Haunting Bombay

by Shilpa Agarwal

  She glanced at the mound that was her grandmother, her stony face made gentle by sleep, her jaw drooping onto the pillow. She reached her hand to Maji’s face until she could feel warmth emanating from it. Then, without a sound, she slid off the bed and crawled down the hallway like someone dying in a desert. When the effort grew too much, she laid her head on the cool floor and caught her breath, then continued in this way until she reached the bathroom.

  Once there, she pulled herself up and peeked into the bucket. The baby ghost opened her eyes and looked up as if she were drowning in air. She was almost bald, her lustrous mane having fallen out and scattered across the bathroom except for a few, sterling strands that glimmered weakly like perishing fireflies.

  “Don’t die,” Pinky whispered.

  But the baby ghost only stared at Pinky with empty, water-seeking eyes.

  Pinky staggered to her feet.

  She turned on the tap but nothing came out, not even a drip. Then she pulled herself to the sink in the hallway, then to the kitchen. She felt dazed, confused, and so very tired. She dropped to her knees. A thought came to her. Again she stood and made her way to the east hallway. Quietly, fearfully, she opened a door.

  It was almost midnight when Pinky returned to the bathroom. “Baby ghost?”

  This time, the ghost did not stir, its body having dissolved into a formless mass except for two tiny fists and two eyes, shut tightly against the world.

  Pinky held a silver urn in her hands, an urn that contained three sacred tulsi leaves and the holy water that Lord Krishna and Radha had frolicked in that very morning. Lord Krishna, incarnation of Vishnu the Preserver, preserver of life, preserver of the universe.

  “Don’t die,” Pinky called again. And then she poured the entire contents of the urn, water blessed by the mighty gods, into the bucket. Exhausted now, she dropped the vessel. Reaching into the liquid, she touched the ghost’s fingers with her own.

  Then curling herself around the bucket, she fell asleep.

  STORMY RETRIBUTION

  Pinky woke the next morning in the parlor. Sunlight cast its fluttering radiance upon her face as the willowy curtains embraced and parted with the morning breeze. Slowly, bits and pieces of the previous night came to her, like petals dropping from the jasmine vine. Avni was gone. Her cough had vanished. She was home. Other petals of memory, the most painful ones, had blown away as if by an unexpected gust of wind. She could see them, faintly pink in the distance, swirling out of her grasp. And then they faded away. Pinky could no longer remember anything of her abduction beyond climbing onto Lovely’s Triumph. The truths that had once traveled through her body had evanesced.

  She sat up, surprised at her strength, as if she had once again crossed the chiasmus between the living and the dead and had returned to the side of the living. Pinky suddenly panicked. She ran to the hallway bathroom where she discovered the bucket, overturned against the wooden bathing stool. The silver urn from the puja room remained in a corner near the far wall, where it had rolled the previous night.

  “Baby?” Pinky called. “Where are you?”

  She turned on the faucet and yellowish water spurted and spluttered out onto the floor. Pinky stood there, watching as the initial outpouring grew into a pool that covered her toes. The lightness in her chest began to grow dark. Something was not right.

  “Hai, hai,” Kuntal said kindly. “Silly girl, you’ll flood the bungalow!”

  Pinky looked up and watched Kuntal lift the hem of her sari as she tiptoed through the water to turn off the faucet.

  “No bath for you until your fever’s gone,” Kuntal chattered on, though her normally cheery voice carried an edge of strain.

  “What happened?” Pinky asked. Did she die?

  “You must get to bed,” Kuntal said, ushering Pinky from the bathroom. “You’ll need your strength.”

  Just before Kuntal closed the bathroom door, her eye came to rest on the puja vessel. A slight frown creased her forehead.

  “Where’s the ghost?” Pinky demanded. “She was here last night.”

  Kuntal reentered the bathroom and picked up the vessel. One solitary tulsi leaf was dried onto the lip, leaving no doubt as to the vessel’s origins or its prior contents. “So it was you,” she said softly.

  “There was no water. The ghost was dying.”

  Kuntal nodded.

