Penguin Book Of Indian Ghost Stories (13 page)

The immediate result of Master Raglan’s dinner-party was, of course, the departure of Sammy, his brother, his brother-in-law, Sammy III and the old mother. Kuppan would have joined them but he had died the year before; the surviving mali followed Sammy. Sammy’s view of the case, once expressed, was repeated without variation.

‘We sending Ranken
dorai
away. Now plenty trouble coming.’ ‘I’m glad to see yer backs, ‘said Bowler, ‘I’d ha’ fired ye anyway. Seein’ spooks an’ makin’ up fours. Enough to give the plice a bad nime.’

But the name was given already. Raglan and Sweete went on next day and never came back; but Palliser, as you will remember,
stayed in Kalashi. He told the story often and dined out on it and became popular; so it was only a question of time till he told it one evening to a grey-eyed, grey-haired, grey-faced stranger in the Club who said—.

‘My name’s Hartle. If there’s anything in anything, that man you saw was Ranken.’

And of course there were others—besides Hartle who had known The Doctor, many others who had heard of him. The old dreary story of Sammy’s Hotel and the Four and their dreadful inhuman weekends went round and round. Neither those who had known Ranken nor those who had not, showed much desire to meet The Fourth Man. Hostesses said—‘Scandal Bay? Ye-es, of course it’s very nice and the food’s quite good, but
I
wouldn’t give a party there, my dear.
No
!’

‘Curse them Sammy’s,’ said Bowler striving to account to his Parsee proprietors for enormously diminished returns, ‘Givin’ the plice a bad nime.’ But one month later Bowler himself lay dead at Scandal Bay—of some obscure species of ptomaine poisoning; and four guests lay dead with him and nearly a score of others escaped but narrowly. So the bad name already given went worse. There was a fire, too, and a particularly distressing bathing tragedy. Someone coined the name Suicide Bay—and it stuck. Scandal Bay Mahal went into the market—and found buyers shy as snipe.

Today you may take a taxi from anywhere in Kalashi and drive northwards along the level road through the continuous chiaroscuro of coconut plantations. Presently you will cross a little ridge of laterite outcrop, and then you will run down that final easy gradient which was the last vista Macrae’s eyes saw on earth. You will look out over the beautifully blue, appallingly empty sea that served the same purpose for Ranken’s. You will find the divinely-appointed beach and the fishing-village of Kapil with its inhabitants going about their peaceful ways as they went about them all through this history. And dominating the foreshore and depressing it and shutting it off as with a barrier from all things human you will see the long, pretentious facade of the Mahal, sun-blistered, rain-begrimed, shuttered, blind, dead. There was no final catastrophe; it just decayed and perished and there it will
stand till it falls down. It just decayed and began perishing from the night when Ranken, The Doctor, went out of it towards the sea and made Fourth Man to threes at its tables no more.

There is one more question which stands out and you will ask it. You will say—why Raglan? Why Raglan, who was barely born when The Doctor shot himself, who was Ranken’s antithesis, hard where he was soft and soft where he was hard? Why (following our theory) should this callow creature be the one man of all men so closely
en rapport
that he could see the invisible and make it appear? And why in the course of his insignificant life should he come for one short hour to Scandal Bay and produce these vast and irrevocable effects? ….

Why Raglan?

There you have me.

C.A. Kincaid

It was a terribly hot afternoon in July some fifty years ago in Upper Sind. In the Deccan cooling showers had turned the hard earth, baked by the summer winds, into a perfect paradise. The soil there was bright with long green grass. The hills rose emerald to the sky, although their summits were often veiled by the monsoon mists; and delightful breezes swept over the glad earth to the great joy of foreign sojourners in the Indian plateau. Even in the Punjab and the Gangetic valley heavy rain had fallen in if the air seemed stuffy to the traveller from southern India, his eyes rejoiced in the rich foliage and endless maize fields. While his ears listened joyfully to the murmuring sound of new-born streams, as they tinkled and splashed on their way to join the brimming rivers.

