Ghosts And How To Deal With Them

The evening had been a long and chaotic one. The ladies had retired, taking the child with them, about half an hour before. A soporific calm had settled over the table as we sat amongst the debris of our meal. Ranjiv and Manish exchanged the occasional remark in Marathi, punctuated with cigarette smoke and long, comfortable silences. They paid me little attention by this point, which suited me just fine, as I was utterly plastered. 

This time last week I’d been decorating flats in Earlsfield, and now here I was in a little wrought-iron pagoda on the shores of the Arabian Sea, eating lemon chicken and rice washed down with illicit beer in the company of the hotel manager and a regional police chief I’d only just met. I still wasn’t entirely clear why the beer was illicit, possibly the cloak and dagger pantomime we’d gone through had just been part of the fun, but either way precautions were being taken. Large bottles of beer in a carrier bag had been fetched by one of the staff, and were now snuggled up against our feet under the table. To top up our glasses we would dive beneath the tablecloth and fumble about, the end result of course being that the beer was warm and our shoes were wet. 

“It is about respect,” Ranjiv intoned gravely, “It is not good for the staff to see us drinking.”

This was all well and good, but if we carried on much longer the staff would see me face down in the curry. With a Herculean effort I hauled myself to my feet, rather stylishly avoiding dropping my glass or knocking over my chair in the process. Filled with a warm pride at this achievement, I winked conspiratorially at the others. 

“Bed.” I explained. “Terribly late. Busy day.”

The others nodded wisely. Ranjiv took a pull on his cigarette. 

“My friend, before you go, you know about ghosts yaar?”

I steadied myself on a chair and raised an eyebrow in what I imagined was a suavely inquisitorial manner. Do go on, I urged him. 

“You must be very careful yaar. Spirits all around.” 

Perhaps it was the approach of midnight that moved him to talk thus. Perhaps it was the beer. Either way, he proceeded to pour out a fascinating set of instructions and precautions, which I will endeavour to repeat here that other weary travellers should benefit from them. 

“It may happen that sometime in the night you will hear me knock at your door and call your name. It is not me. Maybe you hear your mother’s voice call you. It is not your mother.”

It appears ghosts and spirits, although intent on doing you harm, are not so far gone as to do so without knocking. Moreover, while initially patient, they have their limits. The trick with these spirits, knocking and impersonating one’s mother, is simply to pretend not to hear them. 

Knock knock, goes the spirit. 

“Who’s there?” You reply.

“It’s your mother.”

“I beg your pardon, didn’t quite catch that?”

“Your mother!”

“Sorry, you’ll have to speak up.”

“I said it’s your mother!”

“No, completely missed it, once more?”

Silence. For the fact is, a spirit can’t bear to be asked three times. They get frustrated with the whole business and give up, doubtless not wishing to waste their precious haunting time on such a cloth-eared simpleton as you appear to be. The procedure then is a simple one, Ranjiv assures me. One simply dials 206 on the room phone, which connects you to the nightwatchman in his little hut, and inform him that you have a suspected spirit on the mat. He hustles out “in two ticks” and shoos it away, having first identified himself to you the required four times through the door. 

Standing up from the table, I had intended to mutter quick goodbyes and stagger off to bed, my main goal being not to trip over my feet or walk sideways into a bush. Now it appeared I was required to absorb potentially life saving information, containing to my drunken mind some quite complicated counting. Manish was nodding solemnly as Ranjiv continued:

“You wear strong perfume to bed?”

I don’t, but in that moment I began to doubt myself. 

“Um, no…?”

“Perfume, deodorant, no good. The spirits, they love it.” 

Scent plays a big part it seems. Spirits are drawn to any strong scent, so covering oneself in deodorant or perfume prior to retiring is a guaranteed trip to ‘the other place’, whatever that might be. Spirits wish to take you there, and you’ll never be seen again. Equally, if you catch a whiff of a powerful sweet scent while out at night, for god’s sake don’t inhale. That’ll be the spirits again. 

Lastly and most alarmingly, one should never sleep on one’s back. Once I’m asleep, I feel I have little control over my positioning, so this feels unfair. Should I fall asleep on my back, a spirit (no doubt a nasty rude one that wasn’t raised to knock) will inevitably come and sit on my chest, inducing a terrifying sleep paralysis. This worried me greatly, and I briefly debated the possibility of getting hold of some drawing pins to scatter in bed. Rolling on to one of those would surely wake me before a spirit could hop aboard. 

Back in England, I would have viewed all of this with a wry and vaguely patronising smile. Savage superstitions of the less educated man, haw haw! Now though, at midnight on the shores of a strange land, unidentified rustles in the bushes as I weaved my way back to my cabin, nothing seemed ridiculous. In fact, I felt a lot more sober than I had just five minutes ago. How presumptuous of me, how arrogant, to assume I knew the mysteries of the universe. That you wouldn’t find a tiger on a London street was no proof that they didn’t exist elsewhere. Why should it not be the same with spirits? Desperately trying not to inhale, I reached my front door, Ranjiv’s parting words in my head. 

“You have some cross or rosary?”