Haunted Mansion
On the eve of travelling
to Balasore for his six-month long training in a Public Sector Undertaking
(PSU) bank, Anand was a little apprehensive about his accommodation. Back in
1980, Balasore was a small coastal town in Odisha. Decent accommodation would
be difficult to find, he knew. So, upon reaching the place, he checked into an
inexpensive lodge before reporting to the branch.
He was happy to meet
Narayana, a fellow trainee officer at the branch, who had joined a few months
earlier. Anand sought his guidance about accommodation.
‘Don’t bother,’
Narayana said breezily. ‘No need to look for rented accommodation. We’ve got a palace,
owned by the bank, for trainee officers. In the evening, after office, we’ll
check you out of your lodge and you’ll move to the palace. You’ll have to share
it with us, though.’
Narayana was already put
up there. Ganesh, another colleague, who had completed his training, was
married, but his family continued to live in Cuttack. He too stayed in this transit
hostel. Why the branch manager, the senior-most official of the bank in
Balasore, didn’t occupy this stately mansion was not known.
Ganesh went away to
Cuttack every weekend to spend time with his family, leaving on Friday evening
and returning to office on Monday. Narayana’s home, too, was in Cuttack, where
his mother and younger brothers lived. Like Anand, he too was unmarried. He had
no strong motivation to go home every weekend, and only visited when there were
longer periods of leave.
In the evening, Anand hired a cycle rickshaw, loaded his bedroll and suitcase onto it, and checked into the transit home.
***
Standing forlorn in
the middle of a ten-acre plot, the huge building was at least 50 metres away
from the nearest municipal road, a gravel driveway connecting the building with
the road. To the east, the gravel approach road was flanked by a thick bamboo
grove which had not been trimmed for years, maybe decades. The clumps were
ancient, gnarled and thick, serving as a huge, tall fence for the premises, rendering
it almost invisible from a distance.
It was indeed a
palace, though no king had built it nor lived in it. It was a mansion built by
an Englishman sometime around 1900. Very little was known about him, though.
People speculated that he was a retired official of the British Raj who didn’t
go back to England, made India his home, and chose Balasore, a quaint, sleepy
town, to spend his golden years in, in peace and quiet, ‘far from the madding
crowd’.
He was a rich trader,
some said. Many others believed he was a pirate who had stealthily slipped away
from his ship with a large booty, deserted his gang, and chosen this obscure
little town as a hideaway.
‘How else could he
afford to build such a magnificent palace?’ the wise ones speculated.
Thus, while the
profession and the past of the Englishman was a matter of much debate and
varied opinion, what was commonly accepted by everyone was that the angrez was rich as a king, perhaps even
richer. One mystery remained unsolved, though. Why would a very wealthy
Englishman not return to England and choose instead to stay in seclusion in a nondescript
coastal town?
The mansion had no
signage, but it was known as John Bungalow. Why the Englishman was called John
was not clear, for he had never deigned to introduce himself to anyone in the
town. Maybe a local school teacher had heard that the owner was a dreaded pirate
and a ruthless killer. He had read Treasure
Island, so he deduced that the owner must be a distant cousin of Long John
Silver. Ever since, the Englishman came to be known simply as John, and the
mansion was christened John Bungalow.
***
The reclusive
Englishman and his beautiful, young wife lived all by themselves. They met no one,
and no one visited them either. The servants came from the town or the nearby
villages to work at the orchard and the mansion. Only a cook and a gardener
lived in the two small outhouses at the northern end of the plot. All the
shopping, including daily needs, was done by the cook cum man-servant. The
servants were strictly forbidden from speaking to anyone about the residents or
about what transpired inside the mansion.
The young lady was
sometimes seen in her fabulous garden. No one ventured near, though, since the
man was reputed to be quite grouchy. But even from afar, it could be seen that
the garden was filled with beautiful blossoms, mostly in winter. In summer, the
intoxicating fragrance of rajnigandha
and jasmine mingled with the scent from wild forest trees wafted far and wide.
John was never seen in
the town. Not even in his own orchard. But he was often seen pacing furiously
on the terrace, with a gun slung from his shoulder, except when the sun was
strong or when it rained. Was he at his daily exercise to keep fit? But then
why would he have a gun on him while exercising? Or, did he live in perpetual
fear of a stealthy attack on his life? Did he build the mansion so far away
from the nearest road and in the middle of a vast, sprawling plot so as to be
able to easily shoot an enemy or intruder from a safe distance and the vantage
point of his terrace?
John Bungalow, the bilayati mahal, was a mysterious place indeed for the locals. No one had any
occasion to go there while the owner lived there.
