Spooky Places

 Hello again, dear readers! Happy to bring you a new story to mark a birthday - yes, Indian Chai Stories is four years old!! What could be better than a 'bhoot' story - and cha ka baba Dip Sengupta has sent us a story that we'll all love. So pick up your cup of tea, and say cheers - cheers to the spirit ( and the spirits ) of Indian tea! Over to Dip.

What is it about ghosts and pianos?

Growing up in tea gardens in Assam and North Bengal, I was no stranger to ghost stories. The setting of most of these tales were the colonial bungalows, some over a hundred years old , often located in the middle of nowhere . As a child, I have some memories of these bungalows. High ceilings, with wooden rafters where bats sometimes hung, fortress-like walls which would sound hollow if tapped, dark Victorian furniture, deep shaded verandas. And each room, every doorway hinting at more things than could be seen.

In short, spooky places.

And almost each bungalow had a ghost story. Old timers in these bungalows , usually the cooks or the ayahs , some of whom had worked for the British planters , would whisper about footsteps in the corridors, peals of laughter in empty rooms, voices which called out urgently, the tinkle of cutlery in the dining room well past dinner time. And in these isolated bungalows, with the heavy darkness that descended every sundown, such stories were believed.

As was the story of the ghost playing the piano.

This was a story I had heard from my parents. In one bungalow in Assam, sometimes, on moonlit nights, the old piano in the sitting room would begin to play a tune. No one would be at the keyboard, no one would be in the room, but the clear notes of a waltz or a marching tune from another time would break the silence. Even the old timers would shudder and sit closer.

The story goes that the planter who was the current occupant of the bungalow when the last instance of piano playing happened decided that he had had enough of the ghostly business and arranged to have the piano shipped all the way to Calcutta .There, in a famous piano shop on Wellesley Street, it was taken apart, piece by piece, chord by chord. Bits and pieces missing or broken over the years were meticulously replaced. It was rewired and re-tuned by experts who were called in from a renowned music academy. It was scraped and painted and polished till it become an almost new piano.

And then it was returned to the bungalow in Upper Assam, where on a moonlit night, with no one sitting at the keyboard, a tune from an earlier time played all over again.

When I first heard the story, I was a kid and I believed it with all my heart. As I grew older, I
believed less and less. In the bustle of city life, ghosts did not play pianos, much less in tune.

It was a good story to tell and that was that.

But years later, the unexplained came back to me.

On the last day of a road trip to Jaipur, we - my parents, my wife Kajari and our daughters were going around Nahargarh palace. Built on a steep wooded hill dramatically overlooking Jaipur city, Nahargarh was built by a king for his nine queens, each given an identical set of rooms to avoid jealousy. Narrow passageways, nine cupolas each crowning the nine living quarters , the ochre and peach of century-old vegetable dyes glowing in the afternoon sun - it was a step back into another time.

I remember we were all together in one of the queens' rooms, looking around and listening to the guide. I lingered on for a bit, while the others went up to the terrace. I wanted to spend a little time in this room, where long ago, a queen had lived, alongside her other eight sister queens. What conversations had these walls heard, what secrets did they hold? What little instances of love and loss? What conspiracies, what heartbreak, as each of the nine vied for the king's attention?

Wandering around the room, I saw a wooden cupboard which was open. It looked a little odd since the others beside it were closed. On a whim, I shut it.

The next instant, I could not stand. A sharp pain shot through my right leg forcing me to grab a part of the cupboard for support. I tried to hobble away, hoping the pain would go with some movement, but it just kept getting worse. I tried to rub my leg thinking the pain to be some sort of cramp, but to no avail. I was sweating now, and wondering whether I would be able to drive back to Delhi at all. The pain was like a vice around my foot. From the terrace I could hear Kajari asking where I was and why I wasn't coming up to see the lovely view.

It was then that an absurd notion occurred to me. If shutting the cupboard had brought on
this pain, would it go away if I opened it and left it as it had been?

I had stopped believing in ghosts when I left the tea gardens. I do not believe in the supernatural. But the pain in my leg was excruciating. I decided to give it a try.

The cupboard refused to open. I tried, normally at first and then with all my might. I pulled and paused and pulled again, with one hand and then with both. The pain forgotten in the strangeness of the effort, I focused only on opening the cupboard. I was frantic by now. An unexplained logic seemed to tell me that the remedy to the pain lay in opening the cupboard which I had closed.

I remember that I had almost given up, when with a small movement, the cupboard swung open.

At that instant, the pain in my leg vanished. Fully. Completely. As if it had never been there.

I walked without the slightest discomfort towards the terrace where the others were waiting impatiently.

What is it about ghosts and half open cupboards?

Meet the writer: 

 Dip Sengupta Dip grew up in tea estates in Cachar and Terai and the first words he picked up as a two-year old was not in Bengali but in “Madhesiya”, much to the horror of sundry relatives. He has a rich and varied experience of “Bagan life”, including elephants dragging out refrigerators from the dining room ,leopards on the porch and snakes in the storm drains. When memory overwhelms, he tries to put theses in writing and marvel at the wonder of it all. An advertising professional of 25 years, Dip now lives in Gurgaon, with his wife and two daughters. Occasionally he drives up to the mountains to feel once more the magical stillness of the tea- gardens and hear the sound of a leaf fall to the ground.

