FACES
Privacy, in the junior boys’ hostel of North Bengal Medical College, was a rumour, like hot water in winter.
The bathroom opposite Room 46 served an entire corridor. At six in the morning, it held a queue that curled out of the door and past the notice board: forty boys, one reliable tap, each of us clutching a toothbrush like a man waiting for a passport. At night it held the ones who couldn’t sleep, the ones who couldn’t study, and the ones who had discovered that a tiled room does wonders for a bad singing voice. Somebody was always inside. Somebody was always knocking. Somebody, I am fairly certain, was always using my soap.
So, when I walked in one evening in my first semester and found it empty, I did not think warning. I thought miracle.
The bulb over the basins had fused again. In a government hostel, a fused bulb is not a fault; it is a tradition, like the three bathing cubicles opposite the basins, whose wooden doors had refused to close properly since before any of us were born. Only the corridor’s weak yellow light followed me in, and it gave up a few feet past the entrance. Three basins on the left. Three spotted mirrors above them. Behind me, the cubicles, their doors drooping at odd angles like tired drunks. Further back, where the room bent around a corner, lay a darkness that the bulb, even when it was alive, had never managed to reach.
I walked to the middle basin, because it had the tap with the best pressure, and turned it on. Water hit the ceramic, loud and cheerful. I was alone in the busiest room in the building, and I felt like a man who had won the lottery. I splashed my face. Once. Twice.
I looked up.
And in a freezing cold moment, I realised that there were two of us in the mirror.
One was me: wet-faced, tired, glasses fogged at the edges, hair arranged by a pillow and nothing else.
The other was behind me. In the second cubicle. Standing in the gap where the door never closed.
I want to tell you it was a shadow. A towel on a hook, a shirt, a mop with ambitions. But a towel does not tilt its head. A mop does not look at you the way you look at a clock you have been waiting on. This was a face, pale and narrow, turned straight toward me, and it had been waiting, I was sure of that, for me to look up.
It had my eyes. My nose. My mouth. My untidy hair falling across the same forehead. And across its eyes, thin and bright, the shine of spectacle lenses catching the light from the corridor.
It was my face.
I didn’t scream. I would love to say that was courage. It wasn’t. Screaming requires lungs, and mine had temporarily stopped taking calls.
The tap kept running.
Drip, splash, drip. Every other sound in the world had left the building.
And from somewhere deep, from the oldest, coldest cupboard in my mind, a door swung open, and I was ten years old again, standing in the dark in front of a bamboo grove, watching the red light of a bicycle shrink down an empty road.
But to explain that, I have to go back to the lie that started everything. Because if you had known me in Class V, you would agree I had it coming.
I was a boarder at Ramakrishna Mission Ashrama, Narendrapur, one of the finest schools in Kolkata, and a hostel boy since I was small enough to get lost in my own dhoti. The campus was enormous: junior and senior sections, a college, an auditorium, playing fields, a school for blind boys, and a scatter of hostels called Bhavans, all of it buried in so much greenery that you forgot you were inside an institution and began to suspect you were inside a forest with a timetable. Monks and Brahmacharis ran the hostels. We called them Maharaj or Da, depending on the person and how much trouble we were in. In the evenings we put on dhoti, kurta and uttoriyo, folded our hands, and sang for Sri Ramakrishna, Sarada Devi and Swami Vivekananda, in a routine designed by people who clearly believed a boy could never have too much discipline.
Studies and I were not on speaking terms. My father, an electrical engineer in a government job, had climbed a long way from our rural roots, and he wanted the best for me, and by “the best” he meant books. Books during term. Books during vacation. Books until the marks improved. While other boys came back from holidays with films and trips and adventures to report, I came back with a very detailed knowledge of chapter four.
My academic record, in fact, was a ghost story of its own: frightening, and nobody wanted to look at it directly.
Then came the winter exhibition.
For a few glorious days the study hours were suspended and the school filled up with charts, models and miniature monuments. The brilliant boys were handed important responsibilities. Boys like me were handed a stool and told to hold the end of something. I would like to say the teachers had spotted my hidden genius and were saving it for later. The truth is probably less flattering.
Which left us with time. We sat in a circle in the corridor of Advaitanand Bhavan, my hostel, and swapped stories about our holidays. One afternoon somebody described a horror film, scene by scene, and the circle went quiet, leaning in like plants toward a window.
