Penguin Book of Indian Ghost Stories

by Ruskin Bond

  Every evening Nagandi-appan walked along the paddy ridges, as he had in the days when he tended the crops. But he no longer looked after stile or waterway, he carried neither spade nor lantern, he merely walked the ridges. During these journeys, he carried with him a small earthen pot full of palm brew left over from his sundown drinking. He paused every now and then to sprinkle this over the ridges. Neither my father nor mother took notice of this ritual of many years. As a matter of fact, no one in the farm took notice of anything, nor did anyone do anything to manage it, and this included my father; in this state of happy indifference the paddy and the orchard and the cattle grew in fullness and health.

  Nagandi-appan was fond of us children. He procured for us forbidden sweets, crude sugar shaped into pencils and onions, peasant delicacies. We went to his hut when the lamps were lit, and sat before him to hear his stories. These, he reminded us, were true; poltergeists encountered in the fields, winged tortoises which dived in and out of streams and tiny serpents who mocked his faltering steps. My sister Ramani and I found these stories more real than our lessons in history.

  ‘Nagandi-appan,’ Ramani asked him once, ‘what colour are these serpents?’

  ‘Aw,’ Nagandi-appan said, ‘some are gold, some are silver, and others, turquoise.’

  We sat lost in a festival of little snakes, magical and capricious. ‘Nagandi-appan,’ Ramani asked, ‘will these serpents come out to play?’

  ‘Of course, they will.’

  ‘Then shall we call them?’

  Nagandi-appan smiled sadly. He said, ‘The time is not yet.’

  There was no place in Nagandi-appan’s story for why it was not yet time. There were no questions in our contented lives, nor in the story of how our farm prospered unmanaged and untended. We spent the greater part of the evening listening to Nagandi-appan and went back home reluctantly for supper. After this we were too tired to open our books. Thus was our education unmanaged and untended like the farm, with neither recitation nor revision.

  ‘My children,’ Nagandi-appan once said, ‘you will become big and important people. I have done something to ensure that.’

  ‘What, Nagandi-appan?’

  ‘You don’t have to pore over your books. They will come and teach you while you sleep.’

  ‘Who?’

  Again the quizzical smile, Nagandi-appan said, ‘It is not yet time to tell you.’

  We grew up. When Ramani came of age she no longer attended the charmed evenings and I went alone to Nagandi-appan’s hut. Every night Ramani would have me repeat the stories to her. It was still the poltergeists and tortoises and snakes, but a more mysterious presence now lurked on the fringes of the narration as the days went by. But the time had not yet come for him to tell us what this was. All he did say was that he sprinkled the palm brew to propitiate this presence. Back home we discussed the presence and wondered.

  ‘It must be some creature smaller than a snake,’ Ramani said.

  ‘A kind of pest perhaps,’ mother said irreverently.

  But it was no laughing matter for us children. ‘How can it be a pest?’ Ramani. ‘Our crops are fine. If Nagandi-appan is feeding the palm brew to pests, how can the paddy grow so well?’

  Mother put an end to the dispute. ‘Why do you waste your time, my children? Let Nagandi-appan keep whatever little creatures he chooses to.

  Now it came about that mother was stricken with a paralytic seizure. One leg grew limp. The vaidyan began his ministrations. One evening Nagandi-appan made a sacrificial offering of flower and fruit and palm sugar. I sat watching. After the offering he dipped his finger in the earthen pot and sprinkled the palm brew around the room.

  ‘They will go now,’ he said. ‘They will go to mother and heal her.’

  ‘Who, Nagandi-appan?’ I asked, daring to venture into forbidden country. ‘The little ones?’

  Reluctantly Nagandi-appan conceded, ‘Yes.’

  That night I dreamt of Nagandi-appan’s little ones, minute creatures, luminous and subtle bodies. I saw swarms of them descend on my mother and enwrap her leg like mist. The vaidyan had told us that it would take her three months to get well, but her leg was restored in ten days. Neither mother nor we spoke about the little ones. Nagandi-appan made no more offerings but took his earthen pot out to the fields and there propitiated the little ones with the brew.

  There was yet another memorable incident. Ramani was seeking admission to the college of medicine. It was when they called her for the entrance examination that she broke down, she was unprepared.

  ‘I won’t make it,’ she told me, sobbing. ‘They will reject me.’