***
The main entrance to
the building was north-facing, and the municipal road was to the south. Thus, it
was the back of the mansion that was visible from the public road. It faced an
orchard full of mango, cashew, jamun, guava, and other tropical trees. A few
banyan and peepal trees, unlikely to have been planted, had found space, driven
root and grown big, their canopies towering over lesser plants.
Balasore has fertile
alluvial soil and receives robust monsoon rainfall. So, the tropical trees in
the orchard had grown very big over the years, bearing abundant fruit in season.
At other times of the year, they kept the place pleasantly cool.
The mansion was a
tall, muscular, two-storied structure. On the ground floor was an
extraordinarily large hall, about 100x40 ft, with wooden flooring, intended
possibly as a ballroom. Only, no ball was ever held there. No servant had seen
the couple dancing either. Maybe, they danced after the servants retired at
night.
The hall now served as
the drawing-dining cum living room for the bank officers. It was modestly
furnished with an old sofa set discarded by the branch manager’s office and a
plain-vanilla, rectangular working table, earlier used by the cashier of the
bank, now serving as the dining table.
The morning dailies,
paid for and shared by all three residents, were kept in the drawing room, but
no one ever read the papers there. The old sofa set was well past its use-by
date and the springs whined loudly when anyone sat on it.
At the eastern end of
the vast hall was a kitchen with an adjoining store room. Like the drawing room
hall, this area too lay largely wasted. The kitchen had a gas-stove and a
saucepan to make tea. There were a few tea cups, spoons and china bowls lining
the shelves. One could boil an egg and have a sparse breakfast of bread,
butter, jam and cornflakes. But the residents ate all their meals, including
breakfast, at Maa Sharada Bhojanalaya, located close to the branch. They didn’t
have a cook, only a part-time sweeper, his monthly wage paid from the fund pooled
in by the residents.
To the west of the
hall were three very large bedrooms, each containing a dressing room with a giant
6 ft-tall cupboard, and an attached bath. One of the bedrooms had a window
overlooking the orchard at the entrance, another offered a view of the
municipal road to the south, and the third bedroom sat in the centre.
The northern bedroom,
overlooking the entrance to the building and the orchard, was surely the master
bedroom of the owner. It contained within it a much smaller additional room,
with two iron safes mounted deep inside the 4 ft-thick wall. One of the safes
was almost as large as an almirah while the other one was smaller with a rotary
combination lock. Both were Chubb & Sons safes, Made in England.
***
During Anand’s stay in
this house, Samar, his closest friend, came and spent a few days with him. He
was unemployed and keen to get away from home, at least for a brief respite
from persistent parental nagging to ‘find some work and begin earning’.
After Anand left for office
every day, Samar spent all his time in the treasury room, trying to open the
combination lock. With patience and countless permutations and combinations, he
was confident he would crack the code, open the vault, and be instantly and
obscenely rich with the find, the pirate’s hidden wealth. He had solemnly
promised to share the loot with Anand. He was sure there would be enough for
the two of them. It was a pirate’s treasure, after all.
On returning from work
in the evening, Anand would find the treasury room full of cigarette smoke with
a heap of butts piled near the safes. Samar spent several hours each day in the
safe room for all the days he stayed with Anand.
‘Every now and then, I
can hear faint clicks. That means I’m about to hit the magic combination soon,’
he would say excitedly. Alas, no such luck befell him. Surely, others had tried
before and failed, too.
The owner was unlikely
to have left behind his fortune. Even if he had, the government must have had
it opened when the mansion became government property.
***
It was September. The
monsoons were nearly over. The puja
season had commenced. Ganesh Chaturthi was a state holiday and a
local holiday for the banks, a long weekend of four consecutive holidays. Both
Ganesh and Narayana had left for Cuttack, their hometown, by the evening bus.
Anand’s hometown, Burla was far off. It took one and a half days to get there,
so he remained at Balasore.
Before closing of
office, Sanjay, a colleague, came up to Anand.
‘Aren’t you going home
to your family? Staying alone in that bungalow?’
he asked.
‘My hometown is far
off. Yes, I’ll be here during the holidays,’ replied Anand.
‘Surely, you know all
about that house, don’t you?’ he looked quizzically at Anand.
‘What about the house?
No, I know nothing.’
‘How very odd that
Narayana and Ganesh haven’t already told you! Well, everyone knows. That’s a bhoot bungalow, a haunted house. Often,
after midnight, a light is seen on the first floor of the house. The bathroom
shower is turned on and a woman is heard singing a sad song, and sometimes
weeping, too.’
