No More Learning

You may treat anything, from a Viceroy to a Vernacular Paper, with
levity; but you must behave reverently toward a ghost, and particularly
an Indian one.

There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold, pobby
corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveler passes.
Then they drop upon his neck and remain. There are also terrible ghosts
of women who have died in child-bed. These wander along the pathways at
dusk, or hide in the crops near a village, and call seductively. But to
answer their call is death in this world and the next. Their feet are
turned backward that all sober men may recognize them. There are ghosts
of little children who have been thrown into wells. These haunt well
curbs and the fringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch
women by the wrist and beg to be taken up and carried. These and the
corpse ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not attack
Sahibs. No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have
frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have scared the life
out of both white and black.

Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. There are said to be two
at Simla, not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree
dak-bungalow on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very
lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed to do night-watchman round a
house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of her houses "repeats" on
autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible horse-and-precipice
accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and, now that she has been swept
by cholera, will have room for a sorrowful one; there are Officers'
Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open without reason, and whose
furniture is guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of June but with
the weight of Invisibles who come to lounge in the chairs; Peshawur
possesses houses that none will willingly rent; and there is
something--not fever--wrong with a big bungalow in Allahabad. The older
Provinces simply bristle with haunted houses, and march phantom armies
along their main thoroughfares.

Some of the dak-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 dak-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 dak-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 dak-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 dak-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 dak-bungalows, I wondered that
I had met no ghosts. A ghost that would voluntarily hang about a
dak-bungalow would be mad of course; but so many men have died mad in
dak-bungalows that there must be a fair percentage of lunatic ghosts.