Whispers in the Dark Read online

  ‘But that was sixty years ago,’ I said. ‘They must all be dead.’

  ‘Yes, all are dead, sir. But sometimes the ghost of Hazoor Ali appears, especially if one of our guests reminds him of his old master. He was quite devoted to him, sir. In fact, he received this bungalow as a parting gift when Mr Robbins left the country. But unable to maintain it, he sold it to the government and returned to his home in Cuttack. He died many years ago, but revisits this place sometimes. Do not feel alarmed, sir. He means no harm. And he does not appear to everyone—you are the lucky one this year! I have but seen him twice. Once, when I took service here twenty years ago, and then, last year, the night before the cyclone. He came to warn us, I think. Went to every door and window and made sure they were secured. Never said a word. Just vanished into the night.’

  ‘And it’s time for me to vanish by day,’ I said, getting my things ready. I had to be in Bhubaneswar by late afternoon, to board the plane for Delhi. I was sorry it had been such a short stay. I would have liked to spend a few days in Gopalpur, wandering about its backwaters, old roads, mango groves, fishing villages, sandy inlets . . . Another time perhaps. In this life, if I am so lucky. Or the next, if I am luckier still.

  At the airport in Bhubaneswar, the security asked me for my photo identity. ‘Driving licence, PAN card, passport? Anything with your picture on it will do, since you have an e-ticket,’ he explained.

  I do not have a driving licence and have never felt the need to carry my PAN card with me. Luckily, I always carry my passport on my travels. I looked for it in my little travel bag and then in my suitcase, but couldn’t find it. I was feeling awkward, fumbling in all my pockets, when another senior officer came to my rescue. ‘It’s all right. Let him in. I know Mr Ruskin Bond,’ he called out, and beckoned me inside. I thanked him and hurried into the check-in area.

  All the time in the flight, I was trying to recollect where I might have kept my passport. Possibly tucked away somewhere inside the suitcase, I thought. Now that my baggage was sealed at the airport, I decided to look for it when I reached home.

  A day later, I was back in my home in the hills, tired after a long road journey from Delhi. I like travelling by road—there is so much to see—but the ever increasing volume of traffic turns it into an obstacle race most of the time. To add to my woes, my passport was still missing. I looked for it everywhere—my suitcase, travel bag, in all my pockets.

  I gave up the search. Either I had dropped it somewhere, or I had left it in Gopalpur. I decided to ring up and check with the rest-house staff the next day.

  It was a frosty night, bitingly cold, so I went to bed early, well covered with a razai and blanket. Only two nights previously I had been sleeping under a fan!

  It was a windy night, the windows were rattling; and the old tin roof was groaning, a loose sheet flapping about and making a frightful din.

  I slept only fitfully.

  When the wind abated, I heard someone knocking on my front door.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I called, but there was no answer.

  The knocking continued, insistent, growing louder all the time.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I called, but there was no answer.

  The knocking continued, insistent, growing louder all the time.

  ‘Who’s there? Kaun hai?’ I called again.

  Only that knocking.

  Someone in distress, I thought. I’d better see who it is. I got up shivering, and walked barefoot to the front door. Opened it slowly, opened it wider. Someone stepped out of the shadows.

  Hazoor Ali salaamed, entered the room, and as in Gopalpur, he walked silently into the room. It was lying in disarray because of my frantic search for my passport. He arranged the room, removed my garments from my travel bag, folded them and placed them neatly upon the cupboard shelves. Then, he did a salaam again and waited at the door.

  Strange, I thought. If he did the entire room, why did he not set the travel bag in its right place? Why did he leave it lying on the floor? Possibly he didn’t know where to keep it; he left the last bit of work for me. I picked up the bag to place it on the top shelf. And there, from its front pocket, my passport fell out, on to the floor.

  I turned to look at Hazoor Ali, but he had already walked out into the cold darkness.

