Whispers in the Dark

by Ruskin Bond

  Astley himself had said so.

  ‘Keep everything ready for me, Prem, old chap. I may be back after a year, or two years, or even longer, but I’ll be back, I promise you. On the first of every month, I want you to go to my lawyer, Mr Kapoor. He’ll give you your salary and any money that’s needed for the rates and repairs. I want you to keep the house tip-top!’

  ‘Will you bring back a wife, sahib?’

  ‘Lord, no! Whatever put that idea in your head?’

  ‘I thought, perhaps—because you wanted the house kept ready . . .’

  ‘Ready for me, Prem. I don’t want to come home and find the old place falling down.’

  And so Prem had taken care of the house—although there was no news from Astley. What had happened to him? The mystery provided a talking point whenever the local people met on the Mall. And in the bazaar, the shopkeepers missed Astley because he had been a man who spent freely.

  His relatives still believed him to be alive. Only a few months back a brother had turned up—a brother who had a farm in Canada and could not stay in India for long. He had deposited a further sum with the lawyer and told Prem to carry on as before. The salary provided Prem with his few needs. Moreover, he was convinced that Robert would return.

  Another man might have neglected the house and grounds, but not Prem Bahadur. He had a genuine regard for the absent owner. Prem was much older—now almost sixty and none too strong, suffering from pleurisy and other chest troubles—but he remembered Robert as both a boy and a young man. They had been together on numerous hunting and fishing trips in the mountains. They had slept out under the stars, bathed in icy mountain streams and eaten from the same cooking pot. Once, when crossing a small river, they had been swept downstream by a flash flood, a wall of water that came thundering down the gorges without any warning during the rainy season. Together they had struggled back to safety. Back in the hill station, Astley had told everyone that Prem had saved his life, while Prem was equally insistent that he owed his life to Robert.

  * * *

  This year the monsoon had begun early and ended late. It dragged on through most of September, and Prem Bahadur’s cough grew worse and his breathing more difficult.

  He lay on his charpai on the veranda, staring out at the garden, which was beginning to get out of hand, a tangle of dahlias, snake-lilies and convolvuluses. The sun finally came out. The wind shifted from the south-west to the north-west and swept the clouds away.

  Prem Bahadur had shifted his charpai into the garden and was lying in the sun, puffing at his small hookah, when he saw Robert Astley at the gate.

  He tried to get up but his legs would not oblige him. The hookah slipped from his hand.

  Astley came walking down the garden path and stopped in front of the old retainer, smiling down at him. He did not look a day older than when Prem Bahadur had last seen him.

  ‘So you have come at last,’ said Prem.

  ‘I told you I’d return.’

  ‘It has been many years. But you have not changed.’

  ‘Nor have you, old chap.’

  ‘I have grown old and sick and feeble.’

  ‘You’ll be fine now. That’s why I’ve come.’

  ‘I’ll open the house,’ said Prem, and this time he found himself getting up quite easily.

  ‘It isn’t necessary,’ said Astley.

  ‘But all is ready for you!’

  ‘I know. I have heard of how well you have looked after everything. Come then, let’s take a last look around. We cannot stay, you know.’

  Prem was a little mystified but he opened the front door and took Robert through the drawing room and up the stairs to the bedroom. Robert saw the dressing gown and the slippers, and he placed his hand gently on the old man’s shoulder.

  When they returned downstairs and emerged into the sunlight, Prem was surprised to see himself—or rather his skinny body—stretched out on the charpai. The hookah was on the ground, where it had fallen.

  Prem looked at Astley in bewilderment.

  ‘But who is that—lying there?’

  ‘It was you. Only the husk now, the empty shell. This is the real you, standing here beside me.’

  ‘You came for me?’

  ‘I couldn’t come until you were ready. As for me, I left my shell a long time ago. But you were determined to hang on, keeping this house together. Are you ready now?’

  ‘And the house?’

  ‘Others will live in it. But come, it’s time to go fishing . . .’

  Astley took Prem by the arm, and they walked through the dappled sunlight under the deodars and finally left that place forever.

  THE PRIZE

  They were up late, drinking in the old Ritz bar, and by 1 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 upon 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.

  Someone said, ‘Roast pig—I’ve been looking forward to this!’ and stuck a knife and fork into Rahul’s thigh.

  He cried out, or tried to, b
ut no one heard; he could not hear his own voice. He found he could raise his head and look down the length of his body, and he saw he had pig’s trotters instead of his own feet.

