A Season of Ghosts Read online

  ‘Hot water? Certainly.’ I was a little puzzled, but I did not want to antagonize Miss Bellows at our first meeting.

  ‘Thank you. And a glass.’

  She took the glass and I went to get the kettle. From the pocket of her voluminous dress, she extracted two small packets, similar to those containing chemists’ powders. Opening both packets, she poured first a purple powder and then a crimson powder into the glass. Nothing happened.

  ‘Now the water, please,’ she said.

  ‘It’s boiling hot!’

  ‘Never mind.’

  I poured boiling water into her glass, and there was a terrific fizzing and bubbling as the frothy stuff rose to the rim. It gave off a horrible stench. The potion was so hot that I thought it would crack the glass; but before this could happen, Miss Bellows put it to her lips and drained the contents.

  ‘I think I’ll be going now,’ she said, putting the glass down and smacking her lips. The cat, tail in the air, voiced its agreement. Said Miss Bellows, ‘I’m much obliged to you, young man.’

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ I said humbly. ‘Always at your service.’

  She gave me her thin bony hand, and held mine in an icy grip.

  I saw Miss Bellows and the black cat to the gate, and returned pensively to my sitting room. Living alone was beginning to tell on my nerves and imagination. I made a half-hearted attempt to laugh at my fancies, but the laugh stuck in my throat. I couldn’t help noticing that the broom was missing from its corner.

  I dashed out of the cottage and looked up and down the path. There was no one to be seen. In the gathering darkness I could hear Miss Bellows’ laughter, followed by a snatch of song:

  With the darkness round me growing,

  And the moon behind my hat,

  You will soon have trouble knowing

  Which is witch and witch’s cat.

  Something whirred overhead like a Diwali rocket.

  I looked up and saw them silhouetted against the rising moon. Miss Bellows and her cat were riding away on my broomstick.

  Reunion at the Regal

  IF YOU WANT to see a ghost, just stand outside New Delhi’s Regal Cinema for twenty minutes or so. The approach to the grand old cinema hall is a great place for them. Sooner or later you’ll see a familiar face in the crowd. Before you have time to recall who it was or who it may be, it will have disappeared and you will be left wondering if it really was so-and-so… because surely so-and-so died several years ago …

  The Regal was very posh in the early 1940s when, in the company of my father, I saw my first film there. The Connaught Place cinemas still had a new look about them, and they showed the latest offerings from Hollywood and Britain. To see a Hindi film, you had to travel all the way to Kashmere Gate or Chandni Chowk.

  Over the years, I was in and out of the Regal quite a few times, and so I became used to meeting old acquaintances or glimpsing familiar faces in the foyer or on the steps outside.

  On one occasion, I was mistaken for a ghost.

  I was about thirty at the time. I was standing on the steps of the arcade, waiting for someone, when a young Indian man came up to me and said something in German or what sounded like German.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand. You may speak to me in English or Hindi.’

  ‘Aren’t you Hans? We met in Frankfurt last year.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’ve never been to Frankfurt.’

  ‘You look exactly like Hans.’

  ‘Maybe I’m his double. Or maybe I’m his ghost!’

  My facetious remark did not amuse the young man. He looked confused and stepped back, a look of horror spreading over his face. ‘No, no,’ he stammered. ‘Hans is alive, you can’t be his ghost!’

  ‘I was only joking.’

  But he had turned away, hurrying off through the crowd. He seemed agitated. I shrugged philosophically. So I had a double called Hans, I reflected, perhaps I’d run into him some day.

  I mention this incident only to show that most of us have lookalikes, and that sometimes we see

  what we want to see, or are looking for, even if on looking closer, the resemblance isn’t all that striking.

  But there was no mistaking Kishen when he approached me. I hadn’t seen him for five or six years, but he looked much the same. Bushy eyebrows, offset by gentle eyes; a determined chin, offset by a charming smile. The girls had always liked him, and he knew it; and he was content to let them do the pursuing.

