The largest coffee plantation in the hills beyond Madikeri at the time was owned by a man named Somaiah Beliappa and I heard a curious story about him in one of the small shops on the outskirts of town. I had been living in a cheap and cheerful hostel for a couple of months, and often went for a ride on a rented motorcycle along the roads that snaked through the Western Ghats. I was familiar with the picturesque plantations that lay along the routes I took and none of them had a sinister atmosphere. But one day I took a different path and found something odd.
It was an overgrown plantation, obviously abandoned, of great size, with a crumbling house that had once been white but now was black with mould. This didn’t necessarily mean it was an old building. In this misty lofty region, mould grows rapidly on walls. There was an air of sadness hanging over the place like a choking fog and I soon accelerated away.
But I was intrigued to know more about this plantation and a few days later when I was already preparing to leave Madikeri and head to the coast, I entered a shop to purchase a bottle of wine and some chocolates. As I’m sure you know, Coorg is famous for both those products, homemade and unique, and I wanted a worthy souvenir of my enjoyable sojourn.
I bought banana wine, simply because I had never seen such a thing before, and considered the chocolates on display. One jar contained chocolate-covered coffee beans and these appealed to me. I was invited to sample a few. I accepted the offer and delicately chewed on just one.
It was delicious and I told the shopkeeper this, but it also gave me a strange feeling of melancholy, and I couldn’t keep that a secret. Surprisingly, he nodded at my reaction and answered in a low voice: “The beans came from the Beliappa plantation, that’s why. I knew Somaiah Beliappa for years and he sold them to me at a very reasonable price. But no one wants to buy them after sampling one. There’s a good reason for this. The beans come from a haunted plantation and I suppose they must be haunted too. Houses can be haunted, so why not food and drink?”
I laughed but my laugh quickly died in my mouth. He shook his head and I saw he was serious. I don’t suppose he would have said much more, but then it occurred to me to mention my discovery of the abandoned plantation and how it had filled me with an irrational sense of loss.
He shrugged and smiled but never increased the volume of his voice. “That is the Beliappa plantation, for sure. Somaiah was ambitious but not ruthless, an extremely proud man but not a cruel one. His overwhelming desire was simply to own the largest plantation in the region.”
“And he succeeded?”
“Indeed. He bought more and more land, cleared it and planted coffee, and within a year his plantation was the biggest and most productive in Coorg. That should have been the end of the story but one night there was a dreadful storm, a tempest with thunder and lightning, and the lightning came first, before the rain. A bolt struck a tree and the tree burst into flame and the fire spread. The inferno was so fierce that it melted the window frames of the house in which he was fast asleep and all the panes of glass fell out and shattered on the ground. That woke him and he rushed out into the night in his pyjamas. The plantation was one big fireball with swarms of leaping sparks.”
“A disaster, yes, but he must have been insured?”
“Money is of limited value.”
“No use to ghosts, I suppose,” I said.
The shopkeeper twirled the ends of his moustaches and sighed. He gazed at the jar of beans as if they were sapient enough to understand him. I don’t say he was reluctant to continue his tale but he lacked a certain enthusiasm and I think he regarded mention of the events as unlucky. He reminded me that the world is a baffling ball rushing headlong through space and that the heads of mortal men are also baffling balls and equally reckless.
“The coffee bushes were all consumed in the fire. But the main house was spared because the rains came. Torrential and astounding, vast amounts of fresh water from the sky, applauded by the thunder. They extinguished the flames in a festival of hissing steam. It was incredible!”
“Then you were there?”
“I saw the glow on the horizon and heard the whistling at this distance and it was like a pressure cooker. I knew a battle between fire and water had begun and that water would eventually triumph.”
“His life was saved. So what did Somaiah Beliappa do next?”
“He waited for the storm to end.”
That much was obvious. What else could he do? When nature decides on a punishment for us, we are helpless and there is no right of appeal, even if we are plainly innocent. Time passes and we wait for it to carry us to a point where we can regain our footing and consider what lessons, if any, may be learned from the catastrophe we have endured and survived. Somaiah waited patiently, as I would have done, as all men surely must.
“And what after that?”
The shopkeeper made a gesture that had no meaning in itself, was merely a waving of arms, a demonstration of sinuosity, and he grinned at me, while the bottles of outlandish wine gleamed on his shelves and the chocolates in jars like wooden beads awaited a dipping hand.
“He raked away the ashes and planted more coffee. His ambition was solid and fireproof. Within a short time, his plantation was productive again, and still the largest in the hills. He was tenacious.”
“But what does this have to do with ghosts?” I asked.
“They came after the fire.”
“I see. The plantation wasn’t always haunted?”
“By no means. The blaze and the rains were responsible, and who can say how or why? The ghosts appeared after the replanting. They floated through the bushes and menaced the workers. They were disjointed and abstract shapes that flickered and constantly changed. Sometimes many ghosts would merge into an amorphous mass before fading away.”
“They sound more like optical illusions than phantoms.”
“Many people saw them.”
“But did anyone take photographs?”
“An attempt was made.”
I understood this to mean there was no photographic evidence. But a ghost is a sensation rather than a phenomenon and Somaiah Beliappa’s workers cared nothing about the reality of what they felt. They refused to work among drifting forms and protean intrusions and fled from the plantation. Finding replacements proved impossible. The coffee remained unharvested and rotted on the vine. The plantation sank into commercial failure.
