An Excerpt from Young Blood by Chandrima Das

Who the Fuck is Alice?

Savitribai Phule Pune University The summer of 2011

The flickering candlelight showed three different emotions on the three faces before me.

Eyebrows knitted together, Vinay looked confused. Raghu had drummed up Alice Richman as a 'famous ghost,' but it was clear from Vinay's expression that he had never heard of her.

Menon had terror written all over him. He had wrapped one arm across his baniyan-clad chest, and a palm covered his open mouth.

Raghu, playing court jester extraordinaire, brazenly grinned from ear to ear. He was enjoying the high from producing such visceral reactions in these two. He looked across the room to me. Mirth shone on his face—he was expecting a response. Our eyes met. But I remained impassive.

A flash of irritation passed over Raghu's features. After a moment, they settled back into his usual smirk. 'Dev, you know who Alice Richman is, right?' he asked.

I did know who she was. I sent a nod in his direction.

Suddenly, Raghu broke into a song, 'Oh, I don't know why she's leaving, or where she's gonna go. I guess she's got her reasons, but I just don't want to know. 'Cause for twenty-four years, I've been living next door to Alice.'

Menon grinned and sang along with the familiar chorus: 'Alice! Who the fuck is Alice?'

Raghu ambled across to me and put a friendly arm around my shoulders. 'Do you want to tell them who Alice is? I think they'll believe you better than they believe me.'

I turned to Vinay and Menon. 'There's a grave inside PU. The tombstone mentions the name of the woman buried there, Alice Richman. It also gives the year of her death, 1882. No one knows how she died. Or how this Englishwoman came to be buried in a university campus instead of a graveyard.'

'Yes, that's right. Excellent, Dev. So precise!' Raghu flashed a delighted grin and patted me on the back.

'Why do you want to call her?' said Vinay.

'I would have called a ghost from your college, but the monsters from Symby are already here.' He pointed at Vinay and me. Raghu made punching bag of Menon, but with Vinay and me, the joke would be directed at our college—not us. He was smart enough to know that the line between funny and offensive lay in different places for different people.

'Well, I think Raghu wants to call a "genuine ghost",' I mimed my fingers into quotes, 'someone who's been documented and sighted by other people. So he can prove that he's not messing around with us.'

Raghu shrugged. 'Not really. I'm calling her because no one knows for sure how and why she died. And I want to find out. Not twenty-four years, but for two years, we've all been living next door to Alice. Alice!'

Once again, Menon joined in for the chorus. 'Who the fuck is Alice!'

In a way, Raghu was right. We had indeed been living next door to Alice. Our house was adjacent to the PU campus.

'Let's write the alphabet and numbers on a large sheet of paper? We'll make a makeshift Ouija board,' said Raghu. 'Since I know the right mantra to call her, a simple sheet will be enough for the spirit to communicate with us.'

'I have chart paper and marker pens,' volunteered Vinay. He set off for our room with a candle.

'Can I just go to my room and stay there?' squeaked Menon from the dining table. 'You guys are scaring me. I don't want to play.'

'No, you can't. We need you here,' said Raghu. 'In fact, you're safer here with us than in your room.'

'What do you mean?' Menon's eyes expanded to the size of tea saucers.

'The Ouija circle is safe. If a spirit is called into a place and crosses from the realm of the dead to the realm of the living, it can't harm people who are in the circle.' Raghu slowly crept an arm around Menon, not touching him. 'But if you're outside the circle ... then you're a free meal for the spirit.' He poked Menon on the shoulder from the other side. Menon shrieked.

'Quit frightening him!' I said.

Raghu chuckled. 'What's the point of calling a spirit if no one gets frightened?'

Vinay came back with an armload of supplies. He dumped chart paper, markers and a ruler on the dining table. 'Let's get down to work.'

Vinay and I drew a grid with the help of the ruler. We filled it with all twenty-six letters of the English alphabet and numbers from 0 to 9. We drew two boxes on top of the grid and filled them with big, red capital letters. One said, 'YES,' the other said, 'NO.'

Raghu slinked off into the kitchen and returned with a glass tumbler. He did little else while we made the Ouija board and barked useless instructions at us. Menon cowered in his seat at the dining table throughout the process. He kept trying to convince the rest of us to not go ahead with our experiment in the dark, but remained unsuccessful.

I hadn't told them everything about Alice Richman's legend.

The story first made itself known to me through a PU girl I had dated for a brief period last year. Though the girl soon turned out to be too clingy for my liking, I happened to visit the Alice Richman grave with her. It was a familiar hangout spot for campus couples. The PU rumour mill had churned out the same old story for decades: Alice had fallen in love with an Indian boy. Because of the era's social norms and diktats, their brief love affair could never bloom into togetherness. So they killed themselves.

This story had all the typical ingredients of a romantic legend cooked up for campfire gossip sessions by someone with an overactive imagination. It never quite made sense to me. Ghosts and the paranormal were hardly the biggest lies in it. Did upper-class Englishwomen fall in love so easily with the Indians they ruled over? I doubted it.

Anyway, we would never know the truth. The late Miss Alice Richman could no longer tell us what really happened to her, no matter how hard Raghu prayed and chanted.

Though it was dark, Vinay and I completed our work on the makeshift Ouija board pretty quickly. We laid it out on the dining table and weighed down the edges with coasters, Menon's pencil box and a cigarette packet. Since Raghu hadn't contributed to the making of the board, I concluded that this wasn't part of his set up for whatever trick he planned to play on us.

With the smooth flourish of a practiced magician, Raghu placed an old coin in the centre of the sheet and covered it with the glass tumbler. When I reached out to pick it up, he slapped my hand away.

'Don't touch. It'll lose its power.'

I gave Raghu a tight-lipped smile. I knew what to do now. The coin would be my point of focus for unravelling his trick.

Raghu took his place at the head of the table. Vinay and I took the two remaining seats. Menon hadn't moved from his position all this while. He still looked pale and terrified.

We placed a single large candle next to the sheet and lit it. Raghu smiled with satisfaction. The candle flame flickered and danced. Its sudden brightness reflected off his eyes, making them glitter in the dark. For a moment, my imagination escaped logic's grip, and ran along a strange and terrifying line. What if Raghu really possessed strange powers that lay far beyond ordinary human capacities?

Raghu stuck his tongue out, and made a funny face.

Just as quickly as it had come, my irrational worry left me.

'Shall we begin?'

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