  THE SKULL

  I am not normally bothered by skeletons and old bones—they are, after all, just the chalky remains of the long dead—so that, when my nephew, Anil, came back from medical college with a well-preserved skull, it was no cause for alarm. He was a second-year student, at times a bit of a prankster.

  ‘I hope you didn’t take it without permission,’ I said, taking the skull in my hands and admiring its symmetry, but without philosophizing upon it like Hamlet.

  ‘Oh, the college is full of them,’ said Anil. ‘I just borrowed it for the vacation.’ He placed it on the mantelpiece, among some of the awards and mementos (cheap brassware mostly) that had accumulated over the years, and I must say it livened up the shelf a little.

  Anil had placed the skull at one end of the mantelpiece, and there it stood until we’d had our dinner. He settled down with a book, while I poured myself a small glass of cognac, before settling into an easy chair with a notebook on my knee. It was midsummer, and the window was open, so that we could hear the crickets singing in the oak trees. My cottage was on the outskirts of Mussoorie, surrounded by Himalayan oak and maple.

  I had been making some notes for an article on wild flowers. When I had finished my notes and cognac, I looked up and noticed that the skull now stood at the centre of the mantelpiece.

  ‘Did you move the skull?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Anil, looking up. ‘I placed it at the end of the shelf’

  ‘Well, it’s now in the middle. How did it get there?’

  ‘You must have moved it yourself, without noticing. That was a stiff cognac you drank, Uncle.’

  I let it pass; it did not seem important.

  * * *

  People often dropped in to see me. School teachers, visitors to the hill station, students, other writers, neighbours. During that week I had a number of visitors, and, of course, everyone noticed the skull on the mantelpiece. Some were intrigued, and wanted to know whose skull it was. One or two lady teachers were frightened by it. A fellow writer thought it was in bad taste, displaying human remains in my sitting room. One visitor offered to buy it.

  I would have gladly sold the wretched thing, but it belonged to Anil, and he intended taking it back to Meerut. But when the time came to leave, he forgot about the skull, his mind, no doubt, taken up with other matters—such as the daily phone calls he received from a girl student in Delhi. After seeing him off at the bus stop, I came home to find that the skull was still occupying pride of place on the mantelpiece.

  I ignored it for a few days, and the skull didn’t seem to mind that. It was receiving plenty of attention from visitors during the day.

  But it was beginning to get on my nerves. Every evening when I sat down to enjoy a whisky or a cognac, I would feel its empty eye sockets staring at me. And on one occasion, when I tried to change its position, my hand got caught in its jawbone, and it was with some difficulty that I withdrew it.

  Getting fed up of its presence, I decided to lock the thing away where it couldn’t be seen.

  There was a wall cupboard in the room, where I kept my manuscripts, notebooks and writing materials, and there was plenty of room there for the skull. So I shifted it to the cupboard and made sure the door was locked.

  That evening I enjoyed my drink without being watched by that remnant of a human head. The crickets were singing, a nightjar was calling, and a zephyr of a wind moved swiftly through the trees. I finished my article and went to bed in a happy frame of mind.

  In the middle of the night, I woke to a loud rattling sound. At first I thought it was a loose door latch or an insecure drainpipe; then I realized the noise was coming from the wall cupboard. A rat, perhaps? But no, as s
oon as I opened the cupboard door, out popped the skull, landing near my feet and bouncing away, right across the dining room.

  For the sake of peace and quiet, I returned it to the mantelpiece. If a skull could smile, it would probably have done so. I went back to my bed and slept like a baby. It takes more than a dancing skull to keep me from enjoying a good night’s sleep.

  Next morning, I got to work, making up a parcel. Normally I hate making parcels; they usually fall apart. But for once I took pleasure in making a parcel. I wrapped the skull in a plastic bag, then placed it in a strong cardboard box, wrapped this in brown parcel paper, used a liberal amount of Sellotape, and addressed the package to Dr Anil at his medical college. Then I walked into town and handed it over to the registration clerk at the post office.

  Rubbing my hands with satisfaction, I treated myself to fish and chips and an ice cream, before setting out on the walk down the hill to my cottage.

