Fear is the key

Today’s hectic life demands that holidays also have a killing schedule. Art is long and time is short, so I chalked out a thrilling itinerary, wherein the children and I visited monuments at a break–neck pace. By the end of the second day the girls had become rather querulous, and finally lapsed into glassy eyed silence. Faced with the prospect of a mutiny, I was finally forced to wave the white flag in the form of a query as to whether they were interested in going to the Mall. The effect was magical. They discovered afresh the qualities of the aged relative which had hitherto been hidden under layers of history. Within no time, we were in a crowded Mall peopled by youngsters wearing impossible clothes. The object of the kids’ attention was the ‘Scary House’ show being touted as an experience to remember, so I bought four tickets—for my daughters Tanvee, a sedate youngster if ever there was one, Jayati five years her junior, and for Jayati’s bosom pal, Upasana, who had already seen the show and was therefore doubling as our friend, philosopher and guide.

We entered the dim interiors, heartened by Upasana’s whisper that it was going to be such fun. A ghost leapt at us with a blood-curdling yell—Jayati’s equal and opposite reaction was to bang on the door and scream to be let out. So we left her outside the entrance and came back in, with markedly less enthusiasm than before. There were some faintly lit stairs to be mounted and as we neared the top a mummified hand brushed across our faces, causing Tanvee to drop her spectacles and do an undignified jig around, screeching all the while. I told her to stand still and not crush the sole pair she possessed. Thereafter the thrills awaiting us had to be put on hold in favour of some more mundane business, namely, rummaging round on the floor. Finally, I located her spectacles and put them inside my bag, because something told me there would be repeat performances.

Determined not to be shaken by these developments we carried on and came up bang against the wall, so Upasana squeaked ‘which way do we go?’, to which a ghost, disgusted at having been pre-empted, said in as menacing a whisper as it could manage, ‘turn right.’ We turned the corner and there it was—a corpse, hanging by his neck and swaying gently from side to side. Tanvee let out a horrified shriek, slipped her hand into mine and then with another piercing yell, demanded to know whether the hand was mine or of some ghost that had crept up behind us. These chilling notions made the intrepid Upasana tremble with fear and she said ‘Aunty, please hold my hand as well.’ I gave both a brief lecture on how monuments had been far more enjoyable than this.

And thus we crept forward, with ghosts hissing sibilantly all around, until we came to the high point of the whole affair—a dead body on a cot which shot into you the moment you stealthily inched your way towards the exit and freedom. The ghosts luckily, had by now become unnerved by the prospect of getting a dressing down from this scolding adult and meekly let us go when I said sternly that enough was enough. Finally we were out, the two girls a quivering mass of nerves blithely greeted by an enviably cool and composed Jayati. Needless to add, we spent the rest of the holiday visiting museums and admiring objects d’ art sedately confined to glass cases. In management jargon, the takeaway from the experience was a distinctly reduced admiration of the redoubtable Harry Potter as it had been keenly felt by all that meeting up with ghosts on a one-to-one basis was a lot less than fun.