Washer of the Dead, The: A Collection of Ghost Stories

Author

Do You Believe in Ghosts?

That’s the sort of question you ask yourself at that part of the night when the ordinary noises of the day have eased into such a deep quiet that it’s impossible to sleep.

Three cups of coffee. I should have known this would happen. I lie awake and wonder.

So, do you believe in ghosts? I don’t know if I do. Of course every family has its little collection of stories. The aunt who saw something once at boarding school. The uncle born with a caul on his head, blessed with spirit sight. The cousin who was half an idiot. Possessed at the age of fifteen—how she fiercely convulsed on the sheets, and spoke in many branched voices.

Carefully the stories are hoarded for the nights when the power fails, and the eerie wash of candlelight makes anything believable. The children huddle together shuddering deliciously, the ghosts dance between the flames and the storyteller, the stories twist and turn blackly on the walls, and it is all true after all.

India is a land that has long been haunted. Each region has its own legion of those that return. Their names spill like an incantation, a sacred litany, a roll call of the restless. Firelight dances, their names are whispered with many a look over the shoulder and the living rub up uneasily against the dead.

From Assam comes the enchantress with her voice of desire. She calls hauntingly through the night, laying such longing against every syllable of your name that you are wrenched from your lonely bed. Her voice comes undulating out of forests, streams out of whispering fields of sugar cane. Her voice will lead a man from his cold bed, down paths fragrant with evening flowers and stained with the fruit of the jamun. On to where the river rattles past, for the enchantress always kills in running water. The water rises higher, but you are bound to the sound of your name, tied by a thread of sound. You walk on enchanted, until the sweet water snatches at you and you are swept away.

In Uttar Pradesh, they tell of the changeling. Left in the cradle it is a silent child that never smiles. But on full moon nights you have to stop your ears because it will sing—strange twisted little melodies, with words that patter like raindrops and mean nothing. You must stop your ears—for those who listen to the meandering melody are driven mad. No sooner does it have a victim than it disappears, and the next morning the weeping mother will find her own child in the cradle—thin and starving, and sickly ever afterwards.

In Lucknow they tell of ghosts that love music, poetry, and the good life. They have haunted the halls of nawabs, sat aching to the sound of wistful shairi, listened to the voices that rang through the blaze of lights and gems. Here a poet, a singer, a musician is counted great only if he is summoned by a midnight knock on his door. He must obey the summons, rising and following through the narrow alleyways, following the shadow that slips ahead of him until the twisting lane opens onto the abandoned ghat. His audience around the fire turns eager faceless heads towards him. Then he must play like he has never played before. Sometimes as the music moves them, the gathering will accompany the singer with rattling bones, beating complex tattoos on smoky skulls, singing in faded voices. Those who please them are escorted home in a procession ringed by dancing singing ghouls, lit by blazing torches and followed by cringing shadows that slip along behind them. The neighbours shiver and draw the covers over their heads.

Those so honoured will always be successful, touched with something more than human luck. The verses the poet writes will echo with the heartsick tears of the ages, the singer’s voice will hold the anguish of a hundred generations, through the musician’s notes will flow a river of sadness. Turning restless in their beds at night, they will listen with hearts shaken with dread for a second knock. It is said that the spirits return on the night they are to die, and escort them in triumphant procession. With song and dance they are carried into the night, and there are many nights then of revelry around the blazing fire, with no audience but the yellow moon and the cold black water lapping against the broken steps.

The ghats on the banks of the Ganga are haunted by the dancing churails, with their feet set backwards and voices that squeeze through pinched nostrils. Everyone knows that the child out late and far from home will be approached by a friendly aunt who will take him by the hand and tell him stories to enthral him even as she leads him down certain paths. But the paths always lead to the ghats. If he is a quick child he will notice that her feet are on the wrong way. Then he must snatch his hand out of hers and run. Their feet make the churails slow, and a child who runs as fast as he can will leave the lumbering screaming churail behind. Once indoors he is safe. Outside the churail will dance a twisting, lashing, lumber-footed dance of anger.

The many levelled wandering lanes of Hyderabad and Allahabad are a djinns’ delight. They wander wistfully from one tilting terrace to the next, looking for women with long black hair and tiny white hands. Unwary girls drying their hair on crooked terraces often catch a djinn in the outflung net of their tresses. Then he is faithful as long as the hair remains black, and the narrow hands tinkle with bangles. Every morning on the doorstep his beloved will find a little cup of green leaves holding fragrant flowers for the hair that he is so enamoured of. Sometimes there are sweets, and sometimes a gold guinea gleaming among the mogra and chameli. Some djinns love so deeply that they are true long after the hair has turned white, the hands rough with years of work, faithfully bringing their gift of love, even when there is nowhere to lay it but the whitewashed grave.

