The Bhoot Is out There

GET MORE OUT OF DELHI OctOber 28 - NOvember 10 2011 Vol. 5 ISSUe 16 Rs 50 SubScriber copy GET MORE OUT OF DELHI OctOber 28 - NOvember 10 2011 Vol. 5 ISSUe 16 Rs 50 SubScriber copy Have a Monster’s Ball Halloween parties see ligHts in tHe sky Outdoor film screenings visit tHe Blue Bloods royal transylvania Hauntedthe bhoot is out Delhi there Cover 5-16.indd 1 10/21/2011 6:51:50 PM Haunting season Early sunsets and misty nights are upon us. We introduce you to Delhi’s spookiest residents – and tell you how to dress up to join their ranks. Illustrations by Tara Sapru. Spirit Uprising Once upon a time, the Old City was besieged by ghosts, finds Sonal Shah. o native ghost has yet been With its concentration of defunct In the years just before 1857 though, authentically reported to have nineteenth-century Christian cemeteries, there were stories of restless white “Nfrightened an Englishman,” Mughal tombs, crumbling walls and ghosts wandering the galis and gates of wrote Rudyard Kipling in a short story abandoned gates, the Old City is the the Old City. The most famous is that of from 1888, “but many English ghosts natural haunting ground for the ghosts British Resident William Fraser, who was have scared the life out of both white and of real people. And if ghosts in general murdered on the orders of Shamsuddin, black.” Kipling understood the distinction are the spirits of those who died violent, a young nawab of Ferozepur, on his way between the gothic Christian notion of untimely deaths, it’s not surprising home from a nautch in 1835. He’s said to once-living souls trapped between this that many of Delhi’s archetypical ghost lurk around Hindu Rao hospital, formerly plane and the next (your basic bhoot) and stories – still just about in circulation – are his residence in the northern Ridge. our more colorful native procession of rooted in the twilight of the Mughal empire That area, between the Ridge, Civil djinns, yakshis, churails, vetalas and other and the bloody months surrounding the Lines and Kashmere Gate, was the locus spirits and demons. Uprising and siege of 1857. of most of the action during the siege, and 20 www.timeoutdelhi.net October 28 – November 10 2011 Cover Story-Ghost002.indd 20 10/21/2011 7:24:58 PM on Lothian Road, and another “sar kata can be heard rattling their chains. bhoot” in Tees Hazari. Prisoners and royals haunt the Red Civilians wander the battlefield as well. Fort too. In the 1960s, the Hindustan Like George Beresford, the manager of Times sent a photographer to spend the Delhi Bank on Chandni Chowk, who the night in the diwan-e-khas, after the had written a Delhi guidebook just the caretaker heard eerie sounds and saw year before. He passed up his chance to ghosts. And while the Uprising was long escape the city and was butchered, along over and Bahadur Shah Zafar far away in with his wife and five daughters on a roof in Rangoon when he died in 1862, people the complex on May 11, and possibly left who lived around the Lal Qila said they unburied until the end of 1858. would see him, his wife Zeenat Mahal There’s the deep Khuni Jheel in the and a retinue of his dead family members, Northern Ridge, which became a mass circumambulating the fort on Thursday grave for British civilians and Indian sold- nights. How awkward if they were to iers. It’s almost gentrified and pleasant encounter the restless spirits of the now, but in the aftermath of 1857, dead British soldiers, who still prowl the tunnels soldiers, women and children would be below the Fort, seeking Mughal loot. seen there. The actual graveyards in the A day before Nicholson died, Bahadur area – the Lothian, Nicholson and Mutiny Shah Zafar’s sons and grandson were (Rajpura) cemeteries – were of course shot at the “Bloody Gate” and are said haunted too. Brigadier-General John to haunt it still. Khooni Darwaza is near Nicholson, who was mortally injured in the graveyards behind the Indian Express September 1857 while leading the crucial building and was used by other capital push to recapture of the city, is still said punishers, including Aurangzeb, who to haunt the hallowed ground where his mounted Dara Shikoh’s head here. The remains are interred. Though no one in Khooni Darwaza is one of the few sites the area – least of all the caretaker’s that retains its ghostly notoriety, partially family – wants to talk about it, we have it perhaps due to the rape of a medical on good authority that the warrior’s ghost student here in 2002. But in general, the appears atop a white horse, brandishing commonly held belief in ghosts around