Penguin Book of Indian Ghost Stories Read online

  ‘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.

  Red Hydrangeas

  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.

  Mixed Blood

  Ravi Shankar

  The moon tugged at his blood making Kuttan fret for Grandfather. He awoke smelling the moonlight in the wind, an abstract liquid smell, full of distant incense and frangipani. In the family temple behind the house, Grandfather was praying late into the night, and he could hear the sacred bells rise and fall in rapid rhythm. And, as always happened on moonlit nights, when he looked out of the window, he saw the woman sitting under the frangipani tree, combing her hair.

  She sat looking towards the temple inside which Grandfather prayed, as if she was waiting for him to finish. The temple glowed with a golden smoke, and the living darkness around it seemed to ripple with Grandfather’s chants. Outside his window, the countryside was silvery with the moon, but in the corner of the coconut grove where the temple stood, it was always dark.

  The woman had hair which reached her feet, and she ran her comb through it in long, slow sweeps. Her ivory comb looked like polished bone in the moonlight. She had her ankles crossed, and her anklets glistened like mating golden snakes. Though he could not see her face, he knew she looked at him from time to time from the corners of her kohl dark eyes, through the fragrant cascade of her hair, and he knew that her smile would be moist and white against her betel red lips. Grandfather had finished his prayer. His body glistened with sacred oil, and his loincloth was red like blood. The woman shifted imperceptibly, it seemed to Kuttan that she was uncoiling herself. Kuttan saw that Grandfather was smiling, and as he passed her, he paused to pick something up from the ground. It was an ivory flower, which he placed among the black curls of her hair. She rested her cheek against Grandfather’s palm, and her hair spilled over Grandfather’s forearm on to the ground, swirling among the fallen frangipani flowers. He felt they were looking at him, Grandfather with his small and secret smile, she covertly from beneath the curtain of her hair. And that look reached out to him with a satin darkness, involving him in a complicity he felt but could not fully comprehend.

  When Grandfather came to bed, he asked him about her. As he had asked him many times before.

  ‘Is she a yakshi, Grandfather?’

  ‘What do you know about yakshis, little one?’

  ‘The servants talk about the yakshi under the frangipani tree, Grandfather. They say she’ll get them if they go out in the dark. Does the yakshi live under the frangipani tree.’

  Grandfather stroked his hair gently, making him feel sleepy. His fingers smelt of frangipani flower, and fragrant hair. Kuttan’s blood stirred. Outside, the nightwind raised the ravens from their nests, sending them flying in disturbed, noisy circles, showering the waters of the village ponds with dead leaves, surging across the black palms which grew on the hillsides and among the paddy fields.

  ‘The yakshis sleep on the black palm tops, Kuttan,’ Grandfather’s voice was a slow, fond whisper, ‘and when the moon is full, they wait at the crossroads for travellers.

  ‘They have eyes like the night, skin like moonlight, lips wet and red like clean blood. Their hair is like a waterfall at night.

  ‘Watch their feet, Kuttan,’ Grandfather said, ‘they never touch the ground. And when the yakshi meets a traveller, she will ask him for betelnut and vettila. And he who gives is lost.’

  ‘What happens to them, Grandfather?’

  ‘They are borne aloft to her nest on the black palm. In the morning all that will be left will be hair and bones.’

  ‘Will they feast on me too, Grandfather?’

  Grandfather smiled his secret smile, the one that was always on his lips when he came away from the temple at night.

  ‘You are my blood, Kuttan,’ Grandfather said, ‘you are family.’

  Kuttan felt safe, snuggling up to Grandfather’s chest, which smelt of sandalwood and holy ash mingling with Grandfather’s odour which was musky and strong. The cicadas and nightbirds came to him in the nightwind, which had the crispness of the distant rain. He knew he would dream of her that night, as he did on most, under the frangipani tree, combing her hair, teasing him with the hidden look. He never mentioned his dream to Grandfather, but he could tell by Grandfather’s secret smile that he knew about it.

  Grandfather was very tall, and the hair on his chest was still black. Every evening, Grandfather would take him for a bath in the temple pond. They would walk through the road which lay across the lands they owned, and people they met on their way would step aside, avert their eyes, and cover their faces with their shouldercloth. It was forbidden to look on Grandfather’s face, and Kuttan suspected it was more than the rules of caste which forced them to look on the ground. It was fear.

  They would walk along the cinnabar road which ran like winding serpent through the emerald paddy and black palms. In the near distance bullock carts swam through the sunset, the lanterns in their underbellies swaying in the dusk. Night would gather slowly, darkening the stone steps which led from the temples into the water; in the gloaming the waters of the pond were black and cold, and the reflection of the banyan tree which grew above on the bank was like a Shaivite silhouette, the long roots swaying and curling in the wind. It was the cursed hour, the villagers said, and no one bathed when the three hours met upon the water.

  ‘This is supposed to be the hour of the brahmarakshas,’ Grandfather said to Kuttan one evening as they walked to the temple tarn for their bath. Kuttan shivered, for an angry wind had suddenly sprung up. It seemed to flow down from the banyan tree, which Grandfather said was the haunt of the brahmarakshas, the soul of the brahmin virgin who had died, unfulfilled. The wind licked at his bones and left him deathly cold. But now Grandfather frowned, and raised his hand, commanding the wind to be still. And Kuttan felt the wind leave him, and spread howling with helpless malice across the paddy and the bamboo groves like a cold scythe, bending the black palms, putting out the light in the villagers’ huts, f
anning the fires in the forests of the hills. Later that night, in his dreams, he saw the wind again, like a pale woman with streaming, translucent hair and eyes without pupils.

  Dreaming on in restless sleep, other familiars from other nights came to visit: the dark stranger who always stood in the shadows among the lanes which were full of foliage and shade; the presence who stood on the veranda of a distant, dead house, looking out into the night, waiting for he did not know whom. And the most disquieting dream of all, in which his sleep was cradled in hair perfumed with ivory flowers, while he sucked on a cold, blue-veined teat which was full of warm rich blood. He came awake, as he always did when this dream enveloped him, but Grandfather was instantly by his side, patting him back to sleep: ‘Rest, little one, it is not yet time to wake up.’

  He knew it wasn’t time. Meanwhile he would spend the days of his happy, though somewhat lonely, childhood with his grandfather, walking through coconut graves and paddy fields, running ahead of Grandfather, along the village roads edged with spell-bound people averting their faces, and holding their children closer. He wasn’t unhappy, but sometimes Kuttan wished he could play with other children.

  He wondered why they wouldn’t let him. He wasn’t all that different from them. So what if his feet did not touch the ground.

  The Little Ones

  O.V. Vijayan

  The compound bounding our farmhouse was extensive. It sloped down to the south towards the paddy fields, and where it met cultivated land was a hedge full of fruit trees—citrus, pomegranate and guava. Near the hedge was the little hut where old Nagandi-appan, our farm manager, lived. We spoke of him as the manager merely from the persistence of memory, for he had long since ceased to manage the farm. Nagandi-appan’s wife and son were dead, and the old man lived on in the farm as a part of its environment. We, the children, who had always seen him on the farm believed that he would be there for all time.