Mysterical-E

He Said, She Says

The Incident at the Hunting Lodge in Banmori
by Barnali Saha

It was one of those cool and cloudy days with a chance of rain late in the evening that you often get in Delhi during early spring when fantasy, the truant potentate ruling the imagination of all and sundry, decides to show up for a change and unleash the flutter of fancy in the minds of the otherwise grim populace populating the city. On such rare days the city looks especially good, the vintage appeal of its monuments, the charm of its new and disintegrating buildings, and the green of its trees all seem to glow with an accentuated touch of life as the dull, cloud-layered light lather romance on them. The inhabitants of the city often decide to enjoy its offerings on days like this, scrutinize its skies, close their eyes in a moment of fleeting contentment when the cool breeze fingers their faces, smile at a passerby, and if they get a chance, have a sumptuous chat with a friend over lunch.

Smriti Mukherjee, the young Bengali writer who had been visiting Delhi and enjoying its sights for the past couple of days, had the above thought when sitting at the wheel of a hired Honda City parked outside a restaurant with a lemon yellow signboard bearing a red-brown inscription “The Owl’s Perch” accompanied by the portrait of a bespectacled owl and a brimming cup of coffee. For the past fifteen minutes, Smriti had been gazing at a couple of well-fed men in a booth next to the open-window devouring sandwiches and chips and talking to each other. From what she saw, she gathered that both the men were respectable nine-to-five cubicle-workers who were taking a rather long lunch break.

One of them who did most of the talking was animatedly explaining a an experience, and the other, with an incredulous look in his face was staring at the raconteur with the coffee cup in his hand. Nuggets of conversation reached Smriti’s ears at first: “I saw it,” “no legs, I tell you,” “clear as day,” “yes, yes, they told me not to go,” “she struck me as terribly ordinary, except for the legs, of course.” Smriti looked at her watch, it was nearly three in the afternoon and she had originally planned to visit Lodhi Gardens and take a few pictures, but she thought she could do that tomorrow. She felt that snooping on an interesting conversation was as much fun as scrutinizing monuments, and being a writer by profession, she had always wanted to do that only never had a golden opportunity like this presented to her in a platter, so to speak, before now. Smriti nodded, got out of the car, locked it and walked inside the restaurant.

“Oh, madam,” one of the waitresses who took her to-go order said, “we need another fifteen minutes.”

“I was getting bored so I thought I could wait inside,” Smriti said smiling and noticed a couple of empty seats near her booth of interest.

“Of course, madam, please have a seat,” said the waitress and departed, smiling.

Smriti looked around the restaurant which now held apart from those two men, a young couple cuddling surreptitiously in a booth, three young women who talked about some movie that they didn’t like very much and an old man reading two Hindi and an English newspaper.

Smriti walked to the seat she had earlier spotted and took out her cell phone. Gazing at the phone and playing with its keys, she heard all that her rotund neighbor said. The man who was doing the talking was now on the verge of telling a story and was replenishing his caffeine dosage before embarking on the task. She looked at the men carefully now. The one who was talking had a bulbous appearance, a round face with bags under his eyes, red ears and oily skin with large pores on his cheeks. The listener was the calmer of the two and kind of balanced his partner’s animated energy with his serenity. He was slightly rotund but handsome and wore rimless spectacles.

“I tell you,” said Mr. Goyal, the rotund raconteur, “I was never so scared in my life. I get goosebumbs even when I recall that incident. Ghastly, ghastly, that was what it was and I was actually having a lot of fun before it happened.”

“What happened to your brother-in-law, was he scared too?” asked Ankit Sharma, who liked to call himself Mr. Goyal’s colleague but was actually his junior in rank in office, a fact that pained him a lot.

“Oh, yes, he was scared too, terrified actually. Who wouldn’t be if they saw something like that?” said Mr. Goyal masticating his sandwich and for a moment looking at his legs nestled comfortable in the booth.

“What queer people,” Smirti said to herself, “I am sure that man is nothing but a braggadocio. Perhaps I am wasting my time here.”

“Let me tell you the whole story now,” said Mr. Goyal picking his tooth.

“Please do,” said Ankit Sharma, “we don’t have much time.”

“Oh, we do, we have ample time,” said Mr. Goyal, “nobody works on a computer on such a beautiful day as this. By the way, what was I saying, oh yes, my story, but mind you it’s not a story, but a real incident, I hope you understand that, Ankit?” Ankit nodded and said he understood.

The sky had gone dark and a cool before-rain wet wind was at large outside playing with loose garbage. “I think it’s a perfect day to tell such a story,” sighed Mr. Goyal as he relaxed into a comfortable pose. Smriti lay her phone aside and turned her head slightly in the direction of the two men who hardly noticed her. She found Ankit Sharma scrutinizing her once but after that he had never looked back.