the a naked sword. ruins south of Shahjahanabad has petered When British reinforcements wrested out. Writer Sohail Hashi remembered that control of Delhi, it was the turn of Mughul even as recently as his father’s youth, royals and aristocracy to suffer execution it wasn’t considered safe to mill about and murder most foul. Both the prison of around the area. “But many of these ghost Salimgarh Fort and the execution ground stories have died with the expansion of the at Khooni Darwaza had histories of previ- city,” he said. ous haunting, and the events following It’s difficult to now find old Dilliwalas who the Uprising helped entrench their repu- believe or even know the stories about the it has its share of apparitions too. In May tation. Salimgarh Fort, where Bahadur phantoms of 1857. Mostly, they’re found of 1857, after the rebel army attacked, Shah Zafar was incarcerated briefly after just wandering down the memory lanes of the enthusiastic editor of the Dehli Urdu trying to escape via Humayun’s Tomb, people like RV Smith, who know the Old Akhbar wrote that “Some has a haunted past thanks to City well but have studied its history too. people even swear that the Aurangzeb, who supposedly There are still a few haunted spots around day the horsemen came here, kept his ghazal-writing daughter – an abandoned house near Turkman there were she-camels ahead Zebunnisa (pen-named Makhfi) Gate, a white lady who smokes cigarettes of them, on which rode green- They killed here. She died single, and at Kashmere Gate – but these are robed riders. Then they instantly Englishmen, her ghost is said to haunt the just a fading part of the fabric of daily vanished from sight; only the cutting prison. Perhaps she consorts life, nothing much to talk about. Maybe troopers remained, and they them up like with the ghosts of the minor the stories of these specters will return killed whichever Englishman princes of the late Mughal peri- some day. Smith certainly hopes so. they found, cutting them up carrots and od, allegedly raised captive in “Everybody loves ghost stories,” he said. like carrots or radishes.” Some radishes jail-cells here to make sure they “There was a time that it was fashionable of these julienned Englishmen were incapable of revolt. Flash to read them. Now they’re making a may not have vanished quite so forward from 1857 to the next comeback, especially on TV shows.” quickly: Delhi chronicler RV Smith recalled war of Independence, and Salimgarh was Or perhaps it’s only fair that those old that in the early 1900s, a headless used to incarcerate members of the Indian ghosts of old Delhi be allowed to die, at horseman soldier would be seen riding National Army, some of whom died and last, a natural death. October 28 – November 10 2011 www.timeoutdelhi.net 21 Cover Story-Ghost002.indd 21 10/21/2011 7:25:25 PM Favourite haunts Time Out staffers round up chilling tales for your next bonfire. The woman in white The white-sari-clad spirit is an old cliché, given eternal life by Rajkumar Kohli in Bees Saal Baad, in which Dimple Kapadia stops traffic as a vengeful ghost. Whether the woman in white is a Hindi-film construct haunting popular imagination or the other way around is hard to say. But stories of wronged women in their see-through nighties or wedding gowns come from cultures far and wide, and they seem to be the apparitions mostly frequently spotted in Delhi. Delhi’s women-in-white have a predilection for haunting lonely stretches of road. As one story goes, a woman in white roams the Ashok Vihar flyover between 1am and 4am. Anyone who passes by at that hour, and stops to ask her for directions, will not find their way home that night. Their vehicles break down or they go around in circles. The apparition also makes appearances near the Delhi Cantonment, where she’s the one flagging down passing vehicles. If you’re impolite (or too freaked out) and don’t stop, she will run alongside the car to teach you some manners. She’s also been Garlic ghost brand of cigarettes in the bathroom. spotted under a peepal tree in Dwarka If you moved into a flat on Mall Road early Some even reported getting a whiff of his Sector 9 and in Andheria Mor, where call- in the last decade, your neighbours would aftershave. These incidents left 13 of centre employees and their cab drivers be less likely to welcome you with mithai the 19 students of the first-year batch so are strictly advised against pulling over to than with a bag of garlic and a plate of badly spooked, they left the institute to go have a chat.

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