by Nikita Singh
‘I don’t know if I can get my visa done in time,’ I said grumpily.
‘It’ll be a good networking opportunity,’ he said in reproving tones. ‘I expect you to have things sorted out by evening.’ I spent the rest of the day running around trying to get my Singapore visa done, and quarrelling with the Thomas Cook lady who booked me onto Air India instead of Singapore Airlines. My visa got done a day before we were scheduled to leave. Other than making multiple enemies in Thomas Cook, my attempts to change to another airline didn’t meet with any success. So when the Air India flight developed a technical problem, and was stranded on the tarmac for eight hours, I was stranded as well. Deven was supposed to be on the same flight, but thankfully he managed to switch to Singapore Airlines. I don’t think I’d have been able to bear his conversation at one in the morning without committing homicide.
I finally reached Singapore the next afternoon. There was a formal dinner organised at the hotel, but I was too pooped to go. The next day, we had a ‘team building’ exercise that involved an extremely juvenile sounding ‘treasure hunt’ across Sentosa. I liked the cable car ride to Sentosa, because I was in the same car as the sales head and could tell him that he didn’t get his pricing change in time because of Dickhead Deven, and not because of anything I did. The treasure hunt, on the other hand, was terrible. We were painfully conspicuous because we had been given matching bright-red convention T-shirts to wear (mine reached to my knees because they only had men’s sizes) and everyone was rushing after clues from one place to another like a herd of buffaloes in heat. As soon as I could, I dropped behind and bought myself a souvenir T-shirt in the correct size, which I changed into in the loo. Then I took a cheerful-looking orange bus to the beach.
On the beach, I ran into Josh Williams, an American who’d been deputed from our New York office to Mumbai some time back when I was a trainee. He worked in Singapore now, and he was married to South African girl he’d met in Dubai. He even had a ten-month old son called Jason.
Josh decided to come back with me to meet some of the other people he knew from the India office, Deven among them. Deven was in the midst of a heated discussion with our Amit Khanna, who was our Sales Head, and cordially detested Deven. They broke off when they saw Josh. Deven was a compulsive ass-licker, and though Josh was technically junior to him, his being a firang from the regional office automatically elevated his ass to a lickable level.
Josh’s wife dropped by to pick him up along with their son and Deven convinced her to join us for dinner at the hotel restaurant. Monique was a tall, well-built red-head, and Jason was a scarily well-behaved baby. He sat quietly in his stroller and played with his toes instead of bawling his head off like every other kid I’ve ever been to a restaurant with. Either he was on sedatives, or firang kids are naturally better behaved than Indian ones.
We were halfway through dinner, when Deven complained of a pain in the chest. Josh asked. ‘Is it bad, Deven? Should we get hold of a doctor?’
‘Attention-seeking fusspot,’ I thought to myself, but then Deven stood up. His face looked really odd, like he was trying to say something, and couldn’t get the words out. And then he collapsed without a sound. Monique gave a little frightened scream, and Josh rushed to his side. A few waiters came over, and they helped get Deven out of the restaurant. Monique and I followed them. The hotel doctor was called, and he said that it looked like a massive heart attack. Deven didn’t seem to be breathing.
The next ten minutes rushed by. An ambulance was called, and Deven was taken to the nearest hospital. Josh and Amit Khanna followed in Josh’s car, and I was left sitting in the lobby with Monique. Her face was a picture of concern ‘Poor man!’ she exclaimed. ‘He seemed like such a nice person. And he’s quite young isn’t he?’
I agreed that Deven was quite young (he must have been around thirty-five), and carefully refrained from making any comments about his niceness.
Amit Khanna called on my cell phone. ‘Sanjana, Deven didn’t make it,’ he said.
I had been expecting the news—Deven had looked as dead as it was possible for a man without a visible mark on him to look—but I was still a little shaken up. Poor man, he might have been a jerk, but he certainly didn’t deserve this.
‘Do you need me to come down there, Amit?’ I asked.
‘No, we’ve got it covered,’ he said. ‘Josh is helping out with the paperwork, and Sushil from HR will be taking the body back to India. Deven’s brother is making arrangements for the funeral.’
