Twenty Years Ago

Let me at the start say that Nishi Singh is a healthy woman.

She was healthier still, body and mind, at the time of the alleged murder and haunting some twenty years ago. She had been married for almost two years then and had stopped working as sports mistress at an all-girls' school the year before. Her Amazonian field hockey girls, midway through a double-leg calf raise, intoned her words—A healthy body leaves no space for an idle mind. Such was her following. Yet it is true, there's really no point in denying it since the facts will be made public that at the time of the strange train journey she had been housebound for over six months. Her husband, Captain Bhrigu Nath Singh, was gravely ill, and she had been caring for him on her own in a gloomy house, in a hill station in the Himalayas. Winter in a dry climate will do the trick, the family physician had advised. There were the usual visits from a local doctor and nurse who came and went, but the minute-to-minute fell on her. So, yes, she had no real company and was often too tired to even walk the length of the house.

The other thing to bring up here is the circumstances of the train Nishi Aunty and Bhrigu Uncle—I'm related to both by blood—took to travel home. Newly manufactured, on its maiden trip, the twenty-four-bogie train was traveling with two motors attached. The spare was to be dropped off at a rail yard, at a point in the journey, but that never happened, and none of the documentation explains why. At any rate, the train was propelled forward with twice the usual horsepower. At the time, this was the reason given for the relentless feelings of oppression Nishi Aunty and some other passengers endured as their compartments were violently pulled in one direction and then the other each time the train slowed down and stalled. In those moments—once when another train had the right of way and a second time outside a station that was still clearing its tracks—Nishi Aunty realized that the face peering at her was, in fact, disembodied.

What you should be aware of, at this point, is that Nishi Aunty is not the kind of person who expends her energy on cultivating an imagination. She is practical, matter-of-fact, composed. She is exactly the kind of person who devoutly believes both in a pantheon of gods and hell, but if the divine or supernatural were to lurk up to her, she would simply blink. In short, she refuses to think too much, and for the most part this character trait has served her well.

Now, of course, the length of Nishi Aunty and Bhrigu Uncle's journey, those forty hours, is being examined again; the train in question was recently set on fire. No passengers or rail crew were hurt. What is puzzling is that whoever burned the train waited a week before breaking into a guarded rail yard to steal the charred, metallic remains, crushing them elsewhere, before dunking them in the Ganges for purification. The video, once uploaded on the Exorcism Channel on YouTube, got over sixty-five-million hits within a day. In the last ten seconds a link appears at the bottom titled "Secret Histories: Spectres of the Murdered on the Rajdhani Express," where names of the deceased, the year of their death, and their sightings—apparitions—are cataloged, and the third one red-inked on that list is that of Bhrigu Nath Uncle.

At first, I believe, all the officer in charge of the case intended to do was investigate the arson and the subsequent pollution of the Ganges. But before any action could be taken on the latter, one of the nation's notorious holy-man-turned-politician called on his seething followers.

How was it, he asked, that these train murders were committed in the two towns where Hindus are a minority?

How was it that the majority of the murdered names on the...