Hurrying through the forests of Himachal Pradesh at dusk, you will hear a child crying, abandoned and alone. Follow the sound and you will find it huddled in the twisted roots of a lightning blasted tree. Better to leave it where it is no matter how the cry goes to your heart. If you pick it up and turn for home, with every step the child will grow heavier and heavier, until you are staggering under the weight of your burden. But you cannot put it down because it clings with hands that no mortal can unknot. You stagger on until, legs aching, heart pounding, you fall by the path. Lying in the darkness, the child burrowed whimpering in your side, you wait for night and for the fate your malignant burden carries with it.

Many families have their old and familiar ghosts. Inherited from some ancient family feud that was settled in blood, they have grown too familiar over the years for anything but indulgence. With pride the family tells of the ghost that lurks as a reflection in a well, hangs petulantly around the kitchen disarraying the pots, appears when someone is about to die to wave an awful finger of warning.

Scattered across the length of India are the nameless ghosts—so old that they have been forgotten by the spirits themselves. They come from some ancient time of fire and sword and quick alarms in the night. Sometimes not much of them is left—just a voice, a rattle of swords, booted steps where there should be none.

Why do they return? What do they seek, all these troops of phantoms, these vast shuffling crowds of hollow-eyed and rattling spectres? Something they have lost? Something that was theirs in life and which they are now sundered from by all the dry weight of phantom decades? Do they seek revenge for betrayal? Balm for pain? Cool water for healing?

I think, perhaps, they turn restless on the high wind of the centuries because they are still searching. Searching for all that they never had in life. For happiness, for warmth, for love. Love not as they had in life. Not love garrotted against the throat. Not love sharp as a knife that stabs and stabs through a welter of nerves, arteries, veins. Not love lying coiled in green poison. Not love twisting and writhing in the heat of flames. But love like a benediction. Like the smile of a child. Like cool water and blowing grass and slow trickling sunshine.

In the kernel of each of our lives lies the making of a ghost. Sleeping in each of us lies the void that they wander in, voiceless till we allow them to speak. In each of us lies the timeless chasm that stretches blue and aching across the years. The need that hungers on.

Many of the living are haunted even as they breathe. We all carry the wraiths of secret dolorous sorrows, intimate creaking deceptions, raw and reeking betrayals. Each of us rattles our own collection of hollow bones, awake sleepless at night.

I was haunted by a man once. He kept me awake wondering if he was all right wherever he was. Wondering if he was safe. But that was a long time ago and he is less than a ghost now. Faded to a wraith of himself.

I have known other women haunted by the scarred and slow welling abortion, the festering memory of the man who left, the whispers in the closed room of childhood where things happened that should not have.

I spent a long evening with a medium once. Her fingers turned over the cards again and again—the High Priestess … the Fool … the Empress … the Lovers … She whispered to me that men could never be mediums. There were ghosts that only women ever knew.

Do you believe in ghosts? Even if you do not, say a prayer tonight. For all those who sleep spectre haunted. For all those who sleep alone. For all those who toss restless, rendered sleepless from need, aching, pain.

I pray, feeling slightly foolish at the words. Lord’s Prayer turned incantation to ward off those that wander in the night. The sounds that run to herald the coming day begin. The first crow dragging the morning in on its creaking voice. The early truck nuzzling its way through the easing light. Darkness lifting up and away.

I say Amen.

I sleep.

The Ghost Who Fell in Love

The ghost fell in love with Aminia the moment he saw her. She had come searching through the labyrinthine rooms huddled into one another in the dark, looking for the crooked staircase that led to the terrace. Her hair had been washed. It hung down her back, all the way to her knees. Her light steps skipped from one dusty room to another while her tiny lips shaped the words of the latest song that was being sung raucously in the bazaars.

The ghost followed her up the winding twisting stairs, flattening himself against the wall, each step carrying to his hungry nostrils the perfume that wafted from her hair, issued from her breath as she sang her way to the terrace. Under a sky busy with kites she unrolled the little mat she was carrying, shooed away the pigeons and lay down to let her hair dry, spreading it around her narrow shoulders and her face. She closed her eyes and hummed as she lay in the sun. The ghost hovered, watchful, fearful that the sun might lay a shadow on the skin that bloomed like a garden of jasmine. He crept close enough to breathe in the thick odour of coconut and essence and amla that stirred sluggishly among her tresses, and was drowned in that black billowing sea for a thousand years. By the time Aminia dried her hair and returned to the main house, he was lost.

It was an ancient house that Aminia had married into. None could tell how many rooms burrowed under the uneven roofs. There were secret passages, and rooms