  We saw a film—I think it was The Wind Cannot Read—and then we strolled across to the old Standard Restaurant, ordered dinner and talked about old times, while the small band played sentimental tunes from the 1950s.

  Yes, we talked about old times—growing up in Dehra, where we lived next door to each other, exploring our neighbours’ lychee orchards, cycling about the town in the days before the scooter had been invented, kicking a football around on the maidan, or just sitting on the compound wall doing nothing. I had just finished school, and an entire year stretched before me until it was time to go abroad. Kishen’s father, a civil engineer, was under transfer orders, so Kishen too temporarily did not have to go to school.

  He was an easy-going boy, quite content to be at a loose end in my company—I was to describe a couple of our escapades in my first novel, The Room on the Roof. I had literary pretensions; he was apparently without ambition although, as he grew older, he was to surprise me by his wide reading and erudition.

  One day, while we were cycling along the bank of the Raipur canal, he skidded off the path and fell into the canal with his cycle. The water was only waist-deep; but it was quite swift, and I had to jump in to help him. There was no real danger, but we had some difficulty getting the cycle out of the canal.

  Later, he learnt to swim.

  But that was after I’d gone away …

  Convinced that my prospects would be better in England, my mother packed me off to her relatives in Jersey, and it was to be four long years before I could return to the land I truly cared for. In that time, many of my Dehra friends had left the town; it wasn’t a place where you could do much after finishing school. Kishen wrote to me from Calcutta, where he was at an engineering college. Then he was off to ‘study abroad’. I heard from him from time to time. He seemed happy. He had an equable temperament and got on quite well with most people. He had a girlfriend too, he told me.

  ‘But,’ he wrote, ‘you’re my oldest and best friend. Wherever I go, I’ll always come back to see you.’

  And of course he did. We met several times while I was living in Delhi, and once we revisited Dehra together and walked down Rajpur Road and ate tikkees and golguppas behind the clock tower. But the old familiar faces were missing. The streets were overbuilt and overcrowded, and the lychee gardens were fast disappearing. After we got back to Delhi, Kishen accepted the offer of a job in Mumbai. We kept in touch in desultory fashion, but our paths and our lives had taken different directions. He was busy nurturing his career with an engineering firm; I had retreated to the hills with radically different goals—to write and be free of the burden of a ten-to-five desk job.

  Time went by, and I lost track of Kishen.

  About a year ago, I was standing in the lobby of the India International Centre, when an attractive young woman in her mid-thirties came up to me and said, ‘Hello, Rusty, don’t you remember me? I’m Manju. I lived next to you and Kishen and Ranbir when we were children.’

  I recognized her then, for she had always been a pretty girl, the ‘belle’ of Dehra’s Astley Hall.

  We sat down and talked about old times and new times, and I told her that I hadn’t heard from Kishen for a few years.

  ‘Didn’t you know?’ she asked. ‘He died about two years ago.’

  ‘What happened?’ I was dismayed, even angry, that I hadn’t heard about it. ‘He couldn’t have been more than thirty-eight.’

  ‘It was an accident on a beach in Goa. A child had got into difficulties and Kishen swam out
to save her. He did rescue the little girl, but when he swam ashore he had a heart attack. He died right there on the beach. It seems he had always had a weak heart. The exertion must have been too much for him.’

  I was silent. I knew he’d become a fairly good swimmer, but I did not know about the heart.

  ‘Was he married?’ I asked.

  ‘No, he was always the eligible bachelor boy.’

  It had been good to see Manju again, even though she had given me bad news. She told me she was happily married, with a small son. We promised to keep in touch.

  And that’s the end of this tale, apart from my brief visit to Delhi last November.

  I had taken a taxi to Connaught Place and decided to get down at the Regal. I stood there a

  while, undecided about what to do or where to go. It was almost time for a show to start, and there were a lot of people milling around.

  I thought someone called my name. I looked around, and there was Kishen in the crowd.

  ‘Kishen!’ I called, and started after him.

  But a stout lady climbing out of a scooter rickshaw got in my way, and by the time I had a clear view again, my old friend had disappeared.