In Upper Sind the landscape was quite different. Rain hardly ever falls there except in the cold weather and while more favoured parts of India revel in the monsoon, none of it reaches that strange land. Irrigated by canals from the Indus, the fields are in winter gay with young wheat and he who visits Upper Sind in January may well think that he has reached some heavenly spot. But let him go there in July or August and he will soon change his opinion. All day long the hot wind roars driving the mercury up to 120 degrees in the shade; nor is there much relief at night. The hot wind drops, but the thermometer still marks over a hundred; the sandflies and mosquitoes buzz all night and moonbeams like the rays of a powerful electric headlight pour down on the would-be sleeper’s face making slumbering exceedingly difficult.

In the middle of this sunsplashed region is Sehwan, formerly an important town, but now greatly sunk in importance. One thing it still claims with justice: that it is one of the hottest places on earth.
A Persian poet once in the bitterness of his heart asked the Almighty why, after making Sehwan and Sibi, he thought it worthwhile to make Hell. The afternoon on which this story opens was well worthy of Sehwan’s ancient reputation. The train steamed slowly into Sehwan station from Sukkur. The railway on the left bank of the Indus had not then been built, so the railtrack passed through Sehwan on its way to Karachi and the seacoast. The last carriage on the train was the saloon of the traffic superintendent. It was far roomier than the ordinary first-class carriages, as befitted the quarters of senior railway official; but nothing could keep out the heat or make the interior cool. The shutters were closed. A railway coolie pulled a diminutive punka fixed in the roof, but he merely stirred into motion the heavy, hot air. There were two occupants of the saloon; one was the traffic superintendent, Frank Bollinger; the other was a Major Sinclair, whom he had known for some years. He had invited his friend to share the saloon instead of sweltering in the first-class compartment and sharing it with two missionaries, their wives and baby.

‘I shall be devoutly thankful,’ said Bollinger, ‘when we get out of this Hell into the monsoon area.’

‘When will that be?’

‘Once we pass the Lakhi gorge it will be better. They say the monsoon dies there and so they call the gorge the gate of Hell. It is true that once past that frightful mass of heated limestone, one does begin to feel a breath of cooler air. It gradually grows in strength; so we ought to get a good night on our way to Karachi.’

‘I am very glad to hear that. I could not sleep a wink in this part of the world, could you?’

‘Oh! I have had such a long experience of hot nights that I might; but thank God! there will be no need to make the experiment.’

Just then the train drew up in Sehwan station. The stationmaster, Isarmal, who had known Bollinger in earlier days, came running up to pay his respects. His face beamed all over with the pleasure that an Indian almost always feels at meeting a former English friend. Bollinger remembered well the little stationmaster and was also very glad to see him and have a chat over old times.

To let the two old acquaintances have their talk out, Major Sinclair got out of the carriage and strolled about on the platform. After Bollinger and Isarmal had been gossiping together for about a quarter of an hour, the former said suddenly:

‘I say, Mr Isarmal, why are we staying here so long? I never remember waiting more than five minutes at Sehwan before.’

‘I am afraid, sir—I am very sorry, sir—the river has breached the line some four miles down and the train cannot go on until tomorrow morning.’

‘Do you mean to say that we shall have to stay all night in this inferno? I am afraid the Major Sahib will not like that at all. He was grumbling at the heat when the train was moving; what he’ll say when he hears that we will have to pass the night in a stationary train, I can’t think. He will swear horribly.’

‘Yes indeed, sir,’ said Mr Isarmal, anxious to agree to everything his English friend said, ‘the Major Sahib will swear horribly.’

Just then all doubts were settled by the arrival of Sinclair in a frightful temper. After so varied an outburst of blasphemy that it filled Bollinger with respectful awe, he shouted:

‘Damn it all, Bollinger, have you heard that we have to spend the night in this hellhole?’

‘Yes; I’m awfully sorry, old chap; but it cannot be helped. The Indus is in flood and it is just as capricious as a spoilt harlot. Still it will only be for one night and you’ll be able to wipe out your arrears of sleep, when we near Karachi.’

