Tej Bahadur didn’t believe in ghosts. There were no such things, he told himself, even though he had seen his first ghost at the age of ten. It was his mother’s.
He had heard that ghosts always stayed behind when they had unfinished business in the land of the living. It was as if human proclivities passed onto their corporeal form: Hate. Revenge. Love. The list was endless. Tej Bahadur stayed on in the sleepy town of Ooty years after his mother’s passing. “You are destined for great things,” she used to tell him. “You have your father’s blood running through your veins.”
Hah! He chuckled at the memory as he took another good, long swig of the local moonshine. It singed his innards as it made its way down, but he welcomed the old, familiar burn. “Destined for great things,” he scoffed. It would have been funny, had the joke not been on him. The job of a head constable in the sleepy town of Ooty in the 1930s didn’t exactly entail social or financial advancement. “Unlike the Zamindar, Digvijay Rana,” Tej Bahadur spat out in disdain. “The Zamindar of Ooty!”
He took another swig of moonshine and wiped off the remnants around his lips with the sleeve of his once pristine uniform. His alcohol dependence had increased partly due to the onset of the numbing chill of winter and partly, even if only for a few hours, to forget his pitiful failure of an existence. The sky was dark, nary a star to be seen, as the clouds loomed angrily overhead, threatening any moment to unleash their wrath. In his inebriated state, the head of the constabulary had inadvertently stumbled his way to Azad Manor, the grand archetypal residence of the Zamindar, prior to his death.
Tej Bahadur snorted as he took another sip of his drink; the imposing Azad Manor dwarfed the diminutive constable. He spat at the foot of the large bronze gates in disdain. “The Zamindar and his charmed family,” he thought, “responsible for countless deaths and squashed dreams, and yet, they donned a façade of respectability.”
There were two things every child in Ooty knew. The first was the Rana family motto: “The Rana family’s name is only as good as its reputation.”
“Such a fucking farce,” he thought, as he glared at the manor again. In the ubiquitous moonlight, the residence seemed almost sinister, darkness eating through each of its numerous windows, save for one. The lone illuminated window had by it the one good thing that the Ranas brought to Ooty. A thin smile crept upon Tej’s weathered face, as he warmed his eyes on the figure by the window. The shapely bosom in the silhouette was unmistakable. He could feel the heat building up in his loins; the view, and even its silhouette, was enough to warm the blood of any man.
For all purposes, Archana Rana was a widow. Arjun Rana, her husband, and the Zamindar’s son, leading a small militia of the British East India Company, had ridden deep into the hills to quash a peasant uprising. He had left six years ago. Archana patiently waited for his return.
Tej Bahadur took another swig as he felt passion build between his legs. He needed some more liquid courage to continue “keeping vigil” over Azad Manor. The stillness of the night was shattered as lightning cracked over the manor for a brief second, illuminating it in all its grim glory. It was then that Tej Bahadur noticed a pair of eyes that were fixed on him. They did not belong to the lady by the window.
When the lightning had struck, for a brief second, he had seen another figure staring at him from one of the unlit manor windows. The figure had glimmering eyes that radiated a kind of evil that words couldn’t describe. There was something ominous about the sight and Tej could have sworn he saw a menacing grin spread across the face that accommodated that pair of eyes. Tej’s heart galloped within his chest. His hand that held the flask was covered in goosebumps. The constable found it difficult to breathe as the startling fact hit him with the force of a bullet: Archana Rana lived alone.
Tej Bahadur felt a chill on his nape.
It was then that the clouds burst out, releasing a torrential downpour over the sleepy little town. The dread-filled nature of the manor reminded Tej Bahadur of the second thing every child in town knew. The Zamindar’s ghost haunted Azad Manor. “It was just a trick of the light,” he mumbled to himself, but there was a crack in his voice. His hand trembled as he raised his arm for another swig from his flask, but quickly decided against it.
He told himself that his shivers were because of the cold, but he knew in his heart that he was lying. He could feel the unnatural drop in temperature, an eeriness in the space around him and then he felt a presence behind him, a second before he heard it. “Bahadur,” a bloodcurdling whisper reached his ears and he felt someone’s breath on his nape, but when he turned around, there was no one there.
“Just a trick of the light and wind,” he mumbled unconvincingly, as he made his way away from Azad Manor with an apparent haste in his step. “Was Azad Manor truly haunted by the Zamindar’s ghost?” he wondered aloud, once he was a good distance away from the manor.
“No,” he growled, as he downed the remaining moonshine in one long gulp; he enjoyed the burn it brought to his innards.
“Just a trick of the light and wind,” he repeated to reassure himself. Tej Bahadur didn’t believe in ghosts.
There were no such things.
Unfortunately, he was wrong.
Excerpted with permission from The Zamindar’s Ghost, Khayaal Patel, HarperCollins India.