Acclaimed author of The Dollmakers’ Island, Anu Kumar brings a treat for the readers of Unboxed Writers in the form of an unpublished novella that will be carried in nine parts, starting from this week. Here is a brief introduction. Three generations of a family have maintained a hotel that suddenly finds itself close to a new boundary line when India and Pakistan are partitioned.  And as guests become witness to the  drama that plays out on the border, little do they realize the drama unfolding within the hotel precincts itself :  a grandfather who is a war veteran,  a love affair, a friendship with a British officer who himself turns strangely senile;  a disinterested father who develops a maniacal obsession with the hotel and then the narrator grandson whose love for melodrama has tragic consequences.  In this surreal story, real life borders mingle with borders between what is real and what could be almost so.

My grandfather

Soon after Partition, the hotel my grandfather, Hansraj Singh, set up, the one I always knew I would inherit some day,  found itself right on the border. It was five km  from the main checkpost, so from the rooms on the third floor, the border suites as I dubbed them, guests had a clear view of the border. Every evening, if they were lucky to occupy these premium suites, they could witness the  ceremony on either side of the tall, heavy iron gate, as the guards changed  shifts  as they did the same time every day, half-hour before sundown or so.  First the  gate would creak open,  like a man with arthritis slowly stretching his painful knees,  In the hush, I believe, the guests could even hear the  lowering and raising of  flags, as they slithered up, down the poles, and the guards often had  to grapple with a teasing wind that sent the cloth fluttering madly like a woman’s loose hair scattered in tumult.

The hotel  has been lucky for us, my grandfather would  say. He had travelled all around the world, a soldier and it was on this plot of land, handed over to him as a reward for his services, that he had chosen to set up the hotel. In the beginning, it  was  called The Lodge, and of course, the border had not come up yet. Then it was a lodge located in just another village, nondescript like any other. It had all the usual things – wheat fields, and brick houses painted white, the village tank, the well, the church, the gurdwara, the mosque, a school and in my grandfather’s time, a college. It was the  lodge that shook things up.

There had never been a lodge before and people came up in droves to see it. It annoyed my grandfather that they would simply come up to gawk at the impressive building. It had  once been a rundown haveli. The landlord had run up huge debts and in the end it was my grandfather,  too well-travelled after the wars to think of taking up farming again, who put up the money to help resuscitate the landlord’s dying fortunes. But a big haveli needed money for maintenance and upkeep. Grandfather had come back with fancy ideas but little practical knowledge of how to make them work. He was however one of those rare breed of men into whose lap, luck falls into, by the bushels.

The first time the lodge showed full occupancy happened  during the festival of shivratri. In the village, it had always been a big occasion when performers and actors, vendors and sellers from all parts of the country came in their thousands. It also brought in pilgrims, in as many numbers. They came at the oddest hours, in raucous indisciplined groups and made demands of the staff at inconvenient hours. It was the last time, my  grandfather declared, that he would take in  guests of this kind. His years of soldiery had not prepared him for this. The Lodge, he said, was not meant for yokels and country bumpkins. It had higher standards. At that time,  everyone thought he was giving himself airs, no one credited him for being much ahead of his times.

It was soon after, I remember, that grandfather set off on his travels. On his old jonga  purchased second hand from his army contacts, and with his faithful jimmy, Ganja Bahadur in tow. He would return usually a fortnight later, or even a month, saying he had been looking up his old contacts, and establishing new ones. He had also been publicising his hotel. That was the first time anyone in the family or even in the village had heard the lodge described in  such terms. Hotels existed in places like Shimla or Bombay where the big British officers stayed. And publicity…that was too cheap a term to even merit a discussion.

The Lodge was renamed  the Great Indian Hotel and in a matter of weeks, its rooms  began filling up. The British officers came down with their wives. Usually they would stop there for the nights, before  setting off for  destinations further north – Kashmir, or Shimla. Or it could be those who were coming down from the mountains. It had struck my clever grandfather that the village had been blessed by geography. It was suited exactly in the middle, between the city and  mountains to the north  and he made full capital of that fact.

