Penguin Book Of Indian Ghost Stories (19 page)

Jug Suraiya

After dinner we talked about ghosts.

We were sitting in what had once been the library in the big rambling house. Sitting in that quietly smoking circle, surrounded by the heavy bookcases of law, literature and obscure Victorian memories, which in turn were enclosed, beyond the old walls, by the midnight jumble of north Calcutta, we felt secluded and yet protected. Like children wrapped in blankets and flanked by adults on cold and especially dark nights.

There had been a marriage in the big house, in some complicated off-shoot of the family tree, and Freddy had invited a few of us from the college, chiefly for the dinner which had indeed been fantastic. The flurry of more important guests long over, we sat and talked and smoked in the library.

Freddy, immaculate even now in his silk kurta and intricately pleated dhoti, presided over the conversation. We others, in mundane shirts and trousers, were a little awed of him on that evening of flowing
chadors,
sprinkled rose water and elegant ritual. We almost stopped calling him Freddy.

Relaxing now after the strain of the evening, he still had a quick edge which gleamed through in his punctiliousness, his minute attention to details of hospitality. He was pampering us, with an almost narcissistic delight in his own subtle grace and charm. In his dark hands he held one of the roses which the guests had been given. As he talked he twirled the silver-papered stem, traced the warm red contour of a petal with a fingertip, or dipped his head to the fleeting fragrance. He could easily have been sitting for one of the massive portraits which lined the high walls. There was an almost overpowering sense of dynasty.

Suddenly someone asked, as though on a cue whispered off-stage, ‘How old is this house, Freddy?’

He smiled and the flower in his hand stilled.

‘Pretty old. My great-grandfather. That one, there. He built it, about a hundred years ago.’ He swivelled in his chair, his outstretched arm with the flower at the end of it a ranging compass, ‘All around this was open land and jungle.’ Timeless night, fraught with menacing greenness, stole in. Had tigers walked between tapestries of lianas, a growling distance from these dusty panes, while heavy-lidded men drank tea from blue and gilt French china and the voices of women lilted from the inner rooms?

Someone laughed, a mere fraction of an octave too high. ‘This place must be haunted.’

‘Not,’ said Freddy, and his voice was a shade gleeful, ‘this particular room.’

We edged our chairs closer together, ostensibly to hear better the round of stories everyone knew was coming.

Dip, as usual, was the first to speak. He told us about an experience, allegedly terrifying, he’d once had while on a shoot in Bihar. It was a long anecdote, lugubrious in its repetition of details which seemed to get nowhere. It contained the standard quota of haunted dak bungalows (one), local people who warned the shikaris not to stay there (no less than three), and the inevitable eerie noises during the nocturnal hours (exact number fortunately unspecified). At the end of the whole thing I doubted whether Dip had been on a shoot in Bihar or anywhere else, let alone seen/heard a ghost there.

Freddy sat patiently through all this, even managing to look politely interested most of the time. Like a star musician in an orchestra who knows that it is his night and is waiting for the prelude to be done with, so that he can launch into his solo turn. And he was in no hurry to start. The conversational circle finally came to a halt in front of him and we all looked at him expectantly, somehow confident that he wouldn’t let us down. But he just sat there, quietly smiling and playing with the flower until finally someone had to prompt him, ‘How about you, Freddy? Aren’t you going to tell us one?’

He looked down at his dark hands where the red flower bloomed and his voice was as smoothly modest as a rose petal.

‘Well, I don’t know. These murky, elemental goings-on all of you have been describing have no affinity for me. Perhaps it’s just that I’m not psychic or something.’

He let the anticlimax sink in. And then, almost casually, ‘My father though, you met him this evening, did have a rather odd experience in this house. Years ago, before I was born.’

Freddy’s father, of course! We recalled the kindly-looking, quiet-spoken man we had met. His every casual word or gesture was avidly re-examined, loaded in retrospect with a powerful significance. Freddy’s father. We should have known.

‘What actually happened?’ blurted Dip.

And we sat back in our chairs and waited for Freddy, grown suddenly serious, to tell his story.

‘My family, as you know, has been living here for four generations. It’s a joint family, always has been, and the house has always been full of people. Various aunts, uncles and cousins, their visitors, children, servants. A busy, brightly lit place. Expect during the war years, ’39 to ’45. And once again somewhat later.

‘I think it was sometime in ’42 that the Japanese dropped a few bombs on Kidderpore. Comparatively little damage was done, but there was panic in the city. The Burma campaign was going badly for the Allies and people in Calcutta half expected the armies of the Rising Sun to come marching in any day. The bombing was the cinder in the haystack. The trains were packed with people leaving for the safer hinterland. Property prices crashed and they say
paanwallahs
became real estate tycoons overnight.

