Whispers in the Dark

by Ruskin Bond

  Finally, Uncle Ken found a crow’s nest in his bed, and, on tossing it out of the window, was attacked by two crows.

  Then Aunt Ruby came to stay, and things quietened down for a time.

  Did Aunt Ruby’s powerful personality have an effect on the pret, or was he just sizing her up?

  ‘I think the pret has taken a fancy to your aunt,’ said Grandfather mischievously. ‘He’s behaving himself for a change.’

  This may have been true, because the parrot, who had picked up some of the English words being tried out by the pret, now called out, ‘Kiss, kiss,’ whenever Aunt Ruby was in the room.

  ‘What a charming bird,’ said Aunt Ruby.

  ‘You can keep him if you like,’ said Grandmother.

  One day, Aunt Ruby came into the house, covered in rose petals.

  ‘I don’t know where they came from,’ she exclaimed. ‘I was sitting in the garden, drying my hair, when handfuls of petals came showering down on me!’

  ‘It likes you,’ said Grandmother.

  ‘What likes me?’

  ‘The ghost.’

  ‘What ghost?’

  ‘The pret. It came to live in the house when the peepul tree was cut down.’

  ‘What nonsense!’ said Aunt Ruby.

  ‘Kiss, kiss!’ screamed the parrot.

  ‘There aren’t any ghosts, prets or other kinds,’ said Aunt Ruby firmly.

  ‘Kiss, kiss!’ screeched the parrot again. Or was it the parrot? The sound seemed to be coming from the ceiling.

  ‘I wish that parrot would shut up.’

  ‘It isn’t the parrot,’ I said. ‘It’s the pret.’

  Aunt Ruby gave me a cuff over the ear and stormed out of the room.

  But she had offended the pret. From being her admirer, he turned into her enemy. Somehow her toothpaste got switched with a tube of Grandfather’s shaving cream. When she appeared in the dining room, foaming at the mouth, we ran for our lives, Uncle Ken shouting that she’d got rabies.

  Two days later, Aunt Ruby complained that she had been struck on the nose by a grapefruit, which had leapt mysteriously from the pantry shelf and hurled itself at her.

  ‘If Ruby and Ken stay here much longer, they’ll both have nervous breakdowns,’ said Grandfather thoughtfully.

  ‘I thought they broke down long ago,’ I said.

  ‘None of your cheek,’ snapped Aunt Ruby.

  ‘He’s in league with that pret to try and get us out of here,’ said Uncle Ken.

  ‘Don’t listen to him—you can stay as long as you like,’ said Grandmother.

  The pret, however, did not feel so hospitable, and the persecution of Aunt Ruby continued.

  ‘When I looked in the mirror this morning,’ she complained bitterly, ‘I saw a little monster, with huge ears, bulging eyes, flaring nostrils and a toothless grin!’

  ‘You don’t look that bad, Aunt Ruby,’ I said, trying to be nice.

  ‘It was either you or that imp you call a pret,’ said Aunt Ruby. ‘And if it’s a ghost, then it’s time we all moved to another house.’

  Uncle Ken had another idea.

  ‘Let’s drive the ghost out,’ he said. ‘I know a sadhu who rids houses of evil spirits.’

  ‘But the pret’s not evil,’ I said. ‘Just mischievous.’

  Uncle Ken went off to the bazaar and came back a few hours later with a scruffy-looking sadhu—a sadhu being a man who is supposed to have given up all worldly goods, including most of his clothes. The sadhu prowled about the house and lighted incense in all the rooms, despite squawks of protest from the parrot. All the while he chanted various magic spells. He then collected a fee of thirty rupees and promised that we would not be bothered again by the pret.

  As he was leaving, he was suddenly blessed with a shower—no, it was really a downpour—of dead flowers, decaying leaves, orange peels and banana skins. All spells forgotten, he ran to the gate and made for the safety of the bazaar.

  Aunt Ruby declared that it had become impossible to sleep at night because of the devilish chuckling that came from beneath her pillow. She packed her bags and left.

  Uncle Ken stayed on. He was still having trouble with his bedclothes, and he was beginning to talk to himself, which was a bad sign.

  One day, I found him on the drawing-room sofa, laughing like a madman. Even the parrot was so alarmed that it was silent, head lowered, and curious. Uncle Ken was red in the face—literally red all over!

  ‘What happened to your face, Uncle?’ I asked.

  He stopped laughing and gave me a long, hard look. I realized that there had been no joy in his laughter.

  ‘Who painted the washbasin red without telling me?’ he asked in a quavering voice.