Because the guests  stopped over for the night, the villagers never got to see them. For their part, grandfather’s British guests did not have to step out to see some of the more unsightly things a village has to offer –  clogged up canals, the trek of the women and men in separate lines to the fields every morning  to answer nature’s call. Even the frenzied jangling of the temple bells, or the muezzin’s call from the nearby mosque was muted. My grandfather hated noise of any kind. If he had his way he would have installed sound proof systems in every room.  Soon he resigned from all positions he held in the village – as member of the village executive council, the trustee of the temple, the secretary to the gurdwara commitee – because he could not stand the canards being spread against him and his hotel. Instead of realising that here was an opportunity for bringing in more resources to the village, we, he fumed, are bent on pulling each other down, like frogs in a well. The stories they spread however, did not harm the hotel much, in fact, as it turned out, it gave it a unique aura of its own.

The hotel they said was haunted. It came alive at night. How else could you explain it? That in the morning, it stood quiet and sleepy, the only sign of life being the  wind trapped in the imported bougainvillea creepers. Only in the afternoons, did it come  to slow life, the sound of water being pulled up the well, the  aromas  of strange, unplaceable foods, the village palate had never been accustomed to, that drifted out of the kitchen, luxuriating  in the somnolent heat, and then much later, as the villagers turned over, on their tight-strung charpoys, looking for sleep under a starlit summer sky, the revelry and the music that seemed to have no end.

Of course, it was grandfather’s British patrons. The ones who broke their journey for a night in his hotel. Though he did get to hear these silly stories, grandfather did nothing to scotch them. He believed it was good for his business. And business did indeed pick up. Soon, there  were more people working for him than when he first began – three cooks who claimed to have experience working in the viceroy’s staff, a gardener, and later a manager, who had worked in several hotels in Bombay before chucking it all up for a more peaceful life. It left grandfather with more time to interact with and publicise his hotel. He used his spare time to good creative use, conjuring up more ways to make his hotel an attractive proposition.

That was when he thought up the idea of the ghost hunts. With an insouciance  all his own, grandfather inverted the rumours to suit his bottomline. He advertised his hotel as offering a one of a kind experience. An actual ghost hunt in a village lost in time. Ghosts of thwarted lovers, of a lonely soldier, a discredited woman, a miserly zamindar in search of his lost money. Grandfather was never really short of ideas, and these drew more guests in. The villagers, cowered in their beds, not aware that their fears originated from a genie that spawned from rumours they had thrown up in the first place.

But as  darkness settled in thick and furious, and as groups of four escorted by a guard left the hotel for carefully chalk-marked destinations marked on a route grandfather had prepared himself, their forgetfulness could well have been forgiven. Even in summer, there would be a thin mist the river brought up, the only light would be that of the moon, and in the flickering light of the lantern that after a few paces would anyway have to be blown out, for fear of scaring away the ‘hunted’, the sight of those groups, moving silently out only to be swallowed up in the darkness, was eerie.

My father at the  time was doing his own stint in the army and grandfather would insist that I stay up, remain on guard in the hotel, while he was away as an escort. It was his way of training me for  future responsibilities. Cowering in fright and excitement,  watched over by Dindayal, the cook who specialised in Chinese cuisine, it was they, the returning parties, exhausted and happily excited from their futile hunt, that made up all my ghosts of my childhood memories. 

Grey and flitting, sometimes even totally vanishing in the mist, I often had the wild idea that the night and the near total darkness that could often descend in these plains, had played its own evil tricks, by substituting real people for ghosts. And when early the next morning, when the guests took their leave,  sullen and dazed because of lack of sleep and the opium they had imbibed the night before (it steels the nerves, said my grandfather, and helps you focus), I had the wild idea that we had created our own set of ghosts who were  now leaving to infiltrate the rest of the country. I watched their heads bobbing on their horses, or lolling on the back seats of their magnificent cars and was convinced I was not wrong.

What reinforced my impression was that most of these guests were transient as ghosts, not returning for another season. There were only their letters my grandfather treasured and sometimes read them out to me. They were effusive in their thanks, they informed him that they had returned Home and should God be willing, they would return. It was then you knew that they never would.

To be continued…

Anu Kumar’s latest book is The Dollmakers’ Island. (http://www.flipkart.com/dollmakers-island-anu-kumar-book-8190939130) More about her on Story Wallahs.