‘Well, my family didn’t sell out, but it was decided by my grandfather that everyone should move to the country house, about fifty miles further west. The old man felt, quite rightly, that no one was going to blitz rural areas. So everyone was sent off. No arguments either. The old man, as you can see, was a bit of an autocrat.

‘Shortly after the evacuation, my father decided that he had to come to town for a few days for some business. Though he’s told me the story twice or thrice he’s never told me exactly what
business. I don’t think there was any. He had been embarrassed at having to leave Calcutta and this was his way of reassuring himself and at the same time showing that the city was not anywhere near as unsafe as some people made it out to be.

‘There was quite a ruckus, I believe, but my father had his way and came back to town.

‘You should hear his descriptions of the city in those days. Blackouts, of course, and the big houses all deserted and shut up. American and British soldiers all over the place, getting into fights, lording it around. The spooky wail of sirens echoing in the night streets. The way my father tells it, he seems to have enjoyed every minute of it.

‘He could have stayed with friends, but probably felt guilty about putting up with those who had remained behind. “Not deserted”, as he put it. Anyway, one of the main ideas of coming back was to stay in his own house.

‘One or two of the trusted servants had volunteered to stay behind, to look after the place, and they were very happy, though a little worried, to see my father.

‘They opened up his room for him, brought him some hurriedly prepared dinner and then he sent them off to their quarters. Incidentally, my father’s room is the one behind that door there.’

We turned to look at the door set into the wall at the farther end of the long room.

‘Well, he soon settled down for the night. The room was a bit musty, having been shut up all those days, and though he had opened the windows there was hardly any breeze and the atmosphere was very close. He couldn’t sleep, so he decided to read a little. But he had brought only a newspaper with him for the journey, and had already finished reading it. There were no books in his room, and this place was locked up. Anyway the reading light would have necessitated shutting the papered panes. So he sat by the darkened window to get what little fresh air there was. The street below was deserted.

‘It was then that he heard the sounds. Of someone running, gasping for breath in the corridor just outside. At first he thought it was one of the servants, but no one came to the door. Just the
quick, light steps and the snatching gasps, neither nearing nor seeming to retreat.

‘The strangeness of it did not strike him even then. He was in his own room, in the house where he had lived all his life. He pulled the door open and stepped out into the unlighted corridor and turned on the light switch just beside the door. She was standing there in the corridor, a girl of about seventeen or eighteen, like a trapped animal twisting around to look at unseen pursuers.

‘Even in that moment of shock he realized she was very beautiful. He was a young man then, of course.

‘Then someone from the street shouted “Light” and the girl, ignoring my father, ran past him into his room. My father hesitated briefly, but there were no further sounds from the corridor and he switched off the light and turned back to the room.

‘She was standing there staring at the door, but even in the pale moonglow he could make out she had not noticed him. In her hysteria of terror, he did not exist for her. And suddenly, as though by contagion, he felt the fear flowing like a cold blue current through his body. And the room was full of the smell of roses.’

Freddy paused, and bent his head to the flower in his hand and I felt the hair on my forearms begin to rise.

‘The only sound in that room was the breathing of the girl, harsher and sharper as the panic within her contracted and squeezed. She was crouched forward, every sense, every quivering nerve transfixed by a wordless menace that pressed in closer.

‘Then my father shouted. He says now that if he hadn’t done that he would have lost his mind—literally. The smell of terror and roses. He doesn’t remember the exact words, but it was probably something like “Who are you?” and as though in response the sleeping sirens of the city sprang into screaming life. It was an air-raid alarm.

‘The sudden tug of noise jerked his head towards the window, and when he looked around again she was gone. Within a second, with no sound. And the smell of the flowers had gone too.

‘He stood there in that empty room while the sirens wailed and fell and rose again. He says now that even if a bomber had
scored a direct hit on the house he doubts if he could have registered the situation.

‘Fortunately no bombs fell in Calcutta that night, hardly any ever did, you know. And the sirens lulled and then sang out again in the all-clear.

‘Finally my father managed to grope his way to bed and sprawled across it, past questioning, past fear, in a state of numb exhaustion. But as I said he was a young man, and a very strong-minded one, and by morning he was as normal as he was going to be for a fairly long time to come. He didn’t tell the servants anything except that he was going back earlier than expected. He stayed two or three days more with a friend and then returned to the country house.

‘He didn’t tell anyone of what he had experienced, even when it was time to return to the city and to his room. He says he slept with the lights on for the first few nights and then it was all right.

‘The inexplicable episode, for all its horror, might even have been forgotten, put down as a bad dream induced by post-travel tension. But then in ’46 the Hindu-Muslim riots broke out and once again the family was shipped off to the country.

‘And that’s when it happened. People had become beasts in those terrible days. You’ve heard about the murders, the atrocities. This area was a sort of no-man’s land, bloodily contested by armed groups of both communities. Everyone lived at a taut pitch of suspicion. Every individual was either an ally or a mortal enemy.

