It was the middle of November when we arrived at Narajole in West Midnapur, and found the place anything but romantic or pleasant. The walks were broken, the trees were a dusty green, there were no flowers save a few marigold in the garden. Ever since the abolition of Zamindari system, this Rajbari was tucked away in oblivion. We came by road following NH 6 from Kolkata.

It had been a wet season, and the place looked miserable. My wife, Rupa, just being cured of an ovarian cancer after a strenuous operation and multiple sessions of chemotherapy, required a change from the busy city life and when a friend informed us that we can stay in this place, soaked in history, we did not have many second thoughts. Sandeep Khan, the descendent of the royal dynasty gave a part of the mansion on rental, though he himself  stayed in Midnapore city, being a school teacher there. I thought of completing my biographical novel of the actor Utpal Dutta during this month long stay. We arrived on the full moon night in November, the day when Karthik puja is celebrated.

The care taker was informed and he received us at Hawa Mahal, the gate of the Rajbari. The compound also housed a pancharatna styled Joy Durga temple. The temple is believed to have been built by Udaynarayan Ghosh in 14th century. The deity of Joy Durga is a small astadhatu idol of approximately 12 inches of height. It is said that the idol was stolen quite a number of times but interestingly restored the very next day. The temple still continues with its nitya seva (daily rituals) and bhog. The caretaker with his family lived in a room at the side of the temple.

The first problem we encountered was to get a servant and a cook. Some forays into the town enlightened us with the reason of our failure. The Narajole Rajbari was haunted. The women folk narrated ghost stories and it seemed everyone in that vicinity have heard ‘ funny’ noises from the mansion. They knew the part that we were staying and mentioned the last family which took it on rental left after a week though they had paid a month’s rent in advance. People get fooled by the advertisement on Facebook and Google search only showcases the rich legacy without any mention of the reality. According to the folklore that we caught, Devendra Lala Khan’s spirit roams around the house. He disappeared on a no-moon day in November, 1938. It was widely believed that he was abducted and murdered by an unknown assailant, as he stood against the British. His body was never found.

The dinner was brought to us by the caretaker  in a tiffin carrier, who came along with his two teenage sons. He assured us that he has never heard anything ghostly but he has always stayed at the temple at night. There is a police chowki within two kilometres of walking distance in front of  Najarole Raj College. The sleep was comfortable with the nip in the air. Next day bright sunshine flooded our bed room and the ghost stories became less unreal.

But at night there were noises, Rupa and I, with our own ears heard the tramp, tramp, the banging and the chattering which had been described to us. But at our age of early sixties, ghosts made us only curious and not afraid.

My dear reader, you doubtless are free from superstitious fancies. You pooh-pooh the existence of ghosts, and “only wish you could find a haunted house in which to spend a night,” which is all very brave and praiseworthy, but wait till you are left in a dreary, desolate old mansion, at least five kilometres from the town, filled with the most unaccountable sounds, without a servant, with none save a middle aged care-taker and his wife, who, living at the far end of the compound, heard nothing of the tramp, tramp, bang, bang, going on at all hours of the night.

The three rooms renovated for rental was in the bahiragarh ( exterior ramp), one was a bed room with an attached bathroom with a large bath-tub on the first floor , then a passage leading to a circular marble stair case going down to one living room ( baithak-khana)  and one dining room. Separated by a huge courtyard an antaragarh once existed – now half broken and in a dilapidated state. There used be 240 rooms inside the compound but now only these three could be restored. The rooms and passage were beautifully decorated with artefacts  of mid 19^th century from Jaipur, Delhi and Lahore. The furniture was classy and at least a century old.

At first I imagined the noises were produced by some evil-disposed persons, who wished, for purposes of their own, to keep the house uninhabited; but by degrees Rupa and I came to the conclusion the visitation must be supernatural, and Narajole Rajbari by consequence untenantable. Still being practical people, unlike our predecessors, not having plenty of resources  to live where and how we liked, we decided to watch and see whether we could trace any human influence in the matter. We decided to keep our the main door on stairway shut during nights.

We went to the local police station and met up with Officer – in-charge, Mr. Deepak Deb. I gave my short introduction of being a retired police officer, having my last stint  in Hyderabad. Mr. Deb promptly invited us to his house and his wife, Mrs. Rima Deb, played the perfect host to us. Mr. Deepak Deb himself was on the point of getting transferred to Calcutta Police. He laughed off the ghostly stories as rumours and shared his mobile number with us for any untoward incident.

