Ghost, Interrupted

by Sonia Singh

  When I was thirteen, I encountered a ghost.

  There weren’t any rattling chains or bloodcurdling screams or speaking in tongues, but the experience was scary enough for me. Thank you very much.

  The year was 1987, and my mother decided it was time for a visit to India.

  I wasn’t too keen on the idea. My last visit there three years before had resulted in a nasty stomach bug and traumatic nightly attacks from mosquitoes intent on my sweet American blood.

  On the other hand, I did like the idea of ditching pre-algebra for three weeks.

  It wasn’t until our plane was somewhere over the Pacific Ocean that I learned all my teachers had sent a suitcase full of homework assignments to be completed during my trip abroad.

  On the train journey from Delhi to Amritsar (the northern town where my grandparents lived and our final destination), we stopped off in Ludhiana (I kept calling it Louisiana) to visit my mother’s cousin, Muna.

  Muna lived in a small two-story house, and her daughter, Nithiya, was my age. The first thing Nithiya said to me, eyes narrowed behind her glasses, black braids reaching to her waist, was, “Everyone says America smells.”

  “India smells worse,” I countered, and we both glared at each other.

  Aunt Muna beamed at us. “I can tell you girls are becoming fast friends.”

  My mother agreed and therefore decided to leave me at her cousin’s for two days while she and my eight-year-old brother, Samir, took the bus to visit some of my father’s relatives.

  I protested this decision but my arguments went unheeded. “You’ll have more fun here,” my mother said. “Muna is a wonderful cook and you can sleep in Nithiya’s room. Besides, there is no indoor plumbing in your father’s village, just the sugarcane field.”

  That first night at the dinner table as Muna and the family servant, Khaki, a cheerful woman in her thirties, served the meal, I thought the experience might not be too bad. The first dish I tasted—a cucumber, tomato, and red onion salad flavored with salt and cumin—was delicious.

  “I wanted Chinese,” Nithiya complained as her mother took a seat and Khaki returned to the kitchen to eat her own dinner.

  “Tomorrow,” Muna said.

  Nithiya glared at me from across the table. “Chinese food tastes better in India.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “I haven’t seen a single Chinatown anywhere.” (At thirteen this seemed like sound logic to me.)

  She sneered. “We don’t need a Chinatown. China is just across the border.”

  She did have a point.

  Muna smiled at me. “You girls are just like your mother and me at that age. We were fast friends.”

  I wondered what the definition of “fast friends” was in India anyway. Maybe just knowing somebody made them a friend?

  “Rakesh, have some more salad,” Muna said.

  I’d forgotten that my uncle Rakesh was there. He sat quietly, shoveling food into his mouth.

  Muna picked up a piece of yogurt-marinated chicken and placed it on her plate. “Baba came to see me last night. He says we never should have painted the house.”

  Across from me, Nithiya slowly put down her glass of water and stared at her mother, eyes wide. Rakesh frowned and stopped eating.

  I had no idea who this Baba person was and helped myself to a chicken breast.

  That night, while I climbed into bed beside Nithiya and hoped those braids of hers wouldn’t come near my pillow—the smell of coconut oil conditioner was overpowering—I found out who Baba was.

  Babaji is my grandfather—Mama’s father and your great-uncle.”

  “Oh.”

  Nithiya’s glasses were sliding down her nose and she pushed them back up. “Don’t you know anything? Babaji died five months ago and Mama keeps saying she sees him!” “Oh…”

  I felt a chill creep up my spine. “Have you seen…him?”

  “No,” she said and turned off the light.

  I curled up on my side away from her and huddled under the covers. I didn’t know what was more frightening. That Babaji’s ghost was hanging around or that Aunt Muna was crazy.

  The next morning my aunt claimed Baba had paid her another visit. “He wanted to know who you were,” she said, looking at me. “I told him you’re Manjeet’s daughter. From California.” She giggled. “He thought you were a boy.”

  Self-consciously, I touched my hair. A disastrous short cut a few weeks before had led to my being mistaken for a boy in America, India, and now the supernatural plane of existence.

  I felt a sharp stab of homesickness. I wished my mom was there instead of squatting in some sugarcane field.

