by Ruskin Bond
It was on the evening before our departure that something happened that would haunt me for a long time afterwards.
There was a feeling of restiveness as our days there drew to a close. The Rays had apparently made up their differences, although they weren’t talking very much. Mr Dutta was anxious to get back to his office in Delhi and Mrs Dutta’s rheumatism was playing up. I was restless too, wanting to return to my writing desk in Mussoorie.
That evening I decided to take one last stroll across the bridge to enjoy the cool breeze of a summer’s night in the mountains. The moon hadn’t come up, and it was really quite dark, although there were lamps at either end of the bridge providing sufficient light for those who wished to cross over.
I was standing in the middle of the bridge, in the darkest part, listening to the river thundering down the gorge, when I saw the sari-draped figure emerging from the lamplight and making towards the railings.
Instinctively I called out, ‘Gulabi!’
She half-turned towards me, but I could not see her clearly. The wind had blown her hair across her face and all I saw were wildly staring eyes. She raised herself over the railing and threw herself off the bridge. I heard the splash as her body struck the water far below.
Once again, I found myself running towards the part of the railing where she had jumped. And then someone was running towards the same spot, from the direction of the rest house. It was young Mr Ray.
‘My wife!’ he cried out. ‘Did you see my wife?’
He rushed to the railing and stared down at the swirling waters of the river.
‘Look! There she is!’ He pointed at a helpless figure bobbing about in the water.
We ran down the steep bank to the river, but the current had swept her on. Scrambling over rocks and bushes, we made frantic efforts to catch up with the drowning woman. But the river in that defile is a roaring torrent, and it was over an hour before we were able to retrieve poor Mrs Ray’s body, caught in driftwood about a mile downstream.
She was cremated not far from where we found her, and we returned to our various homes in gloom and grief, chastened, but none the wiser for the experience.
If you happen to be in that area and decide to cross the bridge late in the evening, you might see Gulabi’s ghost or hear the hoofbeats of Wilson’s horse as he canters across the old wooden bridge, looking for her. Or you might see the ghost of Mrs Ray and hear her husband’s anguished cry. Or there might be others. Who knows?
GHOSTS OF THE SAVOY
Whose ghost was it that Ram Singh (the Savoy bartender) saw last night? A figure in a long, black cloak, who stood for a few moments in the hotel’s dimly lit vestibule, and then moved into the shadows of the old lounge. Ram Singh followed the figure, but there was no one in the lounge and no door or window through which the man (if it was a man) had made his exit.
Ram Singh doesn’t tipple; or so he says. Nor is he the imaginative type.
‘Have you seen this person—this ghost—before?’ I asked him.
‘Yes, once. Last winter, when I was passing the ballroom, I heard someone playing the piano. The ballroom door was locked, and I couldn’t get in, nor could anyone else. I stood on a ledge and looked through one of the windows, and there was this person—a hooded figure, I could not see the face—sitting on the piano stool. I could hear the music playing, and I tapped on the window. The figure turned towards me, but the hood was empty, there was nothing there to see! I ran to my room and bolted the door. We should sell that piano, sir. There’s no one here to play it apart from the ghost.’
Almost any story about this old hotel in Mussoorie has a touch of the improbable about it, even when supported by facts. A previous owner, Mr McClintock, had a false nose—according to Nandu, who never saw it. So I checked with old Negi, who first came to work in the hotel as a room boy back in 1932 (a couple of years before I was born) and who, almost seventy years and two wives later, looks after the front office. Negi tells me it’s quite true.
‘I used to take McClintock Sahib his cup of cocoa last thing at night. After leaving his room, I’d dash around to one of the windows and watch him until he went to bed. The last thing he did, before putting the light out, was to remove his false nose and place it on the bedside table. He never slept with it on. I suppose it bothered him whenever he turned over or slept on his face. First thing in the morning, before having his cup of tea, he’d put it on again. A great man, McClintock Sahib.’
‘But how did he lose his nose in the first place?’ I asked.
‘Wife bit it off,’ said Nandu.
‘No, sir,’ said Negi, whose reputation for telling the truth is proverbial. ‘It was shot away by a German bullet during First World War. He got the Victoria Cross as compensation.’
‘And when he died, was he wearing his nose?’ I asked.
‘No, sir,’ said old Negi, continuing his tale with some relish. ‘One morning when I took the sahib his cup of tea, I found him stone dead, without his nose! It was lying on the bedside table. I suppose I should have left it there, but McClintock Sahib was a good man, I could not bear to have the whole world knowing about his false nose. So I stuck it back on his face and then went and informed the manager. A natural death, just a sudden heart attack. But I made sure that he went into his coffin with his nose attached!’
We all agreed that Negi was a good man to have around, especially in a crisis.
McClintock’s ghost is supposed to haunt the corridors of the hotel, but I have yet to encounter it. Will the ghost be wearing its nose? Old Negi thinks not (the false nose being man-made), but then, he hasn’t seen the ghost at close quarters, only receding into the distance, between the two giant deodars on the edge of the Beer Garden.