Presently, after emitting two loud oniony burps, Mr. Goyal began. “I wonder, Ankit, if you have even been to Banmori?” Ankit said he hadn’t.

“Well,” said Mr. Goyal, “it’s a beautiful place, a smallish town in Madhya Pradesh with a limited population. People in Delhi hardly know about it. It has a museum where several war souvenirs, stuffed tigers, pottery items like bowls and glazed ware, steel body armors and other items belonging to the erstwhile royal family is displayed. There are a couple of old sculptured temples too done on the line of Khajuraho, but the workmanship is not so fine; a church with beautiful stained glass windows, an old palace where the last descendent of the royal family spent his bachelor life in moderate luxury. I hadn’t known anything about Banmori myself before my first trip there nearly four years ago. My brother-in-law, who, as you know, is a professor at Delhi University and an avid birdwatcher, was going there to attend his friend’s sister’s wedding and asked me join him. He said he hated attending a wedding all by himself but since my sister couldn’t accompany him because of their son’s exam, she suggested that I go. I wasn’t particularly busy at the time and since I hadn’t been out of Delhi for too many years, I naturally relented. What attracted me most to the wedding was the fact that the girl would be married to a family who had relations with the former royal family and that we would be staying at a place that used to be the royal family’s hunting lodge and still had some old artifacts and antiques to be seen. From my minor antique collection at home, I hope you know how interested I am in antiques, and there is something about a hunting lodge that readily catches one’s fancy. The moment I heard about it I thought about stories of indiscretion, licentious incidents, murders that might have happened a long, long time ago under the roof of that hunting lodge. I thought about the place day and night and prayed that something sensational happened there during our stay, only, at that time, I had no idea that it would indeed happen.

In order to avoid the fuss of wedding, we decided to go by ourselves a day after the other wedding guests went and despite by brother-in-law’s friend’s insistent appeal, we didn’t change our plan. Armed with two cameras, one digital and one film, a couple of binoculars, of which one was meant for my use in case we saw some rare bird, and a heavy suitcase, my brother-in-law appeared at my door a couple of hours before our departure.

Around nine-thirty in the evening we boarded our train and soon settled into a belaboring discussion involving politics, cricket, food and travels. Around twelve when all the passengers were displaying disapproval at our being so talkative, we decided to switch off the lights and go to sleep. But I could hardly sleep that night, visions of a rickety wooden hunting lodge with stuffed animal faces gazing at me from all sides, glass fronted gun cabinets filled with old and rusty rifles and shot guns, hookahs filled my mind. My grandfather who was a great traveler had once heard a story about a prince who used children as bait to woo tigers near his hunting lodge. I had never forgotten that gruesome story even though my grandfather had told it rather casually; and now, as I lay in the rocking middle-berth of a train, I remembered it more vividly that ever. I spend the rest of the night dreaming of adventurous escapades and woke up late next morning to listen that our train was late because of some railroad obstruction.

We reached Banmori around four-thirty in the afternoon. The weather was pleasantly chilly and smelled of rain. The driver of the auto rickshaw that took us to our destination said they had heavy rainfall the night before, a phenomenon rarely happening in Banmori in December. On our way to the hunting lodge, I noticed the various small shops, the tree-lined narrow avenues we crossed, the poster-pasted walls of one or two story houses, the thin street dogs, and the children playing football in a mud-daubed wet field, one of them with a whistle in his mouth wearing a yellow sports t-shirt, the back of which had the number ten inscribed on it in green underneath the legendary name Pelé.

It took us around fifteen minutes and a moderately steep hill climb to reach the hunting lodge. From outside it struck me as the very image of the one I had dreamed. It had a two-storied, rustic, brick and wood structure with tall colonial windows and was situated in spacious grounds surrounded by old trees, some of them with ample aerial roots hanging down in ghastly knots. A little away from the main building, among lush green Mahua trees, stood an observation machan, a platform erected in a tree used for hunting or watching animals.
After inspecting the ground for a few moments, we came back to the house. The presence of wedding guests and a lorry with men decanting electric wires and light fixtures from within, and the smell of laddoos being made in the kitchen seemed anachronistic to me. Somehow, the hunting lodge and its surrounding greenery, the shrill cries of birds, and the observation gallery all seemed to woo adventure and excitement and presence of wedding people in the scene relegated its thrill. My brother-in-law thought so too. The bird cries hadn’t escaped him and right from the moment we went inside the house, he urged me to go out with him and climb the machan, a proposition I couldn’t but agree to.

Rajiv, my brother-in-law’s friend was out at the time we arrived with the other male members to meet the wedding band people. His son, Chintoo, who was playing with a few other children in the backyard, informed us that only few of the wedding guests and some of the servants were staying at the lodge and that the rest were staying at a guest house that was ten minutes from the lodge. He said that his father had waited for us a long time and when we didn’t show up went out to attend to his errand. The boy took us through a narrow corridor downstairs with closed rooms on both sides to a room opposite a wide verandah.

