Penguin Book of Indian Ghost Stories

by Ruskin Bond

  Around a Temple

  R.K. Narayan

  The Talkative Man said:

  ‘Some years ago we had a forestry officer in this town who scoffed at things. He was sent down by his department for some special work in Mempi Forest and he had his headquarters here. You know the kind of person. He had spent a couple of years abroad, and after returning home he was full of contempt for all our practices and institutions. He was strictly ‘rational’ by which he meant that he believed only in things he could touch, see, hear and smell. God didn’t pass any of these tests, at any rate the God we believed in. Accordingly to most of us, God resides in the Anjaneya temple we see on the way.

  ‘It is a very small temple, no doubt, but it is very ancient. It is right at the centre of the town, at the cutting of the two most important roads—Lawley Road running east and west and the Trunk Road running north and south; and any person going out anywhere, whether to the court or the college, the market or the Extension, has to pass the temple. And no one is so foolish as to ignore the God and carry on. He is very real and He can make His power felt. I do not say that He showers good fortune on those who bow to Him; I do not mean that at all. But I do mean that it is very simple to please a god. It costs about a quarter-of-an-anna a week and five minutes of prayer on a Saturday evening. Ninety-nine out of a hundred do it and are none the worse for it. On any Saturday evening you can see a thousand people at the temple, going round the image and burning camphor.

  ‘I have said that the temple is at an important crossing and every time our friend passed up and down either to his office or club he had to pass it, and you may be sure, particularly on Saturday evenings, the crowd around the temple caused dislocation of traffic. Lesser beings faced it cheerfully. But our friend was always annoyed. He would remark to his driver. “Run over the blasted crowd. Superstitious mugs. If this town had a sane municipality this temple would have been pulled down years ago ….”

  ‘On a Sunday morning the driver asked: “May I have the afternoon off, sir?”

  “Why?”

  “When my child fell ill some days ago I vowed I would visit the crossroad shrine with my family ….”

  “Today?”

  “Yes, sir. On other days it is crowded.”

  “You can’t go today.”

  “I have to, sir. It is a duty ….”

  “You can’t go. You can’t have leave for all your superstitious humbugging.” The driver was so insistent that the officer told him a few minutes later: “All right, go. Come on the first of next month and take your pay. You are dismissed.”

  ‘At five o’clock when he started for his club he felt irritated. He had no driver. “I will do without these fellows,” he said to himself. “Why should I depend upon anyone?”

  ‘The chief reason why he depended upon others was that he was too nervous to handle a car. His head was a whirl of confusion when he sat at the wheel. He had not driven more than fifty miles in all his life though he had a driving licence and renewed it punctually every year. Now as he thought of the race of chauffeurs he felt bitter. “I will teach these beggars a lesson. Drivers aren’t heaven-born. Just ordinary fellows. It is all a question of practice; one has to make a beginning somewhere. I will teach these superstitious beggars a lesson. India will never become a first-rate nation as long as it worships traffic-obstructing gods, which any sensible municipality ought to remove.”

  ‘It was years since he had driven a car. With trepidation he opened the garage door and climbed in. At a speed of about twenty-five miles an hour his car shot out of the gate after it had finally emerged from the throes of gear-changing. It flew past the temple and presently our friend realized that somehow he could not turn to his left, as he must, if he wanted to reach his club. He could only steer to his right. Nor could he stop the car when he wanted. He felt that applying the brakes was an extraordinarily queer business. When he tried to stop he committed so many blunders that the car rocked, danced and threatened to burst. He felt it safest to go up the road till a favourable opportunity presented itself for him to turn right, and then again right, and about-turn. He whizzed past the temple back to his bungalow, where he could not stop, and so had to proceed again, turn right, go up to Trunk Road, turn right again, and come down the road past the temple.

