Spooky tales

Hearsay

Frankly, I don’t believe in ghosts. But when you are up alone in a flimsy yellow tin-roofed cottage facing a dense oak forest with the cricket’s eerie chatter cutting through the stillness of a misty monsoon night, your belief tends to shake a bit.

I confess to being a romantic, but at moments like these, films with good looking people take an instant backseat in my imagination to those starring long-fanged females and werewolves. So, on the very first night of girlie togetherness, soon after my ex-hostel roommate Anima Pundeer’s gentle snores rang out in the quiet of the room we were sharing for a weekend after 15 years (to relive our golden days of bachelorettehood), my thoughts involuntarily drifted to the ghosts of Lansdowne.

The headless horserider
The first to step into my head that night was the headless angrez, who has been patrolling Lansdowne on his horse for a century-plus, admonishing sleeping sentinels. The story goes that when the hills, the birds, the people (and possibly fellow ghosts) slip into deep slumber, the sarkata angrez patrols the twisting bends of the cantonment, and in the moonlight filtering through the clammy mist, he checks if the ones who are supposed to be awake and guarding the ones asleep are doing their duty or not. Over the years, he has ticked off more than one Garhwali soldier dozing off on duty.

Many of the men have since retired from service and are sitting wrapped in their blankets in little villages, recounting stories to their spellbound grandkids about the night they woke up with a furious shake of their shoulders only to find this fearsome apparition looming before them.

Thereafter, they probably just get on with the business at hand — which (knowing Garhwali faujis as well as I do) is to finish off the Hercules rum swirling around in their white enamel mugs. Since the headless horserider has, in his unique way, made an unsung contribution to keeping the hill station crime-free, he is — for me — the top ghost of Lansdowne.

The stalker
Somewhere near the bottom of my ghost popularity chart comes another English ghost. This one not only has his head intact but also wears upon it a rather nifty red top hat. He suffers from the character fault of stalking lone walkers who happen to pass him by after darkness. An old  relative — who was still a young student in those days — was trailed by him all the way from the bazaar to the up market Subedar Mohalla when he was returning home late one evening, many years back.

Footsteps behind him that quickened their pace when he quickened his made the young lad sweat in the cold but a Rajput to the core, he did not lose his nerve. When the nattily dressed ghost followed him down the steps to his red-roofed house, the young student removed one of his heavy boots and flung it at the ghost who ducked and jumping over the gate to the vegetable patch, disappeared into the stream flowing down the hillside.

Lady Long Arms
The most famous of Lansdowne’s female ghosts is the old lady with the high cheekbones, who sits on the embankment of the bridge over the stream running past the temple of Kaleshwar on wind-lashed rainy nights. She gets her fun out of scaring lone walkers returning from the Ramlila performance at the school grounds, past midnight.

Clad in a white sari, she sobs and shivers in the cold downpour and asks her victim to help locate a grandson who has toppled into the rushing water. When asked where exactly the child fell, she stretches her arm all the way down to the water, sometimes as far below as 20 feet, and parts her lips in an eerie smile.

Naturally, she causes people to break into a quick sprint, with the sound of her cackling laugh ringing in their ears. Why she doesn’t stretch an arm and catch the runaways is anybody’s guess. Possibly, she just does that to get a good laugh and to break the monotony of ghosthood. After all, how do we, the living, know just yet how boring afterlife can be.

Friendly escorts
What I like about the ghosts of Lansdowne is that they appear to believe in the policy of live and let live. Better rephrased as die and let live. My husband’s grandfather would have vouched for that if he had been around us still. Alas! He isn’t. The late Thokdaar sahab was believed to have the power to see ghosts. The story goes that one evening he dined with a learned advocate in Lansdowne and then decided to walk back home about five km away.

A boy was sent as escort since the road was lonely and there were no streetlights in those times. The fellow returned in 10 minutes. When sternly admonished for not accompanying the revered guest all the way home, he replied (shaking like a leaf) that Thokdaar sahab had started seeing ‘people’ right from next doors and had told him to return saying: “These men are going my way, I’ll just go along with them.”

Since the boy could not see a single soul and Thokdaar sahab was already immersed in deep conversation with an invisible being, he raced back all the way home. My husband’s granddad not only reached his house safe but also returned for another friendly drink the next evening, saying staying back late was no problem anymore since he always found company on the long walk back.

Horses in the mist
There are plenty of other ghosts in Lansdowne. Like the invisible horse that is heard climbing up to the gates of late Major Hasting’s Bungalow number 15, on a hill top, and the English ladies whose polished accents sometimes disturb the sleep of weary residents. Also, the garden ghost of Bungalow no 18, who enters through the dining room window as a cloud of mist and leaves through the kitchen window, maybe just to check what’s been cooking over the centuries. There is also the voracious reader of Col Robert’s home in the Garhwali Mess compound (possibly, the late Col Robert himself), who keeps his table lamp on and reads through the night. 

So, now you’ve been introduced to almost all the ghosts of Lansdowne, leaving out new additions that I am not acquainted with yet. Over the years there have been a few accidental deaths and there is a possibility that the ghostly population has grown.

However, since all these creatures of the night believe in peaceful coexistence, we — the locals — get along just fine with them. The only ghosts that have started to seriously scare us are plump tourists with big cars and blaring music that carries over the wind. These are the ones that I feel like shaking my fist at and saying: “Go away! And take your drink cans and empty wafer packets back with you.”