Granta 130: India: New Stories, Mainly True by Ian Jack

Author:Ian Jack [Ian Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9781905881864
Amazon: B00QG98I44
Publisher: Granta Magazine
Published: 2015-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

THE GHOST IN THE KIMONO

Raghu Karnad

It is possible to live in Delhi and not believe in ghosts, but that would be stubborn considering that they’re everywhere. And some, more than others, have to be believed. A dead woman in a kimono visits the grounds of the Old Fort, the Mughal massif at the heart of modern Delhi. She is seen at dusk, especially in the winter, on the lawns or in the ramparts now pinched between the squealing stampede of the ring road and the gloomy cortège of the river. She is too strange to have been invented in mischief or fantasy; who here has even heard of a kimono? She must be real.

I heard about her from a friend, the lawyer Talish Ray, who had heard from the papad-wallah, who sold discs of crackling wafers out of a polythene sack as tall as he was. It was back in 2007, when Talish was younger, and not yet too sensible to walk about Delhi ruins alone, talking to men.

‘Lambe jhabley pehne bhooth,’ the papad-wallah told her. ‘A ghost in long robes.’

‘Really,’ said Talish. ‘And who is she, Princess Draupadi?’

‘Oh no,’ the papad-wallah said. ‘It’s a Japanese ghost. A Japanese dress. And she roams around asking for food for her children.’

Talish absorbed this in silence.

‘Chow mein chow mein!’ he suddenly added. ‘That’s what she says.’ The one fanciful detail apart, the papad-wallah could say no more about the ghost. Others said even less.

The staff of the Archaeological Survey rule out the possibility of there ever having been any Japanese there. ‘Japanese?’ snapped one official. ‘Where is the proof?’

It wasn’t a question.

‘People will say anything that comes in their head. There is no evidence of it, no reference to it and no truth in it.’

Still we persevere. A ghost like that, in a place like that, is a pale bookmark remaining even after its page is gone. Where she meant to lead us, probably, was not across the darkening lawn, but into the dense volume of Delhi’s history; there, in the very endnotes, is the remarkable, untold story of the Japanese in the Old Fort. They were tenants for one bewildering year, 1942, when Britain was losing a war against Japan, and the fort was an internment camp for enemy civilians brought here from across its Asian empire. Their story is not a ghost story, but one as factual, as technical and as burdened with consequence as any sceptic could desire.

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