‘My dear chap, I’m not going to sleep in your saloon. I have just been talking to the khansama of the rest-house. He says it is up on the top of a hill and all night one gets a cool breeze from the river. He’ll give us dinner and he’ll call us at 6 a.m. so that we shan’t miss the train. He’ll put our beds out in the open and he swears that we’ll be able to sleep like tops.’

Just then the khansama himself came up. He was a powerfully built Panjabi Musulman with a long black beard and very strange yellow eyes. His face in repose had a villainous expression. He had a smile that rarely came off, but it was a very unpleasant one; it was rather like the smile of a savage Alsatian fawning on its master. He could speak a little broken English, which in the case of poor
linguists like Major Sinclair was a great attraction. On reaching the saloon he stood at the door and addressing Bollinger very deferentially, said:

‘The Major Sahib, he coming to rest-house. Sahib, please come too, and have good night in cool breeze. I give good dinner and you get good sleep and I wake you 6 a.m. Madras time. Down here too dammed hot, you get no sleep at all, Sahib.’

Bollinger could not help thinking of the old nursery rhyme ‘Won’t you walk into my parlour said the spider to the fly’ and anyway he had no wish to leave his comfortable saloon and a dinner served by his own servants for a hard bed and a doubtful meal at a rest-house half a mile away. He politely thanked the khansama.

‘No, Khansama; I shall be quite all right here. It may be hot, but I doubt whether it will be any cooler on the top of your Himalayan peak. After all, I have been there and it is only about thirty feet high and my dinner will be better than any you can give me.’

The khansama’s yellow eyes flashed disagreeably, but he continued as before to smile in his canine way and to repeat mechanically:

‘Sahib, I give you very good dinner. A cool breeze will blow all night. You get good sleep and tomorrow I call you at 6 a.m. Madras time.’

At last Bollinger said impatiently: ‘It’s no use going on jabbering like that. I’m just not going to your rest-house. I’m going to stay here and there’s an end of it.’

Suddenly Sinclair broke in: ‘Well, I’m not. I’m damned if I’m going to spend the night in your sardine box.’ Turning to his butler, he said: ‘Here, boy, get my luggage out of the saloon and put it in a tonga and tell the man to drive to the rest-house. You can come with the khansama in another.’

Bollinger, taken aback, replied with stiff courtesy: ‘My dear Sinclair, you must, of course, please yourself. I shall stay in the old sardine box and you’ll have a good dinner and a capital night. Goodnight!’

The Major, without troubling to answer, walked off with the
khansama and Bollinger resumed his talk with Mr Isarmal the stationmaster.

When the khansama and Sinclair had passed out of sight Isarmal suddenly said in a low earnest voice: ‘Thank God, you did not go, sahib, with that terrible man. If you had you would be as good as dead already. The Major Sahib will not be alive tomorrow.’

‘What on earth are you talking about, Isarmal?’

‘It is that khansama, sir. He is not really a man, but a—a—a—I have forgotten the English word; we call it in Sindi a
lakhibaghar.’

‘A hyena, you mean,’ said Bollinger, who knew some Sindi.

‘Yes, sahib, he turns himself every night into a hyena and eats anyone whom he finds sleeping alone on a cot in the open. We say that he is the reincarnation of a horrible man called Anu Kasai.’

‘Oh, you mean that fellow who ate Bodlo Bahar?’

‘Yes. I see the sahib knows the story. Bodlo Bahar was the disciple of our great Sehwan saint, Lal Shabaz. One day he disappeared. The following morning one of the saint’s disciples saw that the bits of mutton that he was cooking for his dinner were jumping about strangely in his pot. Other disciples had the same tale to tell. So Lal Shabaz said: ‘It must be our Bodlo Bahar,’ and went to the Governor of Sehwan. He asked from whom they had bought the mutton. They all said, ‘From the butcher Anu Kasai.’ Now this wicked man had once been very prosperous, but he had fallen on evil days; and having no money to buy sheep he used to murder strangers and sell their flesh as mutton. The Governor arrested Anu Kasai and searched his shop and house. They were full of human bones. He had for months escaped punishment, but he was caught when he killed a saint like Bodlo Bahar.’

