Haunting Bombay

by Shilpa Agarwal

  The men yelled out suggestions, several graphically sexual and most entirely useless. And then, remembering waiting obligations, they dashed off to their cars after a last long drag on their cigarettes. One man, dressed in a tight shirt with a large collar and polyester pants, chewed his cigarette back and forth between his teeth. Slowly, he spat on the ground. “Arré, open the bhenchod hood.”

  Jaginder scowled before obediently opening the sister-fucking hood.

  “I’m knowing of a mechanic,” the man claimed while spitting a stream of red paan juice into a puddle. “Very good one, only two minutes nearby.”

  “Go then,” Jaginder said, giving his reluctant assent, knowing that he had no other choice.

  The man reappeared a half hour later. By then, a new crowd huddled over the Ambassador’s soggy engine, peering in with the intensity of somebody watching Kanoon or some other blockbuster movie. The so-called mechanic, an impossibly thin man with protruding cheekbones, arrived with a rusted wrench and a stick, the end of which was alight with burning, oily rags. Hovering dangerously close to the petrol engine with his fireball, he expertly dried up all the electrical points. Jaginder jumped inside the car to try the engine. The men moved back as the Ambassador lurched violently and then hissed to a dead silence. The car would have to be towed.

  The mechanic shrugged his shoulders, banging the engine with his wrench for good measure. Disappointed that the show was over so soon, the men reluctantly returned to their cars and their solitary lives. The mood grew dark. Another motorist jeered. The mechanic waved his torch around threateningly. Afraid that he might actually set his car on fire, Jaginder pulled several bills from his wallet. The first man spat thunderously onto the ground. Jaginder pulled out another ten and, with that, the two men vanished.

  He was stranded.

  Gulu awoke with a start. Heart pounding, he gazed at the Cherry Blossom shoe polish poster hanging near his cot until he felt steady. The two kittens stared back at him forlornly, feet clad in shiny black boots. “Tum bhee—you too?” Gulu asked with forced lightness, fondly tapping their paper noses. He sat up, vigorously rubbing his face until it stung. Something was not right. His first thought was of Chinni, the prostitute on Falkland Road whom he visited on his off-days twice a month. They had a tenuous relationship, sometimes bordering on affectionate.

  The last time Gulu visited, however, Chinni had pulled away from him. “I saw him! I saw him!” she had fumed, pressing her hands to her eyes.

  “Who?” Gulu had asked roughly, the frantic bulge in his dhoti growing impatient.

  “My long-lost son,” Chinni had raged, ignoring both him and the bulge. “That bhenchod uncle of his brought him here, just a young boy he is. I will kill the bastard uncle the next time he comes.” As if to prove her point, she had pulled out a nine-inch Rampuri knife from beneath her cot.

  Had Chinni gone and done something foolish? Gulu wondered, feeling as if the garage walls were closing in on him. He jumped up, grabbed his tattered umbrella, and made his way to the front verandah. Seating himself on a stool, he strained his eyes for the Ambassador’s headlights, deciding to sneak out after Jaginder’s return, to check in on Chinni and make sure everything was okay. He ought to buy her another trinket, some colored glass bangles perhaps, the next time he visited.

  An hour passed, maybe more, before Gulu heard the sound of an engine on the road. Still half-asleep against the wall, he made his way to the green gate, undoing the lock and chain. The gate swung open with a reluctant groan, piercing the rain’s rhythmic drumming like a wounded dog. Wiping his eyes, he peered out onto the street. A faint light was visible at the end of the road. He began to feel relieved, almost elated. He locked the other gate and, pushing it open, took his position at the entrance—standing tall, despite the sparse protection of his umbrella, to welcome back his beloved car.

  He waited. And then waited until he could bear it no longer. Peering out into the rain, he looked expectantly down the road. The light was still there, just beyond the edges of his visibility. He took a tentative step out onto the street, squinting his eyes and straining his ears to hear past the drumming of the rains on the hard ground.

  “Jaginder Sahib?” he called out into the night.

  A darkened figure appeared in front of the light and began to move towards the bungalow.

  Even in the blackness, Gulu noticed two things:

  The body was too slender to be Jaginder’s.

  And, it moved strangely unencumbered by the deluge.