  That afternoon we accompanied Aunt Muna on her errands. I was afraid we’d be traveling by rickshaw, but she loaded us into a cream-colored hatchback called a Maruti and we took off.

  As the hatchback darted in and out of traffic, dodging mopeds, bullock-driven carts, and rickshaws, I kept my eyes trained on my aunt, but she appeared normal, cheerfully making Babaji-free conversation as we stopped by the tailor, the jeweler, and finally the stationer’s so Nithiya could buy colored pencils. Last but not least, we pulled alongside a food stall, and Aunt Muna rolled down the window as a skinny barefoot man ran to the car to take her order. It took me a few seconds to realize we were at the Chinese restaurant.

  From what I could see there wasn’t a single Chinese person working the stall, just a large range covered with woks right there in the open. Stray dogs ran around in a circle, sniffing the air and barking.

  I was hoping the egg rolls wouldn’t taste like curry but all my fears were dashed at dinner that evening when the food tasted like real Chinese takeout.

  After dinner, Nithiya wanted to watch a movie showing on TV. Since I had nothing better to do, I joined her in the family room. It turned out the movie was Annie and it was dubbed in Hindi.

  Nithiya scowled. “Why can’t they leave it in English? I hate dubbed pictures.”

  I’d seen Annie a dozen times but it was kind of cool watching Daddy Warbucks yell in Hindi.

  “Why did they name the bodyguard Punjab?” Nithiya demanded. “He’s not Indian.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

  “Americans know nothing of our culture.”

  By the time the credits rolled across the screen it was almost eleven and we were both yawning. Nithiya turned off the TV and was about to switch off the light when the rocking chair in the corner creaked and began rocking.

  I was sitting on the Persian rug covering the floor, and Nithiya stood near the floor lamp.

  “That was his chair,” she whispered. “Babaji?”

  I was so scared, I couldn’t move. From what I could tell, Nithiya wasn’t too excited about a family reunion either.

  For what seemed like ages but was probably five minutes, the chair continued to rock, and then without warning…it stopped.

  That night we slept with the light on.

  The next morning as Aunt Muna doled out omelets, I kept waiting for Nithiya to say something. She didn’t. My aunt didn’t bring up Babaji either.

  When my mom and brother arrived, I practically flew to their side. I was so happy to see them that I didn’t even mind when my mom made me do my pre-algebra homework on the train.

  I did mind when my brother spilled buffalo milk all over it though.

  The remainder of our visit was thankfully ghost-free.

  Now, almost twenty years later, I’m positive that what I experienced that night—besides watching Annie in Hindi—was a visit from Nithiya’s dead grandfather. To this day I’ve never seen a rocking chair start rocking on its own and then stop mid-rock minutes later.

  My dad thinks it was probably the vibration from a moving train (the station was less than a mile from my aunt’s house) or a tremor from a small earthquake. But I was sitting on the floor. Wouldn’t I have felt any vibrations coming from the ground?

  My mom believes me. According to her, India is crawling
with ghosts. “If you offer them some candy and ask them nicely to leave, they usually listen. If not, a pundit will come to the house and blow cow-dung smoke.”

  I’ve taken her advice to heart. If a spirit ever does pay me a visit, I’ve got it covered. There’s a drawer full of candy in the kitchen (which I don’t touch, I swear). Now I just need a pundit to hook me up with some cow dung.

  The smell should scare the dead, if not the living.

  SONIA SINGH

  SONIA SINGH is the author of Goddess for Hire and Bollywood Confidential. She lives in Orange County, California. She is not psychic.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  By Sonia Singh

  GHOST, INTERRUPTED

  BOLLYWOOD CONFIDENTIAL

  GODDESS FOR HIRE

  Credits

  Cover design by Mary Schuck

  Cover photographs: Jim Naughten / Getty Images,

  Joeseph Sohm-Visions of America / Getty Images

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  GHOST, INTERRUPTED. Copyright © 2007 by Sonia Singh. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2006 ISBN: 9780061866548

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Singh, Sonia.

  Ghost, interrupted / by Sonia Singh.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-06-089022-3

  ISBN-10: 0-06-089022-3

  1. Parapsychologists—Fiction.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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