by M. M. Kaye
Well, there it is. My own true ghost story. The only one, I am thankful to say, that I experienced at first hand. There were many others that I heard of during my years in India, and there was also the ghost that haunted the house in Somerset which my paternal grandfather acquired after my grandmother died, and in which he lived for the rest of his life. But thank goodness that, and the others, were tales I heard at second hand: though I have no reason to disbelieve them. Quite the contrary, in fact. Which is why I am a firm believer in ghosts. India is full of them — and of things for which there is no rational explanation. As, for instance Jim Corbett’s* true tale of the Demon of Trisul and the Temple Tiger of Dabidhura. And though the very idea of haunted houses scares me just as badly as it scares the vast majority of humans, I also find it comforting; because if there are ghosts, then there must be life after death.
In the months after that terrifying night at The Bower we often went over to play with Sybil. But we never again stayed with her overnight or ventured near that room. Nor did we talk about what had happened there. I think we had all been so scared that we deliberately pushed the whole thing into the back of our minds and refused to think about it. Yet curiously enough, even after all those years, describing the event of that last Chunkychaddle — for it was the last — I felt a distinct cold shiver crawl down my spine, and was back once more in Alice’s room on a moonlit night over sixty years ago. Sixty years! How quickly the time has gone. How terribly quickly…
* Merchants.
* The Temple Tiger, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, My India, etc., etc.
Chapter 12
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare…
Meredith, ‘The Woods of Westermain’
Of all the crowding memories that I have of our days at Oaklands, there are only two other frightening ones; both of which occurred during the monsoon, a time when the hillsides are so thickly blanketed with mist that one can barely see more than a yard or two ahead. The first happened while we were being taken for an afternoon walk by a temporary governess along the lower road that led to the Viceroy’s weekend cottage, The Retreat.
This road was little more than a footpath through the forest; a shadowed, moss-carpeted track along the steep slopes of the hillside, used since time immemorial by the hill folk — wood-cutters, charcoal-burners, gypsies and shikaris — most of whom now preferred to use the later British-built rickshaw road which took the main traffic, including the Viceregal cars. From the outer edge of the lower road the hillside dropped sharply downwards for miles before levelling out into an unseen valley, while on the opposite side there was a high bank buttressed by a tangle of tree-roots and draped with maidenhair fern, wild violets and those pink rock-plants with big fleshy leaves.* Pine, fir and deodar, rhododendrons and chestnuts towered above it, and even in fine weather one could seldom catch more than a glimpse of sky through the dense canopy of leaves, pine needles and tree ferns overhead.
On this particular day — as on almost every day during the months of the monsoon — we could barely see more than the dark, dripping trunks of the nearest trees; and those only faintly, for the mist was curling and creeping between them like smoke from a forest fire. We had heard no sound; not so much as the rustle of a leaf or the snap of a twig. Yet suddenly, barely three or four yards ahead of us, a troop of langurs — the grey, black-faced, white-whiskered descendants of the tribe who alone of all Hanuman’s monkey folk refused to help Rama rescue Sita — materialized noiselessly out of the fog like an army of ghosts, and crossing the path, leapt up the high bank to our right, to vanish into the misty forest above. On their heels, acting as a rearguard and walking very slowly on all fours, came the patriarch of the group; the biggest langur I have ever seen, before or since. Until then I had no idea that the species could grow to that size, and the sight of that huge, grey creature frightened me even more than the sound of The Bower ghost had done.
We had checked instinctively on seeing the first of the troop, because langurs are known to have uncertain tempers, and we were standing very still when that King-Emperor of all langurs stalked across the path. He would have dwarfed a Shetland pony, for even on all fours he was nearly the same height as I was, and the temporary governess, a townee if ever there was one, gave a gasp of terror and hastily retreated behind us. The movement made the monster aware of our presence, and he turned his head and favoured us with a long, scornful stare before springing silently up the bank to melt into the mist in the wake of his band.