The next day was a blur. The conference continued, though the ‘gala dinner’ was cancelled. I made Deven’s presentation to the top team—I had worked on the slides, so it wasn’t tough, but I felt terrible, as if I was taking advantage of his death to try and step into his shoes.
I was back in India the next day and in office the day after. The rest of our team was not part of the conference, and they clustered around me ghoulishly to get details of what happened. They were shocked, but no one was noticeably upset—Deven had trodden on all our toes way too often.
The business head, Saket Nagpal, called me and Amit into his cabin later that day. The economic downturn was just beginning to make its presence felt, and there were rumours of a recruitment freeze. After the initial shock of Deven’s death, they were both concentrating on how to re-structure Deven’s department so as to benefit Amit the most.
The structure they’d come up with had me reporting to Amit while taking on most of what Deven used to handle. It was a much larger role for me, and my promotion looked like it was within reach again. With one senior resource less reflecting on his head-count chart, Saket could afford to be generous.
When I got back to my flat that evening, there was a little parcel waiting for me. It was done up in a lot of brown tape, and I carried it into the kitchen looking for something to open it with. I was thirsty, and I poured myself a Coke from a half-empty bottle that had been lying in the fridge for a week. It had gone flat, and looked like dishwater. I sipped at it while I hacked through the layers of tape—it tasted a bit like dishwater too—and I narrowly missed slicing an inch off my index finger.
The parcel was a set of books I had ordered from an online bookstore. Deven had caught me checking out the website when I was supposed to have been working on the next quarter’s budgets. For once, he hadn’t read me a lecture, but he did ask me to order a book for him that he hadn’t been able to get in Mumbai. I pulled it out—it was a book of plays by Noel Coward. It wasn’t really my kind of book, but I started reading ‘Blithe Spirit’ to see what it was like. The humour was a little forced, but the plot was good—it was about a middle-aged playwright whose dead first wife materialises during a séance he organises to gather material for a new play.
‘The other two plays aren’t as good,’ said a familiar snooty voice, and I turned to see Deven sitting on the edge of my sofa. Maybe because I’d been reading a play about ghosts, or maybe because I was very sleepy, I didn’t scream or faint or do anything silly. I just looked straight at Deven, and said, ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’
He grunted and said, ‘I agree. I was about to leave, when I saw you reading my book.’
‘You can have it back,’ I said. ‘Why are you here, anyway? You’re dead.’
He looked annoyed, the way he used to when I interrupted him during one of his interminable monologues.
‘You called me back. You should know.’
I gasped in shock. ‘I called you back? Why would I do that?’ Then I realised that I sounded really rude (even if this was a dream, which I was 99 per cent sure it was). ‘I mean, I’m sorry you’re dead, and all that, but I definitely didn’t do anything to bring you back. Unless I did it involuntarily like the parlour maid in the play.’
He grunted again.
‘Look, Deven,’ I said uncomfortably, ‘I’m really sorry, but you can’t stay here.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of staying.’ He gave my messy living-room a disdainful look. ‘I’ll
need some help with transport though.’
I stared at him. ‘I don’t have a car. Sorry, but you’ll have to find your own way.’
He muttered to himself, then hauled himself off my sofa and marched to the door, a picture of outraged dignity.
‘Good night, Deven,’ I said chirpily and showed him out.
Next morning, I remembered about the dream only when I was in a cab on my way to office, and I felt rather guilty about the way I’d treated him. The feeling of guilt persisted, until I reached my desk, and found him sitting in my chair. This time, I did scream. A couple of guys rushed over from the next cubicle.
‘Sanjana, is everything okay?’ asked one of them.
I pointed to my chair. He looked at it, and back at me, puzzled. Evidently he couldn’t see Deven, otherwise he’d be screaming louder than me.
‘A cockroach,’ I said weakly. ‘It’s gone now.’
He made a face and said, ‘I’ll tell Housekeeping. Don’t worry; it’s probably far away now.’