I listened, quietly, as usual. And then I had a thought, the kind that has ruined many a Class V boy’s evenings: If I don’t have a real story, I can always make one up.
So, I did.
Behind the main school building, past the last classroom of the junior section, there was a pond. By day it was a sulky green sheet of water, famous for frogs and for the cricket balls that went in and never came out. Nobody went there after dark. Nobody had a reason to. Which made it perfect.
I lowered my voice. I told them I had gone there one night, alone. I never explained why. A good storyteller never explains why; the audience is usually too busy gripping each other’s sleeves.
It was a night of full moon, I said. And the pond was different. The moss and the weeds had vanished, and the water lay clear as glass. Lotus leaves floated on its skin. Lotus buds stood above the water, tightly shut, perfectly still.
Then I turned around.
She was standing on the pond. A woman in white, faint and luminous, almost a silhouette, as if she had been cut out of the moonlight itself. She wasn’t hideous. She wasn’t covered in blood. She made no sound at all, and that, I told them, was the worst part. She was almost beautiful.
She began to glide toward me. No hurry. And wherever her feet passed over the water, a bud opened, slowly, one after another, until the whole pond was blooming blue under the moon.
She kept coming.
“And what did I do?” I asked.
I paused. I had seen older boys pause at exactly this spot, and I had studied them like a professional.
“I ran.”
I don’t know where I found those details. The white dress, the opening lotuses, that impossible blue. Perhaps I had borrowed them from something half-heard. Perhaps my imagination had finally found employment. But I told it with such conviction (and with sound effects, and a wind that did not exist) that two boys began to cry and a third asked to be taken to the toilet immediately, preferably with an escort.
One of them, whom I’ll call Shubhankar, was so shaken that he went straight to Sandeep Da, our housemaster, who lived on the ground floor.
“Maharaj! He’s frightening everybody! He’s making up ghost stories!”
It was, technically, the first whistle-blowing incident in the history of Advaitanand Bhavan. The accused was me. The victims were traumatised. The ghost, I note, was never apprehended.
Sandeep Da said nothing to me at dinner. He ate his rice. He did not give a sermon. He did not even look at me.
That should have been my first warning. A man who skips the sermon is saving his energy for something better.
After dinner he called me to his room.
I went in without a flicker of suspicion. He stepped out, locked his door, and said, “Come. I want to show you something.”
“Where, Dada?”
“You’ll see.”
He brought out his bicycle, a black, sturdy thing with a rattling carrier on the back. I climbed onto it, delighted. A ride after dinner with Sandeep Da? This was a promotion.
We rolled past Advaitanand Bhavan, past the other hostels, past the last lit windows. The buildings thinned. The road narrowed. And then the streetlights simply stopped, as if somebody had decided that the rest of the campus wasn’t worth the electricity.
The sky was thick with cloud, and only now and then did a ragged patch of moon tear through. A canal ran along one side of the road, black and sluggish and furred with weeds. Ahead of us, a darker darkness stood against the sky.
The bamboo grove.
Now, that grove had a reputation. The story was that our school had been built over an old Islamic graveyard. We had seen what looked like ancient graves at the edge of the trees, and the azan drifted across from the neighbouring settlement, sometimes in the grey hour before dawn. Nobody checked the history. At that age you don’t do research; you collect evidence in the form of goosebumps.
And then there was the legend of the bamboo itself. A single stalk, they said, that leaned across the path at exactly the wrong height. A man once tried to step over it, one leg raised, and the stalk snapped upright, caught him, and carried him into the grove.
He was never seen again.
In a hostel, you don’t need proof. You need one senior boy, one dark room, and somebody who has just announced he needs to use the toilet.
Sandeep Da stopped the bicycle beside the grove.
The wind moved through the bamboo, and the stalks creaked against each other, a long, dry, wooden complaint.
“Get down,” he said.
I looked at the bicycle. The chain was fine. The tyres were fine. There was no reason to stop.
I got down anyway.
He turned the bicycle around.
For a moment I thought he was going to say something. Scold me, explain, ask me to repeat the ghost story for educational purposes. Instead he climbed on, put his feet on the pedals, and rode away.
Away from me.