  Had I seen his lookalike, a double? Or had he kept his promise to come back to see me once more?

  Something in the Water

  I DISCOVERED THE pool near Rajpur on a hot summer’s day some fifteen years ago. It was shaded by close-growing sal trees, and looked cool and inviting. I took off my clothes and dived in.

  The water was colder than I had expected. It was an icy glacial cold. The sun never touched it for long, I supposed. Striking out vigorously, I swam to the other end of the pool and pulled myself up on the rocks, shivering.

  But I wanted to swim some more. So I dived in again and did a gentle breaststroke towards the middle of the pool. Something slid between my legs. Something slimy, pulpy. I could see no one, hear nothing. I swam away, but the slippery floating thing followed me. I did not like it. Something curled around my leg. Not an underwater plant. Something that sucked at my foot. A long tongue licked my calf. I struck out wildly, thrust myself away from whatever it was that sought my company. Something lonely, lurking in the shadows. Kicking up spray, I swam like a frightened porpoise fleeing from some terror of the deep.

  Safely out of the water, I found a warm sunny rock and stood there looking down at the water.

  Nothing stirred. The surface of the pool was now calm and undisturbed. Just a few fallen leaves floating around. Not a frog, not a fish, not a waterbird in sight. And that in itself seemed strange. For you would have expected some sort of pond life to have been in evidence.

  But something lived in the pool, of that I was sure. Something very cold-blooded, colder and wetter than the water. Could it have been a corpse trapped in the weeds? I did not want to know; so I dressed and hurried away.

  A few days later I left for Delhi, where I went to work in an ad agency, telling people how to beat the summer heat by drinking fizzy drinks that made you more thirsty. The pool in the forest was forgotten.

  It was ten years before I visited Rajpur again. Leaving the small hotel where I was staying, I found myself walking through the same old sal forest, drawn almost irresistibly towards the pool where I had not been able to finish my swim. I was not over-eager to swim there again, but I was curious to know if the pool still existed.

  Well, it was there all right, although the surroundings had changed and a number of new houses and other buildings had come up where formerly there had only been wilderness. And there was a fair amount of activity in the vicinity of the pool.

  A number of labourers were busy with buckets and rubber pipes, draining water from the pool. They had also dammed off and diverted the little stream that fed it.

  Overseeing this operation was a well-dressed man in a white safari suit. I thought at first that he was an honorary forest warden, but it turned out that he was the owner of a new school that had been set up nearby.

  ‘Do you live in Rajpur?’ he asked.

  ‘I used to… Once upon a time… Why are you emptying the pool?’

  ‘It’s become a hazard,’ he said. ‘Two of my boys were drowned here recently. Both senior students. Of course they weren’t supposed to be swimming here without permission, the pool is off-limits. But you know what boys are like. Make a rule and they feel duty-bound to break it.’

  He told me his name was Kapoor, and led me back to his house, a newly-built bungalow with a wide cool veranda. His servant brought us glasses of cold sherbet. We sat in cane chairs overlooking the pool and the forest. Across a clearing, a gravelled road led to the school buildings, newly whitewashed and glistening in the sun.

  ‘Were the boys there at the same time?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, they were friends. And they must have been attacked by absolute fiends. Limbs twisted and broken, faces disfigured. But death was due to drowning—that was the verdict of the medical examiner.’

  We gazed down at the shallows of the pool, where a couple of men were still at work, the others having gone for their midday meal.

  ‘Perhaps it would be better to leave the place alone,’ I said. ‘Put a barbed wire fence around it. Keep your boys away. Thousands of years ago, this valley was an inland sea. A few small pools and streams are all that is left of it.’

  ‘I want to fill it in and build something there. An open-air theatre, maybe. We can always create an artificial pond somewhere else.’

  Presently only one man remained at the pool, knee-deep in muddy churned-up water. And Mr Kapoor and I both saw what happened next.