  Footsteps sounded in the hallway. Kuntal hastily hid the vessel under her sari palloo and pushed Pinky out of the bathroom, before disappearing in the direction of the puja room to surreptitiously return the stolen contents.

  “You’re awake?” Dheer asked, kurta sagging over his belly, hair an oily mess atop his head.

  “Yes.”

  “Cook Kanj made first-class puras for breakfast,” Dheer said, though his announcement lacked its usual enthusiasm.

  “The ghost? Where is she?”

  Dheer shook his head, scratching his scalp with both sets of fingers, “I found you last night and carried you to the sofa.”

  “Last night?” Pinky asked. “Why were you awake?”

  “Papa came into the room yelling. He woke us all up. He wanted Nimish to go with him,” Dheer said, his bulky chest heaving with emotion.

  “What happened? Tell me!”

  “Maji—”

  “Maji?” Pinky ran back to the parlor. The dais was empty. Savita sat on one of the sofas drinking chai, looking surprisingly resilient.

  “Maji!” Pinky shouted. “Where’s Maji?”

  “Beti,” Savita said beckoning her forward. “We think it may have been a stroke.”

  “That’s not what you said before.” Tufan bounded into the room, wiping a smear of ghee from his cheek.

  Savita stiffened, “Go finish your breakfast, Tufan. Pinky, beti, she called out sometime in the night in pain. Your uncle and I ran to her.”

  “What happened?”

  “Uncle and Nimish took her to the hospital, but . . .” Savita turned away. “Maji’s not so strong anymore.”

  “She’s stronger than any of you!” Pinky shouted.

  “But she’s very old,” Tufan said.

  Pinky pushed Tufan so hard that he fell backward and hit his head upon a chair.

  “Shameless!” Savita jumped off the couch but Pinky was already running down the hallway.

  “Do you want to know what Mummy said last night?” Tufan yelled after her as he had regained his balance. “She said that the ghost killed her!”

  Pinky ran into Maji’s room and shut the door. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

  Dheer knocked gently on the door and entered.

  “Go away!”

  “Tufan’s right,” Dheer said grudgingly. “Papa came running into our room last night. He needed Nimish’s help. We all ran to Maji’s room. She was shaking and moving her arms from her chest into the air like there was something heavy on her.”

  “The ghost?”

  “I think so.”

  “How would you know? You never saw her before.”

  “Maji was talking to someone,” Dheer insisted. “I heard her begging for forgiveness.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “She wanted to get rid of the ghost. That’s why we had to turn off the water for four days.”

  Silenced ensued while Pinky registered this information. Dheer plopped down on the bed and began to babble. “We all thought the ghost was dying. I put chocolates in the bathroom. It was my fault.”

  “Ghosts don’t eat chocolates.”

  “I know,” Dheer said, digging a chubby finger into his belly button. “But these had Papa’s tonic in them.”

  “She needed water.”

  “I was only trying to help.”

  There was a long stillness.

  “Me too,” Pinky said in a small voice, realizing the enormity of what she had done.

  “You too? But you were in the hospital.”

  “I gave her water last night,” Pinky confessed, “from the puja room.”

&nb
sp; Pinky thought about what had taken place after she had emptied the urn into the bucket, a coming together of the otherworld and the divine, a union so powerful that it lasted but for a fleeting moment. But long enough to restore Pinky’s health and perhaps to have killed Maji.

  “I thought she was my friend,” Pinky said.

  “She was,” Dheer realized. The ghost had kept her end of the promise, she had given Pinky her life back. He slid next to Pinky and, with an awkward clutch of his chubby arm, held her to him, not caring that the door was closed nor that it was the first time they had ever embraced.

  Savita called Panditji who at that moment was having his fleshy feet expertly kneaded by his assistant. He had slept badly the previous night, the events at the bungalow spooking him in the darkness of his chambers. In an attempt to quell his fears, he had wandered to the temple sanctuary but the steely idols scared him, their oversized arms and legs jeered at him, causing him to race back to his bed as fast as his pudgy legs could carry him. This is my reward for a life of servitude?To be defiled by tantriks and their black magic tricks? he had thought angrily.