Somaiah Beliappa would venture out with a whip in the night and an angry voice and do his best to chase the ghosts away, but to no avail. These were very unusual spirits, dark fragments of madness, and they dissolved and came together again like reflections in a disturbed pond.
He finally had to admit defeat and he abandoned the plantation and gave it to the ghosts, allowing it to run wild, and he started a new life somewhere south where there are no hills. And the ghosts are probably still there, just as formless and pointless as before, and so the natural and supernatural coexist in some sort of harmony on the slopes of that vast estate.
“That is all the story?”
The shopkeeper nodded. “There is no more.”
“I saw nothing on my visit.”
“But you felt something, a vague sadness.”
“The weight of delirium.”
I said that for my own benefit, because I wanted to define it precisely, but he grinned mirthlessly and we contemplated the mysteries of existence together for a brief period. Then I took my wine and left his premises and mounted my motorcycle and returned for my final night at the hostel. Fictional ghost stories have a resolution, a twist or message. But true ghost stories are unsatisfying in terms of a cohesive narrative and that is why I tend to believe them. I was sure the Beliappa plantation was haunted.
Leaving Madikeri, I never expected to hear anything more about Somaiah Beliappa and those spectres of his. But six months later, when I was in Cochin and waiting for a ship to Lakshadweep, I had a random encounter that turned the inconclusive story into something more structured. In the Mattancherry Bar on the waterfront I met a man from Coorg who knew more about the plantation than the shopkeeper had. He told me:
“The facts of the matter are more complex than you may imagine. We talk about ghosts as if they are a species of animal, whereas they are symbols of our uncertainty. A sudden explained noise is a ghost, and so is a gleam of light in a gloomy forest, a prickling of the skin, an unidentifiable odour, the abrupt taste of fear on our tongues. All are ghosts.”
We had started by greeting each other casually, then talking about the beer served in the bar, and that subject led to wine in general and then the homemade wines of Coorg, and thus to coffee and plantations and Somaiah Beliappa and a disastrous fire that had hatched odd ghosts.
“You worked for him?” I asked.
“Yes. He was a cheerful man and do you know why? He never missed out on sleep, never deprived himself of dreaming. Despite his ambition, he always went to bed at the right time. Sleep is a refreshment of the mind and soul as well as the body. He was wise in that regard.”
“Did you witness the fire and the downpour?”
“No, I came later. He called me in after the ghosts appeared. My speciality is solving paranormal problems. I am a ghost hunter, if you like. I don’t care to boast but it didn’t take me long to understand what was happening there. Those ghosts were figments of a sleepless mind.”
“Whose mind?” I asked.
“The mind of the earth itself, which is a living being and a generous one, a child of the sun but grown up now and mature. I don’t just mean the planet that we live on but the soil in particular, the soil of that plantation. Let me ask you a question and I believe you will comprehend.”
I sipped my drink while he leaned closer and said, “What happens to a man who is deprived of sleep? He will grow more and more tired and after only two or three days his judgement will be impaired, he will stumble, struggle to focus on any task, no matter how simple. And then if he is unable to dream? What do you know about that? What will occur?”
“Hallucinations. He will see things that aren’t there.”
“But for what reason?”
“The dreams will come out in the day, if they are prevented from appearing in his head at night. They will appear in his terrible waking hours. Shadows and shapes and flickering lights in the corners of rooms, distortions of perspective, a misunderstanding of sounds and odours.”
“Exactly like the ghosts on Beliappa’s plantation?”
“Yes, I see the similarity.”
The fellow checked his watch. It was time for him to leave, to catch a boat to Trivandrum, and he finished his own drink and shook my hand as he stood. Only now did he introduce himself.
“Amandeep is my name. I have been investigating ghosts and other strange phenomena for more than ten years. The case of the haunted plantation was one of my weirder experiences. Consider this. There was a fire and the coffee plants were consumed. All the beans were roasted until they crumbled to powder. And then the heavy rains came and they were warm storm rains. They brewed coffee from the powder, vast amounts of extremely strong black coffee, and washed it into the ground, into the thirsty soil.”
“You are telling me that the ground was overstimulated?”
“Yes, I am. Too much coffee.”
He laughed and patted my shoulder.
“Remember the size of the plantation,” he added, “and consider how much coffee has percolated into the land.”
I was unable to give him an estimate. He said:
“The coffee kept the ground awake, stopped it from sleeping and therefore prevented it from dreaming. What does the earth dream about? Shapes, flickers, lights, floating masses that divide and recombine. Unable to slumber, the earth was forced to dream outside itself, in the open, in the daytime of its existence, a projection of what is normally hidden.”
“The ghosts were external dreams and nothing more?”
“Nothing more! Already that’s a lot.”
And he strode across the floor of the room towards the door. Before he was able to open it and vanish, I called one last question to him. I wanted to know if the plantation would remain troubled by the figments forever, or if it might be at peace again. He looked over his shoulder.
“The coffee will wear off, the ghosts will wear off. One day.”
Then Amandeep was gone.
I caught my own ship a few hours later and sailed across the ocean to those tropical islands that have long fascinated me. And the waves washed around the hull of the vessel as if it was a tiny island too. An island haunted by a passenger who strolled the deck and knew that the earth can dream and wondered if water could too. Not to mention the wind and stars.
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