  Something rose out of the bottom of the pool. It looked like a giant snail, but its head was parthuman, its body and limbs part-squid or octopus. An enormous succubus. Its stood taller than the man in the pool. A creature soft and slimy, a survivor from our primaeval past.

  With a great sucking motion, it enveloped the man completely so that only his arms and legs could be seen thrashing about wildly and futilely. The succubus dragged him down under the water.

  Kapoor and I left the veranda and ran to the edge of the pool. Bubbles rose from the green scum near the surface. All was still and silent. And then, like bubblegum issuing from the mouth of a child, the mangled body of the man shot out of the water and came spinning towards us.

  Dead and drowned and sucked dry of its fluids, place

  Naturally no more work was done at the pool. The story was put out that the labourer had slipped and fallen to his death on the rocks. Kapoor swore me to secrecy. His school would have to close down if there were too many strange drownings and accidents in its vicinity. But he walled the place off from his property and made it practically inaccessible. The dense undergrowth of the sal forest now hides the approach.

  The monsoon rains came and the pool filled up again.

  I can tell you how to get there if you’d like to see it. But I wouldn’t advise you to go for a swim.

  The Prize

  THEY WERE UP late, drinking in the old Ritz bar, and by one a.m. everyone was pretty well sloshed. Ganesh got into his electric blue Zen and zigzagged home. Victor drove off in his antique Morris Minor, which promptly broke down, forcing him to transfer to a taxi. Nandu, the proprietor, limped off to his cottage, a shooting pain in his foot presaging another attack of gout. Begum Tara, who had starred in over a hundred early talkies, climbed into a cycle rickshaw that had no driver, which hardly mattered as she promptly fell asleep. The bartender vanished into the night. Only Rahul, the romantic young novelist, remained in the foyer, wondering where everyone had gone and why he had been left behind.

  The rooms were full. There wasn’t a spare bed in the hotel, for it was the height of the season and the hill station’s hotels were overflowing. The room boys and kitchen staff had gone to their quarters. Only the night chowkidar’s whistle could occasionally be heard as the retired havildar prowled around the estate.

  The young writer felt he had been unfairly abandoned, and rather resented the
slight. He’d been the life and soul of the party—or so he’d thought—telling everyone about the huge advance he’d just got for his latest book and how it was a certainty for the Booker Prize. He hadn’t noticed their yawns; or if he had, he’d put it down to the lack of oxygen in the bar. It had been named the Horizontal Bar by one of the patrons, because of a tendency on the part of some of the clientele to fall asleep on the carpet—that very same carpet on which the Duke of Savoy had passed out exactly a hundred years ago.

  Rahul had no intention of passing out on the floor. But his libations had made lying down somewhere seem quite imperative. A billiard table would have been fine, but the billiard room was locked. He staggered down the corridor; not a sofa or easy chair came into view. Finally, he found a door that opened, leading to the huge empty dining room, now lit only by a single electric bulb.

  The old piano did not look too inviting, but the long dining table had been cleared of everything except a curry-stained tablecloth left there to do duty again at breakfast. Rahul managed to hoist himself up on the table and stretch himself out. It made a hard bed, and already stray breadcrumbs were irritating his tender skin, but he was too tired to care. The light bulb directly above him also failed to bother him too much. Although there was no air in the room, the bulb swayed slightly, as though an invisible hand had tapped it gently.

  For an hour he slept, a deep dreamless sleep, and then he became vaguely aware of music, voices, footsteps and laughter. Someone was playing the piano. Chairs were pulled back. Glasses tinkled. Knives and forks clattered against dinner plates.

  Rahul opened his eyes to find a banquet in progress. On his table—the table he was lying on, now flanked by huge tureens of food! And the diners were seemingly unaware of his presence. The men wore old-fashioned dress suits with bow ties and high collars; the women wore long flounced dresses with tight bodices that showed their ample bosoms to good advantage. Out of long habit, Rahul’s hand automatically reached out for the nearest breast, and for once he did not receive a stinging slap; for the simple reason that his hands, if they were there at all, hadn’t moved.