The Laughing Skull

by Ruskin Bond

  THE LAUGHING SKULL

  Ruskin Bond has been writing for over sixty years, and now has over 120 titles in print—novels, collections of short stories, poetry, essays, anthologies and books for children. His first novel, The Room on the Roof, received the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Award in 1957. He has also received the Padma Shri (1999), the Padma Bhushan (2014) and two awards from Sahitya Akademi—one for his short stories and another for his writings for children. In 2012, the Delhi government gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award.

  Born in 1934, Ruskin Bond grew up in Jamnagar, Shimla, New Delhi and Dehradun. Apart from three years in the UK, he has spent all his life in India, and now lives in Mussoorie with his adopted family.

  Published by

  Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2016

  7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj

  New Delhi 110002

  Copyright © Ruskin Bond 2016

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-81-291-×××-××

  First impression 2016

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Laughing Skull

  Susanna’s Seven Husbands

  The Overcoat

  On Fairy Hill

  Bhoot-Aunty

  A Face in the Dark

  Eyes of the Cat

  From the Primaeval Past

  Some Hill Station Ghosts

  Pret in the House

  A Traveller’s Tale

  The Chakrata Cat

  A Dreadful Gurgle

  The White Pigeon

  He Who Rides a Tiger

  The Wind on Haunted Hill

  He Said it with Arsenic

  A Job Well Done

  A Face Under the Pillow

  A Demon for Work

  The Happy Herdsman

  The Tiger King’s Gift

  The Ghost and the Idiot

  The Wicked Guru

  Introduction

  Sitting here, looking out at the dark forms at night outside my window, I can’t help enumerating in my mind the many kinds of spirits, djinns, phantom creatures that may be walking out there right at this moment. A strangely shaped tree, a lumpy rock, a whisper of the branches and the sigh of the wind as it passes by my little window are all fodder for the imagination.

  Often I have wondered what it would be like to meet a faceless person in the dark, or to hear otherworldly music and see strange twinkling lights in these hills. Strange creatures that rise up from the depths of a long buried past, whether it be an ancient pond or a graveyard overgrown with weeds that nature is slowly reclaiming have appeared in my stories. When it comes to ghosts and other such matters of the spirit, I like letting the strangest and oddest of them come in and take up residence on the pages. Shape-shifting animals, for one, carry a menace that is a writer’s delight. Nasty and no-good men and women who come to a sticky end are a particular joy to turn into unhappy spirits who lurk in the shadows preying on healthy minds. But one of my favourite kinds of spirit has to be the pret. This is a mischievous, mostly harmless spirit who took to residing in my grandfather’s house when I was a boy. It got up to so many tricks that, exasperated, my grandfather nearly moved out. But a pret is not that easy to abandon and we found it was easier to live with a mostly friendly ghost rather than moving all our belongings out.

  When it comes to hill stations, there is an even wider variety of ghosts to find. Given that these places were the abode of the British in the hot summer days of the Raj, they abound in what are now old abandoned buildings. Once upon a time, these places were hotbeds of romance or intrigue. What now seem to be quaint old houses, were homes where the sahibs and memsahibs may have had unhappy endings. Those poor spirits continue to haunt these gardens and houses, disconsolate, malcontent or maybe only just plain melancholy. Bringing together their stories could well be a way to remember that lost time. In the frantic pace of development that even the hill stations are undergoing, I hope at least a few haunted houses escape through the fingers of the estate developers and these age-old ghosts continue to get a few nooks and crannies to haunt.

  And talking of haunting, if there is one dedicated band of followers of ghosts, it has to be schoolgoing children. Schools, the older the better, seem to be rich breeding grounds for ghosts. To tell each other lurid tales that will keep up the hardiest soul at night is every schoolboy or girl’s favourite pastime. And so it was that the story of Bhoot-Aunty came about. Shrouded in white, she walked the road outside a school, scaring passers-by. And if anyone dared disbelieve her existence, she would make a special appearance just for him. Boarding schools are even richer storehouses of ghost stories and sometimes long ago residents leave their imprints behind not only on minds but physical objects like a particularly unlucky bed or a room.

