Story: Subhobroto Mazumder

Double-crossed
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 sober. 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 so because Amit
didn’t have any western type toilet at home. Rajnish was both bodily and mentally sick
and was retching out whatever he had drunk (or whatever I had paid for 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 like 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 me wondering what to do;
this was no different.
The wind coming down from the hills of Haridwar was biting cold; the fog building up on
the banks of Solani shrouded the entire horizon and filled up the night with an eerie
ambience and a dreary silence that I absolutely hated. The lights of our hostel were now
dimmed and gone, and only the shapes of the Senate building were discernible. Amlan
was the first to break the silence. Half opening his eyelids, as if trying to lift the Titanic
from the bottom of Atlantic with them, he muttered 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.”

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“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. Only his 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 get 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 respond that I didn’t care a damn about the
existence of ghosts.
Anyway, Rajnish had by that time started prodding Amlan with his whens, whys, and
wheres of Amlan’s tryst with the ghost. It had been 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 (‘Wild Youth’) and Pyaasi Husn (‘Thirsty Beauty’), and for the second one
he went to temples and ghaats (embankments) 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 had met a
ghost. Doubts only arose when he said that he had 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 a coward and all his persona, accent, prestige and ego would be

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differentiated (as in calculus) into a big zero, so the only way out was a ‘yes’; 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 demolition 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 which 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 silent suggestions of the
existence of the building. It was on the way to such a dilapidated building that Amlan
narrated to us the bio-data of the ghost whom we 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. 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 upon 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 remained, lying on the floor. The
young captain, heartbroken and shocked, ran out of his house and shot himself in the
head with his double barreled Enfield rifle, dying on the spot. It is said that it was in the
room at the end of the staircase that Captain Smith found the burnt remnants of his wife
and daughter, and since then, every night his ghost visits this house, climbs the staircase,
stands near the door of that 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 ramshackle
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

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American machismo and was clutching my shoulders as if trying to grind it into powder.
Rajnish sat with an expressionless 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; 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 in 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-like 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 too 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 a.m. The alarm clock had failed to
wake me 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 trace 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; it was only due to
the shortsightedness of Professor 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 a universally despicable character – being a model of utter selfishness and
absolute jealousy, and suffering from a compulsive mugging disorder (mugging up

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everything legible, from the institutional prospectus to the Rules and Regulations of the
Library) – nobody ever cared to give a proxy for him. Last year, somebody had misspelt
his name in the class souvenir, deliberately or otherwise, leaving the ‘r’ out of his
surname ‘Chorotia’, and for that he wanted to take some sort of legal action against the
whole institution. The institution, however, escaped that misfortune eventually, 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 the eventful previous night, but because the
professor had a big gap, of about 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; however, 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 to 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 been meeting the ghost for the
last half a century and found something unusual about it only during 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 ghost’s footwear, his shoes.” I figured out.
“Yes, my dear, Hawaii chappals (sandals) 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?”

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That was a bit tough one; I have never seen 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 dimwitted, 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, d’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.

Author Introduction:
A graduate of IIT Roorkee, Subhobroto Mazumder is a geologist by
profession, with a passion for writing stories with a subtle humor in
them. He is inspired by the works of Jerome K Jerome, Joseph Heller,
Ruskin Bond, and very recently, Chetan Bhagat, in his creative
writing. Subhobroto is a geologist by profession. Besides creative
writing, the author also has a penchant for playing harmonica, soccer
and roaming around aimlessly. Born and brought up in Durgapur, he
now lives in Dehradun.
Contact: subhom007@gmail.com

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