Away from the grove.
Away from the child he had just left standing in front of it.
I watched the tiny red glow of his reflector shrink down the road. I heard the whisper of his tyres thin out and fade. Far behind me, the hostel lights glimmered like the lights of another town.
The bamboo creaked.
Behind me. Beside me. I couldn’t tell.
And then, from the corner of my eye, something pale moved between the stalks. Low. Slow. At about the height of a woman’s shoulders.
Polythene, I told myself. A bag. The wind.
But I was the author of a woman in white, and an author knows his own handwriting.
I froze. One second. Two. I understood, with perfect clarity, that I was no longer the clever boy who had made his friends cry. I was the boy who had to stand in the dark and find out whether he believed his own stories.
Then my brain, bless it, sent one useful instruction.
Archan. RUN.
I ran. I have never run like that, before or since. My chappals left me within three strides, and I never learned where they went. I would have run over broken glass. I ran with my chest on fire and the whole night breathing on my neck, chasing a bicycle that had no business being so fast, and somewhere behind me, I swear, the bamboo stopped creaking.
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That was worse. I didn’t look back to check.
The hostel lights swelled up ahead like a shoreline, and Sandeep Da was waiting there, one foot on the ground.
I reached him gasping so hard I could barely stand. He looked me over quickly, almost anxiously. Had I fallen? Was I scratched? Was I hurt?
Then he asked, quietly, “Will you make up stories like that again?”
That was the lesson.
I was furious. I was drenched, my legs were shaking, and I felt betrayed to the bone. How could a housemaster, a man we trusted, abandon a Class V child in front of a haunted grove? It was unfair, it was unethical, it was surely the worst punishment ever devised by an adult.
But as I stood there, I caught something on his face. A smirk, half hidden. And beneath it, something else. A little nervousness. Perhaps even a little fear. I could not tell whether he had been afraid for me, or afraid with me, or whether I was simply too wound up to read a face.
He gave me water. He sat me in his room until my heart settled. He scolded me again, thoroughly this time, and sent me to bed.
We never spoke of it again.
He did get what he wanted. I never told another ghost story. As a free gift, I discovered I could run faster than anybody in my class, and in Class IX, I became the Sportsman of the Year. If you want to thank somebody for that, thank a bamboo grove.
Case closed. Ghost invented, storyteller punished, lesson delivered.
Except that the next time, I had not invented it at all.
I don’t remember crossing the bathroom.
I remember the corridor light, almost holy after the dark. I remember my own door, and the lock, and the sound of the bolt sliding home. I remember sitting on the edge of my bed with my wet face in my hands, my heart going like a dhak in a Durga Puja procession, asking the empty room the only question I had.
What the hell was that?
My roommates were out. I called Mehboob, my closest friend in the hostel, and the whole story came tumbling out of me in the wrong order. The cubicle. The face. The glasses. The resemblance.
He listened. He did not laugh, which I appreciated, though I could hear him thinking about it.
“Which cubicle?” he asked.
“The second one.”
A pause.
“Archan,” he said carefully, “I bathe in the second one. I bathed in it this morning. I sang. Half our batch uses that cubicle. It’s the only one with a bucket that doesn’t leak. A thousand boys have stood in there. It has had more visitors than the Taj Mahal.”
“Then why — ?”
“Light,” he said. “Mirror. Your brain. You were tired. You’ve been reading too much anatomy and now you’re seeing faces in cubicles. It happens.” Another pause. “Use the other wing’s bathroom for a few days, if you want. Don’t think too much about it.”
It was perfectly sensible advice, and I wanted very badly to believe it. The brain is a magnificent builder of explanations, and it works fastest when the alternative is not knowing.
For the next few days I went to the other wing every morning, like a refugee carrying a bucket, a towel and a grudge. I told no one else. I stopped looking into mirrors for longer than necessary. Within a week or two, I had almost convinced myself that nothing had happened.
Almost.
One afternoon I decided to try the college library.
I had seen the seniors going in, carrying books and an air of enormous seriousness, and I wanted to see whether it was contagious. The reading room was hushed and high-ceilinged, the exact opposite of our hostel, where someone was always singing, shouting or watching a film at a volume that suggested the neighbours were deaf.