  That evening I went to Nagandi-appan and suggested with a sense of absurdity, ‘Nagandi-appan, can you send your little ones somewhere for me?’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘To the medical college.’

  ‘Of course, I could.’

  He made the ritual offering of flower and fruit and palm sugar, then sprinkled the brew in the room. ‘My little ones,’ he spoke to his invisible host, ‘go.’

  Sobbing and unprepared, Ramani sat for the test and passed. She enrolled in the college of medicine and in five years was a doctor.

  And I started working as a factory engineer. Both of us left the farm and went to faraway towns. Once she confided to me, ‘When I make an incision, I don’t see anything I learnt in the books of anatomy. Often I marvel how all that gets back into place once again, how it heals.’

  ‘The work of nature, I suppose.’

  ‘I don’t know. But it keeps reminding me of Nagandi-appan’s little creatures.’

  In time our parents died, and there was no one left on the farm except Nagandi-appan who had become brittle with age. The farm looked after itself. On one of my visits home, I found Nagandi-appan bedridden. I sat by his bed and talked about the poltergeists and tortoises and snakes in nostalgia. ‘But, Nagandi-appan,’ I said, ‘one thing remains.’

  ‘What is it, my child?’

  ‘You have not shown me the little ones.’

  Nagandi-appan’s eyes grew distracted, scanning the far spaces. He clenched his fist, and opening it again read the lines on his palm.

  ‘You have come,’ he said, ‘at the right time. I shall now show you the little ones.’

  ‘Really, Nagandi-appan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When, Nagandi-appan?’

  He read his palm again, and concentrated.

  ‘Tomorrow night,’ he said.

  I wondered what the old man had seen in his palm; I felt his forehead. ‘Nagandi-appan,’ I asked, ‘are you very ill?’

  Nagandi-appan looked at my face and smiled, contented.

  ‘The breeze,’ he said.

  ‘What about the breeze, Nagandi-appan?’

  ‘It blows over me. And it is full of the scent of the wild tulasi.’

  It was a closed room, yet a subtle and aromatic wind, beyond my senses, blew in for Nagandi-appan. Sleep was coming over him, his eyes began to close.

  ‘Rest, Nagandi-appan,’ I said.

  He looked at me again, intently, and said, ‘Let your mind be pure tonight.’

  In my dreams that night, I sat on a paddy ridge and felt the breeze of the sacred tulasi.

  The next day, as the dusk darkened over the farm, I went to the hut. Nagandi-appan had grown even more feeble, he struggled to breathe. ‘It is time, my child.’

  I gazed on the old face in the silent enquiry. Speaking each word with visible effort, he said, ‘Go into the compound at the west end and watch the sky.’

  I caressed the fevered forehead, and walked out into the compound. I looked to the west. It was a moonless night, and the stars were large and bright. I sent up a childhood prayer, Little ones, oh my little ones! Only the stars shone.

  Then, slowly, in the far segments of the sky appeared gentle luminescences, soft green and red, glimmering like Stardust. They came from the caverns of space rising in infinite multitudes, flying from mandala to mandala to
fulfil the last wish of their high priest. Now they were a deluge, refulgent, dense, another milky way.

  ‘God,’ I said, ‘Nagandi-appan’s little ones!’ I raced back to the hut.

  ‘Nagandi-appan,’ I cried out as I ran, ‘I saw them!’

  I entered the hut breathlessly.

  ‘Nagandi-appan, I saw them!’

  But the bed was empty.

  The Loving Soul-Atmah

  Jaishankar Kala

  They were shaking and lurching in a rickety bus on their way to a Yatra of the ancient temples situated in the Himalayas. The bus had just stopped at Haridwar, and they had lunch. Most of the passengers, or pilgrims, were divided out into two buses, about thirty in each. Haridwar is a holy city and through the bus window, a young pilgrim, Sunil, could see hundreds of people bathing in the sacred Ganga. An old bearded Sadhu was singing hymns from the Rig Veda.