  “When can you come?” Savita asked him, explaining the situation.

  The priest fingered his Favre-Leuba wristwatch as he lay back in his bed, feeling emboldened by the claims engraved on the back of the watchface: Antimagnetic. Waterproof. Shockprotected. He felt betrayed, made a fool of by Maji. Her current dire condition was evidence that she had fallen prey to the dark forces of the universe. He wanted nothing more to do with her or her family nor with a flat full of demons and whatnots, the promise of a new Electrolux refrigerator be damned. “I’m busy-busy all day.”

  “But my mother-in-law needs you,” Savita explained. “I’ll make a most generous offering.”

  Panditji rolled his eyes. Nothing, not even the promise of good money was enough to make him return to that godforsaken, haunted bungalow. “I will break a coconut for her here at the temple,” he offered, plucking a laddoo from a silver tray as he hung up the phone.

  “Idiot,” Savita huffed as the dial tone droned in her ear, rankled that she did not have the same sway over the priest as Maji. Carefully, she replaced the receiver and then called her mother in Goa. Soon enough, the extensive network of friends and family would find out about Maji’s condition and flood their home once again. This time, Savita, seated prominently in the parlor to receive visitors’ condolences would be the one to carefully orchestrate the event. There was so much to plan, from the food to the most appropriate sari for her to wear, something subtle, perhaps in a soft pink to suggest hope. In Maji’s absence, everyone would be looking to her to set the tone. Savita felt a delightful shiver in her spine. Finally, finally, the bungalow was becoming hers.

  Gulu stood outside the green gates smoking furiously as he paced in the thickening rain, berating himself for being so weak. Yes, he thought, the gods were making him suffer for his weakness. Isn’t that why Avni was dead? And why he stood outside Maji’s bungalow like a stray mongrel? He kicked at the ground, cursing under his breath. He, who had stood up to Red Tooth back in his shoe-shining days, had been felled by three women—one old and fat, another a prostitute, and the third, dead. The shame caused him to spit a glutinous blob of saliva at the gate.

  “So you’ve come back?” Parvati clucked disapprovingly as she opened the gate, proffering a tiffin of roti and green beans.

  Gulu stared at her for a moment, anger and lack of sleep plastered his features into hard, ugly crevices. He had spent the night pacing the wet streets of Bombay, gazing despondently at every passing Ambassador. Gratefully, he accepted the tiffin. “My Cherry Blossom poster.”

  “Is that why you returned, for that?”

  Gulu thought of that marigold flower, pressed in newspaper, hidden under his cot.

  “I can’t believe she threw me out,” he said, hoping that perhaps Parvati could find a way to get him back into her good graces. Of all the servants, she was the one who had Maji’s ear.

  “You’re the one who left,” Parvati said, hand on her hip. “I wouldn’t let you back either.”

  “Whose side are you on?”

  “I’m speaking with my brains, not my loins, you fool. You men are all the same, two-two lingams each, one in your head, the other in your pants. Both ee-qually dull. You let Avni go, you idiot, and now thirteen years later you want to chase after her ghost? You’ve thrown away your future. And for what? A dead Koli girl.”

  “I didn’t know she was dead,” Gulu said. “All these years I thought she’d come back.”

  “For what?”

  “For me.”

  At this, Parvati let out a laugh. “Believe me yaar, you weren’t her type.”

  Gulu felt the heat rise in his face.

  “You’d better go,” she said, turning to look over her shoulder, “before someone finds out you’re back.”

  Gulu took the tiffin and squatted against the gate, ravenously dipping his fingers into the curried green beans. He ate in large gulps, barely tasting the food that he had become accustomed to for so many years. The roti filled his belly, warming his body and assuaging his desperation. Sighing, he let out a roaring burp and lit a bidi, intently drawing in the smoke and remembering the quiet hand of fate that had led him to the Maji’s bungalow in the first place.