Then he narrated the
whole story.
***
The enigmatic
Englishman and his wife lived in their mansion rather uneventfully for a few
years. Then, people noted that the lady was no longer seen in the garden. But
John would still be spotted pacing the terrace, gun slung on shoulder. Some
assumed that she had gone over to England to join her sons and daughters.
But a rumour soon
spread that the lady had an affair with
the young gardener. Her husband had confronted her, demanding a confession about
her affair with the native. She had denied it. In a fit of rage, he had
strangled her, in the bath. In the dead of the night, he had dug a pit in the
orchard, just outside the master bedroom, all by himself, and had buried the
corpse and planted a Swarna Champa sapling on the grave.
‘Haven’t you seen the
big champa tree, just outside the
master bedroom window, which blossoms and spreads its sweet fragrance in
season?’ asked Sanjay.
Anand had. But he had
no reason to suspect that a woman had been buried under it.
‘What happened to the
gardener?’ he asked.
‘Possibly, he fled
during the fateful night,’ said Sanjay.
Shortly thereafter,
the Englishman too vanished without a trace, never to be seen again. The lone
servant in the outhouse looked after the abandoned house for some time, but
with no one to pay his monthly wages, he returned to his village.
After Independence,
the abandoned house became government property. Since it was fast deteriorating
with years of neglect and disrepair, a PSU bank was persuaded to take over the
building on a nominal lease rent. Essential repair and maintenance were done by
the bank and the building then began to be used as Transit Home for trainee officers.
Some resident trainee officers were believed to have
heard, at unearthly hours, a woman’s voice singing plaintive tunes in the
bathroom on the first floor. From the distant municipal road, passers-by had
reportedly seen sometimes a solitary feeble light on the first floor. People
knew that the bhoot bungalow was now
used as temporary boarding by the bank, but they also knew that the trainee
officers stayed on the ground floor and never ventured onto the first floor,
certainly not after dark. So, it was
generally agreed that the bhoot of
the murdered lady was the sole and exclusive occupant of the first floor of the
mansion.
***
Anand, being an agnostic, had doubts about the
existence of gods and goddesses. So, he had little reason or justification to
believe in the existence of ghosts. He patiently and politely heard the ‘ghost’
story narrated by Sanjay, thanked him for the well-meaning advisory, and
promptly put it out of his mind. Being an educated person with a modern outlook,
he couldn’t be bothered by such cock and bull stuff.
***
It was Friday evening. Ganesh and Narayana had already
left for Cuttack. Considering the long weekend ahead, Anand decided to catch
the evening show at the nearby ramshackle Laxmi cinema hall. He had dinner at
the usual eatery which offered a basic but filling fixed plate of rice, fish
curry, a saag and side-dish of potato
or brinjal fry.
Then he took a cycle rickshaw back home at about 10.15
p.m. It was too early to sleep. There was no TV. Nothing interesting on All India Radio or Radio Ceylon, either. But he had with him a few novels bought some
time ago. He picked up A Bend in the
River by V.S. Naipaul, got inside the mosquito curtain draped on the
four-poster bed, and began reading.
The story was engaging and he was beginning to enjoy
his quiet reading when the lights went off. Nothing unusual. Power outages were
frequent and long in Balasore. A storm was possibly in the offing. He could
hear the wind howling through the bamboo grove, blowing in gusts at periodic
intervals.
Reconciled to a night-long outage, he kept his torch
on the side-table beside the bed, drank a little water and prepared to sleep,
when the power came back.
Thank Heavens, he thought to himself. At least the fan
will be working. Or else, it’d be impossible to sleep in such muggy, warm,
sweaty weather.
***
Anand wasn’t feeling sleepy, so he got back to reading
his book. Five minutes later, the lights went off again, only to resume in a
while. This pattern repeated four or five times.
Rather unusual, he thought. He stepped out of bed to
look out of the window. The street light on the distant municipal road was faint,
but not flickering like the bulb in his room. It was steady. No power failure
in the town, then.
Why is the light
playing hide-and-seek in my room only, he wondered. Anand
felt a bit uneasy. He decided to wait for a while to see what happened next. But
the sequence continued—lights off, then on,
off again, on again.
‘Is someone doing this to scare me?’ he mused, in a
half-whisper. He had securely locked the house. He didn’t think any of his
colleagues would be so stupid and reckless as to come all the way to this
forlorn mansion to play a prank on him at this hour of night.
Could this be the
resident female ghost of the mansion? The thought floated into his mind. She’d of course
know that I’m alone tonight in this huge, solitary house. Is she trying to
scare me or is she just playing with me? He mulled over this in silence.