  When they were about an hour’s drive from Deo Prayag, at about 8 p.m., those in the front of the bus suddenly saw and heard in simultaneity, headlights plumetting precipitously down, crashing sounds, human voices wailing. The bus behind them had left the road and plunged down the precipice. It was pitch dark. Himalayan roads, mere winding threads, poorly metalled, have no lights. The ill-fated bus had broken up, strewing its passengers. Most fell right below into the fierce Ganga river; but a few had spilled out, quite close to the road. Some of them clung to trees and shrubs and their cries were heart-rending. The men of Sunil’s bus managed to rescue a few. None of them even had a torch. But the bus driver, the only smoker among them, distributed cigarettes, and to their glows they managed to clamber down with the help of a rope and rescue five people. Sunil brought up a girl of fifteen, who died in his arms.

  Savitri had been fast asleep, head nestled against her elderly aunt. She felt suddenly the untowardness of something that was happening, the feeling instantly accompanied with being tossed out into the dark, straight into a leafy shrub to which her snatching arms clung. In simultaneity to her ejection, and merger with this precipitious shrub, echoes of successive smashing noises, wails and screams, squelched out of the bloated doomed plunging bus, growing progressively fainter. Suddenly the steep hillside sprouted pain. Savitri’s limbs and face were gashed, and if she hadn’t been entangled in the shrub’s branches, she would have slipped and fallen. A sprouting foliage of incredibly wild screams very near her suddenly withered and died. Another, a prolonged scream, as a man fell down the steep hill. The strangest flower, violently erupting, and then its colours all fading. From Savitri who was silent crept out an almost inaudible moan.

  After what seemed like a long time a dark form had dangled down hundreds of feet. Drawn by her whimpers. Suddenly the dark blob was upon her, amalgamated with the bush and her limbs. Her life was ebbing. ‘Put your arms around my neck,’ he murmured. ‘Don’t let go—you’re going to be all right.’ Then he jerked his head up and howled ‘Pull, Pull!’ Her frail arms were entwined chokingly round his neck. They pulled from above, the rope made of shirts, pajamas, sheets, towels, turbans, even the driver’s tough army surplus stockings. The shrub now accustomed to her soft suffering body wasn’t going to let go of her. He had to tear off the terrible prickly rough branches that held her. They slowly ascended, buffeted in jagged tearing rocks, a bundle swinging on a rope. She was half dead. They brushed the steep hillside, and a huge shape, a dark sweep of erratic eerie flaps dived with deafening cries, deserting a bouquet of pitiful tiny cries. He said: ‘Little birds, if you knew how timid and frightened we are, you wouldn’t be frightened of us.’ She was aware at last of the clamour of voices on top, and she died looking at Sunil’s face, for so long just darkness, lit up now by the bus’s headlights.

  Every insect, plant sap, flower, the very stones, let alone humans, were they to pray with a sort of sudden vehemence of urgent desperate yearning to Shiva to spare them, to feel love a while longer, Shiva would, even while caught up in the frenzy of eternal creation through love’s ecstasy, fling a scrap of longevity to the insect, to the plant’s sap, to a flower, managing not to omit even the pebbles. So declaims a Sanskrit chant. How could Shiva ignore this blood-soaked girl’s soul’s plea, not to forget her love for her rescuer, and let her linger on a bit. After the pilgrim’s bus with the injured had arrived at Deo Prayag, the wounded dropped at the local hospital, Sunil sat on the bed of the rest-house, the hardness of the millimetre-thick mattress assailing his buttocks.

  Mr Rajneesh Patel, who had sat next to him in the bus, and now shared the dingy room with dirty walls, was sixty-two, with a winning boyish smile. Savitri’s Soul-Atmah, a dab of smokiness stuck in a shape bearing a frayed likeness to herself, invisible to all but a colleague soul, had crept close to Sunil, its head pressed to an arm. Preserving a sort of modesty of undressing, Mr Patel in pursuit of wearing his night clothes had wrapped his towel around his trousers, and was easing the trousers below to the floor. Then he squirmed his pajamas up. Mr Patel was sharing his supper, packed by his daughter-in-law, with him. One bed was vacant. The yellow blankets and sheets, were filthy. The window was wide open, the light of one bulb dim. Sunil, whose arm and head was bandaged, munched, but barely even tasted the food. He was far away. In retrospect it seemed daft to have put oneself at such risk. Yet when puffing away to create a bit of light, all they could risk in lieu of the petrol-soaked hillside, his own life had receded in import. All that mattered was to reach the source of the whimper.