I remember that after he vanished we stayed where we were, listening, for at least a minute. But though in general langurs on the move can crash through the branches with as much noise as a gang of football fans on the rampage, the misty silence remained unbroken. Apart from the breathing of our panic-stricken governess we could hear no other sound, and abandoning our walk we turned with one accord and hurried back home to Oaklands.
I don’t remember anything much about that governess. But neither Bets nor I have ever forgotten our encounter with the King Kong of the forest. And when I hear people doubting the existence of creatures like the Abominable Snowman, and speaking scornfully of travellers’ tales and the gullible fools who believe them, I remember the thousands upon thousands of square miles of unexplored rhododendron forest that clothe the lower slopes of the Himalayan ranges, and the sea of wrinkled plush that spreads away in wave upon wave up to the snowline and is in reality made up of billions of trees among which man has barely penetrated. There are, or there were then, few paths and no metalled roads through that trackless wilderness; so who knows how many species hitherto unknown to man are lurking there? After all, no one believed in the giant panda until comparatively recently, and the skins that were brought back from the Far East were pronounced fakes. There could be hundreds of unknown birds, beasts and plants in those vast, untrodden forests, waiting for those who dare to ‘enter these enchanted woods’…
The other frightening incident that I remember from our halcyon days at Oaklands also took place on a misty afternoon during the monsoon. A clutch of baby ducklings whose mother had been carried off by a hill fox had been brought into the house to be hand-reared by us, and that day we had put them into a wooden box, lined with flannel, which we pushed under the window-seat of our dining-room for safety. But sometime during the afternoon a wild cat crept into the room through the door leading into a short covered passageway that ended in the kitchen quarters, where the outer door had been left ajar. There had been no rain that day, but the mist that lay thick on the hillsides stole into the house through every crack and cranny, and by the time we returned from our afternoon walk the day had become so dark that Abdul Karim was already lighting the lamps as Bets and I rushed into the dining-room to peer at the baby ducklings. The box was empty. The little quacking balls of yellow fluff had gone and there were bloodstains on the flannel; and when Abdul, in answer to our howls of woe, came hurrying in with a lamp, we saw that there were drops of blood on the carpet and along the passageway and on the kitchen floor, while on the path outside lay one dead and mangled duckling; presumably dropped by its killer on hearing us arrive back from our walk.
The wild cat, emboldened by the mist, must have been prospecting for scraps outside the kitchen door, and lured by the cheeping of the ducklings, found its way into the dining-room and polished off the entire brood. We didn’t recover from the nightmare horror of that for some days. I suppose it was the bloodstains and the fact that it was such a dark and misty day that made us keep on picturing that wild cat creeping into our own familiar house and clawing out those poor, helpless little balls of fluff one by one … There can only have been just room for it to insert a paw between the top of the box and the underside of the window-seat; yet it had caught all of them. We liked cats. But wild cats, with their pointed ears, their fierce yellow eyes and ferocious faces, were something quite different: creatures of the dark forest and, like leopards, savage and frightening.
There were times when, lying
in bed and listening to the karka deer barking, I would think how safe children in England must feel at night in a country where there were no wild animals. Not that I would ever have dreamt of changing places with them, for as far as I was concerned every inch of India was enchanted.
I cannot use ‘idyllic’ to describe my childhood there, because the dictionary defines that word as ‘peaceful or romantically blissful scene, incident, etc.’ This is not an accurate picture of India. But then there are different shades of enchantment — just as there are two kinds of magic, black and white. I was always aware of that, and it was part of the charm that a forest that could be unbelievably beautiful on a cloudless day — green, scented, spangled with ferns and flowers and full of bird songs — could change with the mist into a shadowy world in which giant langurs could appear and disappear without sound. Or that the enormous expanse of golden, sun-burnt grass on the mountainside below the mule-track could suddenly turn hostile when something that had looked like a patch of freckled shadow thrown by a thorn bush stirred and stretched, and turned into a leopard that loped unhurriedly away along the hillside to vanish among the nearest outcrop of rock.