I waited till he went back to his desk, and glared at Deven.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘This is my desk!’
‘Uhh, actually, it’s mine now.’
‘They gave you my job?’
‘Well, you couldn’t expect them to leave it vacant, could you? Now will you please get out of my chair?’
He got up and walked huffily across to the filing cabinet.
‘I spent thirteen years in this company. And the day I die, they hand my flat over to someone else, and give my job to you, of all people. I suppose they’ve given my car away as well.’
‘That’s what death does to you,’ I said. ‘Now be a good ghost, and go away and haunt someone else. Amit Khanna, maybe? He’s the one who’s actually got your job. I only get to do the work.’
Deven flatly refused to go haunt anyone else. There was, of course, the basic disadvantage that no one could see him other than me. Not much point haunting people who walked through him, or, like Amit Khanna, almost sat on him. So he hung around my cubicle, and pretty soon I was at the end of my tether.
Four days after he’d materialised, I walked into office to see Deven sitting at my desk with his head in his hands. I began to feel a little sorry for him, and reached out to pat him on his shoulder. He jumped back, and I felt a warm breeze waft over my fingers, as they passed through his arm. Funny, I’d thought ghosts were supposed to be cold.
‘Don’t touch me,’ he said. ‘I hate having people’s hands go through me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, sounding apologetic though his being permeable was definitely not my fault. Besides, he wasn’t even listening to me.
‘This is driving me crazy,’ he said. ‘I need to get away from here.’
‘If you haven’t noticed, Deven, I’m not exactly holding you back,’ I said.
‘You are definitely the most insensitive woman I’ve ever met,’ he said angrily. ‘You know I can’t get around without you.’
After he’d talked for a bit, I figured he wanted me to take a week off and take him to visit his brother in Bengaluru. ‘I’m saving my leave for my wedding,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, how could I forget? You’re marrying that longhaired graphic designer chap.’ (He’d met Varun once at an office party, and they hadn’t got along, to put it mildly.) ‘Bad choice, if you ask me. Does he know you’ve started seeing ghosts?’
He had a point there. I hadn’t had the guts to tell anyone about him. Especially not Varun, who was a staunch rationalist. If I’d told him that I was communing with the shade of my ex-boss, he’d have sent out for a strait-jacket. Telling Amit Khanna or Saket would have been a seriously career-limiting move. I finally decided to tell Josh, who was the ‘there are more things in heaven and earth’ sorts—he’d even been through a major spiritualism phase when he was in India.
I popped into Amit’s cabin, and used his phone to call Josh. I could see Deven mooning around my cubicle. Poor bugger, he could touch things, but he couldn’t move them—a paperclip on my desk could be Mount Fujiyama for all the luck he was having picking it up. Finally he gave up, and started staring moodily at my computer screen.
Josh picked up on the fourth ring. Bringing up the topic was incredibly awkward and finally I blurted it all out, true dumb-chick-in-horror-movie style.
‘You’re having me on,’ Josh said when I finally stopped talking.
‘I swear I’m not.’
‘Then you’re imagining it. Your subconscious is taking this way out to get away from the shock of Deven’s death.’ Damn, I’d forgotten about Josh’s Freudian phase.
‘Josh, if it was my sub-conscious, I’d have dreamt up someone like Heath Ledger, not Deven Bhat! Granted, his dying like that was shock, but I swear I wasn’t traumatised enough to start seeing ghosts.’
Josh was no use. All he could suggest was getting Deven to Singapore and leaving him behind somehow. Because he’d died there. It was the lamest idea ever—I should have asked my mum, she’d at least have recommended a reliable tantric.
As it turned out, I did end up taking Deven to Singapore. It happened this way—Varun suddenly decided that we’d been seeing each other for long enough, and he needed to make an honest woman of me immediately. He insisted on having a simple registered wedding, because his atheist principles did not allow him to participate in a religious ceremony. I wasn’t too keen on a big circus of a wedding with my mum playing ringmaster, so I agreed.