  Feeling frightened now, he closed one gate, firmly pressing its anchor into the ground. The figure seemed to stop as if registering the sound. And then it began to move faster, almost as if it were floating, the faint glow behind it casting eerie shadows along the road’s rough edges. Gulu threw his umbrella down and pulled at the second gate. It was stuck. Water lashed his face with such force that he could barely see his hands shaking with feverish intensity right in front of his eyes. Thunder roared overhead, followed by an even more terrible noise. A low howl raced down the street, hitting his ears with an unearthly sound.

  Throwing the full weight of his body against the gate, Gulu felt it suddenly give way and close with a fierce slam. The noise was matched only by another scream, that coming from his own lips, as his finger was caught against the metal and severed. As warm liquid gushed down his hand, the chain clanged to the ground. With his good hand he blindly groped the flooded concrete while his body continued to press against the gate. A rush of water carried his finger under the metal doorway and onto the street where it swirled frantically into an overflowing drain. Pressing his wounded hand against his armpit, he desperately wiped at his eyes, spotting the chain just beyond reach. Abandoning the gate for a split second, he lunged at the links as if for a lifeboat in a flood.

  Turing around, he saw that he was too late. The gate had swung open. And in the split second of lightning that followed, he saw the fl ash of a flaming red sari palloo, a glint of metal, a beckoning of slender arms. A ghostly laugh from darkened lips.

  “Avni!” he cried out as the chain once again slipped from his grasp and he fell, face forward, against the hard, wet earth.

  PUDDLE OF PINK GUM BOOTS

  Lying next to her grandmother, Pinky had not been able to sleep, fearful of what the ghost might do next and searching her mind for a logical explanation for her drowning. Was the ayah crazy? Is that what the ghost was trying to tell me? Deciding to find the ghost after Maji’s breathing slowed, Pinky halfheartedly listened to Gulu’s movements outside, the moan of the opening gates, his voice calling out.

  And then came the terrifying scream followed immediately by racing footsteps.

  “What! What!” Maji snapped awake as Pinky heaved her out of bed.

  They watched the action from the verandah.

  Cook Kanj rushed toward the front gate.

  “He’s fallen!” Nimish yelled out, having reached him first.

  “Who’s there?” Parvati called out to the darkness, retrieving the tattered umbrella from the driveway. A rusted edge of metal glinted in the moonlight, catching her eye. Pushing back curling ivy and jasmine blooms, she caught sight of a deteriorating brass plate inscribed with the words The Jungle and Christened in 1825. And just below that, a trail of perfectly formed footprints shimmered clearly on the street, despite the rushing water. Parvati leaned forward for a closer inspection, noticing six distinctive toes on the left footprint. She gasped, knowing without a doubt who had been responsible for Gulu’s accident. All at once, as if they had been a mirage, the footprints vanished.

  “Parvati!” Kanj called out, seeing his wife squatting by the gate, hand over her mouth. “Tum theek ho?”

  Parvati swiftly stood and nodded, rushing away from the gate while glancing back at the thick foliage as if trying to detect something within the dripping leaves and tightly curled blooms. Only after she had reached the verandah, under the dim yellow bulb flickering hesitantly, did she turn her attention to Gulu
. And then she let out a blood-curdling scream.

  “His finger!” Nimish yelled, noticing the blood.

  “Bring him inside!” Maji ordered as she called Parvati to obtain fresh towels, gauze, and her personal supply of aspirin. Cook Kanj ran to the kitchen, returning with a steel cup of turmeric paste, which he liberally applied to Gulu’s stub as an antiseptic, and a cup of nimbu-pani which he poured into his gaping mouth. Gulu sputtered, coming to consciousness. “Outside,” he moaned, trying to point with an intact finger.

  “Where is he? Where is he?” Savita raced into the room, mistaking Gulu’s comment as a reference to her returning husband. Peering out the window, she cursed at Jaginder and wildly waved her arms until Kuntal gently led her to a seat and began to massage her shoulders.

  “The gate,” Gulu moaned again.

  “We have to leave!” Savita wailed, milk dripping down her blouse, making her feel dizzy, weak. “Get out before it’s too late! Nimi, get my wrap and purse!”

  “Mummy!”

  “Do it!”

  Nimish left the room. Dheer, fast asleep on the sofa was finally awakend by his stomach. Making no attempt to stifle a mammoth yawn, he stretched and plopped down next to Tufan who was huddled under a sheet.

