Bertha and Felix had been a strange couple. You owe it to pure coincidence that their paths crossed. Although they in common except their huge appetite, absolutely nothing, had the two close friends have become.Rudyard Kipling: My Own True Ghost Story
August 3, 2009 by storybus
The older Provinces simply bristle with haunted houses, and march phantom armies along their main thoroughfares.
Some of the dâk,bungalows on the Grand Trunk Road have handy little cemeteries in their compound..witnesses to the "changes and chances of this mortal life" in the days when men drove from Calcutta to the Northwest. These bungalows are objectionable places to put up in. They are generally very old, always dirty, while the khansamah is as ancient as the bungalow. He either chatters senilely, or falls into the long trances of age. In both moods he is useless. If you get angry with him, he refers to some Sahib dead and buried these thirty years, and says that when he was in that Sahib's service not a khansamah in the Province could touch him. Then he jabbers and mows and trembles and fidgets among the dishes, and you repent of your irritation.
In these dâk,bungalows, ghosts are most likely to be found, and when found, they should be made a note of. Not long ago it was my business to live in dâk,bungalows. I never inhabited the same house for three nights running, and grew to be learned in the breed. I lived in Government,built ones with red brick walls and rail ceilings, an inventory of the furniture posted in every room, and an excited snake at the threshold to give welcome. I lived in "converted" ones..old houses officiating as dâk,bungalows..where nothing was in its proper place and there wasn't even a fowl for dinner. I lived in second,hand palaces where the wind blew through open,work marble tracery just as uncomfortably as through a broken pane. I lived in dâk,bungalows where the last entry in the visitors' book was fifteen months old, and where they slashed off the curry,kid's head with a sword. It was my good luck to meet all sorts of men, from sober traveling missionaries and deserters flying from British Regiments, to drunken loafers who threw whisky bottles at all who passed; and my still greater good fortune just to escape a maternity case. Seeing that a fair proportion of the tragedy of our lives out here acted itself in dâk,bungalows, I wondered that I had met no ghosts. A ghost that would voluntarily hang about a dâk,bungalow would be mad of course; but so many men have died mad in dâk,bungalows that there must be a fair percentage of lunatic ghosts.
In due time I found my ghost, or ghosts rather, for there were two of them. Up till that hour I had sympathized with Mr. Besant's method of handling them, as shown in "The Strange Case of Mr. Lucraft and Other Stories." I am now in the Opposition.
We will call the bungalow Katmal dâk,bungalow. But THAT was the smallest part of the horror. A man with a sensitive hide has no right to sleep in dâk,bungalows. He should marry. Katmal dâk,bungalow was old and rotten and unrepaired. The floor was of worn brick,
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