There were always two sides and a hundred different facets to India; and I loved and was fascinated by them all. Just as I loved the two completely different aspects of the Simla hills that depended on which way you looked at them, and from where. People who have never been there and think of Simla solely in terms of the youthful Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills or Under the Deodars probably imagine it as densely wooded. And they are right. But only half right. For though the slopes that face north and north-east (thereby escaping the worst of the sun because by midday they are in the shade) are thick with trees, the ones facing south and south-west are parched and barren. This is because they take the furnace glare of the sun and the full blast of the hot winds that blow off the sandy wastes of the Thar and the deserts of Rajputana; and lacking shade or any defence against those hot winds, few seeds manage to sprout, and those few, with no thick mat of rotted leaves or the grappling nets of tree-roots to protect the soil and hold it in place, fall victim to erosion as the bare hillsides take the brunt of the downpour when the rain-clouds of the monsoon roll in across the plains to crash down on the Himalayas like storm-driven breakers on a reef.
It was Buckie, standing in the gardens of his beloved Dukani on the hilltop overlooking Oaklands, who first showed me that if one stood on one particular vantage-point on the lawn and looked northwards toward the snows, the enormous ranges appeared as bare as the palm of one’s hand except where the shadowed sides of some outlying spur faced north; while if one crossed the lawn to another viewpoint, every hillside as far as the eye could reach was covered with forests. An all gold world or an all dark-green one. Yet both were only the two faces of the same sea of mountains. Two sides of the same coin. India … How lucky I was to live there!
Looking back at myself as a child and realizing that young children are apt to accept anything, whether good or bad, without question, simply because they have nothing to compare it with or have not yet learnt to make comparisons, I find it strange that I should have been so strongly aware of my own good fortune. It would seem more reasonable if I had taken my surroundings and the manner in which I spent my days for granted. Yet I never did, and the only explanation I can find for this is that my first visit to my native land must have been more uncomfortable and traumatic than I supposed; even though I remember so little of it. But the cumulative effect of the necessary restrictions on board ship, the discipline of an English nursery (and more particularly, a Scottish one), the fact that my Kaye grandparents and my Aunt Molly, together with their respective household staffs, considered that ‘children should be seen and not heard’, the climate (which was frequently cold and wet) and the general crossness of British grown-ups who seldom if ever had the time and certainly not the inclination to sit on the floor and discuss local affairs and gossip with a child (as any member of an Indian household could be trusted to do at the drop of a hat, and without talking down either!) had been shattering enough to make me draw comparisons between the citizens, scenery and climate of the country I had been born in, and the chilly, unfamiliar and dauntingly unfriendly land that my parents persisted in referring to as ‘home’ — and in which I must always remember not to speak until I was spoken to!
The trees and flowers in Belait had lacked the flamboyance of those in India; as had the plumage of the birds and the colour and size of the butterflies. Then there were no monkeys or pi-dogs or jackals, and (this was a distinct asset) no dangerous wild animals either. But apart from that last, I had seen very little to admire in my native land and had been delighted to see India again. India never let me down; not then or later. And one of the clearest memories I have of my first rapturous homecoming is of standing in the garden of a house on Bombay’s Malabar Hill, where we were staying with friends for a few days after disembarking, and seeing the fishing fleet put out to sea in a spectacular sunset — the kind you never see in Western countries. The last low rays of the sinking sun had caught their sails and made them look like a flight of pinkish-gold butterflies drifting out over the darkening water, and overhead the sky was turning green, while on Malabar Hill the trees were full of birds coming home to roost and the air smelt of jasmine and roses, and I could hear all the far-away sounds of the city drifting up from below.
Years later I was to see a duplicate of that lovely sight thousands of miles to the eastward, off the coast of North China; and once again ‘it hit me where I lived’ — to use an expressive phrase of my father’s. Yet it is the earlier sight, that butterfly flight of sails setting out into the Indian Ocean from Bombay, seen from Malabar Hill when I was not yet five years old, that is still the clearer of the two. The other is just an echo of something that had happened before — the memory of a memory.