  ‘We’ll have to move, I suppose,’ said Grandfather later. ‘Even if it’s only for a couple of months. I’m worried about Ken. I’ve told him that I painted the washbasin myself but forgot to tell him. He doesn’t believe me. He thinks it’s the pret or the boy, or both of them! Ken needs a change. So do we. There’s my brother’s house at the other end of the town. He won’t be using it for a few months. We’ll move in next week.’

  And so, a few days and several disasters later, we began moving house.

  Two bullock carts laden with furniture and heavy luggage were sent ahead. Uncle Ken went with them. The roof of our old car was piled high with bags and kitchen utensils. Grandfather took the wheel, I sat beside him, and Granny sat in state at the back.

  We started off and had gone some way down the main road, when Grandfather started having trouble with the steering wheel. It appeared to have come loose, and the car began veering about on the road, scattering cyclists, pedestrians, stray dogs and hens. A stray cow refused to move, but we missed it somehow—and then suddenly we were off the road and making for a low wall.

  Grandfather pressed his foot down on the brake, but we only went faster. ‘Watch out!’ he shouted.

  It was the Maharaja of Jetpur’s garden wall, made of single bricks, and the car knocked it down quite easily and went on through it, coming to a stop on the maharaja’s lawn.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ said Grandmother.

  ‘Well, we missed the flower beds,’ said Grandfather.

  ‘Someone’s been tinkering with the car. Our pret, no doubt.’

  The maharaja and two attendants came running towards us.

  The maharaja was a perfect gentleman, and when he saw that the driver was Grandfather, he beamed with pleasure.

  ‘Delighted to see you, old chap!’ he exclaimed. ‘Jolly decent of you to drop in. How about a game of tennis?’

  ‘Sorry to have come in through the wall,’ apologized Grandfather.

  ‘Don’t mention it, old chap. The gate was closed, so what else could you do?’

  Grandfather was as much of a gentleman as the maharaja, so he thought it only fair to join him in a game of tennis. Grandmother and I watched and drank lemonades. After the game, the maharaja waved us goodbye and we drove back through the hole in the wall and out on to the road. There was nothing much wrong with the car.

  We hadn’t gone far when we heard a peculiar sound, as if someone was chuckling and talking to himself. It came from the roof of the car.

  ‘Is the parrot out there on the luggage rack?’ asked Grandfather.

  ‘No,’ said Grandmother. ‘He went ahead with Ken.’

  Grandfather stopped the car, got out and examined the roof.

  ‘Nothing up there,’ he said, getting in again and starting the engine. ‘I thought I heard the parrot.’

  When we had gone a little further, the chuckling started again. A squeaky little voice began talking in English, in the tone of the parrot.

  ‘It’s the pret,’ whispered Grandmother. ‘What is he saying?’

  The pret’s squawk grew louder. ‘Come on, come on!’ he cried gleefully. ‘A new house! The same old friends! What fun we’re going to have!’

  Grandfather stopped the car. He backed into a driveway, turned ro
und, and began driving back to the old house.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Grandmother.

  ‘Going home,’ said Grandfather.

  ‘And what about the pret?’

  ‘What about him? He’s decided to live with us, so we’ll have to make the best of it. You can’t solve a problem by running away from it.’

  ‘All right,’ said Granny. ‘But what will we do about Ken?’

  ‘It’s up to him, isn’t it? He’ll be all right if he finds something to do.’

  Grandfather stopped the car in front of the veranda steps.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I said.

  ‘It will have to be a picnic lunch,’ said Grandmother. ‘Almost everything was sent off on the bullock carts.’

  As we got out of the car and climbed the veranda steps, we were greeted by showers of rose petals and sweet-scented jasmine. ‘How lovely!’ exclaimed Grandmother, smiling. ‘I think he likes us, after all.’

  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 Latin) 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, and 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 as 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.

  The vaults of the ruined mansion were rumoured to contain a buried treasure—the amassed wealth of the lady Susanna. But no one dared go down there, for the vaults 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. 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!

  ‘Today no one enters those ruins, where once there was mirth and laughter. She was the Zamindari lady, the owner of much land, and she administered her estate with a strong hand. She was kind if the rent was paid when it was due, but terrible if someone failed to pay.

  ‘Well, over fifty years have gone by since she was laid to rest, but still men speak of her with awe. Her spirit is restless, and it is said that she often visits the scenes of her former splendour. She has been seen walking through this gate, or riding in the gardens, or driving in her phaeton down the Rajpur road.’

  ‘And what happened to all those husbands?’ I asked.

  ‘Most of them died mysterious deaths. Even the doctors were baffled. Tomkins Sahib drank too much. The lady soon tired of him. A drunken husband is a burdensome creature, she was heard to say. He would eventually have drunk himself to death, but she was an impatient woman and was anxious to replace him. You see those datura bushes growing wild in the grounds? They have always done well here.’