A lot of people who enter the Writers’ Bar look pretty far gone, and sometimes I have difficulty distinguishing the living from the dead. But the real ghosts are those who manage to slip away without paying for their drinks.
SOMETHING IN THE WATER
I discovered the pool near Rajpur on a hot summer’s day some fifteen years ago. It was shaded by close-growing sal trees, and looked cool and inviting. I took off my clothes and dived in.
The water was colder than I had expected. It was an icy, glacial cold. The sun never touched it for long, I supposed. Striking out vigorously, I swam to the other end of the pool and pulled myself up on the rocks, shivering.
But I wanted to swim some more. So I dived in again and did a gentle breaststroke towards the middle of the pool. Something slid between my legs. Something slimy, pulpy. I could see no one, hear nothing. I swam away, but the slippery floating thing followed me. I did not like it. Something curled around my leg. Not an underwater plant. Something that sucked at my foot. A long tongue licked my calf. I struck out wildly, thrust myself away from whatever it was that sought my company. Something lonely, lurking in the shadows. Kicking up spray, I swam like a frightened porpoise fleeing from some terror of the deep.
Safely out of the water, I found a warm, sunny rock and stood there, looking down at the water.
Nothing stirred. The surface of the pool was now calm and undisturbed. Just a few fallen leaves floating around. Not a frog, not a fish, not a water bird in sight. And that in itself seemed strange. For you would have expected some sort of pond life to have been in evidence.
But something lived in the pool, of that I was sure. Something very cold-blooded, colder and wetter than the water. Could it have been a corpse trapped in the weeds? I did not want to know; so I dressed and hurried away.
A few days later I left for Delhi, where I went to work in an ad agency, telling people how to beat the summer heat by drinking fizzy drinks that made you more thirsty. The pool in the forest was forgotten.
It was ten years before I visited Rajpur again. Leaving the small hotel where I was staying, I found myself walking through the same old sal forest, drawn almost irresistibly towards the pool where I had not been able to finish my swim. I was not over-eager to swim there again,
but I was curious to know if the pool still existed.
Well, it was there all right, although the surroundings had changed and a number of new houses and other buildings had come up where formerly there had only been wilderness. And there was a fair amount of activity in the vicinity of the pool.
A number of labourers were busy with buckets and rubber pipes, draining water from the pool. They had also dammed off and diverted the little stream that fed it.
Overseeing this operation was a well-dressed man in a white safari suit. I thought, at first, that he was an honorary forest warden, but it turned out that he was the owner of a new school that had been set up nearby.
‘Do you live in Rajpur?’ he asked.
‘I used to . . . Once upon a time . . . Why are you emptying the pool?’
‘It’s become a hazard,’ he said. ‘Two of my boys were drowned here recently. Both senior students. Of course, they weren’t supposed to be swimming here without permission, the pool is off-limits. But you know what boys are like. Make a rule and they feel duty-bound to break it.’
He told me his name was Kapoor, and led me back to his house, a newly-built bungalow with a wide, cool veranda. His servant brought us glasses of cold sherbet. We sat in cane chairs overlooking the pool and the forest. Across a clearing, a gravelled road led to the school buildings, newly whitewashed and glistening in the sun.
‘Were the boys there at the same time?’ I asked.
‘Yes, they were friends. And they must have been attacked by absolute fiends. Limbs twisted and broken, faces disfigured. But death was due to drowning—that was the verdict of the medical examiner.’
We gazed down at the shallows of the pool, where a couple of men were still at work, the others having gone for their midday meal.
‘Perhaps it would be better to leave the place alone,’ I said. ‘Put a barbed-wire fence around it. Keep your boys away. Thousands of years ago, this valley was an inland sea. A few small pools and streams are all that is left of it.’
‘I want to fill it in and build something there. An open-air theatre, maybe. We can always create an artificial pond somewhere else.’
Presently, only one man remained at the pool, knee-deep in muddy, churned-up water. And Mr Kapoor and I both saw what happened next.
Something rose out of the bottom of the pool. It looked like a giant snail, but its head was part-human, its body and limbs part-squid or octopus. An enormous succubi. It stood taller than the man in the pool. A creature soft and slimy, a survivor from our primeval past.
With a great sucking motion, it enveloped the man completely, so that only his arms and legs could be seen thrashing about wildly and futilely. The succubi dragged him down under the water.
Kapoor and I left the veranda and ran to the edge of the pool. Bubbles rose from the green scum near the surface. All was still and silent. And then, like bubblegum issuing from the mouth of a child, the mangled body of the man shot out of the water and came spinning towards us.
Dead and drowned and sucked dry of its fluids.
Naturally, no more work was done at the pool. The story was put out that the labourer had slipped and fallen to his death on the rocks. Kapoor swore me to secrecy. His school would have to close down if there were too many strange drownings and accidents in its vicinity. But he walled the place off from his property and made it practically inaccessible. The dense undergrowth of the sal forest now hides the approach.
The monsoon rains came and the pool filled up again.
I can tell you how to get there if you’d like to see it. But I wouldn’t advise you to go for a swim.
THE FAMILY GHOST
‘Now tell us a ghost story,’ I told Bibiji, my landlady, one evening, as she made herself comfortable on the old couch in the veranda. ‘There must have been at least one ghost in your village.’
