Death Road to Sounds of Eternity

 Fiction

Kurseong: Image from Times of India

It was in an informal meeting of the members of a bloggers’ community that I met Ajay personally though I knew him for a few years through his blog. He usually wrote about the paranormal. His ghost stories were particularly haunting. The bloggers’ meet was held in Siliguri. Since I was working in Guwahati, not too far from Siliguri, I thought of joining the meeting for the heck of it. A lot of bloggers whom I knew through their writing would be there too.

“Have you ever come across a ghost?” I asked rather flippantly when the meeting as well as the dinner was over and Ajay was with me in the room we shared in the hotel.

“I wish I did,” said Ajay. “I want to fall in love with a ghost so that I can write a romance novel set in the paranormal milieu, a new genre, you see.” He laughed. Then he asked, “Are you interested in visiting the most haunted hill station in India? It’s nearby.”

I was curious though I never believed in ghosts or in any paranormal and supernatural affairs including gods and devils.

Ajay told me about the ghosts of Kurseong, a hill station just over 30 km from Siliguri. There is a road named Death Road in Kurseong on which you will have supernatural and paranormal experiences, he said. There are mysterious sounds – cries and moans that don’t belong to the earth. People have seen a headless boy walking around sometimes. There is a woman in a grey dress that appears from nowhere occasionally to travellers. The most interesting thing, said Ajay, is that these ghosts dare to haunt travellers even in the daytime. “Just Google Dow Hill ghosts and look at the results,” he challenged me.

The amount of stuff in the internet on the ghosts of Dow Hill in Kurseong rattled my bones. A haunted school too! I was surprised. And that too a school which functions regularly! I do want to visit this place, I decided.

Ajay and I said goodbye to fellow bloggers and the organisers of the meet soon after breakfast next morning. Kurseong’s Dow Hill was our destination.

The Dow Hill is a beauty and a beast. I recalled one of the many narratives I had read the previous night through my Google search. Day or night, paranormal activities never cease here.

“What’s the fun in visiting ghosts in daytime?” I asked Ajay when we reached Kurseong.

We decided to walk the Death Road after sunset, when it’s really dark. “Is that permitted?” That was my only fear.

“Of course,” Ajay said. “The Death Road is open to all ghost lovers at all times.

There were enough things in Kurseong to engage us during the afternoon.

“There’s something eerie about the whole place,” I said as we were walking on the narrow streets of the town.

“That’s because of the colonial hangover that lingers on like an unwanted guest,” Ajay said. I wasn’t convinced, however.

It was after dinner that we embarked on our supernatural walk. Death Road. Beauty and beast. Headless boy and woman in grey. The uncanny groan of the towering pines. Shadows flicker among those pines and their groans. Some occasional screeches from mountain birds or wild animals. And some sounds that neither Ajay nor I could identify. Mystery yes. But ghost no. Not yet.

Just then a female laughter from behind us brings us to a sudden halt. Both Ajay and I turn back in some horror. In the faded moonlight that hardly manages to reach the road through the little spaces in the canopy held aloft by the pines we can see two shadows walking towards us. They are unmistakably women, I have no doubt and I am sure Ajay doesn’t either. My heart begins to beat faster. I’m sure Ajay’s does too. Two women on Death Road at this time!

They approach us faster than we expect.

“Going to encounter ghosts?” One of them asks with a chuckle that is trapped between her words. She looks gorgeously beautiful, I say to myself. I look at the other one. She is even more beautiful. Ajay can write his paranormal romance fiction after this, I tell myself. My heart is pounding harder - not with romance, however.

“Shall we join you? It’s good to have company on Death Road.” The other woman says. I notice that both their voices have something exotic about them. Something that does not belong to the earth. I’m scared, I tell myself. I’m misreading, I tell myself. Look at their charms. Ghosts can never be this charming.

They are two adventurers, they tell us. From Calcutta.

Kolkata, I mumble. Calcutta is dead.

Yup, Kolkata, one of them says as if she heard my muted mumbling. Come, let’s walk on, she says.

Ajay is silent too all the while. I wonder whether his heart is palpitating like mine. I wonder whether a paranormal romance is taking birth among those palpitations.

We walk on. With the two ethereal beauties by our side and groaning pines around. And a pale moon above. A screech from a distance jolts me.

A bike is coming up the road from behind us. It stops a few yards ahead of us. The rider, a young man, turns back and asks, “Want a lift?” The beauties say yes instantly. Will see you on top of the mountain, one of the beauties tells us as both of them make places for themselves behind the biker who adjusts his bum so that the ladies can sit comfortably in the little space behind him.

“Adventurers!” Ajay mumbles loud enough for me to hear.

“Fit to be heroines for your proposed novel,” I say.

“Really? Didn’t you notice the wrinkles on their cheeks?”

“What?” I have never seen a woman more beautiful than those two ever.

“Hmm.” And then Ajay falls silent.

We walk on in silence until Ajay breaks it with a question. “Can ghosts be benign enough to be romantic?”

He thinks ghosts are essentially wicked. Good people attain liberation from earthly existence. It is wicked people who are not even suitable for eternal damnation that are condemned to linger on the earth.

I don’t believe in eternal retribution of any kind. There is no eternity except the infinity I learnt about in maths, as far as I’m concerned. And mathematical infinity is an absurd notion at which all logic capitulates.

Discussing the nuances of eternity and infinity, we reach the top of the hill. There’s no one there. What about our heroines and the biker? We listen to the variegated sounds that come from the darkness all around us. Sounds of eternity, Ajay says.

We decide to sit somewhere and listen to the sounds of eternity. It is then a bike comes in our view as if from nowhere. And the young man whom we met on the road is sitting on it too. We approach him.

Where are those ladies? I ask.

Ladies? He asks me. Which ladies?

What do you mean which ladies? Ajay is not quite pleased obviously. He reminds the biker about the two ladies to whom he offered lift on the way.

I didn’t see any ladies, says the biker. It was you two to whom I offered the lift.

That eerie screech again. Some vulturous bird it must be. But this time the sound was unmistakably unearthly. Sound of eternity.

My eyes had shut impulsively when that screech came. When I open my eyes, the biker is not there. Nor the bike.

As we walked down the Death Road, I wondered whether Ajay would write a novel about the romance of eternity.

PS. Previous ghost story: A Ride with a Ghost