Tilbury's Ghost

It was a precipitate departure. He had left the army to become a civil servant, acquired a pretty divorcee for a wife on his last visit to England, and found himself in the midst, or so everybody believed, of domestic and professional bliss in the little sub-divisional town of Lungleh in South Lushai Hills, dispensing justice and succor as the long arm of the Raj.

Mr. Tilburry's departure six months after his wife had left evoked considerable dismay, particularly because he had packed up and left for England for no apparent reason. His wife's leaving had startled nobody. She had demonstrated no great fondness for India or its people, and people had surmised that she wanted her first born to see the first light in her own native Cornwall.

But it was the subsequent news of Mr. Tilburry's death and reported visitations of his ghost at Fort Lungleh that generated considerable speculation. In those days, before the advent of airmail, news took upto two months to travel from London to Lungleh, and the absence of an authorised version of the story only added to conjecture in that little outpost ensconced deep inside the wooded hills on the Burmese border where people had little else to do. All kinds of theories were advanced by the folks of Lungleh: that he had never gone back to his wife in England and had taken another wife; that he had been killed by his wife's former husband or a current paramour; or that he had died in an equestrian accident. The last one had come from those who claimed to have espied the apparition of Mr. Tilburry on a horseback. The spirits and ghosts were the stuff of the Lushai romance in those pre-Christian days in northeastern extremities of India.

It was only six months later that people got to know the truth. Mr. Tilburry had indeed gone back to England, and then returned to India a few months later, had resigned from the civil service and died in the Nilgiris shortly thereafter. But this was not the whole truth, and theories about how and why he died have continued to be part of the local mythology unto this day.

There were other reasons, besides the Lushais' ease of belief in the arcane and the supernatural, for the survival of the legend long after the end of the white man's rule. The utter loneliness of the place, the absence of electricity, the conspiratorial element of life in the insurgency era, the eeriness of the encircling jungle fires of the slash-and-burn agriculture, and the sound of drums reverberating against the silent walls of the night - all added up to an awareness of some disembodied realities. Whenever I ran into somebody who had lived and worked in Lungleh before me, the first question would inevitably be about Mr. Tilburry rather than the more contemporaneous issues. Like everybody else, I kept the legend alive by inveterately ascribing all happenings, good or bad, within the precincts of that colonial bungalow to the spirit of my unprehensive predecessor.

The fact was that I never saw the ghost myself when I lived in that house almost fifty years after Mr. Tilburry's death. Indeed, it was one of the first stories I heard from old Pu Denga when he narrated anecdotes about all the officers he had known or worked for. He had himself seen the ghost a number of times, he told me, and assured me that it a was a most harmless apparition, and the visitations could perhaps be ascribed to the events of Mr. Tilburry's last days in that hill-top stone edifice. I suspected that Pu Denga knew about those events, but he never revealed them.

I spent a year at Oxford University twenty years later. Alongside the work on my academic assignment, I researched a book I intended to write on political developments in northeast India. In the process, I made an attempt to tap, through a letter to the editor of The Oxford Times, the family archives of British officers who had served in the region before 1947. This elicited a number of interesting responses. But the one from Mr. Tilburry's grandson was the most premonitory.