‘Oh, there were many,’ said Bibiji, who never tired of telling weird tales. ‘Wicked churels and mischievous prets. And there was a munjia who ran away.’
‘What is a munjia?’ I asked.
‘A munjia is the ghost of a Brahmin youth who had committed suicide on the eve of his marriage. Our village munjia had taken up residence in an old peepul tree.’
‘I wonder why ghosts always live in peepul trees!’ I said.
‘I’ll tell you about that another time,’ said Bibiji. ‘But listen to the story about the munjia . . .’
Near the village peepul tree (according to Bibiji), there lived a family of Brahmins who were under the special protection of this munjia. The ghost had attached himself to this particular family (they were related to the girl to whom he had once been betrothed) and showed his fondness for them by throwing stones, bones, night soil and rubbish at them, making hideous noises and terrifying them whenever he found an opportunity. Under his patronage, the family soon dwindled away. One by one they died, the only survivor being an idiot boy, whom the ghost did not bother, because he thought it beneath his dignity to do so.
But, in a village, birth, marriage and death must come to all, and so it was not long before the neighbours began to make plans for the marriage of the idiot.
After a meeting of the village elders, they agreed, first, that the idiot should be married; and second, that he should be married to a shrew of a girl who had reached the age of sixteen without finding a suitor.
The shrew and the idiot were soon married off, and then left to manage for themselves. The poor idiot had no means of earning a living and had to resort to begging. Previously, he had barely been able to support himself, and now his wife was an additional burden. The first thing she did when she entered his house was to give him a box on the ear and send him out to bring something home for their dinner.
The poor fellow went from door to door, but nobody gave him anything, because the same people who had arranged his marriage were annoyed that he had not given them a wedding feast. When, in the evening, he returned home empty-handed, his wife cried out, ‘Are you back, you lazy idiot? Where have you been so long, and what have you brought for me?’ When she found he hadn’t even a paisa, she flew into a rage and, tearing off his turban, threw it into the peepul tree. Then, taking up her broom, she thrashed her husband until he fled from the house, howling with pain.
But the shrew’s anger had not yet diminished. Seeing her husband’s turban in the peepul tree, she began to beat the tree trunk, accompanying her blows with strong abuses. The ghost who lived in the tree was sensitive to her blows and, alarmed that her language might have the effect of finishing him off altogether, he took to his invisible heels, and left the tree on which he had lived for many years.
Riding on a whirlwind, the ghost soon caught up with the idiot, who was still running down the road leading away from the village.
‘Not so fast, brother!’ cried the ghost. ‘Desert your wife, certainly, but not your old family ghost! The shrew has driven me out of my peepul tree. Truly, a ghost is no match for a woman with a vile tongue! From now on we are brothers and must seek our fortunes together. But first, promise me that you will not return to your wife.’
The idiot made this promise very willingly, and together they continued their journey until they reached a large city.
Before entering the city, the ghost said, ‘Now listen, brother, and if you follow my advice, your fortune is made. In this city there are two very beautiful girls, one is the daughter of a raja, and the other the daughter of a rich moneylender. I will go and possess the daughter of the raja and her father will try every sort of remedy without effect. Meanwhile, you must walk daily through the streets in the robes of a sadhu, and when the raja comes and asks you to cure his daughter, make any terms that you think suitable. As soon as I see you, I shall leave the girl. Then I shall go and possess the daughter of the moneylender. But do not go anywhere near her, because I am in love with the girl and do not intend giving her up. If you come near her, I shall break your neck.’
The ghost went off on his whirlwind, and the idiot entered the city on h
is own, and found a bed in the local rest house for pilgrims.
The next day the city was agog with the news that the raja’s daughter was dangerously ill. Physicians—hakims and vaids—came and went, and all pronounced the girl incurable. The raja was distracted with grief, and offered half his fortune to anyone who would cure his beautiful and only child. The idiot, having smeared himself with dust and ashes, began walking the streets, occasionally crying out, ‘Bhum, bhum, bho! Bom Bhola Nath!’
The people were struck by his appearance, and taking him for a wise and holy man, reported him to the raja. The latter immediately entered the city and, prostrating himself before the idiot, begged him to cure his daughter. After a show of modesty and reluctance, the idiot was persuaded to accompany the raja back to the palace, and the girl was brought before him.
Her hair was dishevelled; her teeth were chattering, and her eyes almost starting from their sockets. She howled and cursed and tore at her clothes. When the idiot confronted her, he recited certain meaningless spells; and the ghost, recognizing him, cried out, ‘I go, I go! Bhum, bhum, bho!’
‘Give me a sign that you have gone,’ demanded the idiot.
‘As soon as I leave the girl,’ said the ghost, ‘you will see that mango tree uprooted. That is the sign I’ll give.’
A few minutes later, the mango tree came crashing down. The girl recovered from her fit and seemed unaware of what had happened to her. The news spread through the city, and the idiot became the object of respect and wonder. The raja kept his word and gave him half his fortune; and so began a period of happiness and prosperity for the idiot.