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!
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