  How did the skull get out of that parcel? I shall never know. Perhaps a nosy postal clerk had opened it to check the contents. I hope he got the fright of his life.

  Anyway, I was about halfway down the steep path that leads to one of our famous schools, when I heard something rattling down the slope behind me. At first I thought it was an empty tin, but then I recognized my boon companion, that wretched skull, embellished with bits of wrapping paper and Sellotape, bouncing down the hill, towards me. I broke into a run, making a dash for the cottage door. But it was there before me, grinning up at me from a pot full of flowering petunias.

  So back it went to its favourite place on the mantelpiece. And there it remained for several weeks.

  * * *

  The school’s playing field was situated just above the path to the cottage, and during the football season, I could hear the boys kicking a football around.

  One day a football escaped from the field and came bouncing down the hillside, landing in a flower bed. The match got over and no one bothered to come down to retrieve the ball. But it gave me an idea. I removed the bladder, stuffed the skull into the leather interior and tied it up firmly. Then I had the football delivered to the school’s games master with my compliments.

  Nothing happened for a couple of days. There was no shortage of footballs. Then, in the middle of the game against St. George’s College, a ball went out of the grounds and a spare one was required.

  The replacement didn’t bounce quite as well as the previous one, and it was inclined to spin around a lot and take off in directions opposite to those intended. Also, it squeaked whenever it received a kick, and sometimes those squeals sounded a bit like screams of protest. The goalkeeper at either end found the ball difficult to hold—it did its best to elude their grasp. And more goals were scored by accident rather than design. Finally, this eccentric ball was kicked out of play and was replaced by another.

  What happened to old footballs? I expect they finally fall apart and end up in a dustbin.

  In this case, the football found a new owner, for the sports master was a kind man who gave away old bats, balls and other worn-out stuff to the poor children of the locality. A boy from a village near Rajpur was the recipient of the battered football, and he and his friends carried it away with a cheer, kicking it all the way down the steep path, making so much noise that they did not hear the groans of protest that issued from the battered old football.

  Well, weeks passed, months passed, without the skull making a reappearance. But then something strange began to happen. I found myself missing that troublesome skull!

  It had, after all, been company of a sort for a lonely writer living on his own on the edge of the forest. And when you have lived with someone for a very long time, then no matter how much you may quarrel or get on each other’s nerves, a bond is formed, and the strength of that bond can only be known when it is broken.

  The skull had been sharing my life for over a year, and now that it was gone, seemingly forever, my life seemed rather empty.

  So I began searching for the skull. I inquired amongst the children down in Rajpur; but they had long since lost the football. I made a round of all the junk shops in Dehradun, without any luck. There were lots of old footballs lying around, but not the one I wanted. And no, they didn’t buy or sell human skulls.

  Young Anil, the doctor, paid me a brief visit and found me looking depressed.

  ‘What’s the trouble?’ he asked. ‘You look as though you have just lost a friend.’

  ‘I have, indeed,’ I said. ‘I miss that skull you gave me. It was company of a sort.’

  ‘Well, I’ll get you another. No shortage of skulls in my college.’

  ‘No, I don’t want another. I want the same skull. It had a personality of its own.’ Anil looked at me as though he thought I was going off my rocker. And perhaps I was.

  And then one day, as I was walking down a busy street in neighbouring Saharanpur, I noticed a fortune teller plying his trade on the pavement. I don’t believe in fortune telling, but everyone has to make a living, and telling fortunes seems to me a harmless way of doing it. And then I noticed that he had a skull beside him, and that he would consult it before handing his customer a slip of paper with words on it. It looked a bit like my skull, but I couldn’t be sure. All the kicking and manhandling it had received had possibly altered its appearance.

  But anyway, I gave the fortune teller some money and asked him for a prediction. He chanted something, then extracted a slip of paper from beneath the skull and handed it to me with a flourish.

  I read the words printed neatly on paper.

