The souls have converged upon the living to party on Halloween- the “official” carnival of the spooks on the festival roster – tracing its roots to ancient Celtic ceremonial rites to recall and appease the dead. In a majority-Hindu nation like India, where one person departs the world of the living every minute, as rough estimates cite, souls jostle cheek by jowl for place at the doorstep or at the ghouls’ masquerades to revel in “mortal warmth” and goodies. Too many to make room for in too confined a space. But snatches of “unexplained” knocks by old souls – from the mists of history, often unknown – is the haunting of Halloween.
They live, often too near for comfort, whipping up disquiet in some unchecked crannie in the head, not always warm to reason. In the past few weeks since leaving my work-desk – under a set of co-incidences (which are often known to have another-worldly connection) – to scout for new and fresher pastures, the staple of reminiscences among colleagues has been of “spooks” and “spirits”- withering recollections of souls long departed – who inhabited the spaces between the present and past in my last (erstwhile) organization, nearly 275 years old – a publishing house that marked the beginning of English print journalism in Hindustan (India). Some are friendly while others cold – a whiff of chill that rustles the tips of the nose, trailing in a swish of old skirts, swirling bits of smokes, dissipating vapours and footsteps in the arching stairways amid the rubble -heaps of dismantled built spaces and concrete blocks- in odd hours of the night .
A posse of old English “lairds” and ladies, who set the lathe grindstone in motion at the turn of the 19th century and in the early decades of the 20th century till after Independence (on August 15, 1947) – 10 years or less – continue to vie for space in the memory with their tales of grisly rivalry, near starvation, wastings, Calcutta floods, famines, chills, wars riots, murders (fable like legends of the 1930s and 1940s Calcutta) and their eventual demise – and sometime somnolent retreat into twilights in day care homes far away in England- the land both cherished, hated and coveted by the natives and the lords of Raj then- for more than one reason.
Some were banished from the crown, others sought exile driven by disgrace or under pressure to serve in the dominions, some fled penalties and while others were barred access (mostly the desi stock of dubious antecedents).
The lone refuge – for the illustrious babu-turned sahibs of the colony, the renegade Englishman with money and a fetish for the fine print but no carpet walk on the Queen’s roll of honour and eager wannabes – was the “English” bulletin that covered the city and the world to the honest possible extent- culling, lifting, coaxing, contributing, observing and pasting on the type set. The tales were falling off the closet like pennies – old but tingling, replete with the “hoos-hahs”, “m’ gawd”, “I don’t believe this” and “scary, yeah! Boy)- the stock of the nippy Halloween night. Till someone complained of “spooks” literally in the closet!
After three days of relentless October rain, the walls and floors of the old Calcutta homes had begun to gather “damp”- patches of moisture that seeped in through cracks in the ceilings and the loose reinforcement on the walls. The floor felt clammy. In the scuffle that the deluge brought to the riverine lowlands – inundation of the conclaves along the Ganges – the closets at home began to show signs of a strange wetness. I spied – along with several others who were still part of the organization and common friends – wetness in eerie patches on the wood of the cupboards, on clothes , in edibles stashed in the pantry and on the pages of books in closed shelves. The fluids were sticky and musty in smell tempered with brown at the edges, not exactly colourless like water. The vine was abuzz with possibilities and wistfulness.
It reeked of “old blood”- ooze from old wounds that had been cut open afresh and were still alive. The stains were real – contained in small patches – not the seeping spread of the monsoon moisture, but little “botches of rain-washed blood”.
The stains are yet to dry on the wood and the clothes – faint – but we have allowed them to linger on our mortal skins and memory like a bridge between this and the other world. Some suggested they were -checks against “recurring patterns” from history, recalling lores (or may be true stories) of a “lady of bearing” being mauled on the premises of the organization by a tiger owned by a whimsy “babu” that roamed the lawns like a pet cat, a young English lady being tortured to death on the job and yet another dying of chill in a city hospice – they were apparently the early crop of English lady editors, as the legend goes down the generations – meshed in a bitter battle of pride between a section of the “desi trading class” (a community of moneyed businessmen who wanted to secure a social toehold in the hallowed corridors of English journalism) and the English owners, who refused to cede inches. It was another mutiny played out in the elite corridors of the intellectual heart of the city- silent, ruthless and aggressive between the early masters and their novices. It was not on the official log. The women, it was rumoured, paid the price behind the Gothic colonnades of the concrete hulk – that remains a crumbling testimony to two hundred years of Kolkata’s and India’s colonial history and discord. And to the city’s forgotten tragedies.
A few unmarked gravestones in the city and in England were swamped by rain almost simultaneously in a waking call to Halloween- they were all makers of the history of modern Hindustan and “women” from the pulse of the British Raj.
The souls called – rather knocked in blood on their “official resurrection” in the Gregorian Christian calendar. HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Madhusree Chatterjee
Senior Editor & Foreign Affairs Analyst
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