  ‘Half-an-hour later the dismissed driver arrived at the shrine with his family and was nearly run over. He stepped aside and had hardly recovered from the shock when the car reappeared. The driver put away his basket of offerings, took his family to a place of safety, and came out. When the car appeared again he asked, “What is the matter, sir?” His master looked at him pathetically and before he could answer the car came round again: “Can’t stop.”

  “Use the hand-brake, sir, the foot-brake’s rather loose.”

  “I can’t,” panted our friend.

  ‘The driver realized that the only thing his master could do with a car was to turn its wheel right and blow the horn. He asked, “Have you put in any petrol, sir?”

  “No.”

  “It had only one-and-a-half gallons; let it run it out.” The driver went in, performed puja, sent away his family and attempted to jump on the footboard. He couldn’t. He stood aside on a temple step with folded hands, patiently waiting for the car to exhaust its petrol.

  ‘The car soon came to a stop. The gentleman gave a gasp and fainted on the steering-wheel. He was revived. When he came to, the priest of the temple held before him a plate and said, “Sir, you have circled the temple over five hundred times today. Ordinarily people go round only nine times, and on special occasions one hundred-and-eight times. I haven’t closed the doors thinking you might like to offer coconut and camphor at the end of your rounds.”

  ‘The officer flung a coin on the tray.

  ‘The driver asked, “Can I be of any service, sir?”

  “Yes, drive the car home.”

  ‘He reinstated the driver, who demanded a raise a fortnight later. And whenever our friend passed the temple, he exercised great self-control and never let an impatient word cross his lips. I won’t say that he became very devout all of a sudden, but he certainly checked his temper and tongue when he was in the vicinity of the temple. And wasn’t it enough achievement for a god?’

  A Shade Too Soon

  Jug Suraiya

  After dinner we talked about ghosts.

  We were sitting in what had once been the library in the big rambling house. Sitting in that quietly smoking circle, surrounded by the heavy bookcases of law, literature and obscure Victorian memories, which in turn were enclosed, beyond the old walls, by the midnight jumble of north Calcutta, we felt secluded and yet protected. Like children wrapped in blankets and flanked by adults on cold and especially dark nights.

  There had been a marriage in the big house, in some complicated off-shoot of the family tree, and Freddy had invited a few of us from the college, chiefly for the dinner which had indeed been fantastic. The flurry of more important guests long over, we sat and talked and smoked in the library.

  Freddy, immaculate even now in his silk kurta and intricately pleated dhoti, presided over the conversation. We others, in mundane shirts and trousers, were a little awed of him on that evening of flowing chadors, sprinkled rose water and elegant ritual. We almost stopped calling him Freddy.

  Relaxing now after the strain of the evening, he still had a quick edge which gleamed through in his punctiliousness, his minute attention to details of hospitality. He was pampering us, with an almost narcissistic delight in his own subtle grace and charm. In his dark hands he held one of the roses which the guests had been given. As he talked he twirled the silver-papered stem, traced the warm red contour of a petal with a fingertip, or dipped his head to the fleeting fragrance. He could easily have been sitting for one of the massive portraits which lined the high walls. There was an almost overpowering sense of dynasty.

  Suddenly someone asked, as though on a cue whispered off-stage, ‘How old is this house, Freddy?’


  He smiled and the flower in his hand stilled.

  ‘Pretty old. My great-grandfather. That one, there. He built it, about a hundred years ago.’ He swivelled in his chair, his outstretched arm with the flower at the end of it a ranging compass, ‘All around this was open land and jungle.’ Timeless night, fraught with menacing greenness, stole in. Had tigers walked between tapestries of lianas, a growling distance from these dusty panes, while heavy-lidded men drank tea from blue and gilt French china and the voices of women lilted from the inner rooms?

  Someone laughed, a mere fraction of an octave too high. ‘This place must be haunted.’

  ‘Not,’ said Freddy, and his voice was a shade gleeful, ‘this particular room.’

  We edged our chairs closer together, ostensibly to hear better the round of stories everyone knew was coming.

