Ruskin bonding-III

Jyaneswar Laishram *

Ruskin Bond, author of many widely sought after books, was at the Landmark store in Forum Mall, Bangalore, on June 6, 2012, to release his new book of poems "Hip Hop Nature Boy and Other Poems" published by Penguin Books India. :: Pix - Wikipedia/Jim Ankan Deka

Ghosts don't seem to appear at random. They choose places and seasons. Generally hill stations are home to ghosts and winter their season. Stories of ghostly phenomena on foggy winter nights in hill towns are commonly told among local folks and often written by many authors, including most loved hill-man storyteller Ruskin Bond who lives in Mussoorie. I like Ruskin Bond's ghost stories for one particular reason—its involvement of hill towns. Some of his short 'ghost' stories are closely resembled with that of freaky incidents, real or rumoured, reported now and then in my hometown Bishenpur. Whether it's Ruskin Bond's hometown or mine, hills have a common trait when it comes to dealing in ghosts.

Bishenpur in actual is not a Mussoorie-type of hill town located on a hilltop; it's curled up sleepily at the foot of Laimaton Hill, which stands huge in the western horizon, casting a gloomy shade upon the town when the sun goes down behind it at five on winter evenings. I don't know should it be called fortunate or unfortunate, unlike Ruskin Bond I haven't yet encountered even a single ghost in Bishenpur. But like Ruskin Bond, I have heard a lot about ghosts from sensible and practical people, like my pupu (grandfather) who once stood face-to-face with a freaky figure on the corridor of Bishenpur District Hospital on a cold hazy winter night.

I have been fascinated by 'ghost stories' ever since my discovery of a chunk of classic works by Walter de la Mare, HG Wells, MR James, Algernon Blackwood, Sheridan Le Fanu and Stephen King. But I haven't had any good read of desi ghost stories before I stumbled upon Ruskin Bond a few years back. Even Ruskin himself picked up pen for this genre quite lately in his fifty years of writing career. Most of his ghost stories were written in the late-1990s when he underwent a phase of life that he wished to rightly call it his 'dark' or 'supernatural' period.

His novella Who Killed The Rani? is one of my all-time favourites; it's a blend of horror and humour as he always makes room for the second element almost in all of his writings, whether it's a novel, a short story or a memoir. My collection of Ruskin Bond's freaky short stories includes some of his critically acclaimed pieces, namely, Night of The Millennium, A Face in The Dark, Wilson's Bridge, Something in The Water, On Fairy Hill, Reunion At the Regal and The Prize. Ruskin Bond, though he's a children's writer, seldom uses monster characters in his horror stories, except the one in Something in The Water.

In his memoir piece Some Hill-Station Ghosts, he narrates one of his firsthand encounters with a ghost lady in Mussoorie. It reminds me of a similar encounter my grandfather once had at Khoirock, a Chiru tribe village dotted on the Laimaton Hill range, around 11 km to the west of Bishenpur town. In the mid-eighties, when I was just a teen, grandfather often told me tales based on true freaky incidents in Bishnepur during our momentary post-dinner hangouts on veranda on balmy summer evenings enjoying the puff of breeze blew from the forest near Loukoi Lake. And I heard about his encounter with two ghost ladies at Khoirock in one of such chat sessions one evening.

Grandfather worked at Bishenpur District Hospital; but for surplus earning, he indulged in wholesale trading of bananas and yongchaks carried out with some farm owners/planters in Khoirock. For this, after his office every Saturday, he hit the non-motorable winding hill tracks leading to the Chiru village for weekly meetings with his business partners. He normally set off at five in the evening and it took around five hours to reach the tribal village at night. Most of the time he sought someone's company for the sundown trip, it could be either a Chiru boy or a beautiful Chiru lady who came to Bishenpur bazaar for shopping. For the latter companion, ibok (my grandmother) always set vigilance on grandfather.

One cold Saturday night before Christmas, grandfather with a young Chiru boy was on the trip to Khoirock. When they past walking a thickly forested area, which is called Lokchao by locals, something so weird occurred as two ladies appeared blurrily behind a dense roadside thicket, both laughing audibly. When grandfather startlingly directed the beam of his torchlight towards them, the Chiru boy stopped him from doing it so, saying in whisper, "No uncle, don't do that! They may harm you; they are satans!" I will elaborate on this another time. Today, grandfather's Lokchao ghost incident finds its resemblance to Ruskin Bond's story of a 'woman in white sari' often seen sitting on the parapet wall on the serpentine hill road from Dehradun to Mussoorie in his memoir Some Hill-Station Ghosts.

Local taxi drivers call the 'woman in white' Bhoot Aunty who asks for lift at night. They advice tourists not to offer her lift, because she's got strange eyes that can fix her victims and ruin their Mussoorie holidays. A number of accidents have been linked to the baleful presence of the strange midnight woman. Whenever her victims recur to consciousness themselves or local village rescuers pick them up from the road, the woman was nowhere to be seen, but the survivors swear that she was in the car with them. It's not that Ruskin Bond merely heard about the woman from the local taxi drivers. He saw her first hand! One night when he was on his way back to Mussoorie from Dehradun with two of his friends saw the 'woman' sitting on the parapet by the roadside, requesting for lift. As they slowed down near her, she smiled a wicked smile that drove them to press down the car accelerator in a hardest possible thrust.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" readers once asked Ruskin Bond. He answered, "I don't! But I keep seeing them." His answer defies the universal maxim—'Seeing is Believing'. He argues in the context that people could see a magician cut a woman into two during stage performance, but they would believe the act only when he failed to put the two halves together. Places where Ruskin Bond mentioned seeing ghosts include his school, rented accommodations and old ruins around Mussoorie. Bishop Cotton's School in Shimla, where he studied, had a ghost who walked around the school corridor at midnight. Similar occurrence was reported from La Martiniere School in Lucknow where Ruskin's mother studied.

Most old schools have their very own ghosts. My friend Maisnam Loya Meitei who studied in an army school in Happy Valley in Shilong had spine-chilling ghost experiences. One of them being an incident of a lady in white gown diving down from a 150-metre-high water tank erected near their school campus into a bush grown at the foot of the water tanky tower. Everybody alerted! Army shot up search light to light up the area. Assumed to be a suicide bid, the bush was totally cut down and thoroughly combed, but no dead body found.

You can find at least one or two ghost stories in almost every short stories collection of Ruskin Bond. But his 1999 Penguin India edition of A Season of Ghosts is a good compilation for those who long to feel the mists Ruskin's hills longer. And if you need more, hit the winding hill roads or tracks to Mussoorie or Khoirock to encounter the ladies first hand, like Ruskin Bond and my grandfather.