  The dim bulb laboured, about to be defeated, dimming further. The mosquitoes came, the fan revolved at low voltage, providing them with little inhibition in torturing them. Mr Patel was poor of seeing and hearing. Sunil had washed, changed into his pajamas, and interchanged with Mr Patel a word about the mechanics of waking up early next morning.

  ‘Will you rouse us early?’ Sunil howled at Mr Patel, who lay one leg hoisted and crossed on a raised knee.

  ‘What?’ he lowered his leg, and his head loomed towards Sunil’s mouth that howled a repetition.

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Patel broke into a boyish smile. ‘But the birds will wake us with their chatter.’

  ‘The only alarm is … a natural one … of chirping birds,’ Savitri thought. She could still think.

  Mr Patel gave a loud belch, turned to the wall and started to snore.

  No one bothered to turn off the dim light.

  From his lying posture Sunil sprang up. He went up to the chair and lifted his coat slung on the wooden back. Out of one of its pockets he took out a tiny box that once contained gramophone needles and was now used for keeping supari. However its present contents bore no resemblance to the crushed fragmented nut. Through the box’s dark lips opened a tiny bit, a sort of blackish thread had already squirmed out as if asking for help. Opening the tiny box fully, both hands clawed out, hooked out, this mass of a sort of tiny demented thinly frayed dark fish-like creature. That nestled to his mouth like a warm kiss. And the disaster earlier on, came back, in a sudden flutter and flapping all over his face, like those frightened birds.

  Sunil had sat on the long back seat that spanned the whole width, to peer at the silent bundle, between him and the conductor. And even in the dim light of the bus, crawling at tortoise-pace after the accident towards Deo Prayag, his fingers kept coming across long meanders of wiry hair on his pullover. As if the threads were looking for him. Endless dark twinings on his revolving finger, the threads enjoying endless cartwheels, covered in her gore. And the net result of drawing so many tiny circles, he buried in his handkerchief. The hair was transferred into the empty supari box later on.

  It was a little after 2 a.m. that Sunil put away the box, and crept under the yellow blanket. But Savitri could feel the liquefying eyes of her rescuer. The hot sensation of his tears meeting hers, wet her cheek. How little her feeling had been tampered with. Yet when she tried to say ‘I love you, Sunil,’ it wasn’t possible. She moved her lips to no sound.

  She had snuggled so close to him that his breathing fanned her face. Night was punctuated with
Mr Patel breaking wind several times during the night. And there were some obvious advantages in not being full-fledgedly alive. The spirit was spared Sunil’s orgy of scratching, his body restless all night owing to the lice in the sheets.

  In the whole of the rest-house, not one mirror. There was no question of being able to procure hot water for shaving in the morning. And a flock of lather-covered cheeks, including Sunil’s vied for a glimpse of the bus’s huge external mirror. This amused the Soul-Atmah.

  After his ablutions, Sunil ate his breakfast. Savitri wound an arm round his, as he stared endlessly, leaning on the fence of the gravel and plant-covered courtyard, in front of the rest-house, at the mingling of the two rivers far down below. The Bhagirathi is so effeminate, frolicsome and slender, and the Alaknanda so thunderously forceful and fierce. The poor transparently blue frightened thing merges into union with this grey pitiless roaring mass.

  The time allowed to Savitri’s Soul to linger with her beloved Sunil, was fast getting spent. The pilgrims reached Kedarnath, after a couple of days of rickety bus rides and trekking. It was 5 a.m., bitterly cold, and Savitri had crept into Sunil’s haversack. Sunil had just stepped out of the ancient temple built by the Pandavas of the Mahabharata. Suddenly Savitri stretched out her hand to touch Sunil’s face, as pulling away overtook her. An irresistible pull soared her away—a beggar without legs sang an exquisite hymn, plucking at a one-stringed instrument. It faded for Savitri. All around, watching with intense curiosity, were the snow covered Himalayas. And the distant echo of the Ganga flowing right below mingled with all. Sunil gave the beggar a rupee. Confronting, Shiva’s Linga had been a stunning spiritual experience for him. He lingered at the entrance, from where the posterior view of the golden bull’s titanic balls assailed him. But it was in the adjoining room, that the greasy-with-oil, huge, mountainous Linga flowered, as if boring through the crux of the universe, to create the sobs and gasps of union, oneness, love, art, death and tumultous life. All the privation he had encountered was forgotten. A strange tearful emotion gripped him. All around him were crowds of pilgrims.