I was not suddenly a scholar. I issued a gigantic book, heavy enough to double as a doorstop or a weapon, found a seat, and tried to look like a boy who had come to study. Mostly I watched the room, and wondered how many of the couples at the corner tables were actually revising. First-year medical students have many questions, and not all of them are academic.
Mehboob joined me after a while. We lasted twenty minutes before we realised that everybody around us was actually trying to work, and we got up to leave.
On the way out, I noticed the wall.
A row of old black-and-white photographs hung beside the door, framed and faded, behind glass that had not met a duster in years. Former students, I assumed. I let my eyes slide along them as we walked.
Then my feet stopped on their own.
One of the photographs showed a young man in old-fashioned glasses.
And he looked like me.
Not vaguely. Not if you squint. The eyes, the nose, the mouth, the shape of the face, the way the hair fell. Take the glasses off both of us, and I would have said ninety percent.
“Mehboob.”
He came over. He looked at the photograph. He looked at me. He looked at the photograph again, for a long time.
“Bro,” he said slowly, “that’s you.”
That was the first time anyone else had seen it. It was not the dark, or the mirror, or my tired eyes. A second pair of eyes, in broad daylight, had signed off on it.
Then we noticed the two frames beside it.
Each carried a name, a year of birth, and a year of death. Three young men. The same year. Beneath them, in careful handwriting, their friends and batchmates had added messages asking that their souls rest in peace.
It wasn’t a wall of alumni. It was a memorial.
We asked the librarian if he knew anything. He was new, and he made it politely clear that history was not in his job description. We left without answers.
That evening I found Debdas da, a friendly, talkative senior from the next room, and described the photographs. The names. The year.
For the first time since I had met him, he went quiet.
Then he told me that the three young men in the frames had been first-year students, just like me. They had lived in our hostel wing, in a room at the far end of our corridor, the end the bathroom bulb had never reached. And one day, all three of them had died by suicide.
No one ever knew why.
Their friends had framed their photographs and hung them in the library, so that someone, somewhere, would remember.
I cannot tell you the year. I have tried; the number has slipped away from me. But the faces I kept. The face in the second frame I would keep for the rest of my life.
The bathroom came back to me then. The dark cubicle. The glint of glasses. The head tilted, waiting.
Later, the seniors said that the room at the end of the corridor had needed a puja, a full havan, before anyone would agree to sleep in it again. I cannot verify that. It is only what people told me.
I never went to that room. I did know which one it was, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask the boys who lived there if they had ever noticed anything. So, I avoided the room. I avoided the library wall. I avoided the bathroom, and made peace with a bucket in the other wing.
And I never saw the face again.
Not once.
Not for fifteen years.
It is three in the morning, and I have grown old now. A respected doctor.
I have 5 degrees, many publications, and a very sensible opinion about optical illusions. I know the word pareidolia, the brain’s habit of finding faces in electrical sockets and wallpaper. I can explain, with diagrams, why the dark plays tricks.
I am on night duty in a government hospital, and I have come to the washroom at the end of the corridor to splash cold water on my face, because the alternative is falling asleep on my feet in front of a patient. The bulb above the basin flickers, deciding whether to live. Behind it, a row of cubicles. Their doors hang a little crooked. Of course they do. It’s a government building.
I turn on the tap. Water hits steel, loud and cheerful.
I wash my face. Once. Twice.
I am alone. I think nothing of it. It is three in the morning; of course I’m alone.
I look up.
The mirror is spotted at the edges. In it I see what I always see: a tired man in glasses, water running down his chin, a little grey beginning to show at his temples. Behind him, the cubicles.
The second door is open by a hand’s width.
And there is a face in the gap.
Pale. Narrow. Turned toward me. Waiting.
And it is not nineteen. It is older. The tiredness under the eyes. The first grey at the temples. The glasses I upgraded last year, the left lens smudged, the way I never clean it.
It has my face. Not the face I had then. The face I have now.
The tap runs. Drip, splash, drip.
From the oldest, coldest cupboard in my mind, a door swings open, and I am ten, and then I am nineteen, and then I am here.
I do not move. I do not turn around. I have never turned around. It has always been my one rule.
But in the mirror, the tired man at the basin lifts his head from the water, and slowly, very slowly, begins to turn toward the cubicle.
I am still facing forward.
But he is not.