‘How did the Governor punish him?’

‘He walled him up in the battlements of Sehwan fort, that is the hill on which the rest-house now stands. As you pass it you can see a sort of hollow in the side of it. That is where they walled up Anu the butcher.’

‘But what is this talk of the khansama being his reincarnation?’

‘Well, sahib, he has only been here three or four months and yet several people in the town have disappeared. Whenever they have done so, a large hyena has been seen galloping through
Sehwan. Not only that, but two Chota Sahibs (subordinate Europeans) who went to the rest-house also have disappeared. The khansama said the same in both cases. They dined and slept outside the rest-house, but when he brought the tea next morning they had vanished. We say the khansama turns himself into a hyena and eats them during the night. You will never see the Major Sahib again, I am afraid; but thank God you are here! Still at night close the doors and windows of your saloon, otherwise that khansama may attack you even here. We always shut ourselves in at night, although it is so hot.’

Bollinger was far too wise to laugh at the stationmaster’s story. He did not believe that the khansama and the hyena were the same: but remembering his villainous expression he did think it possible that he was a murderer; and after Isarmal had left he began to wonder what he should do.

At last he determined to go to the rest-house and share the danger, if any, with Sinclair. He had no gun, but he had a long heavy hunting knife that, had it been a bit sharper, would have been a very efficient weapon. He did not bother to take his servant as he did not wish to have him on his hands too. In the glare of the setting sun he walked along the dusty limestone road and then up the steep side of the old fort, now the rest-house. He noticed as he walked a depression in the fort wall and said to himself that that must be the place where they walled up Anu Kasai. At last he reached the top of the old fort. He arrived just as Sinclair was sitting down to dinner outside the building. It certainly was far cooler than in the station siding, for a cool breeze blew from the river.

‘Come along, Bollinger, I am so glad you have come,’ said Sinclair cordially. ‘You must dine with me. We can get a good night here in the breeze. I say, I’m awfully sorry for having been so grumpy just now. I cannot make out what came over me.’

‘Oh, that’s all right!’ said Bollinger cheerily, wondering secretly what Sinclair would think of Isarmal’s tale. The khansama also welcomed Bollinger and made ready a place for him. He then served an excellent dinner and after dinner began to put the two officers’ cots outside.

‘Oh, don’t do that, we shall sleep inside.’

‘It will be damned hot, almost as hot as in your saloon below.’

‘Oh no, we shall leave the windows open and so get a through draught. The stationmaster tells me that the place is alive with scorpions and one may well get stung if one sleeps outside.’

Sinclair looked towards the khansama, but he made no objection, so Sinclair said ‘Very well; but it will be so hot that we shall not get a wink of sleep.’

‘Oh well, no matter, we’ll play piquet until midnight. After that it will cool down sufficiently for us to sleep indoors.’

‘Right-o!’ said Sinclair gloomily, wishing Bollinger in the infernal regions.

From nine on the two men played cards and Bollinger deliberately played badly so that Sinclair might win and remain interested in the game. The simple device succeeded and Sinclair was so pleased that at 11 p.m. he was still absorbed in the piquet. Just then someone tried the door, but Bollinger had bolted it. A few seconds later the khansama appeared at the window in front of which had been fixed wire netting to keep the numerous pigeons from soiling the rooms.

‘I have brought iced lemonade for the Sahib,’ said the khansama with an obsequious grin. Bollinger thought that he had never seen any man with such an odious expression and his yellow eyes were twinkling as if with some horrible anticipation.

‘All right,’ said Sinclair. ‘I’ll open the door.’ He rose, and before Bollinger could stop him he had drawn the bolt. Bollinger pushed him aside and flung his weight against the door. It was too late. A huge paw and the muzzle of a monstrous hyena forced their way through the opening. Bollinger brought his knife down with all his strength on the paw. It was too blunt to cut deeply through the hair, but the blow was a heavy one and numbed the brute’s limb. A bloodcurdling growl followed and the paw and snout were withdrawn. Bollinger slammed the door and shot the bolt.