll have to get into the water.’

We removed our shoes and began paddling upstream. The ravine became shadier and narrower, until the sun was almost completely shut out. The ferns grew right down to the water’s edge. We bent to pick them but instead found ourselves in each other’s arms; and sank slowly, as in a dream, into the soft bed of ferns, while overhead a whistling thrush burst out in dark sweet song.

‘It isn’t time that’s passing by,’ it seemed to say. ‘It is you and I. It is you and I ….’

I waited for her the following day, but she did not come.

Several days passed without my seeing her.

Was she sick? Had she been kept at home? Had she been sent away? I did not even know where she lived, so I could not ask. And if I had been able to ask, what would I have said?

Then one day I saw a boy delivering bread and pastries at the little tea-shop about a mile down the road. From the upward slant of his eyes, I caught a slight resemblance to Hameeda. As he left the shop, I followed him up the hill. When I came abreast of him, I asked: ‘Do you have your own bakery?’

He nodded cheerfully, ‘Yes. Do you want anything—bread, biscuits, cakes? I can bring them to your house.’

‘Of course. But don’t you have a sister? A girl called Hameeda?’

His expression changed. He was no longer friendly. He looked puzzled and slightly apprehensive.

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I haven’t seen her for some time.’

‘We have not seen her either.’

‘Do you mean she has gone away?’

‘Didn’t you know? You must have been away a long time. It is many years since she died. She killed herself. You did not hear about it?’

‘But wasn’t that her sister—your other sister?’

‘I had only one sister—Hameeda—and she died, when I was very young. It’s an old story, ask someone else about it.’

He turned away and quickened his pace, and I was left standing in the middle of the road, my head full of questions that couldn’t be answered.

That night there was a thunderstorm. My bedroom window kept banging in the wind. I got up to close it and, as I looked out, there was a flash of lightning and I saw that frail body again, swinging from the oak tree.

I tried a make out the features, but the head hung down and the hair was blowing in the wind.

Was it all a dream?

It was impossible to say. But the topaz on my hand glowed softly in the darkness. And a whisper from the forest seemed to say, ‘It isn’t time that’s passing by, my friend. It is you and I ….’

R.K. Narayan

The Talkative Man said:

‘Some years ago we had a forestry officer in this town who scoffed at things. He was sent down by his department for some special work in Mempi Forest and he had his headquarters here. You know the kind of person. He had spent a couple of years abroad, and after returning home he was full of contempt for all our practices and institutions. He was strictly ‘rational’ by which he meant that he believed only in things he could touch, see, hear and smell. God didn’t pass any of these tests, at any rate the God we believed in. Accordingly to most of us, God resides in the Anjaneya temple we see on the way.

‘It is a very small temple, no doubt, but it is very ancient. It is right at the centre of the town, at the cutting of the two most important roads—Lawley Road running east and west and the Trunk Road running north and south; and any person going out anywhere, whether to the court or the college, the market or the Extension, has to pass the temple. And no one is so foolish as to ignore the God and carry on. He is very real and He can make His power felt. I do not say that He showers good fortune on those who bow to Him; I do not mean that at all. But I do mean that it is very simple to please a god. It costs about a quarter-of-an-anna a week and five minutes of prayer on a Saturday evening. Ninety-nine out of a hundred do it and are none the worse for it. On any Saturday evening you can see a thousand people at the temple, going round the image and burning camphor.

‘I have said that the temple is at an important crossing and every time our friend passed up and down either to his office or club he had to pass it, and you may be sure, particularly on
Saturday evenings, the crowd around the temple caused dislocation of traffic. Lesser beings faced it cheerfully. But our friend was always annoyed. He would remark to his driver. “Run over the blasted crowd. Superstitious mugs. If this town had a sane municipality this temple would have been pulled down years ago ….”

‘On a Sunday morning the driver asked: “May I have the afternoon off, sir?”

“Why?”

“When my child fell ill some days ago I vowed I would visit the crossroad shrine with my family ….”

“Today?”

“Yes, sir. On other days it is crowded.”

“You can’t go today.”

“I have to, sir. It is a duty ….”

“You can’t go. You can’t have leave for all your superstitious humbugging.” The driver was so insistent that the officer told him a few minutes later: “All right, go. Come on the first of next month and take your pay. You are dismissed.”

‘At five o’clock when he started for his club he felt irritated. He had no driver. “I will do without these fellows,” he said to himself. “Why should I depend upon anyone?”

‘The chief reason why he depended upon others was that he was too nervous to handle a car. His head was a whirl of confusion when he sat at the wheel. He had not driven more than fifty miles in all his life though he had a driving licence and renewed it punctually every year. Now as he thought of the race of chauffeurs he felt bitter. “I will teach these beggars a lesson. Drivers aren’t heaven-born. Just ordinary fellows. It is all a question of practice; one has to make a beginning somewhere. I will teach these superstitious beggars a lesson. India will never become a first-rate nation as long as it worships traffic-obstructing gods, which any sensible municipality ought to remove.”

‘It was years since he had driven a car. With trepidation he opened the garage door and climbed in. At a speed of about twenty-five miles an hour his car shot out of the gate after it had finally emerged from the throes of gear-changing. It flew past the
temple and presently our friend realized that somehow he could not turn to his left, as he must, if he wanted to reach his club. He could only steer to his right. Nor could he stop the car when he wanted. He felt that applying the brakes was an extraordinarily queer business. When he tried to stop he committed so many blunders that the car rocked, danced and threatened to burst. He felt it safest to go up the road till a favourable opportunity presented itself for him to turn right, and then again right, and about-turn. He whizzed past the temple back to his bungalow, where he could not stop, and so had to proceed again, turn right, go up to Trunk Road, turn right again, and come down the road past the temple.

‘Half-an-hour later the dismissed driver arrived at the shrine with his family and was nearly run over. He stepped aside and had hardly recovered from the shock when the car reappeared. The driver put away his basket of offerings, took his family to a place of safety, and came out. When the car appeared again he asked, “What is the matter, sir?” His master looked at him pathetically and before he could answer the car came round again: “Can’t stop.”

“Use the hand-brake, sir, the foot-brake’s rather loose.”

“I can’t,” panted our friend.

‘The driver realized that the only thing his master could do with a car was to turn its wheel right and blow the horn. He asked, “Have you put in any petrol, sir?”

“No.”

“It had only one-and-a-half gallons; let it run it out.” The driver went in, performed
puja,
sent away his family and attempted to jump on the footboard. He couldn’t. He stood aside on a temple step with folded hands, patiently waiting for the car to exhaust its petrol.

‘The car soon came to a stop. The gentleman gave a gasp and fainted on the steering-wheel. He was revived. When he came to, the priest of the temple held before him a plate and said, “Sir, you have circled the temple over five hundred times today. Ordinarily people go round only nine times, and on special occasions one hundred-and-eight times. I haven’t closed the doors thinking you might like to offer coconut and camphor at the end of your rounds.”

‘The officer flung a coin on the tray.

‘The driver asked, “Can I be of any service, sir?”

“Yes, drive the car home.”

‘He reinstated the driver, who demanded a raise a fortnight later. And whenever our friend passed the temple, he exercised great self-control and never let an impatient word cross his lips. I won’t say that he became very devout all of a sudden, but he certainly checked his temper and tongue when he was in the vicinity of the temple. And wasn’t it enough achievement for a god?’