Penguin Book of Indian Ghost Stories, The [S.S. Ant.] by Various (Bond Ruskin - Ed.)

Author:Various (Bond, Ruskin - Ed.) [Various (Bond, Ruskin - Ed.)]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Anthologies (various), Classics, Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, India, Short Stories
ISBN: 9788184754452
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2013-03-15T03:00:00+00:00

II

Of the enormous, the incredible metamorphosis that befell Kalashi—the piers, groins, moles, jetties, cranes, railway-lines and swinging bridges that emerged out of nothing at the bidding of Sir Alexis—I have no call to write. I am concerned solely with the metamorphosis that befell Sammy’s Hotel.

The original Sammy was a good, capable, efficient butler; at any rate Maclagan, who was no doubt a man of some discernment, appears to have thought so. His son, on whom the title of Sammy devolved, may even have risen to cook’s matey; but easy days came upon him too young and with fatal results. There being no rent to pay and the staff being furnished almost entirely by the family, quite occasional visitors sufficed to run Sammy’s at a profit; and a single weekend, as conceived by the Four and spent by them, kept all the Sammy’s in comfort and plenty for some time. Those regular weekends, week after week for a couple of years, demoralized Sammy altogether. Moreover, the Four were that beau ideal and delight of the Indian servant—a master who is prepared to establish a procedure and stick to it without deviation for an indefinite period. I imagine the Four’s dinner hardly altered: ‘Clear Soup, Fry Fish, Chops, Malabar Pudding, Ramkin Toast,’ probably served them time after time after time. To drink, whisky and ‘bilewater’. As a result, Sammy had no occasion to learn and never did in fact learn the rudiments of running a hotel. When the Harbour opened and the boom came, he at first expected great things; then found it all rather a nuisance. Strange Europeans appeared, clad and speaking as he had never known; tendering English money; asking for the most impossible and incomprehensible things; grumbling over deficiencies nobody had ever noticed before. It was all work, work, work and never anybody satisfied; and if they paid blindly and one made big money—who wanted all that money? Sammy found himself sighing for the comfortable sufficiency of the old days and for the Four contented with their unvarying routine.

Then one day came a Parsee gentleman in black alpaca and a strangely-shaped hat; and presently the Bombay syndicate materialized and bought up the place with stock and goodwill. Sammy sold gladly and cheaply on condition that all the Sammy family, their heirs and assigns, were provided with employment in the new hotel for life. These were for the time being Sammy—that is, Sammy II, son of Sammy I—Sammy’s mother, over seventy who had once been ayah to Maclagan’s sister, Sammy’s brother Thambi and his brother-in-law Muni, and Sammy’s son, Sammy III, aged twenty. All these, except the last, had inhabited the ‘Hotel’ since Maclagan left it. The syndicate also took over an aged waiter called Kuppan and some odds-and-ends of syces, malis and the like.

Now began the great days of Kapil. Over the demolished ruins of Sammy’s there rose the vast facade of the Scandal Bay Mahal. It was a wonder of a place containing English baths and what not;

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.