‘No one knows how or why the girl was in this area. She must have got separated from her family in the chaos of the streets.

‘A mob, a Hindu one incidentally, not that it matters, spotted her and chased her. She ran into this house. Perhaps the gates were open or perhaps the old
durwan
opened them for her. They followed her, through the empty rooms and corridors, and they finally found her in the room that was my father’s.

‘They must have seen by now that she wasn’t Muslim. She was not dressed like one and she had vermilion in the parting of her hair and wore a
mala
of lilies and roses. She must have been married a very short time. But they raped her and then they killed her, and
when the others came later they said the room had smelled of flowers. Especially roses.’

Freddy paused and turned the flower very slowly, almost languidly, between his fingers. In a voice drained of all tonal colour he said finally, ‘Not much of a ghost story, I’m afraid. Most of those have their punch lines in their pasts. This one had its in the future.’

The silence was a hush. Then Dip, the irredeemable, came in, ‘But I don’t understand it.’

Freddy replied softly, ‘Understand? I don’t think it is something which one could understand. Call it a particularly vivid premonition. Or a psychical chain-reaction set off by my father’s overstrained nerves, and which had a tragic coincidence later. People talk of fields of psychic emanation. Why must these work unilaterally from the past forward? Why not the other way round as well? All I know is my father hasn’t used that room since.’

It was very late, and we were all tired; the evening had come to its conclusion. With a rattle of chairs we got up to leave and I casually picked up the cloth-bound book lying on the table. The faded title on the spine said
An Anthology of the Supernatural and Strange.

I wanted to borrow the book, but Freddy smiled apologetically and said he had borrowed it himself and promised to return it the following day. I smiled in return, but before putting the book down opened it at random. The dried petals had been pressed between the pages and as they scattered across the table left behind a faint but unmistakable fragrance of roses.

Victor Banerjee

1.00 PM

As Sheila lay in bed a single crystal on the chandelier above her trembled. The footsteps in the hall had stopped. The moon shone straight through the skylight. Its beams falling on the dresser and the lace doily that lay under her sister’s photograph: Yes that would make a great story, but this time let me tell it as plainly as it really happened.

Ranjit, the erstwhile Abbey cook, lived in the Protestant graveyard. Nobody had the guts to take his place and so no one threw him out. He earned a daily wage whenever he wanted to, and spent the rest of his time stoned on
charas.
He had bitten off his wife’s nose when she was unfaithful and, tired of sophistry, had wrapped the Bishop’s banquet in its table cloth and flung it down the hill. He once went down to Woodstock school to deliver a package to my daughters and scared the living daylights out of every Christian missionary he passed. A legend in Landour. Ranjit is a self-proclaimed
sanyasi.

Last autumn, on the 7th of October, it had drizzled all day. By the time evening came around, a sticky fog had descended into the oak forests around us.

I watched a chestnut leaf spiral down and settle on the ground just outside the boundary wall of the graveyard. I was alone, taking an evening stroll. It was half past seven. I remember the time because our dog, Badshah, had been barking into the fog when our little kitten knocked over the onyx timepiece on the dressing table.

I could hear Ranjit’s laugh resounding through the deodars
and wondered what was amusing him. As I passed the cemetery gate and looked up a sudden chill wind twisted around the weepy sycamores with a groan. Something caught my sleeve. I turned. A large red tongue, and dirty spiky teeth grinned at me. I could have died, but it was only Ranjit. He was swirling his head and glaring at me through the long strands of matted hair that swished past his face. He stopped and stared deeper, into my guts.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked sheepishly. He grabbed my arm and swung me through the cemetery gate, up to his hut, and set me down, rather unceremoniously, beside the cypress planted in 1870 by H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh. Outside his room, there was a fire burning in a hole in the ground. Near it, seated on a broken cane chair, was a young European. Although he looked pale, I could tell from his face, licked as it was by the leaping flames, that he had spent some weeks in our country. Another scholar from the Language school, I thought, arrived in Mussoorie ostensibly for a cultural awakening through Hindi grammar, a bit of ‘grassy’, and curious forays into the villages of India.

‘That’s not true,’ he said, barely audible over the sizzle and crackle of wet oak. The wind had dropped and the fire burned the mist, its nimbus enveloping the three of us. ‘What’s not true?’ I asked hesitantly.

‘I have come here in search of my daughter.’ He continued, ‘Ranjit knows my little girl.’ A sudden roar of laughter from Ranjit startled me. ‘She left looking for red hydrangeas and hasn’t come back. It’s a rare flower, difficult to find, blood red. There used to be some growing here.’

I noticed he held a twisted length of iron railing in one hand.

‘I wish the rain would let up. I can’t stand the monsoons, the sodden earth makes me feel wet to the bones.’ His ashen lips quivered with a soft chuckle. ‘I’d love some tea, but can’t swallow the stuff Ranjit makes,’ I turned around, to find that Ranjit had disappeared.