  Since first stepping behind the wheel at age fifteen, Gulu maneuvered the city streets as if he were Lord Krishna entering the battlefield upon his glowing chariot. Battling the demons who obstructed his way, he mercilessly honked at slow-moving bullock carts, cut off motor scooters whizzing by with entire families precariously balanced atop, out-revved BEST buses, and sent bicyclists scattering as if they were panic-stricken birds. He thought of himself as a warrior, scoffing at those who relied on their turn signals or brakes, the Ambassador’s metal providing a solid layer between him and the unfortunates who littered the road.

  Now, after all these years, he had ended up on the street again. How did this happen? he asked himself.

  The answer hung in the air for some time, curling in the smoke, before he dared to acknowledge it.

  Avni.

  It always came back to her. Like the cycle of karma, Avni was without beginning or end. She was everywhere.

  He had forsaken her. He could have stopped her from dying. But that was in the past now. He pondered on his favorite verse from the Bhagavad Gita: Let right deeds be thy motive, not the fruit which comes from them. Back then, that fateful drowning day, he had failed to follow this sacred command.

  Gulu spat again. He was not going to let himself be thrown out, after all he had done for this family. Damning his shame and his vows of loyalty to the Mittal family, he finally made up his mind. He would reveal what he had seen thirteen years back. He would do as Chinni asked. Blackmail.

  He weighed the options in his mind, deciding that approaching Jaginder was his best choice. He was just the type with whom to play such games, if only Gulu could face him with the conviction needed.Red Tooth, he repeated over again like a mantra; Jaginder was nothing compared to his old shoe-shining adversary. And, if everything went according to plan, Gulu consoled himself, he could start over on his own terms. Maybe buy a flat in the suburbs and even purchase a taxi of his own. Nothing would please him more.

  Gritting his teeth, he stood and prowled by the gate, resisting the urge to storm inside and confront his boss face to face. He slapped on the gate with his flattened palm until Parvati appeared.

  “Where’s Jaginder Sahib?”

  “He left early this morning.”

  “Achha? ” Gulu tried hard to contain his disappointment. It was so unlike Jaginder to leave the bungalow before ten.

  “What do you want with him?”

  “Urgent business.”

  “Well, it’ll have to wait.”

  “Very urgent.”

  Parvati shrugged.

  “I’ll go inside if I have to.”

  “Arré, hero,” Parvati said, “and do what?”

>   Gulu cast his face down. “The four days are over now, nah?”

  “Yes.”

  “The ghost gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has something more happened?” Gulu asked, noticing Parvati’s swollen eyes and the flush in her cheeks. “Is Pinky-baby okay?”

  Parvati nodded. “Tantrik Baba came yesterday. It was Avni. Avni was inside her.”

  Gulu searched Parvati’s eyes for signs of disbelief. “Where’s Avni now?”

  “Gone,” Parvati said. “For now.”

  “You think she’ll come back?”

  “I think she attacked Maji last night.”

  “Maji?”

  “She’s in the hospital,” Parvati said, sighing. “We’re waiting for Jaginder’s phone call.”

  “You should leave the bungalow.”

  “Where would I go that she couldn’t find me?”

  “Or me.”

  “She already got you, didn’t she?” Parvati said. “She maimed your driving hand, didn’t she?”

  “You’re more vulnerable.”

  “I’m not afraid of her,” Parvati’s eyes flashed with anger. “I won’t let her hurt my child.”

  Inside the bungalow, the phone finally rang. Savita ran to answer it as the rest of the household crowded around. “Yes, yes,” she said breathlessly.

  Maji had survived.

  “Cerebral thrombosis,” Savita announced gravely after she hung up the phone.

  “Will she be okay?” Pinky asked.

  “It’s too early to tell,” Savita said as if she had a physician’s insight. “She can’t speak.”

  “Can’t speak?”

  Savita arched one of her manicured eyebrows as she patted Pinky on the head. “Don’t worry. We’ll make sure she has the best care, your uncle has already hired a full-time malishwallah to come home with her.”

  “She won’t like that,” Pinky shouted, angry that Maji was at the mercy of Savita’s care. “She only likes Kuntal to do her massage!”

  Savita’s face stiffened. “Pack up Pinky darling,” she hissed, her mouth curling into a smile. “Guess what? I’m sending you to boarding school.”