MATCHBOX

Soon after becoming a ghost, the ghost princess realised this vital truth: all those rules of time and decorum that had once corseted her as a human being no longer applied to ghosts. So, for instance, if she wished, she could arrive at the same place at the same time day after day, like a song played on loop. And if she desired to visit her home on a full moon night – she still thought of it as her home after all these years – she would just have to appear there. She would not have to announce her arrival in advance: all she had to do was glide through the wrought iron gates and into the garden. She would then slip inside the shadow of her favourite tree, a friendly, ancient, spreading banyan, which had been there long before her and still stood sentinel after all these years, watching the moon rise before it got entangled in the tree branches. It reminded her of a pearl earring she had lost decades ago – and even though she had lost so much else and of greater significance since then, the loneliness of that single pearl earring continued to haunt her.

And yet, over the years, the ghost princess started to question what she had once taken for granted as a newly minted ghost: could she truly arrive at her home whenever she pleased? In the absence of an heir, the government had taken over her house and converted it into a museum after she was no longer alive (she still could not bring herself to believe she was that ugly, final word: dead). In the beginning, though, she had been incensed at the thought of all those strange people pouring into and invading the precious, sacred privacy of her home. She had been a recluse for the last years of her life, becoming accustomed to the heavy silences that carpeted the rooms. The unceasing laughter and chatter that now filled the corridors unsettled her: she thought her ears and head would explode from the clamour. She resented the visitors examining her sarees or peering at their reflections in her silver hair-brushes or photographing the balcony where she had once taken her morning and evening tea till the very end. 

Yet, over the passage of time, she began to see the house had now come alive, wonderfully so, glowing softly, deeply, as if it had fallen in love. She gradually accepted that the house was no longer the tomb it had been while she had called it home. Its mistress may have gone but the house had in turn acquired life – and how could she possibly begrudge it that? And with that realisation, she decided she would no longer venture inside her home anymore, limiting her explorations only to the garden.

It was a full moon tonight: her favourite time of the month. When she glided through the gates and into the garden, she saw that visitors were still walking around the place although the sun had long begun its descent. Newly in love couples whispered into each other’s hair while two middle-aged women sat and gossiped on a stone bench. She made herself comfortable inside her usual favourite spot, the many-limbed banyan tree, her attention now drawn towards a skinny girl with huge black glasses intently photographing an enormous dawn-hued hibiscus bush. Even though the light was rapidly fading, its blooms still appeared so brilliant, their colours as if competing with the tangerine-pink sky. The princess personally did not like that hibiscus variety, which had always been a little too vulgar for her taste. She preferred their daintier candy-floss pink cousins, secretly seeing them as self-portraits. One of the gardeners at the time had insisted on planting those huge hibiscuses though and she had been surprised to see how they had soon become the garden’s star attractions, everyone flocking to admire them. She too eventually became used to their flamboyant presence although she still gravitated towards the pink hibiscus, the only ones which were permitted to adorn her hair and home. 

She examined the girl’s singular doubled attention, her eyes and camera trying to capture the hibiscus, almost as if it were a rare butterfly. The girl eventually prised her gaze away from the flowers, perhaps conceding to the approaching darkness and then glanced at the banyan tree. The princess shivered, terrified that the girl might have seen her. In the past, someone had once spotted and photographed her, sending the photographs to a local newspaper. There had then followed a feverish speculation in the city for months, everyone wondering about the identity of the shadowy figure in the images. A local historian gave a detailed interview to a TV channel, suggesting that the figure haunting the place was the house’s former inhabitant, a princess from a faraway land. Thanks to his careless words, the home soon became overrun with people trying to get a glimpse of this mysterious ghost princess. 

More guards than ever were deployed to ward off these amateur ghost hunters, whose numbers increased with each coming day. Is this how tigers or lions felt upon encountering humans during safaris, the ghost princess had wondered at the time? She could not return to her beloved home for months and it was only after the furore finally died down that she dared to come back, making sure it was always after dusk and limiting her visits to every few days. Perhaps, it was then she had begun to realise that ghosts did have boundaries, after all, that they too could become trespassers in what had been their own homes. They ultimately had no choice but to follow a ghostly version of visitors’ rules, adhering to a set of visiting hours and permitted to access only certain spaces.