  Dip, as usual, was the first to speak. He told us about an experience, allegedly terrifying, he’d once had while on a shoot in Bihar. It was a long anecdote, lugubrious in its repetition of details which seemed to get nowhere. It contained the standard quota of haunted dak bungalows (one), local people who warned the shikaris not to stay there (no less than three), and the inevitable eerie noises during the nocturnal hours (exact number fortunately unspecified). At the end of the whole thing I doubted whether Dip had been on a shoot in Bihar or anywhere else, let alone seen/heard a ghost there.

  Freddy sat patiently through all this, even managing to look politely interested most of the time. Like a star musician in an orchestra who knows that it is his night and is waiting for the prelude to be done with, so that he can launch into his solo turn. And he was in no hurry to start. The conversational circle finally came to a halt in front of him and we all looked at him expectantly, somehow confident that he wouldn’t let us down. But he just sat there, quietly smiling and playing with the flower until finally someone had to prompt him, ‘How about you, Freddy? Aren’t you going to tell us one?’

  He looked down at his dark hands where the red flower bloomed and his voice was as smoothly modest as a rose petal.

  ‘Well, I don’t know. These murky, elemental goings-on all of you have been describing have no affinity for me. Perhaps it’s just that I’m not psychic or something.’

  He let the anticlimax sink in. And then, almost casually, ‘My father though, you met him this evening, did have a rather odd experience in this house. Years ago, before I was born.’

  Freddy’s father, of course! We recalled the kindly-looking, quiet-spoken man we had met. His every casual word or gesture was avidly re-examined, loaded in retrospect with a powerful significance. Freddy’s father. We should have known.

  ‘What actually happened?’ blurted Dip.

  And we sat back in our chairs and waited for Freddy, grown suddenly serious, to tell his story.

  ‘My family, as you know, has been living here for four generations. It’s a joint family, always has been, and the house has always been full of people. Various aunts, uncles and cousins, their visitors, children, servants. A busy, brightly lit place. Expect during the war years, ’39 to ’45. And once again somewhat later.

  ‘I think it was sometime in ’42 that the Japanese dropped a few bombs on Kidderpore. Comparatively little damage was done, but there was panic in the city. The Burma campaign was going badly for the Allies and people in Calcutta half expected the armies of the Rising Sun to come marching in any day. The bombing was the cinder in the haystack. The trains were packed with people leaving for the safer hinterland. Property prices crashed and they say paanwallahs became real estate tycoons overnight.

  ‘Well, my family didn’t sell out, but it was decided by my grandfather that everyone should move to the country house, about fifty miles further west. The old man felt, quite rightly, that no one was going to blitz rural areas. So everyone was sent off. No arguments either. The old man, as you can see, was a bit of an autocrat.

  ‘Shortly after the evacuation, my father decided that he had to come to town for a few days for some business. Though he’s told me the story twice or thrice he’s never told me exactly what business. I don’t think there was any. He had been embarrassed at having to leave Calcutta and this was his way of reassuring himself and at the same time showing that the city was not anywhere near as unsafe as some people made it out to be.

  ‘There was quite a ruckus, I believe, but my father had his way and came back to town.

  ‘You should hear his descriptions of the city in those days. Blackouts, of course, and the big houses all deserted and shut up. American and British soldiers all over the place, getting into fights, lording it around. The spooky wail of sirens echoing in the night streets. The way my father tells it, he seems to have enjoyed every minute of it.

  ‘He could have stayed with friends, but probably felt guilty about putting up with those who had remained behind. “Not deserted”, as he put it. Anyway, one of the main ideas of coming back was to stay in his own house.

  ‘One or two of the trusted servants had volunteered to stay behind, to look after the place, and they were very happy, though a little worried, to see my father.

  ‘They opened up his room for him, brought him some hurriedly prepared dinner and then he sent them off to their quarters. Incidentally, my father’s room is the one behind that door there.’

  We turned to look at the door set into the wall at the farther end of the long room.

