Sunday, October 12, 2003		Books

Sending a chill down the spine
Samra Rahman

The Rupa Book of Scary Stories
edited by Ruskin Bond. Rupa, New Delhi. Pages 175. Rs 295.

A scientist is said to have exclaimed, "Thank God, I am an atheist." Most of us are similarly Janus-faced in our attitudes. Under the surface of our self-professed skepticism and loudly proclaimed rational approach, there lie some dark, obscure corners in our unconscious. When we read a scary story, it strikes a chord at that level and that is what gives us the frison. In one of the stories in this anthology, The Dead Man of Varley Grange, a lady character says: "I don't believe in ghosts or any such rubbish one bit, but I should like to hear your story." So do we.

Ruskin Bond has trawled far afield to pick his baker's dozen. There are different species of short stories; those that feature ghosts and those that rely on the forces of nature and the malignity of man-but all of them calculated to give us a shudder, a quiver and a chill. The Empty House by Algernon Blackwood, an acknowledged master of the psychic and the supernatural, holds you breathless till the very end. W.W. Jacobs, who wrote many comic tales about sailors and rustics, some of them hilarious, is best known for The Monkey's Paw. He is represented here with this classic tale. Stories by lesser-known authors as well as a Victorian ghost story-author unknown-also find a place in this collection.

Rudyard Kipling, arguably the greatest short story writer at any rate in the English language, who occasionally wrote tales of terror and the supernatural, is represented by two such stories, both of them set in the Simla hills of the Raj. The Phantom Rickshaw could be read either as a ghost story or as one depicting a psychological phenomenon, of a mind tortured by remorse. The phantom of the rickshaw and its occupant are akin to the phantom dagger that led on Macbeth: "`85or art thou but/A dagger of the mind, a false creation, /Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?" The other story, At the Pit's Mouth, starts out as a tongue-in-cheek, almost flippant narrative about the philandering between a grass widow, ensconced in the cool climes of the hills-while her husband is sweating it out in the plains-and an unattached young man, as in the previous story, but goes on to a chilling culmination.

Saki's Interlopers shows him to have been far ahead of his times in raising and dealing with the question whether forests belong to the humans, who claim ownership, or to the denizens of the wild. Who really are the 'interlopers'? Then there is, of course, the sudden twist at the end and his trademark use of animals-ursine terror in this case.

Ruskin Bond's own contribution is Faceless, the theme of which is an old perennial of the cantonments, with such variations as the 'Sahib' seen holding his decapitated head in his hands. But in Bond's version, there is an apparent happy ending, followed immediately by a sort of fatal postscript.

Henry by Phyllis Bottome gives a masterly glimpse into the powerful working of instinct and the glimmering of a thought process in the mind of a circus tiger. The immediacy of the narration raises the level of the story above the ordinary, depicting a crushing end.

One would have wished that Sir Walter Scott's great classic of the supernatural or rather the infernal forces, The Wandering Willies Tale, had been included. But the deterrent factor would have been the Scottish dialect in which that superb story is written.