  “He must have stumbled in the rain,” Maji declared, “and caught his finger.”

  “Gulu didn’t slip.” Parvati stood with her arms crossed. She had had enough of the family’s covering-up, especially now that the past had returned, leaving her damp footprints outside the gate like an evil omen. Glancing at ashen-faced Kuntal, however, Parvati bit her lip and decided against revealing the truth. Kuntal mustn’t know who came to the gate, not after what happened back then. She recalled the purification ceremony they had done after the baby’s death, blocking the ayah’s spirit—alive or dead—from ever entering the bungalow. We’re safe from her as long as we stay in here.

  “Then what?” Nimish asked. “What happened out there?”

  “It was the ghost,” Parvati lied.

  “Ghost?” Savita sat up.

  “Ghost?” Tufan echoed, jumping off the couch as if he had just been bitten by one and dashed to his mother.

  “Outside?” Pinky exclaimed incredulously. Why? Why after all these years would she have left the bungalow?

  Maji shot Parvati a withering glare, “Bring some milk for the children.”

  Parvati reluctantly uncrossed her arms before walking off to the kitchen.

  “Ghost?” Savita demanded. Suddenly it dawned on her that what lay behind that door was even more terrible than what she had thought all these years. “Dheer! Nimish!” she cried out. “Come here!”

  Dheer sidled next to his mother. Nimish returned with her wrap and purse.

  “Check the bathroom door!” she yelled at Parvati. “Make sure it’s bolted!”

  Pinky grabbed her pink gum boots and slipped out the door unnoticed in all the commotion.

  “Was it the ghost?” Cook Kanj prodded Gulu as he crouched over him.

  “A ghost?” Gulu looked confused. His face was pale. The cloth wrapped around his hand had sprouted red clusters of fresh blood.

  “It’s unbolted,” Parvati said, returning with a tray of Horlick’s Malted Milk.

  “Biscuits too?” Dheer managed through his terror.

  “She’s already out,” Parvati said. “I know it.”

  “She?” Savita gasped. Was it possible she had been wrong, that the presence in the bathroom was not the evil spirit that had killed her child but— “Parvati!” Maji warned.

  “No, tell me!”

  “Pinky saw something,” Maji said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “She’s only a child.”

  Savita grasped at Parvati’s sari palloo, “Who?”

  “Your baby!”

  Savita shrieked with such intensity that Dheer choked on his milk. Thick streams of bubbly liquid shot from his nostrils.

  “Stop this nonsense!” Maji ordered.

  “Where is she?” Savita shouted as she stood up, eyes wild. “Where is she? I want to see my little Chakori!”

  “Mummy!” Tufan squeaked as Nimish forced his mother to sit down on the sofa.

  “Savita, get a hold of yourself,” Maji ordered. “She’s dead.”

  “She’s come back to me! I knew she would!”

  “Mummy, you’re not making sense,” Nimish cried out, draping the wrap around her shoulders.

  “Get a hold of yourself,” Maji warned. “For your sons’ sake.”

  “We’re staying,” Savita announced to Nimish, shrugging off the wrap. “My baby’s come back to me.”

  Cook Kanj shook Gulu again, this time more vigorously. “Was it the ghost?”

  Gulu’s mind grasped to make sense of Kanj’s question, of what had happened that night. In the fuzziness of his brain, he knew two things for certain:

  Avni, the dead baby’s ayah had returned.

  And, he was not going to tell a soul.

  “No,” he said out loud. “I only . . . slipped.”

  “What did I tell you?” Maji boomed, exhaling loudly.

  “Where’s Pinky?” Dheer abruptly asked.

  Everyone fell quiet and looked around.

  “Pinky!” Maji yelled, straining forward on the dais. “Pinky!”

  There was no response. Kuntal and Nimish were dispatched to check the east hallway but returned shaking their heads. Parvati and Kanj went together to check the rest of the bungalow and were equally unsuccessful. Maji’s gigantic bosom began to heave as she lifted herself from the dais. “Pinky!” she called again.

  “Maybe she went outside?” Nimish suggested.

  “Outside?” Gulu asked, suddenly recalling his terrifying experience by the gates.

  “Oh God no!” Parvati yelled, rushing to the door.

  “Where is she?” Maji shouted, propelling herself at the front door, cane in hand. “Pinky! Come inside! Kanj, find her!”