  ‘Belladonna?’ I suggested.

  ‘That’s right, huzoor. Introduced in the whisky-soda, it put him to sleep forever.’

  ‘She was quite humane in her way.’

  ‘Oh, very humane, sir. She hated to see anyone suffer. One sahib, I don’t know his name, drowned in the tank behind the house, where the water lilies grew. But she made sure he was half-dead before he fell in. She had large, powerful hands, they said.’

  ‘Why did she bother to marry them? Couldn’t she just have had men friends?’

  ‘Not in those days, huzoor. Respectable society would not have tolerated it. Neither in India nor in the West would it have been permitted.’

  ‘She was born out of her time,’ I remarked.

  ‘True, sir. And remember, most of them were fortune hunters. So we need not waste too much pity on them.’

  ‘She did not waste any.’

  ‘She was without pity. Especially when she found out what they were really after. Snakes had a better chance of survival.’

  ‘How did the other husbands take their leave of this world?’

  ‘Well, the colonel sahib shot himself while cleaning his rifle. Purely an accident, huzoor. Although, some say she had loaded his gun without his knowledge. Such was her reputation by now that she was suspected even when innocent. But she bought her way out of trouble. It was easy enough, if you were wealthy.’

  ‘And the fourth husband?’

  ‘Oh, he died a natural death. There was a cholera epidemic that year, and he was carried off by the haija. Although, again, there were some who said that a good dose of arsenic produced the same symptoms! Anyway, it was cholera on the death certificate. And the doctor who signed it was the next to marry her.’

  ‘Being a doctor, he was probably quite careful about what he ate and drank.’

  ‘He lasted about a year.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He was bitten by a cobra.’

  ‘Well, that was just bad luck, wasn’t it? You could hardly blame it on Susanna.’

  ‘No, huzoor, but the cobra was in his bedroom. It was coiled around the bedpost. And when he undressed for the night, it struck! He was dead when Susanna came into the room an hour later. She had a way with snakes. She did not harm them and they never attacked her.’

  ‘And there were no antidotes in those days. Exit the doctor. Who was the sixth husband?’

  ‘A handsome man. An indigo planter. He had gone bankrupt when the indigo trade came to an end. He was hoping to recover his fortune with the good lady’s help. But our Susanna Mem, she did not believe in sharing her fortune with anyone.’

  ‘How did she remove the indigo planter?’

  ‘It was said that she lavished strong drinks upon him, and when he lay helpless, she assisted him on the road we all have to take one day, by pouring molten lead in his ears.’

  ‘A painless death, I’m told.’

  ‘But a terrible price to pay, huzoor, simply because one is no longer needed . . .’

  We walked along the dusty highway, enjoying the evening breeze, and sometime later we en
tered the Roshanara Gardens, in those days Delhi’s most popular and fashionable meeting place.

  ‘You have told me how six of her husbands died, Naushad. I thought there were seven?’

  ‘Ah, the seventh was a gallant young magistrate who perished right here, huzoor. They were driving through the park after dark, when the lady’s carriage was attacked by brigands. In defending her, the young man received a fatal sword wound.’

  ‘Not the lady’s fault, Naushad.’

  ‘No, huzoor. But he was a magistrate, remember, and the assailants, one of whose relatives had been convicted by him, were out for revenge. Oddly enough, though, two of the men were given employment by the lady Susanna at a later date. You may draw your own conclusions.’

  ‘And were there others?’

  ‘Not husbands. But an adventurer, a soldier of fortune came along. He found her treasure, they say. And he lies buried with it, in the cellars of the ruined house. His bones lie scattered there, among gold and silver and precious jewels. The cobras guard them still! But how he perished was a mystery, and remains so till this day.’

  ‘And Susanna? What happened to her?’

  ‘She lived to a ripe old age. If she paid for her crimes, it wasn’t in this life! She had no children, but she started an orphanage and gave generously to the poor and to various schools and institutions, including a home for widows. She died peacefully in her sleep.’

  ‘A merry widow,’ I remarked. ‘The black widow spider!’

  Don’t go looking for Susanna’s tomb. It vanished some years ago, along with the ruins of her mansion. A smart new housing estate came up on the site, but not after several workmen and a contractor succumbed to snakebite! Occasionally, residents complain of a malignant ghost in their midst, who is given to flagging down cars, especially those driven by single men. There have also been one or two mysterious disappearances.

  And after dusk, an old-fashioned horse and carriage can sometimes be seen driven through the Roshanara Gardens. If you chance upon it, ignore it, my friend. Don’t stop to answer any questions from the beautiful, fair lady who smiles at you from behind lace curtains. She’s still looking for her final victim.