Anand contemplated his situation. If there really was
a ghost and it meant to torment him, there was nothing he could do. She could
appear when the lights went off, or even when the lights were on.
But Sanjay had mentioned that the spirit appeared only
in the first-floor bathroom to sing in the shower. She had never made an
appearance on the ground floor.
So then, why would she play ‘switch-off, switch-on’
with the lights? Wasn’t it her habit to flick on the bathroom light alone on
the first floor?
After careful consideration and rational thinking,
Anand concluded that he had only two options before him.
One was to just junk all the crazy fears and go to
bed. But it was impossible to get sleep with the lights playing hide and seek.
Every time the lights went off, he waited with bated breath for any ‘presence’;
when the lights came back on, he looked all around the room to make sure that
no one was standing quietly in a corner draped in all-white silk attire, or was
already tucked inside the mosquito curtain in the vacant bed adjoining his,
kept as a reserve for transit officers visiting the branch for a day or two.
The other option was to go up to the first floor to
verify if the bathroom was indeed being presently used for a shower.
His reasoning was simple. If
she lived on the first floor and wished to meet him, she might come down
anytime she fancied. He couldn’t prevent her from doing that. But the suspense
would kill him. If he somehow fell asleep and she appeared by his bedside past
midnight and softly whispered in the dark, he’d surely get a heart attack!
It’s far better, therefore, to confront the tormentor
now when he was wide awake and in full possession of his faculties than to wait
endlessly for her to make an appearance.
It’d at least be a time of my own choosing, and not
hers, he rationalized.
Having made his bold decision, he picked up his
Eveready torch, gathered courage, drank a sip of water, chanted OM thrice and offered
a silent prayer to his family deity, before proceeding to the first floor.
He left behind his flip-flops in the bedroom and
softly climbed the wooden staircase barefooted, so as not to startle her, in
case she wasn’t expecting to meet him. The staircase was very old and decrepit.
It groaned and creaked with every step. He went up ever so slowly, one step at
a time, nearly holding his breath all the way, his mind on high alert to sense any
change in the environment.
On reaching the landing, he looked around. No presence, no movement, no sound. So far, so good. He approached the bathroom. It was closed. Mercifully, not from inside. He paused for a while outside the bathroom door, trying to make out any light in the gap between the door and the floor. No, it was dark, and the shower wasn’t running either. Gently, without making a noise, he slid open the door handle, stepped into the bathroom, located the switchboard with the torch light, and pressed the switch. The bulb wasn’t fused. The bathroom was flooded with light.
***
A beautiful bathroom, indeed. No less elegant than the
one in the master bedroom. Italian marble floor with soft, white-and-blue,
flower-patterned wall tiling. The high-quality fixtures had lost their shine,
though, he noticed.
The floor was not wet. No one had showered here of
late. He heaved a sigh of relief, silently complimented himself for his
scientific temper, switched off the light, closed the door, and made his way to
the stairs. As he descended the creaking stairs gingerly, he noted that his
breath was still rather short and quick.
Suddenly, there was a little tug at his long, white,
khadi kurta from behind.
Now I’m dead. She is beckoning me from behind, he thought. Mustering courage, he
looked back. The back flap of his kurta had got caught on a protruding nail.
Back in his bedroom, he gulped down a full glass of
water, switched off the light, chanted Om
Namah Shivaya thrice (Shiva being the Lord and Master of all ghosts and
eerie creatures of the night), and fell asleep.
***
Anand woke up at about 6 a.m., after a reasonably
restful sleep. All night, the storm had raged intermittently. It had brought with
it a brief downpour, providing some welcome relief from the sweltering heat.
The storm had abated but the wind was still rather strong.
He made his morning tea and sat down by the bedroom
window, taking in the salubrious morning breeze while glancing at the daily
paper.
After some time, the lights went off again. It was a
bright, cheerful morning. Hardly a suitable time for any resident or itinerant
ghost to play mischief with the lights before making an appearance.
He thought for a while, walked up to the first floor, and
checked the bathroom once again. The floor was completely dry, caked with a
thick layer of dust, except where he had stepped at night, near the
switchboard. It brought a smile to his lips. He had, indeed, been brave.
***
Anand went up to the terrace and stood there for a
while. The beautiful Swarna Champa
tree just outside the master bedroom stood taller than the house, its canopy luxuriantly
and majestically swaying to and fro whenever the wind gained speed. A single
errant branch nudged the main power cable intermittently. Or, was it the
mansion it was fondly caressing?
***