‘That’s your room,’ he said opening the door and letting us in. He then departed saying that his cousins and he were going to the guest house and that he would ask one of the servants to bring us tea.

Our room was spacious and had recently been dusted. A couple of single beds with milky-white sheets stood in its middle. It had a quaint wooden cupboard and a heavy writing desk. The room had an attached bathroom with a heavy brass washbasin and brass faucet.

An old servant with heavy accent presently came to take our orders of tea.

‘Should we wait for the other guests?’ I asked him.

‘No, sir, nobody would be coming back before dinner, I guess. Rajiv babu had asked me to serve you tea; he said we would come back soon and take you to the other house where the guests are in now,’ said Charan Das, the septuagenarian, slightly crippled servant displaying a set of tobacco stained teeth.

Nodding and giving him orders for fresh towels and warm tea, we left our room to look around the place.

‘We will have our tea at the machan, Charan Das,’ said Aravind, my brother-in-law.

Charan Das, presumably, being slightly deaf, didn’t hear what he said at first. ‘What’s that, sir?’ he said stopping in his track and turning back.

‘We will have out tea outside at the machan,’ he repeated loudly.

‘But it’s dark now sir,’ said Charan Das with a gulp.

‘You have electricity there, I presume, a light bulb, or something?’

‘No, sir,’ Charan Das said. ‘People don’t go there in the evening. Nasty things are seen from there, you know… my grandfather who was a caretaker here…’

‘Charan Das,’ said Aravind cutting the old man’s reminiscences, ‘I am not interested in your grandfather. We want our tea, and we will have it at the machan, as I said. Put a lantern there and it will be all right. And now, go.’

Charan Das examined our faces incredulously for some time and then turned and went away nodding his head and muttering to himself.

‘Loony,’ said my brother-in-law exacting his binocular from his bag. ‘I think I saw a bullfinch outside; I am going to look for it from the verandah, would you come?’

‘No, I better look around and checkout the rooms now. Nobody is about now and this seems to be the best chance to inspect them,’ I said.

‘Well, I guess some of the rooms are unlocked. Call me if you find something interesting,’ he said and went toward the verandah.

Most of the downstairs rooms were closed and had heavy brass locks descending from their latches. Those that were opened were as ordinary as ours and had mattresses lain on the floor and utensils and wires piled in corners. I walked down the corridor and reached the other end, turned the corner and went up the narrow flight of stairs to the upper story of the house. A strong smell of bats reached me along with that quintessential musty mildewed smell you get in old places suffering from desuetude. I wondered if people at all use this place or was it the first time in years that the place was seeing guests. Evidently, there were no arrangements for guests upstairs.

Three of the rooms in the upper story were locked, the rest of the three rooms were closed but not locked. I unlocked one of them, with the whine the door opened and I encountered nothing but dusty emptiness. The second room showed more prospects as it had very old and faded carpets piled in a corner and an inbuilt gun cabinet with broken glass doors. The iron gun rack, used presumably to hold long firearms, had rusty patches on them. Next to the long cabinet hung a huge but old deer head which retained a strange life-like quality in its two beady eyes, which I thought were directed at me. Several hooks fixed high up on the walls and some sagged, sawdust spilt-out bird carcasses lying in another cabinet with broken glass doors suggested that the room had once been a trophy room.

As I was looking around and inspecting the various objects in the room, I had a queer feeling that somebody was watching me. I turned and saw Charan Das standing at the doorway.

‘Tea is served,’ he said and left without waiting for a reply.

I found his behavior extremely strange and thought I should have a word with him. I wondered how long he had been upstairs watching me, and why was he watching me at all? He didn’t think that I would steal any of those sagged birds, did he? But that was outrageous, and yet, there the man was quietly watching me behind my back.

I encountered the man once waiting for me in the landing. ‘Nobody goes to the machan in the evening, don’t tell me I didn’t warn you,’ he said in a low conspiratorial tone and went down the stairs hastily.

I found my brother-in-law waiting for me downstairs. He smiled when he saw me and said, ‘Did you find anything interesting?’

I told him about the trophy room and he smiled and said, “I found my bullfinch and a number of others.”

As we went outside I told him about Charan Das. ‘He is a queer old man, reminds me of the Ancient Mariner from Coleridge’s poem,’ Aravind said with a laugh.

The steps that lead to the top of the observation deck was old but sturdy. We found a flask of warm tea, a kerosene lantern, and a couple of teacups on a tray placed on the ground of the machan. Several old camping chairs were littered about the place and we took two of them and sat. Contrary to my belief, the deck was pretty spacious and could accommodate a large hunting party easily. I was saying that to my brother-in-law when my eyes fell on one of the corners of the deck.

