The ghost was standing at a road crossing. I saw her face as she watched the traffic go past. I stood fixed to my spot, watched the light turn green. She walked with a slow, meditative stride and she raised her hand to shield her eyes from the sun. A hand from my past reached out and brushed my cheek.
My aunt, Nusrat Begum, had lived and died in Pakistan many years ago. She was married to my mother’s brother and they had a son together, but my uncle passed away in the early seventies and she spent the rest of her life as a widow in Karachi, bringing up her child in a house made of limestone block and red Mangalore roof tiles in Old Clifton. Her house too remained preserved in its own time, like a lost world, full of hunting trophies, a billiard table, deep, sunken leather chairs, onyx consoles and carpets of great antiquity. Things were covered with dust. Traces of old wealth existed amid decay. Real Mughal miniatures hung from the walls even though the paint was peeling off. Glass cabinets full of bohemian crystal and china dolls nestled against musty Empire sofas. There was even my uncle’s old Rolls Royce rusting on bricks in the garage. Grass grew underneath it and a cat had somehow made its way inside and given birth to a litter of kittens on the back seat. Since my aunt could not drive, no one had used it after my uncle died.
My uncle used to sleep with a revolver under his pillow. One day, he put the gun to his head and shot himself. I was told that he had had a heart attack. The neighbours found my cousin hugging his father’s body. For months afterwards, he did not utter a single word. I was told it was some kind of sickness. Mercifully he made a full recovery except that he remembered nothing at all about his father’s suicide. And so the family hushed up the whole thing. Until my mother told me about it decades later, I had no idea of what actually happened.
My uncle, after trying his hand at several businesses, became a distributor of Western and Indian films in Pakistan. By the early sixties, he had made a fortune. He threw big parties and entertained lavishly. I remember his house was always filled with visitors. There were writers and actors and some beautiful actresses who I was in love with. After the 1965 war, the import of Indian films into Pakistan came to a stop and the film business went into a decline. My uncle took to drink and then he started having affairs. When my aunt found out, she left him. From that moment, he must have realised that he had run out of luck.
My aunt placed great affection on us – her nephews and nieces. When night fell, she would sit in her Voltaire chair dressed in her faded green dressing gown, while we gathered around her feet and listened to stories as the cicadas screeched outside. Ghost stories were our favourite. I remember the night she read us The Ancient Mariner from the wonderfully translated and abridged edition published by Ferozsons that some people might remember. We were so scared that we could barely sleep for it was a windy night and the shadows of trees turned and twisted like demons outside, but we loved every moment of it. Then there was Oscar Wilde’s story about the haunted house where a fresh bloodstain appeared on the floor in the morning. It scared me for weeks afterwards. The more gruesome and frightening the ghosts, the better. She obliged us, God bless her, she indulged us in our fetish until we squirmed but her favourite, I suspect, were stories of solitary and melancholic ghosts, lost souls in empty places, ghosts who remained ghosts because of unrequited love, or because they remained unconquered in spirit, or because, in their foolishness, they did not realise that the world could not be theirs.
I still remember the day she told us about the ghost of an English soldier who haunted the house where she lived when she was a young girl growing up in Calcutta. Unlike ghosts who left bloodstains on floors and dragged chains or banged doors in the dead of the night, this was a literary ghost who wrote. No one in her family could see him or hear him except for her. When she was ten or eleven years old, she spotted him writing in a window in the attic. At first, she thought that they had a guest staying with them but the servants knew nothing. Summoning all her courage, she went up into the attic. There was a chair and a desk by the window and in the drawer lay a manuscript. She started reading it and discovered that the ghost was writing his memoirs. Her English was good. She spotted some mistakes and she corrected them in pencil. The next day, she went up again and discovered new pages of the manuscript. She made some more corrections. The following day, a dozen pages awaited her. And from then on, she became a regular reader of the ghost’s memoirs. When Partition came in 1947, my aunt’s family sold their house and migrated to Pakistan.
I have many impressions of my aunt but if there is one impression, one picture, that always comes to mind, it is the image of her sitting on a musty sofa, in her faded green dressing gown, reading a novel. She was a voracious reader. She claimed that she had five thousand books in her house. She borrowed every new title that arrived at the British Council and the Sindh Club libraries and when she could not borrow new books there, she went to the Thompson & Thompson bookstore in Saddar to buy them. I saw her read everything from Daphne du Maurier, Melville, D. H. Lawrence, and the usual sub-continental suspects, James Michener and M. M. Kaye. She picked up whatever she could find.
Sometimes I noticed her reading an old, handwritten manuscript. When I asked her if it belonged to the ghost, she laughed and told me that ghosts not only haunted places and buildings, they haunted people too. I asked her why ghosts existed.
‘Well, my child, some of us cannot let go of the past and we remain trapped in it because it seems better than the present or because we cannot forget our suffering. I think it is quite possible that ghosts, if they exist, are no different. They cannot let go of the moment when they were most happy or when they suffered the most and so they remain in that moment forever, doing whatever it is that they were doing. They might have been writing or playing a child’s game – yes, ghosts come back as children too – trapped in their nostalgia. They might have been mothers who could not come to terms with the grief of losing a child, and so they become ghosts trapped in sorrow. They might have been innocent men murdered for crimes they did not commit, and so they come back as vengeful ghosts, or they might have died before they were unable to make peace with themselves and with those who loved them, and they so remain trapped in regret.’
‘When do they stop being ghosts?’ I asked.
A faint smile played on her lips. ‘Ghosts are ghosts because they are unable to make choices,’ she said. ‘Someone else has to make the choice for them. Someone who is still mortal needs to save them. When that person concludes for them whatever it is that they are doing, they become free.’
She seemed weary now. ‘But sometimes they cannot be helped,’ she said. ‘Sometimes they are too far gone, and there is no one left who remembers them or cares for them, and then they remain ghosts forever.’
I saw the ghost once. My aunt was asleep downstairs and I was upstairs, rummaging through a pile of old National Geographic magazines. I was turning the pages when I was drawn by the smell of pipe tobacco to one of the rooms. I peeped through the door and could just make the figure of a sandy haired Englishman writing on a desk. Everything about him was silent and still. It was so quiet in fact that I could hear the ticking of the clock from the dining room downstairs. He looked up at me and put a finger to his lips. Even as I blinked, he was gone and I was running down the stairs.
When I was older, I dismissed the vision as a figment of my imagination but ghosts, I discovered, do not only come in human guise. Some years ago, I was in a bookshop in Peshawar where I came across a memoir of an English soldier who had been killed in action during the second Afghan over a century ago. I turned over a few pages and a shiver ran down my spine - the dedication was for my aunt. I bought a copy but I lost it and I could not find another. It is not as if the book is rare. It simply does not exist.
All these things happened a long time ago. When I left Pakistan, I left this life of mine behind and no evidence remains of it now in my life in Australia except my memory of it. One should never put trust in memories. Memories fade or they turn into dreams. And so much is forgotten and so much is simply not remembered and so little trace is left of the things we said and did. Even the person I was once seems unrecognisable to me. It is as if there was another self of mine that is lost to me. Or as if I had never been born.
