that I will scream and shout and waken everybody here if you attempt to go.' She tried to wrest my gun from my hands. For some time past my annoyance had been giving place to a feeling of amusement. Now I laughed aloud and said, 'I can't say whether ghosts actually exist or not, but I can say that there are false ghosts who do exist. They speak to you, weep, and stand in your path—and, when the occasion arises, they wring the necks of their victims and drink their blood.'
Piari grew pale and seemed to be much too taken aback to be able to speak. At last she said, 'So you have recognised me, I see. But that is a mistake of yours. Those false ghosts are capable of doing a lot of things, it is true: but they don't obstruct your path for the pleasure of wringing your neck. Even they have a sense of what is due to those who have any claim on them.'
'Well,' I said laughing, 'you are speaking of yourself. Are you a ghost?'
'Of course I am,' said Piari. 'Those that die and yet are not dead, are ghosts, to be sure. Didn't you mean the same thing?' She paused for an instant, and then continued, 'In one sense it is true that I am dead. But whether that is false or true, it was not I who spread the report of my death. My mother got her brother to circulate the rumour. Will you hear the whole story?'
At the mention of her 'death', all my doubts vanished: I recognised without a shadow of doubt that she was Rajlakshmi. Many years ago she had gone on a pilgrimage with her mother and she had never come back. Her mother, on her return home, announced that she had died of cholera at Benares. Though at first I had not been able to think of where I had seen her before, I had from
105