  Someone turned him over and sliced a bit off his rump.

  ‘A most tender leg of pork,’ remarked a woman on his left.

  A fork jabbed him in the buttocks. Then a giant of a man, top-hatted, with a carving knife in his hand, leant over him. He wore a broad white apron, and on it was written in large letters: CHAIRMAN OF THE JURY. The carving knife glistened in the lamplight.

  Rahul screamed and leapt off the table. He fell against the piano, recovered his balance, dashed past the revellers, and out of the vast dining room.

  He ran down the silent hotel corridor, banging on all the doors. But none opened to him. Finally, at Room No. 12A—hotels do not like using the number 13—the door gave way. Out of breath, shaking all over, our hero stumbled into the room and bolted the door behind him.

  It was a single room with a single bed. The bedclothes appeared to be in some disarray but Rahul hardly noticed. All he wanted was to end the nightmare he had been having and get some sleep. Kicking off his shoes, he climbed into the bed fully dressed.

  He had been lying there for at least five minutes, before he realized that he wasn’t alone in the bed. There was someone lying beside him, covered by a sheet. Rahul switched on the bedside lamp. Nothing moved, the body lay still. On the sheet, in large letters, were the words: BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME.

  He pulled the sheet back and stared down at his own dead self.

  THE GHOST WHO GOT IN

  It was Grandfather who finally decided that we would have to move to another house.

  And it was all because of a pret, a mischievous north Indian ghost, who had been making life difficult for everyone.

  Prets usually live in peepul trees, and that’s where our little ghost first had his abode—in the branches of a massive old peepul tree which had grown through the compound wall and spread into our garden. Part of the tree was on our side of the wall, part on the other side, shading the main road. It gave the ghost a commanding view of the entire area.

  For many years, the pret had lived there quite happily, without bothering anyone in our house. It did not bother me either, and I spent a lot of time in the peepul tree. Sometimes I went there to escape the adults at home, sometimes to watch the road and people who passed by. The peepul tree was cool on a hot day, and the heart-shaped leaves were always revolving in the breeze. This constant movement of the leaves also helped to disguise the movements of the pret, so that I never really knew exactly where he was sitting. But he paid no attention to me. The traffic on the road kept him fully occupied.

  Sometimes, when a tonga passed by, he would jump down and frighten the pony, and, as a result, the little pony cart would go rushing off in the wrong direction.

  Sometimes he would get into the engine of a car or a bus, which would break down soon afterwards.

  And he liked to knock the sola topees (pith helmets) off the heads of sahibs or officials, who would wonder how a strong breeze had sprung up so suddenly, only to die down just as quickly. Although this special kind of ghost could make himself felt, and sometimes heard, he was invisible to the human eye.

  I was not invisible to the human eye, and often got blamed for some of the pret’s pranks. If bicycle riders were struck by mango seeds or apricot stones, they would look up, see a small boy in the branches of the tree and threaten me with dire consequences.

  Drivers who went off after parking their cars in the shade would sometimes come back to find their tyres flat. My protests of innocence did not carry much weight. But when I mentioned the pret in the tree, they would look uneasy—either because they thought I must be mad, or because they were afraid of ghosts, especially prets. They would find other things to do and hurry away.

  At night no one walked beneath the peepul tree.

  It was said that if you yawned beneath the tree, the pret would jump down your throat and ruin your digestion. Our gardener, Chandu, who was always taking sick leave, blamed the pret for his tummy troubles. Once, when yawning, Chandu had forgotten to snap his fingers in front of his mouth, and the ghost had got in without any trouble.

  Now Chandu spent most of his time lying on a string bed in the courtyard of his small house. When Grandmother went to visit him, he would start groaning and holding his sides—the pain was so bad. But when she went away, he did not fuss so much. He claimed that the pain did not affect his appetite, and he ate a normal diet, in fact, a little more than normal—the extra amount was meant to keep the ghost happy!

  ‘Well, it isn’t our fault,’ said Grandfather, who had given permission to the Public Works Department to cut the tree, which had been on our land. They wanted to widen the road, and the tree and a bit of our wall were in the way. So both had to go.

  Several people protested, including the Maharaja of Jetpur, who lived across the road and who sometimes asked Grandfather over for a game of tennis.

  ‘That peepul tree has been there for hundreds of years,’ he said. ‘Who are we to cut it down?’

