While out hunting in the 1960s I used to pass a dilapidated colonial bungalow outside Munnar. Squatting on a wooded hillock, it was isolated, spooky and abandoned. And it was rumoured to be actively haunted by the spirit of a British tea planter who had committed suicide there in a fit of depression. Thereafter it had remained unoccupied.
Forbidding and scary as it was, I never dared to enter the bungalow, contenting myself with studying it from a respectful distance. It often struck me that it was the perfect setting for a Dracula horror movie starring Christopher Lee. The eerie scenario it presented—broken windowpanes, peeling paint, thickly cobwebbed walls, dusty interiors and an overall air of desolation—would certainly have stoked Bram Stoker’s imagination!
Then one wet monsoon evening in the mid-1990s two drenched foreign tourists, out exploring the area, took refuge in the abandoned bungalow, or rather its ruins. They somehow lit a fire, dried themselves and finally ended up roughing out the night there since the downpour hadn’t abated.
Call it serendipity if you like, but I ran into the elderly foreign couple the next day and learnt that the husband was none other than the son of the British planter who had killed himself in that very bungalow decades earlier. With his wife he had come all the way from Aberdeen in Scotland on a nostalgic first-time trip down memory lane, trying to piece together his forgotten boyhood in these hills.
Over a cup of tea in a local planters’ club, the silver-haired Scot fondly recalled details of his father’s former bungalow— the fish pond fronting it, the ivy-covered exterior, the antiquated architecture, the nursery where he grew up under the ever-watchful eye of an ayah, the courteous domestics at their beck and call, etc. And now all that remained were its ruins, he sighed wistfully.
What about the rainy night spent in the crumbling bungalow, I asked warily. The weather was bad, he grimaced, but otherwise their stay was uneventful—occasioned by sheer necessity rather than choice. And despite their age, they were none the worse for it, he assured me, since they were seasoned campers. Perhaps, the father’s restless spirit had been appeased by the son’s visit at long last.
George N Netto
Email: gnettomunnar@rediffmail.com