The deck was hexagonal in shape and had bamboo pillars, and was, I thought, vacant apart from us. But now, in the faint glimmer of twilight, I distinctly saw a female form occupying a chair a little way from us. I nudged my brother-in-law and we both looked at her, ‘Probably some local women taking in the scenery,’ he said.

The woman had her back to us. Her head was covered with a sequined dupatta, and her delicately curled long hair reached the small of her back. She was wearing a sequined dress which caught the yellowish light from our flickering lantern and shone with a demurred brilliance. ‘Was she here when we came?’ I asked.

‘Of course, she must have been; how the hell did you think she spring from otherwise?’ said Aravind rebuking.

Arvind and I looked at one another. The woman had turned her head to the left and we could see her beautiful profile now. She had a sharp nose, a small forehead, and a delicate jaw. She wore an enormous jeweled nose ring, the kind of which hardly small-town maidens wandering alone in a secluded hunting lodge would wear.

‘Give me your binoculars,’ I said to Aravind. I stuck the instrument in my eyes and froze.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Aravind said and I handed him back the binoculars without a word. He picked it up and looked in the direction of the woman. After a second the instrument fell from his hand with a crash. The woman hearing the sound turned her head and looked at us with steady, unblinking eyes.

‘But what does it mean, what does it mean?’ Aravind said excitedly, his cold hands grabbing my cold arm.

‘You noticed it too then?’ I said ‘You saw the bare ground underneath the chair, right?

‘She has no legs,’ Aravind said in a whisper, ‘the chair has no legs.’

We looked at each other in utter disbelief. A bird cried from somewhere and a moment later we felt a warm breath near our shoulder. We turned to the right and saw the woman standing with a mischievous smile on her lips a few steps away from us. Her beautiful face, her crimson lips were daubed in some unearthly mirth and her cold, hard eyes shimmered in some ancient fury. We saw her more clearly now, her long arms, her sequined dress present and correct up to her knees, and then nothing. Her body seemed to walk with ease without its legs, the missing feet didn’t bother her and with every passing second we observed her coming closer and closer toward where we sat. Presently, I gave out a loud yell and another, and then another and grabbing Aravind, who stared at the woman with openmouthed amazement still muttering, ‘She has no legs; she has no legs,’ I rushed down the rickety staircase as fast as I could.

…

‘So you saw her then,’ said Charan Das handing me a cup of tea in the kitchen a little later, ‘that’s why I told you not to go there.’ Aravind was asleep after taking the pills the doctor gave him. His friend was taking to the medical man while I decided to go the kitchen and have a chat with the old servant.

‘But it’s impossible, Charan Das?’ I said sipping my tea.

‘But, you saw her with your own eyes, didn’t you?’ Charan Das replied with a sneer.

I remembered the leg-less beauty and nodded. ‘Who was she?’ I asked.

‘She was a dancer who used to entertain the king and his friends when they stayed here. She developed some disease and performance failed for some time and so the king ordered her legs to be cut-off and she killed. It was a gruesome incident in the history of the family, and strangely enough most male members of the royal family died from one disease or another after that incident. It is said that they cut-off her legs in the machan and fed it to the tigers. She is often seen there in the evening that’s why nobody goes near the machan after sunset,’ said Charan Das.”

“Your food, madam,” said the waitress with a broad smile and Smriti looked up. “I brought it sometime ago.”

“It was a good story, wasn’t it?” said Mr. Goyal looking at Smriti. Ankit Sharma smiled and looked at her as well.

“It was,” Smriti said, a little embarrassed. She then got up and walked toward the door. The pavement was wet; it had rained a bit during the last half hour. Before stepping out of the restaurant she stopped, thought something, turned back and went to the table where the two gentlemen sat. He found gathering their coats and getting ready to leave.

“Tell me, sir, did that really happen to you? I mean did you really see that girl?” she asked.

“As plain as I see you,” said Mr. Goyal, “it rattled me at the time, and from then on I always make it a point to see whoever I meet had all their limbs intact.”

Mr. Goyal laughed and pointed at Smriti’s legs. To her relief both her legs with her all toes, safely encased in a pair of comfortable shoes stared up at her. “That’s what you call happy feet,” she said to herself and left.

Bio:
Barnali Saha is a creative writer from Gurgaon, India. She enjoys writing short stories, articles and travelogues. Her works have been published in several newspapers and magazines in India and in several e-magazines in the USA (e.g., The Tribune, Woman's Era, Muse India, The Statesman, The Indian Express, Mused -Bella Online Literary Review, The Smoking Poet, Fiction at Work, Parabaas, Palki, etc). One of her short stories has also been featured in "A Rainbow Feast", an anthology of new Asian short stories published by Marshal Cavendish, Singapore. Apart from writing, she is interested in painting and photography.