For nights and nights we sat up till two or three o’clock in the morning. Rupa listening to music on her mobile, I reading, with a wooden log lying on the table beside me; but nothing, neither sound nor appearance rewarded our vigil. This confirmed my first ideas that the sounds were not supernatural; but just to test the matter, I determined on 26^th November , the Bhaumoti Amavasya day which coincides with the anniversary of Raja Devendra Lala Khan’s disappearance, to keep watch myself in the bed room and not to fall asleep. Even to Rupa I never mentioned my intention.

About 10 o’clock at night, tired out with our previous vigils, we each retired to rest. Somewhat ostentatiously, perhaps, I noisily shut the door of the room, and when I opened it half-an-hour afterwards, no mouse could have pursued its way along the corridor with greater silence and caution than myself. Quite in the dark I sat in the bedroom. For over an hour I might as well have been in my shell for anything I could see in the apartment; but at the end of that time the new moon rose and cast strange lights across the floor and upon the walls.

Hitherto I kept my watch opposite the window, now I changed my place to a corner near the door, where I was shaded from observation by the heavy hangings of the bed, and an antique wardrobe. Still I sat on, but still no sound broke the silence. I was weary with many nights’ watching, and tired of my solitary vigil, I dropped at last into a slumber from which I awakened by hearing the door softly opened.

“Listen,” said my wife, almost in a whisper; “Hello, are you awake?”

“Yes,” I answered; “but what are you doing up at this hour?”

“Come downstairs,” she replied; “they are in the baitakh-khana.”

I did not need any explanation as to whom she meant, but crept downstairs after her, warned by an uplifted hand of the necessity for silence and caution. By the door — by the open door of the baitakh-khana, she paused, and we both looked in.

There was the room we left in darkness overnight, with a bright lantern blazing on the oakwood table, the small table pulled out from its accustomed corner, and two men seated beside it, playing Dashavatar cards. Round shapes with a radius of 4.5 inches these cards depicted different avatars of Vishnu and originated in Bishnupur under the influence of Akbar. We could see the face of the younger player; it was that of a man about five and thirty, of a man who had lived hard and on the edge; who had wasted his substance and his health; who had been while in the flesh Devendra Lala Khan.

It would be difficult for me to say how I knew this, how in a moment I identified the features of the player with those of the man who had been missing for eighty-one years — eighty-one years that very night. I had seen his portrait in a corner of a roofless room in the dilapidated Hawa Mahal, covered by layers of dust and age.

He was dressed in the costume of a bygone period; his hair was oiled, and round his wrists there were bracelets of gems. He looked like one who, having come from a jalsha, had sat down after his return home to play cards with an intimate friend. On his little finger there sparkled a diamond ring, the knots of the strings of his silk blue kurta were adorned with small diamonds. He was wearing a pleated dhoti with gold thread embroideries. There were diamond studs in his Jodhpuri Juttis, and, according to the fashion of his time, he had an ornately curved walking stick resting on the handle of his arm chair. He sat opposite the door, but never once lifted his eyes to it. His attention seemed concentrated on the cards.

For a time there was utter silence in the room, broken only by the momentous counting of the complex game. In the doorway we stood, holding our breath, terrified and yet fascinated by the scene which was being acted before us. The ashes from the cigars dropped on the silver ashtray softly; we could hear the rustle of the cards as they were dealt out and fell upon the table; we listened to the count — ten two, ten-four, and so forth, — but there was no other word spoken till at length the player, whose face we could not see, exclaimed, ” I win; the game is mine.”

Then his opponent took up the cards, sorted them over negligently in his hand, put them close together, and flung the whole pack in his guest’s face, exclaiming, “Cheat; trickster; take that.”

There was a bustle and confusion — a flinging over of colonial chairs pf teakwood, and fierce gesticulation, and such a noise of passionate voices mingling, that we could not hear a sentence which was uttered. All at once, however, Devendra Lala Khan strode out of the room in so great a hurry that he almost touched us where we stood; out of the room, and tramp, tramp up the staircase to the room at the side which was suddenly reconstructed in all its old glory and lighted in a spectral red light, whence he descended in a few minutes with a couple of Golias under his arm. These were short swords with a curved blade which mimics the sweeping geography of the Persian shamshir.

When he re-entered the room he gave, as it seemed to us, the other man his choice of the sword, and then he flung open the window, and after ceremoniously giving place for his opponent to pass out first, he walked forth into the night air, Rupa and I following.