We got married in a little registry office lined with green Godrej almirahs. We had planned to go to Greece for our honeymoon, but Varun’s visa got rejected. The only valid visa that both of us had was for Singapore, and tickets were surprisingly cheap.
We were due to leave the morning after the wedding. Both sets of parents came over for dinner, finally leaving at around ten o’ clock at night. My mother cornered me in the kitchen to give me some hurried ‘first night’ advice.
Poor mum, she was trying really hard to pretend she was fine with her long-haired son-in-law and the wedding among the almirahs. I suddenly felt very sorry for her, and I listened to her patiently without telling her that she was a couple of years too late with the advice.
I think it was the whole ‘first night’ conversation that put me off the thought of sex—my mum had made it sound like the first, slightly unpleasant task in a long list of postwedding to-dos. We lay in bed, talking softly for a long while, and then drifted off to sleep.
I woke up at around five o’ clock and wandered into the kitchen for a drink of water. I was still half-asleep, and I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard Deven’s voice say reproachfully, ‘You didn’t even tell me the date of your wedding.’
‘Holy shit!’ I said furiously. ‘What are you doing here—it’s my wedding night!’
Apparently, he’d walked the whole way, when I didn’t turn up for work. Even for a spook, this was seriously spooky behaviour.
Varun was still asleep. I called Josh. It was later in the day in Singapore, and he was awake and getting ready for work.
‘Right, I’ll do it.’
‘Do what?’
‘Bring Deven across.’
Now that I’d agreed, Josh wasn’t so keen on the idea, and he kept throwing out feeble excuses that I mowed down firmly. I had had enough of handling Deven. Josh could take over, whether he could see him or not.
It was difficult getting Deven into the flight, because he was still not used to people walking through him, and he gave out startled yelps whenever he walked into someone’s hand baggage. Of course, I couldn’t tell Varun, even though Deven was sitting next to him all through the flight (thankfully there was a seat vacant). Both Deven and I winced whenever Varun put a hand or elbow through him—Deven was convinced that I was making him do it on purpose, and kept up a stream of waspish conversation that drove me bananas.
Josh met us ‘by accident’ in the lobby of the hotel as we were checking in. And—break-through! Josh could see him t
oo. I could tell by the way his eyes widened and followed Deven around as he dodged behind Varun to escape having a huge trolley full of luggage go through him.
I told Varun that I’d join him in a couple of minutes and stayed behind to talk to Josh.
‘Man, all this while I was sure you were off your rocker. I can’t believe this. Can he hear us?’
‘Yes, I can,’ said Deven huffily. ‘Glad to see you, Josh—I thought I’d go crazy hanging out with these two love-birds.’
I scowled at him, but didn’t protest. Some of Varun’s conversation in the flight had been embarrassingly explicit—of course he didn’t know that my ex-boss was sitting next to him, lapping up every word. Josh offered to take Deven home with him, and I thankfully agreed.
I couldn’t say that my honeymoon was a success. I was too stressed out, expecting Deven to reappear at any moment. Varun noticed it, but didn’t comment, probably attributing my edginess to post-wedding jitters.
Josh was having a rough time too. I sneaked downstairs and called him from the lobby at least once every day. Deven had lodged himself firmly into their family. Monique could see him, and so could Jason probably, because Josh thought he saw him watching Deven once. However, as Jason commonly ignored all adults not equipped with either breasts or milk bottles, they weren’t sure. Josh’s theory was that everyone who was with Deven when he died could see him. What worried him was Monique—she seemed to be inordinately pleased with their house guest.
‘You mean she likes having him around?’ I asked in amazement.
‘She’s always been into supernatural stuff. But it’s not just that.’ Josh looked really harassed. ‘She’s been getting really bored at home with just Jason for company. Somehow, she hasn’t made too many friends around here. And she and Deven have a lot in common. They spend the whole day discussing books and music and movies. I’ve been trying to hint to her that we should be figuring out some way of getting him back onto his astral plane or wherever he should be, but she only gets annoyed.’ I couldn’t quite fathom it. Monique had seemed sensible enough when I’d met her—why would she want to hang out with an idiot (albeit a dead one) like Deven?