  ‘Well, he soon settled down for the night. The room was a bit musty, having been shut up all those days, and though he had opened the windows there was hardly any breeze and the atmosphere was very close. He couldn’t sleep, so he decided to read a little. But he had brought only a newspaper with him for the journey, and had already finished reading it. There were no books in his room, and this place was locked up. Anyway the reading light would have necessitated shutting the papered panes. So he sat by the darkened window to get what little fresh air there was. The street below was deserted.

  ‘It was then that he heard the sounds. Of someone running, gasping for breath in the corridor just outside. At first he thought it was one of the servants, but no one came to the door. Just the quick, light steps and the snatching gasps, neither nearing nor seeming to retreat.

  ‘The strangeness of it did not strike him even then. He was in his own room, in the house where he had lived all his life. He pulled the door open and stepped out into the unlighted corridor and turned on the light switch just beside the door. She was standing there in the corridor, a girl of about seventeen or eighteen, like a trapped animal twisting around to look at unseen pursuers.

  ‘Even in that moment of shock he realized she was very beautiful. He was a young man then, of course.

  ‘Then someone from the street shouted “Light” and the girl, ignoring my father, ran past him into his room. My father hesitated briefly, but there were no further sounds from the corridor and he switched off the light and turned back to the room.

  ‘She was standing there staring at the door, but even in the pale moonglow he could make out she had not noticed him. In her hysteria of terror, he did not exist for her. And suddenly, as though by contagion, he felt the fear flowing like a cold blue current through his body. And the room was full of the smell of roses.’

  Freddy paused, and bent his head to the flower in his hand and I felt the hair on my forearms begin to rise.

  ‘The only sound in that room was the breathing of the girl, harsher and sharper as the panic within her contracted and squeezed. She was crouched forward, every sense, every quivering nerve transfixed by a wordless menace that pressed in closer.

  ‘Then my father shouted. He says now that if he hadn’t done that he would have lost his mind—literally. The smell of terror and roses. He doesn’t remember the exact words, but it was probably something like “Who are you?” and as though in response the sleeping sirens of the city sprang into screaming life. It was an air-raid alarm.

  ‘The sudden tug of noise jerked his head towards the window, and when
he looked around again she was gone. Within a second, with no sound. And the smell of the flowers had gone too.

  ‘He stood there in that empty room while the sirens wailed and fell and rose again. He says now that even if a bomber had scored a direct hit on the house he doubts if he could have registered the situation.

  ‘Fortunately no bombs fell in Calcutta that night, hardly any ever did, you know. And the sirens lulled and then sang out again in the all-clear.

  ‘Finally my father managed to grope his way to bed and sprawled across it, past questioning, past fear, in a state of numb exhaustion. But as I said he was a young man, and a very strong-minded one, and by morning he was as normal as he was going to be for a fairly long time to come. He didn’t tell the servants anything except that he was going back earlier than expected. He stayed two or three days more with a friend and then returned to the country house.

  ‘He didn’t tell anyone of what he had experienced, even when it was time to return to the city and to his room. He says he slept with the lights on for the first few nights and then it was all right.

  ‘The inexplicable episode, for all its horror, might even have been forgotten, put down as a bad dream induced by post-travel tension. But then in ’46 the Hindu-Muslim riots broke out and once again the family was shipped off to the country.

  ‘And that’s when it happened. People had become beasts in those terrible days. You’ve heard about the murders, the atrocities. This area was a sort of no-man’s land, bloodily contested by armed groups of both communities. Everyone lived at a taut pitch of suspicion. Every individual was either an ally or a mortal enemy.

  ‘No one knows how or why the girl was in this area. She must have got separated from her family in the chaos of the streets.

  ‘A mob, a Hindu one incidentally, not that it matters, spotted her and chased her. She ran into this house. Perhaps the gates were open or perhaps the old durwan opened them for her. They followed her, through the empty rooms and corridors, and they finally found her in the room that was my father’s.