A mocking laugh rang through the silence and came from far off. There was a sudden crash in the branches above. A dark silhouette scrambled wildly through the tops, and then, disappeared.

A faint whistle oozed from the bubbling sap of a burning log and I squirmed when the stranger casually began to whistle, the same aria. There was something spooky about all this, and I wasn’t going to stay to find out what it was. I tried moving but my legs wouldn’t respond. I tried to speak, but my tongue had begun to swell.

The ghostly duet grew louder; its pitch hurt my ears. Then the stranger stood up, slowly, and I could feel my heart throbbing behind my eyes, gradually pounding them out of their sockets. The log stopped whistling, but the stranger didn’t. As he drew close to me, the sharp air from his pursed lips froze the pores of my skin. I got a cramp under my jaw that jarred my head back in horrific spasms. And then he stopped. The blood rushed back into my face, scalding the skin around my eyes. But I still could not move. Then—.

‘Goodbye, Victor,’ he said, with a warmth that miraculously soothed every nerve in my body. ‘If you see Anna, tell her not to bother about the red hydrangeas.’

He walked away past fallen angels and crumbling urns, tapping the twisted rod against the riding boots I now noticed he was wearing. The mists took him in and then rested on the curling ivy that shone weakly under a vaporous moon.

A barking deer coughed somewhere in the valley. For a moment I wondered what it was that had disturbed the trees above us. I was sure it wasn’t a langur but then, what was it? And how and where did it vanish so suddenly? It’s a mystery I have never been able to solve. I stepped out of the cemetery and walked back home.

The next morning, Ruskin Bond, a cheerful author of several ghost stories, dropped in for breakfast. I told him about my weird encounter. He paled and grew terribly excited. We decided to go talk to Ranjit, it would only take a few minutes.

We hopped over the boundary wall of the graveyard and could see Ranjit pottering around outside his hut. He saw us coming and burst into peals of laughter, his face artistically covered with the ashes of yesterday’s fire.

Suddenly, through a cluster of irises, a piece of twisted metal
caught my eye. It had been stuck into a grave whose identical railings had nearly all been stolen and obviously sold for scrap.

‘Look,’ I said to Ruskin, ‘that’s it! That’s what he was holding in his hand last night.’

The morning dew still sparkled spectrally in the grass and a little drop ran down the length of the metal rod and seeped quietly into the earth. Ruskin had meanwhile cleared the lichen from the headstone and we both stared with disbelief at the words engraved: ‘Here lieth Richard Andrew Hughes, Leiut. Col. of the 61st Cavalry, a loving father. Died 7th October 1926. Erected by his loving wife, Mary Anne.’ Ruskin gasped as he saw something behind me. I turned quickly, and fell over backwards on him. It was Ranjit, who had quietly crept up on us.

We both laughed uncontrollably, untangled ourselves with enormous relief while Ranjit just stood there, laughing at us. He was pointing a grimy finger at a little mound of grass nearby. I crawled over, still sniggering from the fright we had got and tried to read the broken lettering on the grave. ‘In loving remembrance of Anna Marie, our beautiful daughter, aged 6. Died October 2nd 1926. She rests beside her father, who died heartbroken. Erected in deep sorrow by her mother, Mary Anne.’ Strangely though, my story doesn’t end here.

About a week later, to my utter astonishment, a blood red hydrangea bloomed in our front garden—a flower that exists nowhere else in Mussoorie. I had never spoken to my wife about the happenings of that night and so went straight to Ruskin to discuss the phenomenon. For days we debated whether I should plant cuttings of the red hydrangea near Richard Hughes’ grave. Finally, we decided against it.

Is that what Richard would want? Would he not feel cheated to discover his daughter had not returned? Further, was my hydrangea a gift from Richard, or Anna, or both?

This year on the 7th of October, I shall summon up the courage to ask.

The chandelier, had begun to sway. Its prisms cast patterns across her sister’s face so it seemed she was drowning, again. The tinkling crystals muffled the steps that were coming closer to the door. The moon dipped into a solitary cloud, and the room was drowned in black. Crystals quivered in the dark, but its little alarms could not be heard outside the room.

The handle turned, the door eased open, and the pale face of a little girl appeared around the door. Sheila who was peeping through her duvet with one eye, screamed, ‘Get into bed, your brat!’

Anna crept gingerly towards her bed and when she got there, dived under the quilt. The moon reappeared. The little red hydrangeas patterned on Anna’s patchwork quilt glowed, while she trembled inside it.

She wished Grandmother would never tell her that story about her times in India again. But she loved the part about Ranjit biting off this wife’s nose. Little Anna would never know that her Grandmother, Mary Anne, seated in a cane chair next door, was crying.