  ‘Ullu ka pattha (Son of an owl)!’ went the message, followed by ‘Gaddhe ka baccha (Child of a donkey)!’ It was definitely my skull! Only an old friend could abuse me like that.

  So I pleaded and haggled with the fortune teller, paid him a hundred rupees for the skull and carried it home in triumph.

  And there it is today, decorating my mantelpiece, a little the worse for wear, and with a silly grin on its skeletal face. To improve its looks I have placed an old cricket cap on its head.

  Sometimes we don’t value our friends until we lose them.

  A BLOODTHIRSTY VAMPIRE CAT

  Hours later, another bus delivered the boys to a dimly lit bus stand on the outskirts of Chakrata. It was almost deserted except for the few arrivals who disappeared into the surrounding gloom. A few lights twinkled on the hillside. Tall deodars loomed out of the darkness. Dogs howled.

  ‘Why are the dogs howling?’ asked Rusty.

  ‘They howl when there are evil spirits around,’ replied Popat. ‘That’s what my grandmother told me.’

  ‘She’s probably right,’ mused Rusty. ‘Dogs bark at people and at other animals. They howl at what they can’t see or hear.’

  ‘This is the end of the earth,’ said Pitamber, looking about in dismay.

  ‘Only the end of the road,’ said Rusty.

  ‘And where do we eat?’ asked Pitamber. ‘It’s only nine o’clock but everything is shut.’

  ‘My father gave me an address,’ said Popat. The boys hopefully set out in search of it but were told that it was on the far side of the town. There was no hotel. Then someone told them to try the old forest rest house. No one went there any more—not since a new one had been built for visiting forest officials.

  So off they trudged, helped, to some extent, by a half-moon that occasionally appeared between the scurrying clouds. Popat had wisely brought along a pencil torch but they used it sparingly, knowing the battery wouldn’t last too long.

  Down below, in the thick of the forest, they saw a faint light—the glow of a lantern standing on a veranda wall.

  ‘That must be it!’ exclaimed Rusty.

  They stumbled down a narrow path which led to the veranda steps. The rest of the building was in darkness, seemingly unoccupied. In the distance, a dog howled.

  ‘This place is full of howling dogs,’ said Popat. ‘I say we go back to Dehra in the morning, after I’ve seen my father’s clients.’


  ‘Let’s do some howling too,’ suggested Rusty. ‘There must be a chowkidar somewhere.’

  So they began shouting, ‘Chowkidar! Chowkidar!’ and presently, another lamp appeared from the rear of the building, moving towards them very slowly, almost as though there was no one behind it. But gradually a figure manifested itself, and the man who held the lamp raised it so that he could see their faces, at the same time revealing his own.

  It was the face of a one-eyed man. A scar ran down one side of his face. It was hard to tell his age—he may have been fifty, he may have been seventy. He wore a funny-looking hat; it looked like a bowler hat, something left behind by a British official.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked suspiciously, for he was wary of high-spirited students.

  ‘Shelter,’ said Rusty.

  ‘Food,’ said Pitamber at the same time.

  ‘Do you have any money?’

  ‘Er—a little,’ said Popat cautiously.

  ‘Very little,’ added Rusty, who didn’t like the man’s attitude.

  ‘All right, you can come in. There’s a spare room. Wait until I put on the lights.’

  Finally, there was light everywhere. The front room had a large dining table in the middle. Then there was a bedroom with two double beds and a huge, cavernous bathroom with a basin at one end and a potty at the other. And there was a kitchen—which looked empty.

  Pitamber made a quick inspection of the kitchen and discovered some stale chapatis.

  ‘You could play table tennis with these,’ he said.

  ‘Probably made in Emperor Ashoka’s time,’ added Rusty.

  But the chowkidar promised to rustle up some food and the boys made themselves at home. Pitamber did some exercises. Popat studied a small notebook and made some calculations. Rusty stared out of the window into the night. The light of the half-moon played upon the trees and bushes opposite the clearing. A large black cat emerged from the shrubbery and crept towards the rest house; the kitchen light gave promise of a meal.