DOUBLECROSSED

Rajnish raised his glass towards heaven and said “May you live to see a lot of moons and throw such a wonderful party every night”

The night above was moonless, foggy and dull and I had a very strong urge of taking Rajnish to the moon and then kicking him out from there, allowing him a free fall down to earth defying all the boring laws of Newton, Kepler, Galileo and Stephen Hawking.

It was my birthday party and it was also the worst party I had ever had. The worst thing about it was that, I had to pay the entire bill of this whole damned party out of my own pocket. And so, even after four pegs of white rum I wasn’t feeling any better than the time when I had to dole out the money. There were as usual the three of them feasting on my money and I could swear that neither of them was anywhere near normal, even when they were in a very much sober state. The nearest case to normalcy was that of Amit, and he was sitting by the fire and whining about his last girlfriend. He had lots of them but all of them eventually ditched him for some unheavenly reason. The last one did that because Amit didn’t have any western type toilet at home. Rajnish was both bodily and mentally sick and was retching whatever he had drunk (or whatever I had paid to get him drunk) into the fire. Amlan didn’t drink anything but had eaten up everything that was bought to go along with the drinks. And yet he looked the greatest drunkard among us and had shut his eyes and sat in a drunken stupor as if trying to imbibe whatever intoxication was there, floating about in the atmosphere around him. And I was there gripped in a cloak of loneliness from which I wanted desperately to escape, trying to figure out what I was doing there with my life which was going nowhere. All of our parties usually ended like that with Amit whining, Rajnish retching, Amlan brooding and I wondering what to do, this was no different.

The wind coming down from the hills of Haridwar was biting cold and the fog building up on the banks of Solani, shrouded the entire horizon and filled up the night with an eerie ambience and a silence that I dreadfully hated. The lights of our hostel were now dimmed and gone and only the shapes of the Senate building were discernable. Amlan was the first to break the silence. Half opening his eyelids, as if trying to lift Titanic from the bottom of Atlantic with them,  he told something that sounded like “I had seen a ghost last night”

“A what?”- Rajnish had recovered a bit from his habitual retching but started again on hearing Amlan

“A ghost – as in bhoot”

“Balderdash” – that was Amit

“Bolder- what, another type of ghost” Rajnish was now finding trouble figuring out such ghostly things.

“Bolderdascht-that’s German for bullshit”

“The English sounds better”

“It’s the same you know- Shakespeare once wrote, What’s in a name, that a rose by any other name will smell the same or something like that”

Shakespeare’s ghost if he were nearby might have strangled Amit and committed hara-kiri becoming a ghost again. Whatever type of worldly intelligentsia could ever extrapolate Shakespeare’s comparison of a rose to that of bullshit or whatever this bolder-something was.

“ I don’t believe in ghosts” – that was spoken with an accent typically smacking of urbaneness, sophistication, intellect, suavity and all things like that , which Amit  lacked and tried to achieve but never would be able to do that in this life.  He by default was an idiot and everybody believed that except him.  He believed in girlfriends (and maybe their ghosts).

“Shoe, do you believe in ghosts”

My name isn’t Shoe, it is Shubhom and I didn’t like my name being vandalized and mutilated to something as insignificant as Shoe just to fit Amit’s Yankee accent. Yet I was too drunk to protest and only managed to tell that I didn’t care a damn about the existence of ghosts.

Anyway Rajnish had by the time started prodding Amlan with his when’s, why’s, and where’s of Amlan’s tryst with the ghost. It was last night- at the Hazi Manzil beside the river where Amlan had seen it (or him) and he was planning to go there today too. Amlan had only two interests in life, pornography and parapsychology, strictly in that order. For the first one, he raided theatres and movie halls of Haridwar for movies like Junglee Jawaani and Pyaasi Husn and for the second one he went to temples and ghats of Haridwar to consult priests and yogis and gain knowledge about the supernatural. He had also developed a habit of bunking classes and roaming in very odd places in very odd times to meet ghosts and other odd beings like that; hence nobody ever doubted or cared when Amlan said he met a ghost, doubts only arose when he said that he met a teacher (alive) in a class.

“Anyone wants to join me?”- invited Amlan again in his dull drab tone.

