Henry and his Horse

by Viraj Circar

Like I mentioned in my previous story, I used to talk a lot to my classmates in Kolkata about my life in the estates in the Dooars. Not surprisingly one summer holiday a gang of my friends felt the need to verify the contents of my stories. 

I picked up Avnish, Karan and Hemant from NJP station and on the meandering drive back to Sylee Tea Estate through the gorgeous Sevoke road, I proudly showed off the untamed timbered hills, the temperamentally tinted green-brown Teesta River and the endless fluorescent carpets of tea as if it was my hand that had created it all. I think most ‘Chai ka baba log and baby log’ (‘Tea boy-folk and girl-folk’ is the best English translation I can come up with for this unlikely Facebook group) will identify with this utterly sincere, if slightly misguided, vainglorious tendency.

The Teesta at Sevoke, viewed from Coronation Bridge*

My parents were really keen on showing their son’s friends a fantastic time. My mother, happy to have three more boys to fatten up, made sure that our meals were sumptuous. Readers of this blog will certainly understand what I mean by that. Tea ladies pounce on opportunities to manifest their well earned culinary reputations and I think my city friends, unused to the three course meals, the puddings and a bell you could ring whenever you wanted something to eat, began to harbour secret ambitions of becoming planters. 

My father arranged for us to be as mobile as possible, leaving a slightly harassed Maru Driver to ferry us around and deal with his burra sahib’s son trying to wrestle the wheel from him (I had just learnt to drive and was eager to show off to my friends). The other thing my father did that made him very popular was leave his capacious teakwood bar, handcrafted by the Dooars-famous Panchaman Mistri, open for us at night.

One night after we had drunk more rum than seventeen year olds could or should handle, we stumbled back to the guest room which had been turned into a temporary dormitory, with two mattresses on the floor supplementing a king size sheesham bed. As the room swayed and the conversations became incrementally hilarious we realised that Hemant’s voice was conspicuous by its absence. As is the way with adolescents we were all shy of being the first to ‘pass out’, and the fact that one of us had bitten the dust already meant we could now formally and manfully segue into dreamland. 

We were happily nodding off after having a good laugh at Hemant’s gaffe when he suddenly decided to speak.

‘Henry...’ he mumbled.

 Half asleep, with only half our wits in order, none of us reacted.

‘Hnnnnrry!’ mumbled Hemant again, slightly urgently, eating up vowels and straining consonants through gnashed teeth. 

Karan, who was on the bed next to Hemant, was the first to locate the source of the noise and, uninterested in the content of Hemant’s yearning, gave him a sleepy kick to shut him up.

Undeterred, Hemant continued speaking his subconscious mind, staying loyal to his curious, completely random, protagonist. Eventually we got used to his mumbling but just as we began to accommodate Henry’s name as yet another loud repetitious sound in the room along with the heavy inebriated respiration, he decided expand his ensemble and add some mammalian colour to his dream.

‘Henry, don’t....Oh please....Hnnnnnnnrrrry. Your horse!’

And again after a few moments, ‘Oh my God...Hnnnnrrry. That horse.’

Finally, after Henry’s horsing around had kept us at the fringes of deep sleep for what seemed like a very long time, Avnish and I wearily decided to turn on the lights and attend to the twaddle issuing from Hemant’s mouth along with runnels of drool.

Karan, not a fan of the light he found himself bathed in suddenly, was about to kick Hemant again, but Avnish stopped him with a mischievous grin on his face. He had decided, since he was up and about, to have some fun at Hemant’s expense.

‘Tell me about Henry and his horse, Hemant,’ said Avnish, his gruff post pubescent voice replaced by a sugary falsetto.

‘Nnnnnn’ 

We couldn’t figure out if this was a neigh to attribute to Henry’s horse or a refusal to answer, but the ambiguity kept us going.

‘Who’s Henry, Hemant?’ 

‘Hnnnrrry’

By now the three of us were wide awake and struggling to keep our chuckling under control.

‘Yes Hnnnnrry. Who is he, Hemant?’ Avnish enquired sagely, gesturing for us to be quiet. 

But despite our pressing, Hemant decided to keep the identity of Henry and his relationship with his horse private, and we soon went to sleep, tired of soliciting answers, but determined to rib him about it in the morning.