  Kanj took a tentative step onto the verandah.

  “Pinky!” Maji frantically rushed to the gate, plowing him down in the process. Gulu and Parvati and Nimish were at her side, all four of them pushing open the gate.

  The chain lay sunken in a pool of water.

  Two pink gum boots lay overturned in a puddle just beyond.

  But Pinky was nowhere to be seen.

  CAPTIVE ON A RAINY NIGHT

  The Ambassador locked and abandoned on the side of the road, Jaginder hitched a ride through the stormy twilight, past Cumbala Hill, past his home in Malabar Hill, and all the way south to Church-gate Station on Churchgate Street. Just opposite the station was a small tea shop, the Asiatica, which contained a sprinkling of old men hunched over The Evening News; a flock of students clutching copies of Gorky, Chekhov, and Turgenev; and a scattering of newly married couples cautiously entering and exiting the closed-off, private cubicles known discreetly as “family rooms.” Even at this time of the night, the Asiatica thrived with a friendly, relaxed energy.

  Jaginder slowly walked past the tall marble-slab counter behind which the Irani owner, dressed in a thin white muslin pajama, sleeveless kurta top with a triangular neck, and the Zoroastrian sadra holy rope tied around his waist, perched on a high stool as he completed a transaction.

  “One peela hathi, one yellow elephant,” a young man said, pointing to a box of cigarettes labeled Honeydew with a picture of an elephant emblazoned on its front.

  The owner reached over to extract the ten-pack and then, pulling out a drawer from under the slab, placed the change in one of six cup-like depressions—each containing a different denomination, from the tiny two-paisa coins to the large one rupee ones with King George’s head in profile on the side.

  Jaginder stood behind the counter, eyeing the cigarette display: the expensive Gold Flake and Capstan lay nestled together on the top, supported by rows of the cheaper Charminar, Honeydew, Scissors, Cavenders, Panamas. Cartons of Passing Show, sporting a dastardly toff in a top hat, lined the bottom. “One Gold Flake,�
� he said, eyeing the faded poster behind the counter boasting Will’s Gold Flake: The Cigarette that made smoking popular.

  The owner extracted a single cigarette from a tin of fifty and handed it to him.

  Jaginder found a vacant, round marble table and took a seat on a thin wooden chair that had Made In Czechoslovakia imprinted on its high back. Lighting his cigarette, he briefly wondered who would go to the trouble of importing these rickety chairs, of all things, from such a faraway Communist country. His gaze fell on one of the long vertical mirrors that were set into the wood-paneled wall. The top of the mirror declared: SORRY NO FIGHTING, NO SITTING LONG, NO TALKING LOUD, NO COMBING, NO SPITTING, NO DISCUSSING GAMBLING, NO WATER TO OUTSIDERS, NO ADDRESS INQUIRY, NO LEG ON CHAIR. Below that, the entire menu was scrawled in wet chalk: Tea – 10p, Coffee – 20p, Khari – 10p, Pastry – 25p, Brun maska – 50p, Omelet (single) – 50p, Omelet (double) – 90p, Coca-Cola, Gold Spot, Mangola, Ice Cream Soda, Soda – 25p.

  “Ek brun-maska aur chai, malai mar ke,” Jaginder called out, ordering one of the popular Irani buttered buns that Rustom, the middle-aged owner, made on the premises until recently when his wife passed away. Now the buns and several other savories were delivered in a tin box by a cycler from Maqdoomia, a small entrepreneurial bakery located in Dharavi, Bombay’s largest slum. Jaginder leafed through a scattering of newspapers that had been left on his table: the English-language Times of India, Indian Express, and Free Press Journal, the Parsi Jaam-e-Jamshed, and the Blitz, a weekly Communist tabloid. Inside the Blitz, his attention was captured by a the headline, “Gold Bar Found After Sixteen Years!” The American S. S. Fort Stikine explosion in the Bombay Docks in 1944, the article stated, is remembered not only by its devastation but for an ongoing mystery about one missing 28-pound bar of solid gold. The explosion created a wave so immense that it deposited the stern of a 4000-pound ship on the roof of a shed. The docks burnt away in an inferno. But the gold bar was never found. Oceanography experts stated that it had been carried away by an underwater current. Just yesterday, however, a man was caught trying to smuggle a gold bar with similar markings out of the country.