Strange happenings on Dodi Rest House
I have told you in passing about things that were supposed to happen in Dodi Rest House. Despite its nondescript appearance, this old building has, or at least one of the rooms in the building had, a rather sinister aura. This is the bed room that is away from the road. On the face of it, there is nothing remarkable about this room. It is as commonplace as the Rest House itself. It flanks the large hall, which serves as a drawing cum dinning room from this hall has a high ceiling and the dim light when the ventilators and windows are shut down in summer can make the room appear quite cavernous and spooky. But nothing out of the ordinary has ever been reported to have happened in this room. There is a real fireplace on one side, the old furniture in it is full of character, and it can be conceded that the room has a certain old world charm.
But the same thing can't be said about the room next door. This is a drab, twelve by twelve room, with a much lower ceiling, which slopes down towards the outer wall. The room has a wooden bedstead, a small cupboard in one corner, and a chair and writing table that are almost of regulation size and appearance. There is a tiny bathroom attached to the bedroom. No one looking at this room can imagine that it can have any connection with the supernatural, but as any of the locals, specially the older men will tell you, spending a night in the room can sometimes lead to unexpected events.
'Naturally there is a story attached to this room. The story concerns a Sahib, who was probably, the senior engineer in the Public Works Department of the Bhopal state. This sahib was also a shikari and whenever he came down to Dodi on official work, he brought his guns with him, to take advantage of the plentiful game that was to be found in the vicinity of Dodi. In those far off days. Shikar, was in fact the favoured pastime of the nobility of Bhopal, and the Sahib's love of shikar was looked upon with indulgent regard by the Nawab and his court. He was after all only engaged in what they also considered the only sport deserving of a man's consideration.
Well, it was a winter day that promised a fair day' shooting, and the Sahib had spent the whole day chasing a bear in the Jungles around Rampur, a few miles south of Dodi. Bears are easy game, especially when they are out grubbing for roots or termites. When a bear has put down his snout into a termite hill to suck out the termites, he will hardly deign to notice any shikari who has the temerity to stalk him at these moments. This particular bear however had an annoying habit of wandering off just when the Sahib got within shooting distance. The Sahib however lacked nothing in persistence, he followed the bear up and down innumerable ravines which were overgrown with lantana bushes, and which left him bruised and bleeding. After a few hours of this fruitless effort however, he finally gave up the chase. When he got back to the Dodi Rest House, footsore and weary, with thorns and thistles sticking into his stockings, night was setting in.
It was the Sahib's practice, like the rest of his compatriots in India, to start the evening with a few sundowners. A table was thus laid out for him on the lawns of the Rest House, where it was a little cooler then the stuffy air within the Dak bungalow. It was a da1 night, with a slight breeze and isolated clouds scudding across the sky. Quite pleasant really, with the stars coming out and the heat of the day dissipating gradually. But the Sahib was not content to sip his drink and enjoy the evening. He was still thinking of the bear. He did not enjoy missing his prey, and this bear had come so maddeningly close and yet eluded him. He kept playing out the events of the day in his mind's eye and reviewing his mistakes. It was easy, sitting in an armchair, with a tall drink in his hand, to outwit the bear every time. So busy was he in this make believe hunt that he hardly realized how much he had drunk He was through with his sixth large drink, when he asked the Khansama to serve dinner, and also to bring him his gun .
Dinner, even in an upcountry Rest House was a ceremonious affair in those days. The dishes were brought out under starched coverlets, in silver or at least pewter containers. I don't know what the khansama had dished out that day. It might have been mulligatawny soup followed by curried chicken and rounded off by plum pudding, I don't know. All I know is, that it was when he decided to wash down his dinner with another large rum, that he finally shot his bolt, and when the khansama came out to clear the table, he took him for the bear and shot him dead in his tracks.
It was this khansamah who haunted the Rest House. He was seen sometimes as a dark spectral presence wandering about the compound. Strangers staying at th bungalow, who didn't know about this ghostly presence often took him to be one of the staff, and there are amusing stories of visitors calling him up, only to find after a while that what they had taken to be a man was only a wavering shadow and that they were yelling into thin air. There were also those who said that they often heard unaccountable knockings in the night and the sound of some one walking about. No one had however been harmed. It seemed this was a benign ghost.
Before I recount what happened one night when I was sojourning there, let me tell you how I came to be spending the night in the Rest House in the first place. It was the night of Diwali, the festival of light, which every Hindu likes to celebrate with family and friends. Diwali is a big day for children, one to which they look forward for weeks. Firecrackers and sparklers are stockpiled in advance and thousand of diyas or earthen lamps are lit to usher in the festival of light. Diwali is also a good time for those who love sweets, as I do. My wife takes care to prepare all my favourite sweets for Diwali, even if she is not so obliging the rest of the year.