Right up to the end of the Second World War and the Chinese invasion of Tibet, the mule-track behind Oaklands was in constant use by Tibetan traders bringing their wares to Simla. Enchanting wares, the product of a race of artists and craftsmen who worked in wood and metal and precious stones; men and women who carved, wove cloth, painted fabulous pictures on vellum, made prayer-wheels and devil-masks, sticks of incense and endless other odds and ends for which there was always a ready market in the shops and bazaars of India’s summer capital. There is a marvellous description of such artefacts in Kim, where they form the bulk of the objects for sale in Lurgan-Sahib’s shop on the Mall. These goods were brought over the passes and along the wandering tracks through the forests and across the bare hillsides in bulging panniers slung over the backs of mules and pack-ponies; and whenever we heard the jingle of the mule-bells, Bets and I would rush out of the house and up to the crest of the ridge, and sitting on top of the dry, grass-grown bank that overlooked the track, watch the mule-train pass and call out greetings to the smiling, slant-eyed Tibetans.
The men wore long, loose robes of hand-woven wool that smelt of wood-smoke and asafoetida, thick-soled felt boots and curious duffle hats with ear-flaps that could be tied down to protect them from the cold. Their women, who walked with them (only very small children rode on the mules, while infants in arms were invariably carried on their mother’s backs), were more colourful, for they wore great necklaces of silver set with coral and lumps of raw turquoise, enchanting head-dresses of black felt sewn with flat plaques of turquoise, and a species of hand-woven apron bordered with a multitude of gaily coloured stripes. They were smiling, friendly and gentle people who, being traders, spoke a certain amount of Hindustani, so that we could pass the time of day with them. And sometimes they would throw us small gifts such as a stick of incense, a tiny filigree betelnut box set with uncut garnets, or a little lump of turquoise matrix with a hole in it which one could wear on a string round one’s neck, like a charm. In return we would give them whatever fruit happened to be ripe or, when there was no fruit, a flower or two from the garden, which they would sniff delightedly b
efore tucking it behind their ear. Running up the hill to exchange pleasantries and wave to them as they went by was always a favourite pastime of ours. But it was only one of many.
There being no TV and no radio either when I was young, we had to invent our own amusements; and we were, of course, lucky enough to have a fantastically beautiful playground in which to carry out our various ploys. But when we were finally sent back to England and dispatched to a boarding-school, our holidays were spent in any number of different and very ordinary places; among them Aunt Lizzie’s house in Bedford, where the garden was no more than a narrow strip of ground separated from its neighbours by a high brick wall, and backed on to a railway siding which ensured that the few horse-chestnut trees, a scattering of gloomy-looking laurel bushes and the even fewer flowers that struggled to survive in that cramped space, were all liberally coated with soot from the steam-driven trains that huffed and puffed past less than a hundred yards away. Yet this far from alluring back garden — together with a derelict house on the abandoned lot next door — provided us with endless ploys, and of all our holiday homes in England, Aunt Lizzie’s was our favourite one by far.
Out at Mahasu we had no artificial, ready-made entertainment. We devised our own; which included stalking the bands of brown rhesus monkeys (we never took similar liberties with the langurs), chasing butterflies, constructing and furnishing houses for elves among the roots of pine trees, inventing stories, building tree-houses in which to play Swiss Family Robinson, weaving baskets out of dry grass stems and filling them with moss and flowers, and a hundred other activities. At least twice a week we would climb the hill path (it was little more than a goat-track) to Buckie’s house, Dukani, and help — or more likely hinder — his head mali, Khundun, a particular friend of ours, in picking up windfalls in the orchard, sweeping the narrow gravel paths or, squatting happily on the warm, sun-baked planks that covered the water-tank, we would listen to tales of his youth and stories of the gods and demons and creatures of the hills.