  Ruskin Bond

  The Laughing Skull

  I am not normally bothered by skeletons and old bones—they are, after all, just the chalky remains of the long dead—so 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 my cognac, I looked up and noticed that the skull now stood in 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. Schoolteachers, 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 gladly have sold the wretched thing, but it belonged to Anil and he int
ended to take 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 wouldn’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 space there for the skull. So I shifted it to the cupboard, and made sure the doors were 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 softly 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 a wobbly drainpipe, then realized the noise was coming from the wall cupboard. A rat, perhaps? But no. As soon as I opened the cupboard door, out popped the skull, landing near my feet and bouncing away right across the drawing 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.

  The 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.

  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. 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. 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 on a flower bed. The match was 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 did not 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 squeaks sounded a bit like screams of protest. The goalkeepers 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 happens 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 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 enquired 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’ve 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 of advice or encouragement written 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 the paper.

  ‘Ullu ka patha’, went the message, followed by ‘Gadhe ka baccha!’

  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.

  Susanna’s Seven Husbands

  Locally, the tomb was known as ‘the grave of the seven-times married one’.

  You’d be forgiven for thinking it was Bluebeard’s grave; he was reputed to have killed several wives in turn because they showed undue curiosity about a locked room. But this was the tomb of Susanna Anna-Maria Yeates, and the inscription (most of it in Lati
n) stated that she was mourned by all who had benefited from her generosity, her beneficiaries having included various schools, orphanages, and the church across the road. There was no sign of any other graves in the vicinity, and presumably her husbands had been interred in the old Rajpur graveyard, below the Delhi Ridge.

  I was still in my teens when I first saw the ruins of what had once been a spacious and handsome mansion. Desolate and silent, its well-laid paths were overgrown with weeds, its flower-beds had disappeared under a growth of thorny jungle. The two-storeyed house had looked across the Grand Trunk Road. Now abandoned, feared and shunned, it stood encircled in mystery, reputedly the home of evil spirits.

  Outside the gate, along the Grand Trunk Road, thousands of vehicles sped by—cars, trucks, buses, tractors, bullock-carts—but few noticed the old mansion or its mausoleum, set back as they were from the main road, hidden by mango, neem and peepul trees. One old and massive peepul tree grew out of the ruins of the house, strangling it much as its owner was said to have strangled one of her dispensable paramours.

  As a much-married person with a quaint habit of disposing of her husbands, whenever she tired of them, Susanna’s malignant spirit was said to haunt the deserted garden. I had examined the tomb, I had gazed upon the ruins, I had scrambled through shrubbery and overgrown rose-bushes, but I had not encountered the spirit of this mysterious woman. Perhaps, at the time, I was too pure and innocent to be targeted by malignant spirits. For, malignant she must have been, if the stories about her were true.

  No one had been down into the vaults of the ruined mansion. They were said to be occupied by a family of cobras, traditional guardians of buried treasure. Had she really been a woman of great wealth, and could treasure still be buried there? I put these questions to Naushad, the furniture-maker, who had lived in the vicinity all his life, and whose father had made the furniture and fittings for this and other great houses in Old Delhi.

  ‘Lady Susanna, as she was known, was much sought after for her wealth,’recalled Naushad. She was no miser, either. She spent freely, reigning in state in her palatial home, with many horses and carriages at her disposal. You see the stables there, behind the ruins? Now, they are occupied by bats and jackals. Every evening she rode through the Roshanara Gardens, the cynosure of all eyes, for she was beautiful as well as wealthy. Yes, all men sought her favours, and she could choose from the best of them. Many were fortune-hunters. She did not discourage them. Some found favour for a time, but she soon tired of them. None of her husbands enjoyed her wealth for very long!