We went through the garden and down a narrow winding path of smooth gravel to a smooth piece of turf, sheltered from the north by a plantation of young palm trees. Though it was a no-moon night, and we could distinctly see Devendra Lala Khan measuring off the ground. The ground was mesmerising with smell of hidden hasnuhana.

“When you say ‘three,’” he said at last to the man whose back was still towards us.

They had thrown a dice for the ground, and the lot had fallen against Devendra. He stood thus with the lantern light beams falling upon him in his embellished adornment.

“One,” began the other; ” two,” and before our zamindar had the slightest suspicion of his design, he was upon him, and his goliya through Devendra Lala Khan’s breast.

At the sight of that cowardly treachery, Rupa screamed aloud. In a moment the combatants had disappeared, the new moon was obscured behind a cloud, and we were standing in the shadow of the broken boundary wall, shivering with cold and terror. Two bats flew past, startled, adding to the eerie atmosphere.  But we knew at last what had become of the late owner of Narajole , that he had fallen, not in fair fight, but foully murdered by a false friend.

When late on next morning I awoke, it was to see a winter morning, to behold the ground, and trees, and shrubs all laden and covered with a mist. As if overnight the weather changed to cast a spell of cold.

I called Sandeep Khan and urged him to come. He had no classes on Thursdays and paid us a visit and then gave a patient hearing.

“It was on just such a no-moon day that Devendra Lala Khan disappeared,” remarked the school teacher to my wife. We took a walk to the spot where we had witnessed the duel. Sandeep called up the Police and some of his old contacts to mobilise some workers for digging. In a matter of a day after taking out soil for a length of three to four metres, a half- skeleton with quite a few diamonds strewn around the hollow space was found. This was sent by Mr. Deepak Deb promptly sent to Forensics for a DNA test. A sample was taken from Sandeep by the local hospital for matching. The sounds had stopped. The news spread and on a morning we saw some cameras and crews of couple of television channels. The spot of discovery now have become an itinerary. Towards Christmas the DNA report came and it became confirmed that the skeleton removed was indeed that of Devendra Lala Khan’s.

Sandeep Khan did a shradh ceremony with havan in the Joy Durga Temple. We finally got a maid to stay with us with the exorcism finally laid to rest.

At the Christmas party hosted by Mr Deepak Deb and his wife, we were cordially invited along with Sandeep Khan and his family. Several other honourable citizens were part of the extravagant affair with wine and whisky.

While we were having a smoke, Deepak asked me, “ Did you in your dream see the face of — of the gentleman — Devendra Lala Khan’s opponent?”

“No,” I answered, “he sat and stood with his back to us all the time.”

“There is nothing more, of course, to be done in the matter,” observed Mr. Deb.

“Nothing,” I replied; and there the affair would doubtless have terminated, but that  afterwards, when we were having food at the dining hall, Rupa all of a sudden dropped the glass of water she was carrying to her lips, and exclaimed to me, “Look, there he is!” rose from her seat, and with a face as white as the table cloth, pointed to a portrait hanging on the wall. “I saw him for an instant when he turned his head towards the door as Devendra Lala Khan left it,” she explained; “that is he.”

Of what followed after this identification I have only the vaguest recollection. Servants rushed hither and thither; Mrs. Rima Deb, wife of the police officer, dropped off her chair into hysterics; the young ladies gathered round her; Mr. Deepak Deb, the husband, trembling like one in an ague fit, attempted some kind of an explanation, while Rupa kept praying to be taken away, — only to be taken away. I took her away, not merely from the Police officer’s bungalow but from Narajole in a week.

Before we left the Rajbari, however, I had an talk with Mr. Deepak Deb, who said the portrait Rupa had identified was that of his wife’s grandfather, the last person who saw Devendra Lala Khan alive. He used to work in Indian Imperial Police and though on opposite sides of the law, was a friend of Devendra Lala Khan. Rima’s father was also in Police.

“My father-in law is also an old man now and stays in Kolkata. I met him yesterday . It seemed he knew as his father had confessed on his death-bed. Wife’s grandfather died in nineteen sixties,” finished Mr. Deepak Deb. , “ But you know how sentiments spread like wildfire. I hope you won’t bring further sorrow and disgrace upon us by making this matter public?”

I promised him I would keep silence, but the story gradually oozed out, and the Debs’ hastened their transfer.  I forgot to mention that one of the goliya which was not chosen by the rival parties, is still in my possession. I had kept it hidden, even my wife doesn’t know it. One every Bhaumoti Amabasya I take it out to have a look at the Persian intricacies on the sword.