Is this your first visit here? Welcome to Indian Chai Stories! 
Do you have a chai story of your own to share? Send it to me here, please : indianchaistories@gmail.com. 

 

My name is Gowri Mohanakrishnan and I'm a tea planter's wife. I started this blog because one of the things that I wouldn't want us to lose in a fast changing world is the tea story - a story always told with great seriousness, no matter how funny - always true (always), maybe a tall tale, maybe long, short, impossible, scary, funny or exciting but never dull. You will find yourself transported to another world! 
 
Happy reading! Cheers to the spirit of Indian Tea!
ADD THIS LINK TO YOUR FAVOURITES : 

https://teastorytellers.blogspot.com/

Friends Forever

by Dip Sengupta

Hello again, dear readers, and a very happy Diwali to all of you! It’s lighting up time, and Dip Sengupta has a bright and heartwarming story for all of us today. Thank you, Dip. 

 
In a small house in the green Tindharia hills lived an old man. And with him lived a part of my childhood.

Saila was our one time chowkidar and my friend forever. Tall, gaunt, with a deeply lined face through which shone two merry eyes. A tooth lost in some drunken brawl, long forgotten. Khaki shorts faded by the sun and many monsoons. Dusty feet.

I was ten when we met. My father had just been transferred from a remote tea estate in Upper Assam to one in Terai and with a good school nearby at last, did not want to keep me in Calcutta any longer.

I liked coming to the tea garden for holidays. But my friends were all in Calcutta. And being an only child did not help.

Saila changed all that.

On the day I arrived, he greeted me with his trademark ear-to-ear grin which made his eyes almost disappear. As a welcoming gift, he carved me a lethal looking dagger from a piece of bamboo. I, understandably, became his devoted follower.

With Saila around, life was a blur of activity. We spent long hours setting up wire snares for the rabbits which raided the kitchen garden every night. We poked around dead leaf for discarded snakeskin. We made newer and better catapults but forgot to use them as hundreds of parrots screeched and descended in a blur of green on the Jamun trees for the semi-ripe fruit.

Saila was the wise one, with answers to all questions a ten-year old could think of. He could tell why the wind blew this way and not that way, why the peepul leaves turned a deep crimson in October, which shaded pathway was home to which ghost or how many pineapples a wild elephant preferred for breakfast.

Not everyone held Saila in high regard. My parents considered him a bit of a nuisance but a tolerable one. The others were more definite in their feelings, because Saila was rather generous with his advice. He told the gardener exactly where to plant the roses, he instructed the cook on the finer points of making lemon soufflé. He also knew how much petrol Somra the driver was filching.

Then one day, Saila retired from service and went away to live with his son in Tindharia.

Years passed. I was now in college in Calcutta. One summer, two friends and I went trekking to Sandakphu. Going to the hills was like a homecoming. I was back again in the wilderness of my childhood days, the scents of the forest, among bursts of lilac rhododendron, my horizon filled with white clouds and blue hillsides.

We stayed in Darjeeling for several days. Suddenly, Tindharia and Saila seemed very near. An hour's journey by bus later I was there in front of a row of houses perched precariously on the Tindharia hillside. Several questions in broken Nepali, a couple of misdirections later, I was standing at Saila's door.

Saila came out. The years had taken their toll. The tall frame was bowed, the face was even more lined and he had lost all his teeth. He could not believe that the person standing before him was the little boy he had befriended long ago. But memory flooded back. And the famous smile followed.

We sat in his little room overlooking the quiet hillside and talked. For two, maybe three hours, we talked. Those were troubled times in the hills, with widespread unrest and discontent. But our memories held their own.

And as we spoke long into the evening, we could hear once again the screeching of hundreds of parrots, wheeling and descending, in a blur of green, on those faraway Jamun trees.

Meet the writer: 

 Dip Sengupta Dip grew up in tea estates in Cachar and Terai and the first words he picked up as a two-year old was not in Bengali but in “Madhesiya”, much to the horror of sundry relatives. He has a rich and varied experience of “Bagan life”, including elephants dragging out refrigerators from the dining room ,leopards on the porch and snakes in the storm drains. When memory overwhelms, he tries to put theses in writing and marvel at the wonder of it all. An advertising professional of 25 years, Dip now lives in Gurgaon, with his wife and two daughters. Occasionally he drives up to the mountains to feel once more the magical stillness of the tea- gardens and hear the sound of a leaf fall to the ground.

Is this your first visit here? Welcome to Indian Chai Stories! 
Do you have a chai story of your own to share? Send it to me here, please : indianchaistories@gmail.com. 