This was a loaded question and meant specifically for Amit.  A no to Amlan’s invitation would brand him as a coward and all his persona, accent, prestige and ego would be differentiated (as in calculus) into a big zero, so the only way out was a yes and this came after a considerable time and thought and that too in a Yankee accent less tone.

I was interested to see the chemistry that Amit would share with the ghost, more than that to see the ghost itself and readily agreed to join Amlan in this ghostly venture. Rajnish nodded his head into a yes or a no or something in between, nobody knew and nobody cared.

Hazi Manzil appeared as if it had undergone a 9/11 type of thing somewhere back in the Old Stone Age.  It was the ruins of some sort of building where you would expect ghosts of dinosaurs rather than those of Homo sapiens. It was a two storied building, the top of which seemed as if it had been eroded off and the interior of it housed an entire Amazon forest with all its flora and fauna. None of the rooms bragged of a roof or a window or a door and only the walls and a staircase stood as a silent suggestion of the existence of the building. It was on the way to such a dilapidated building that Amlan narrated us the bio-data of the ghost whom were to meet.

Well, every ghost has some sort of background which sometimes makes it more interesting than it actually is. Our ghost as per Amlan, was a Captain Smith in the Meerut regiment sometime during the 1857 Revolution. It was in this house that his in- laws lived with his wife Emily and daughter Rose. During the days of the revolution, he served in subduing the revolt in areas in and around Delhi and it was after such an encounter with the sepoys of Delhi did he learn of a great mob uprising in Roorkee that was robbing, burning and murdering all white skinned people, with a special vengeance towards families of army men. Captain Smith, concerned about the safety of his family, rode back the entire distance from Delhi to Roorkee directly from the battlefield but on reaching, found that he was too late. His whole family including little Rose had been butchered and burnt by the mob and only their burnt and disfigured corpses were there lying on the floor. The young captain, heart broken and shocked ran out of his house and shot himself in the head with his double barreled Enfield rifle and died on the spot. It is said that it was in the room at the end of the staircase, Captain Smith found the burnt remnants of his wife and daughter and since then, every night his ghost visits this house, climbs the staircase and stands near the door of the unfortunate room and peers inside. And then with a cry of shock and anguish he runs down the stairs and vanishes into the dark night.

We were all drunk (except Amlan) but I could swear that the story sent a feeling of fear and excitement down my spine. Suddenly the house (or its ruins) which seemed so normal got transformed into a haunted one and from every corner of this ram shackled house the ghost of Captain Smith seemed to watch us. Silently we followed Amlan tiptoeing our way up the stairs, as if afraid to disturb anything or anybody in this abandoned and decrepit house and were led into the room in which Captain Smith was to appear. All of us, anxious of something unknown and afraid of something unseen, waited with bated breath in the darkness of the room. Amit had by then shed all of his all his American machismo and was clutching my shoulders as if trying to grind it into powder. Rajnish sat with an ex-pressionless face in the same way he sat before a surprise test. Again around us a shroud of silence began to build sometimes interrupted by the unevenly intermittent heavy breathing of Amit. Beads of sweat dripped down my forehead even at peak winter temperatures. Moments passed dragging time with it and we sat for the unexpected.

The sound of silence was suddenly shattered by footsteps climbing up the staircase and as it grew nearer the pressure on my shoulders increased proportionately and became so unbearable that I had to push Amit aside. The footsteps ended and suddenly at the door, a short and dark silhouette of a human form appeared, stared at us in the dark of the room for a few moments, and then gave a shrill cry which sounded more of fear than of anguish and raced down noisily vanishing into the dark. ”Captain Smith”, Amlan whispered.

The entire episode lasted for a few moments but the effect was profound, especially on Amit. As soon as all the shock and awe of this momentary guest appearance of the Captain Smith passed off, the first thing that registered to my mind was some sort of light machine gun fire somewhere in the room. I groped around trying to figure out the source and caught hold of Amit, kneeling down in the floor. Either he was chanting something to invoke some American God to save him or his teeth were chattering wildly or both- well that was what produced the machine gun sound. Rajnish was there sitting on the floor, a paradigm of masterly inactivity, same as he was before Captain Smith’s visit, no impact showed on him, he was to drunk to perceive anything ghostly or worldly. Amlan looked dazed and I was knocked out of my senses. Somehow gathering ourselves, we walked wearily back to our hostels; none spoke a word- only Amit’s machine gun fire continued. He had suffered worse than that; his confidence had been shattered, once and for all.

