On the night of October 31 it is believed that the spirits of the dead pay a visit to their erstwhile habitat. Since it is hard to find spirits, people dress up as wizards and witches — and some even put on pumpkin heads, complete with cut-out features of what a ghost would look like. Some children go even further and dress in black, and wear masks depicting a skeleton face. There have been instances in the US and Britain too, when immigrants from the Orient, particularly women and kids, have gotten hysterical on answering the doorbell and seeing Halloween revellers grinning at them with ghoulish glee. A girl from Lebanon nearly died after one such encounter in New York last year.
In India, few people know about this strange observance, but some embassy staff of Western countries get together to put up a Halloween show in Chanakyapuri. This scribe attended one such show at a time when Peter Hazelhurst had just dropped in for a short while, but the AP man had come all decked up like a wizard and was among those group of people — including a few women — who seemed to be enjoying the early 1970s evening the most, with groans and screams and whistles building up a ghostly atmosphere in the dimly-lit room.
A diplomat called Smallfoot sat in a corner, regaling guests with a story he had heard from a former Times man, Neville Maxwell — or so he claimed. Maxwell, incidentally, was an Oxford don who went back to university after his stint as a newsman. And the story as recorded in “Unknown Tales” went like this:
“In the days when Sir Thomas Metcalfe was the British Resident in Delhi (1836-1853), he would hold a Halloween’s function at the Metcalfe House. That was a few months before he was allegedly poisoned by Queen Zeenat Mahal. As the night progressed, Sir Thomas suggested that scary tales be told to create the right ambience.
“Among the invitees was a morose doctor who was picked by lot to tell the first tale. The man seemed to be least inclined to do so, but the guests were adamant and the ladies at their coaxing best. So the short, fat Dr Hamilton cleared his throat and related this yarn based on that period in the 19th Century when the ‘Vampire plague’ was sweeping Europe and elsewhere too.
“When the doctor was attached to a civil surgeon in Delhi, he was summoned by his senior one day and asked to proceed to Mehrauli to examine a Thakur whose case, he was told, was most unusual. The doctor declined at first, but seeing that his boss was put off by the refusal agreed to travel to the tehsil on horseback.
NEW DELHI, 07/04/2013: Tomb at Mehrauli, in New Delhi. April 07, 2013. Photo: E_Mail
“Dr Hamilton was greeted at the gate by a durban, who informed him that Thakur Beni Singh’s life had undergone two changes within the span of a few years. The first one, following the death of his wife and daughter from consumption, was that he took to the life of a gay lothario frequenting courtesans. And the second change came about when he bought an old chess set during an auction.
“He stopped going out after that and spent his evenings playing chess all alone. That was collaborated by the Thakur. The doctor found him looking thin and rundown. He confided that he was not suffering from an illness but anxiety — the anxiety to meet his ‘Begum’ on moonlit nights. His reference was to the Queen — the prized chess piece — which, he claimed, came alive on bright nights and lent him her company and much more.
“The doctor was not amused and guessed that this man was suffering from consumption too. So he prescribed him medicines and beat a hasty retreat from the eerie haveli of the aristocratic chess player. The Thakur had told him that the ‘Rani’ would come for the last and final time the next moonlit fortnight and take him with her.
“Sure enough after a fortnight, the civil surgeon was informed by the durban that his master had died during the night under mysterious circumstances. So the civil surgeon, Dr Hamilton and the magistrate galloped to the Mehrauli haveli on their horses and what they found unnerved them too, for sticking inside the Thakur’s throat was the prized Queen chess piece.”