 

My name is Gowri Mohanakrishnan and I'm a tea planter's wife. I started this blog because one of the things that I wouldn't want us to lose in a fast changing world is the tea story - a story always told with great seriousness, no matter how funny - always true (always), maybe a tall tale, maybe long, short, impossible, scary, funny or exciting but never dull. You will find yourself transported to another world! 
 
Happy reading! Cheers to the spirit of Indian Tea!
ADD THIS LINK TO YOUR FAVOURITES : 

https://teastorytellers.blogspot.com/

A Matter Of Honour

by Dip Sengupta
I grew up in the tea gardens of North Bengal. Tea gardens tend to be lonely, isolated places - miles and miles of plantations, often bordered by dense forests. The bungalows, built by the British, sometimes lay bang in the middle of the ancient routes that elephant herds had followed for centuries - to go from one part of the forests to another.

The Brits, of course, couldn't care less.

It was of no concern to the greatest empire on earth if a herd of elephants was inconvenienced by a bungalow built right in the middle of the path they had known and used for ages. The elephants would have to shift their route and that was that. So, the British planters and engineers built their lovely bungalows with tall iron gates and bougainvillea hedges and thought no more of it.

The elephants too, couldn't care less.

Elephants, of course, are known to have elephantine memories. And etched into them was a sense of direction that had guided them for countless generations, almost like a pachyderm GPS. When a herd moves, munching, bellowing, trumpeting with pesky calves, anxious mothers and aggressive young males just about turning into musth with hormones flowing, traffic niceties and giving right of way to a bungalow in their path seems to be too much to expect. I was once caught in the middle of this standoff, when I was all of eight.

Pic sourced from the internet

My parents had gone for a dinner and I was alone in the bungalow. 'Alone' was a misnomer because my parents had left me with two chowkidars, two bearers and an ayah, telling me as they got into the car that I should read my books, eat dinner on time and generally behave as I was now the captain of the ship. For good measure, they requested Mr. Jhalani, a fellow planter and neighbor, to look out for me.

The elephants came soon after my parents left.

It was a large herd, and following their pachyderm GPS, they had come straight for the bungalow en route to the rice fields that lay beyond. The tall iron gates they just walked over, and when the bougainvillea hedge came in the way of a couple of playful calves, the lead elephant solicitously opened up a path right through it. Soon they were milling about all around the bungalow. The kitchen garden with its pineapple patch was being noisily relished.

The chowkidars, the bearers and I went into a huddle. The chowkidars put out the lights inside the rooms and we crouched down among the sofas as the sound of the elephants steadily increased - the trumpeting of the adults, the squeals and bleats of the calves, the sound of leaves being shoveled pneumatically down hungry throats and occasionally a rough scraping sound as an elephant or two scratched itchy sides against the bungalow walls.

In the midst of all this appeared Jhalani uncle. Armed only with a five-cell torch, the kind planters always had close at hand in those days, he had somehow made his way from his bungalow to ours, through the wall of elephants, to make sure I was safe. How he did it I do not know till this day, but there he was in our huddle. He wanted us to try to leave immediately, because the herd was growing in size and becoming a little restive. Grabbing my hand, he prepared to make a dash for it.
All of eight, I disagreed.

I had just started reading commando comics - World War 2 tales of leadership and valour in the face of adversity. Pulling myself up to my full height - I would have been about four feet in my pajamas; I uttered the ringing declaration, 'A captain does not desert his sinking ship.'

No reply was forthcoming. I just remember being bundled out of the bungalow by Jhalani uncle. I still recall the run in the moonlight, the crouching, the swerving, the strong elephant smell all around and trumpeting and snorting very close by.

It was a not so honorable night for the captain of the ship.

Meet the writer: 

Dip Sengupta

Dip grew up in tea estates in Cachar and Terai and the first words he picked up as a two-year old was not in Bengali but in “Madhesiya”, much to the horror of sundry relatives. He has a rich and varied experience of “Bagan life”, including elephants dragging out refrigerators from the dining room ,leopards on the porch and snakes in the storm drains. When memory overwhelms, he tries to put theses in writing and marvel at the wonder of it all. An advertising professional of 25 years, Dip now lives in Gurgaon, with his wife and two daughters. Occasionally he drives up to the mountains to feel once more the magical stillness of the tea- gardens and hear the sound of a leaf fall to the ground.

Is this your first visit here? Welcome to Indian Chai Stories! 
ADD THIS LINK TO YOUR FAVOURITES : https://teastorytellers.blogspot.com/Indian Chai Stories
There are over a hundred stories here, and they are all from the tea gardens! Our storytellers are tea planters and their memsaabs, baby and baba log. Each of our contributors has a really good story to tell - don't lose any time before you start reading them! 

Do you have a chai story of your own to share? Send it to me here, please : indianchaistories@gmail.com. My name is Gowri Mohanakrishnan and I'm a tea planter's wife. I started this blog because one of the things that I wouldn't want us to lose in a fast changing world is the tea story - a story always told with great seriousness, no matter how funny - always true (always), maybe a tall tale, long, or short, impossible, scary, funny or exciting but never dull.
Happy reading! Cheers to the spirit of Indian Tea!