  ‘We,’ said the chief engineer, ‘are the PWD’

  And not even a ghost can prevail against the wishes of the Public Works Department.

  They brought men with saws and axes, and first, they lopped off all the branches, until the poor tree was quite naked. (It must have been at this moment that the pret moved out.) Then they sawed away at the trunk until, finally, the great old peepul came crashing down on the road, bringing down the telephone wires and an electric pole in the process, and knocking a large gap in the maharaja’s garden wall.

  It took them three days to clear the road, and during that time the chief engineer swallowed a lot of dust and tree pollen. For months afterwards he complained of a choking feeling, although no doctor could ever find anything in his throat.

  ‘It’s the pret’s doing,’ said the maharaja knowingly.

  ‘They should never have cut that tree.’

  Deprived of his tree, the pret decided that he would live in our house.

  I first became aware of his presence when I was sitting on the veranda steps, reading a novel. A tiny chuckling sound came from behind me. I looked around, but no one was to be seen. When I returned to my book, the chuckling started again. I paid it no attention. Then a shower of rose petals fell softly on to the pages of my open book. The pret wanted me to know he was there!

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘So you’ve come to stay with us. Now let me read.’

  He went away then; but as a good pret has to be bad in order to justify his existence, it was not long before he was up to all sorts of mischief.

  He began by hiding Grandmother’s spectacles.

  ‘I’m sure I put them down on the dining table,’ she grumbled.

  A little later, they were found balanced on the snout of a wild boar, whose stuffed and mounted head adorned the veranda wall, a memento of Grandfather’s youthful hunting exploits. Naturally, I was, at first, blamed for this prank. But a day or two later, when the spectacles disappeared again, only to be found dangling from the bars of the parrot’s cage, it was agreed that I was not to blame; for the parrot had once bitten off a piece of my finger, and I did not go near it any more.

  The parrot was hanging upside down, trying to peer through one of the lenses. I don’t know if they improved his vision, but what he saw certainly made him angry, because the pupils of his eyes went very small and he dug his beak into the spectacle frames, leaving them with a permanent dent. I caught them just before they fell to the floor.

  Our parrot must have been psychic, because even without the help of the spectacles, it seemed that he could see the pret. He would keep turning this way and that, lunging out at unseen fingers and protecting his tail from the tweaks of invisible hands. He had always refused to learn to talk, but now he became quite voluble and began to chatter in some unknown tongue, often screaming with rage and rolling his eyes in a frenzy.
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  ‘We’ll have to give that parrot away,’ said Grandmother. ‘He gets more bad-tempered by the day.’

  Grandfather was the next to be troubled.

  He went into the garden one morning to find all his prize sweet peas broken off and lying on the grass. Chandu thought the sparrows had destroyed the flowers, but we didn’t think the birds could have finished off every single bloom just before sunrise.

  ‘It must be the pret,’ said Grandfather, and I agreed.

  The pret did not trouble me much, because he remembered me from his peepul-tree days and knew I resented the tree being cut as much as he did. But he liked to catch my attention, and he did this by chuckling and squeaking near me when I was alone, or whispering in my ear when I was with someone else. Gradually I began to make out the occasional word—he had started learning English!

  Uncle Ken, who came to stay with us for long periods when he had little else to do (which was most of the time), was soon to suffer.

  He was a heavy sleeper, and once he’d gone to bed, he hated being woken up. So when he came to breakfast looking bleary-eyed and miserable, we asked him if he was feeling all right. ‘I couldn’t sleep a wink last night,’ he complained.

  ‘Whenever I was about to fall asleep, the bedclothes would be pulled off the bed. I had to get up at least a dozen times to pick them off the floor.’ He stared suspiciously at me. ‘Where were you sleeping last night, young man?’

  ‘In Grandfather’s room,’ I said. ‘I’ve lent you my room.’

  ‘It’s that ghost from the peepul tree,’ said Grandmother with a sigh.

  ‘Ghost!’ exclaimed Uncle Ken. ‘I didn’t know the house was haunted.’

  ‘It is now,’ said Grandmother. ‘First my spectacles, then the sweet peas, and now Ken’s bedclothes! What will it be up to next, I wonder?’

  We did not have to wonder for long.

  There followed a series of minor disasters. Vases fell off tables, pictures fell from walls. Parrots’ feathers turned up in the teapot, while the parrot himself let out indignant squawks and swear words in the middle of the night. Windows which had been closed would be found open, and open windows closed.