This story could have ended here, but the aftershocks continued the next day too. It was a class day and that too a morning class as early as 8 am, the alarm clock failed to wake me up and it was someone’s thoughtful kick on my door that ultimately got me up from my bed. The outside was grey with fog with no traces of sun and I had to use all my talents to brush my teeth, search and wear my shoes, dig out all the matter out of my eyes, find a few books and then rush to my class all within five minutes and it was only due to shortsightedness of Prof Prakash did I get a chance to sneak in through the back door. Neither Rajnish, nor Amit or Amlan were present and most probably were still under the combined hangovers of yesterday’s party and the effect of Captain Smith’s ghost, and hence I had to give a proxy for all of them. Even our class topper DK Chorotia was absent, which indeed was a very rare event, something like a solar eclipse, but since he was universally despicable character being a model of utter selfishness and absolute jealousy and suffered from a compulsive mugging disorder, (mugging up everything legible from the IIT prospectus to the Rules and Regulations of the Library) nobody ever cared to give a proxy for him. Last year, somebody mis-spelt his name in the souvenir, deliberately or otherwise leaving the ‘r’ out of his surname “Chorotia, for which he wanted to take some sort of legal action against the whole IIT.  The IIT however escaped that misfortune but he dropped his surname and became DK.

Anyway nothing that Professor Prakash taught entered my ears, not because my mind was choked with the happenings of yesterday’s eventful night but because, the professor had a big gap, the size of Khyber Pass, between his front teeth and whatever wisdom he tried to impart to this world slipped out between them and disappeared into oblivion. Only showers of spit and air materialized and baptized those who sat in the first bench and were desperate to trap some knowledge from such a leaking source. I was in the last bench but all through the class, the ghost of Captain Smith haunted me and I was frantically waiting for a chance to discuss it with my friends.

The chance came in the evening at the Cafeteria, only after Rajnish had sobered up and devoured one large burger and a glass of milkshake and was helping himself with a club sandwich, again at my expense.

“How was Captain Smith’s ghost?”- He was the first to ask.

“Well- ghostly” was all I could think off.

“Did you find anything odd with it?”- he asked, as if he had being the meeting the ghost for last half a century and found something unusual about it only in last night’s meeting.

No, I didn’t find anything odd with the ghost. It was perfectly ghostly.

“You heard it, when it ran back?”

“Yes, it was a bit noisy”

“Noisy, yes, but what was the sound of?” it was almost becoming a Sherlock Holmes- Dr. Watson affair.

“The ghosts foot wear, his shoes” I figured out

“Yes, my dear, Hawaii chappals to be more precise”

“What, sound of what?”

“Bathroom Slippers, It was the sound of bathroom slippers”

“So, what’s odd about that?”

“Can you ever imagine a ghost, that too a British military captain rushing around in bathroom slippers”

That was a bit tough one, I never saw any British Military officer, other than James Bond, and I never saw him wearing slippers and I didn’t know whether his ghost would wear Hawaii chappals.

“Then, what?”

“DK- it was DK, didn’t you notice he was absent today?”

“DK’s ghost wearing Hawaii chappals?”- That sounded more befitting.

“No you dim-witted brainless idiot, DK alive. We were invited to see Captain Smith’s ghost, we saw DK and thought he was the ghost. Similarly, Amlan lured DK to Hazi Manzil to see a ghost, probably those of Captain Smith’s family; he came, saw us, he thought we were the ghosts, panicked and ran away. Now he is suffering a nervous breakdown in his room, just like Amit. We were double crossed, you understand”

Things began to dawn on me; some sort of rusty hard disk began to spin at 10 rpm inside my hollow head.

“Sssso, Captain Smith?” I tried to compile the inputs.

“Was actually DK”- Rajnish shrugged in a Shashi Kapoor like way.

“And the ghost?”, I was still a bit perplexed

“Balderdash”, he said