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Updated: June 7, 2025
Not for everything in Asia would I have dropped the door-bar and peered into the dark of the next room. When the morning came, I considered that I had done well and wisely, and inquired for the means of departure. "By the way, khansamah," I said, "what were those three doolies doing in my compound in the night?" "There were no doolies," said the khansamah.
"Dhola !" he said, and brought his teeth together with an audible click, staring at the khansamah as if he were a recrudescence of a prehistoric mammal. He caught a motion of the head and a wave of the hand toward the window, warning him that there might be an eavesdropper lurking without, and rose admirably to the emergency. "That is a lie, misbegotten son of an one-eyed woman of shame!
From a glass case in the sitting-room containing a scanty store of canned provisions the khansamah provided a meal with such ill-assorted ingredients as Somebody's desiccated soup lukewarm, a tin of sardines and sweet biscuits to eat with them, and a bottle of beer to wash it down with. Wargrave was too choked with dust, too sickened with the heat and glare, to have any appetite.
Very few people are permitted to go there, for the owner has no care for money and makes no provision for guests. You must take your own servant and the khansamah will cook you such simple food as men expect in the wilds, and that is all. You stay as long as you please and when you leave not even a gift to the khansamah is permitted.
Instantaneously it was the khansamah who confronted the Virginian the native with head and shoulders submissively bended, as one who awaits an order. Amber, surprised, stared, started to speak, received a sign, and was silent, the excuse for Labertouche's sudden change of attitude being sufficiently apparent in an uproar which had been raised without the least warning in the compound.
A shaft of sunlight struck in through the window and lay stark upon the sleeper's face. He did not move. The khansamah drew close the shades, and with the other left the room in semi-dusk. Beneath the spreading banian, by the cistern of the goldfish, Naraini with smouldering eyes watched Amber disappear in the wilderness of shrubbery. He walked as a man with a set purpose, never glancing back.
These bungalows are under the direction of a khansamah, or native butler, who hires a small corps of servants to attend the wants of travelers. If you bring provisions, the khansamah will have them cooked for you, or he will supply you with a limited bill of fare, charging for each dish according to an official scale with which every bungalow is furnished.
I went into the next room and the daylight streamed through the open door. I was immensely brave. I would, at that hour, have played Black Pool with the owner of the big Black Pool down below. "Has this place always been a dâk-bungalow?" I asked. "No," said the khansamah. "Ten or twenty years ago, I have forgotten how long, it was a billiard room." "A how much?"
Then Surja Mukhi said, "If you stay there I shall drown myself in the tank." The khansamah, finding he was unable to do anything, ran swiftly with the news to Nagendra. Nagendra came with a palanquin for her; but Surja Mukhi was no longer there. He searched all about, but found no trace. Surja Mukhi had wandered thence into a wood. There she met an old woman who had come to gather sticks.
If I had encouraged him the khansamah would have wandered all through Bengal with his corpse. I did not go away as soon as I intended. I stayed for the night, while the wind and the rat and the sash and the window-bolt played a ding-dong "hundred and fifty up." Then the wind ran out and the billiards stopped, and I felt that I had ruined my one genuine, hall-marked ghost story.
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