We got up late the next day, partly due to the liquor and partly due to Hemant’s imaginary friends, and by the time we made it to the sunlit, French-windowed dining room my parents had almost finished their breakfast. Readers of this blog will understand how a planter’s itinerary involved him pit-stopping at the bungalow for breakfast, and then for lunch and an afternoon nap. For the non-plantation readers of this blog, lest I give out the impression that life was very cushy, I should add that a planter’s workday started at the office at six thirty in the morning, with only a cup of tea as fuel.

When we told my parents about Hemant talking in his sleep my mother had a good laugh (between assertions that we should drink less, of course) but my father seemed uncharacteristically reserved. For a moment I thought he was having second thoughts about leaving his bar open.

‘Are you absolutely sure the person in your dream was called Henry, Hemant?’ he asked.

Hemant shrugged his shoulders indifferently. He was obviously in denial about his midnight mumbling in an effort to mitigate the amount of ribbing coming his way, but the rest of us confirmed the fact to my father. 

‘And you mentioned Henry’s horse?’

Once again we confirmed the fact, quite curious by now.

 ‘Hmm. Okay,’ he said thoughtfully, as he mopped his mouth and got up. ‘Well, I better get back to work.’ 

My mother looked at him quizzically. 

‘Ron, are you okay?’ she asked. ‘You haven’t finished your toast. That’s very unlike you.’

My father insisted he was fine, said something about the toast being burnt, and gave her a peck on the head as he passed her. 

As he reached the door, Hemant finally spoke. He had stopped chewing his food and was looking mildly uncomfortable about the apparent significance of his utterances. 

 ‘Uncle, why did you go silent when they told you what I’d said?’ He wasn’t about to let the suspense hang over his head till lunch, which is when we would see my father next.

My father paused and slowly turned around. Instead of looking at Hemant, his eyes found me in the room.

‘Beta, do you remember when the malis were shovelling around in the malibari last year? Do you remember what they found?’

I did. My mother did too. Before the days of the automobile, planters used to do the rounds of the estates on horses. A huge stash of rusty horseshoes had been raked up while planting carrots, indicating that perhaps the area was formerly used as a stable. In fact, my mother had nailed one of the horse shoes to the top of the front door for good luck.

‘Well, what I didn’t tell you was that they also found bones...human bones.’

There was silence in the room. 

‘Go on, Uncle,’ Hemant managed.

‘There used to be a manager here in Sylee. His name was,’ here my father looked at Hemant, ‘Henry o’Connor.’

Hemant began to look very agitated. 

‘The story goes that he had a horse that was very loyal to him. Henry fell off it during a garden inspection, broke his neck and died. They were both buried in the bungalow compound. It was 1915 I think.’

The sunlight in the room had turned cold suddenly and held everyone in a tableau. The diaphanous fabric of the otherwise airy lace curtains seemed to brace the maze-like window grills, the bluster knocked out of them. Hemant’s hands were on his mouth and my mother slowly got up and stood next to him. Avnish, Karan and me stared at each other. Whether we believed in the paranormal or not, it was clear that our little joke had gone horribly wrong. 

To add to the sense of enormity of our insensitivity, even my father seemed to be trembling, his face turned to the floor. All heads turned to look at him, fearful and confused, as his trembling became more violent, eventually turning into a shaking, not unlike the depiction of possessed people in horror movies. My mother and I both got up together, dismayed, and began to move towards him.

But before we could reach him he clutched his sides, straightened up, inhaled deeply, and to everyone’s enormous relief, burst into an intractable, riotous laughter. He had been shaking with hilarity the whole time! ­He laughed and laughed, leaning on the mantle to support his heaving frame.

Amazingly, Hemant was the first amongst us to join him. He slumped back in his chair collapsing into it in mirth. 

Avnish, Karan and I were thoroughly bewildered. We assumed Hemant owed his joy to the relief that my father was joking, but his chortling reeked of amusement, not reprieve. As we tried to wrap our heads around this inappropriateness, he walked over to my father and, to our astonishment, shared a high-five with him!

It turned out that Hemant had been up before all of us and when he related his dream to my parents, it had been my mother’s mischievous idea to fix us for drinking too much, and for ganging up against him. 

The joke was on us and even though Henry never existed, Hemant never tired of bringing up the story again and again, incessantly and irritatingly flogging his dead horse.

Western Dooars Club borders on Sylee Tea Estate

*Editor's note: All the images here are from the internet.