Well the usual festive mood that year was dampened by the wolf menace, but the Diwali spirit can't be completely dashed. My children had collected their usual assortment of firecrackers, and swirlers and sparklers and rockets, and were creating a merry din, when I received a phone call from Ashta that a child had been killed close to the Dodi Rest House by the wolf. There was nothing for it but to say good bye to the children and set off for Dodi.
About two furlongs from the Rest House, close to the foot of the Dodi ghati is a power sub station. A child, who lived in the nearby village of Dodi had wandered out in the evening, thinking that it would be quite safe as the sub station was virtually next to the highway. There used to be a small tea shop there, and perhaps the child wanted to have a glass of tea, but the shop happened to be closed on account of Diwali. It is possible that finding the shop closed he boy sat down to watch the traffic, ad boys de sometimes. In any case, the wolf pounced on him as he was sitting by the roadside. He had time to cry out once, and his despairing cry was heard by a passer by, who sounded the alarm. The villagers were able to send forth a search party within minutes, and they soon found the boy. Frightened by all the noise that they were making, the wolf had made off in the nick of time, but the boy was quite dead. The wolf had sunk his fangs deep in his throat, and his life had ebbed out. All I could do after reaching the spot was to console the parents.
As I had no heart left for Diwali celebrations after this unfortunate incident, I decided to spend the night in Dodi. I had never before slept in the Rest House and was unaware of its ghost. But it was a melancholy night that I prepared to pass in the Dak Bungalow. It was a bad enough to be parted from one's family on Diwali night, it was much worse to be spending the night in a dinghy old room, alone and without cheerful company or cheering news.
As it happened I was lodged in the far bed room. The other bed room was occupied by a PWD engineer, and although my staff was insistent that I get the room vacated, I thought it unnecessary to put the sub engineer to so much bother, for the sake of just one night. This bed room I have already described briefly above. It was a small room, with a sloping roof. The room had three doors, one of which led to the veranada outside, the second to the drawing room which was adjacent, and the third to the attached bathroom. It had only one large window with an iron grill across it. This window, which was a large wooden affair painted a dark green, as PWD windows and doors sometimes are, opened inwards, so that it could only be opened by some one within the room. It could not be opened from the outside, because of the iron grill. The only remarkable thing in the room was a rather fine print of a tiger killing a black buck, in a jungle. This print, somehow had a faintly sinister aspect to it. It showed a ruined house in one coner, with a small clearing in front, which was fringed by thick jungle. It was in this clearing that the tiger standing up on his hind legs, was shown killing the deer, down whose flanks, a trickle of blood was flowing. There was a hint of a shadowy presence, looking out from one of the windows of the ruined house, though it was hard to pin point whether it was really a human figure, or something else. The most dramatic thing in the scenery was the sky, a heavy, black, lowering sort of sky, which seemed to be the presage of a tremendous storm. And in fact a bolt of lightening was shown flashing from one of the clouds.
It was a cold and windy night, so I remember I had shut the window, but probably did not bolt it. The rain had warped the old wooden frame of the window and when it was shut, the bolt was slightly out of alignment and it was not so easy to fasten it, without a great deal of wrenching and pulling. But the heavy timber and the warp meant that the window did not move smoothly on its hinges and no gust of wind would be able to open it. Some of these thoughts probably passed through my mind as I shut the window, put out the light and went to sleep.
I don't know how long I slept, but at some point in the night I found my self wide awake. The stiff breeze that had been blowing earlier had died down and it was deathly quiet. In the sepulchral silence I heard, or thought I heard a gentle scratching and knocking at the window. As I have mentioned the window had a grill and a wire mesh across it, which made it impossible for some one standing outside to open it. Yet this is what, if my senses did not mislead me, I was now witnessing. For one of the halves of the window now swung open noiselessly, as though pushed gently by some one from the outside. As I have already said, the window was virtually jammed on its frame, and it could not swing open in this noiseless fashion, like the swing doors of a saloon, yet this is what had happened. I had a sense that someone was peeping in through the opening, though I could see nothing when 1 stood up to peer out. However the sense of being under surveillance persisted. I was unsettled by what I had seen, but I had to investigate this business further. I had my. 12 bore gun with me, this I picked up and was outside in a flash. I had no kind of light with me and it was still quite dark, but again I sensed rather than saw a presence, a dark insubstantial figure that seemed to melt into the darkness as I yelled, Kaun hai -who is there ?-knowing that no one would respond to my query. But here I was again wrong, some where far away in the depths of the night, a wolf called suddenly, as if responding to my shouted challenge. The eerie sound rose in volume and intensity, rising and falling like passing gusts of wind on a stormy night, before dying away. Then the silence and the darkness closed in again, leaving me alone witl1 the mystery. To this day I have no satisfactory explanation for the manner in which the window had opened. It must have been the resident ghost playing one of his usual pranks on me, or may be my senses were overwrought, and I had imagined the whole thing. I will leave the whole thing to the judgement of the reader and get on with my story.
