from another age

Had lunch with my great-aunt's family last weekend. They visit my aunt and uncle every year and spend the summer with them. This year conversation at lunch took a delightful turn when people of my parents generation and up began reminiscing about my great-grandparents' house in Allahabad. I've heard stories about it from my grandmother, and I even have dim memories from the one time (I think) that I visited in 1995 or so. I remember my great-grandmother lying supine on a large bed surrounded by faceless people. There was also a white woman who was saying something incoherent. I later learnt that she might have been a great-aunt by marriage. At any rate, last weekend's stories were variously fascinating and funny.

My dad and my great-aunt were talking about the layout of the house, which was apparently ginormous, to use the scientific term, as houses of the well-off tended to be pre-Independence. There was a large courtyard at the center of the house with the main house built around it. I seem to remember that my maternal grandmother's ancestral home had a similar layout. My dad recalled how spooked he used to be by the house when he was a kid, and how people would travel from the living quarters to the dining area in groups to avoid being left alone in one part of the house while everyone else was in another. My great-grandmother's bed was apparently so big that she could lie vertically in it while three people could lie horizontally underneath - a strange mental image. It was all very fun. The house is well over a hundred years old now. My great-grandfather bought it sometime in the late forties (earlier?). My grandmother told me that her father had bought a one hundred-year-old house and then renovated it in sections. Could this be the same house, I wonder? My great-grandfather was apparently a big name in business in U. P. back in the day. I ran a Google search on him recently in the hope of finding something interesting, but all I found were records of lawsuits filed by him (I should hope).

Now for the amusing part. My grandfather had a thing for planchettes, apparently, and would amuse my grandmother's family by communicating with the dead. Two of my great-aunts, including the one with whom we lunched last weekend, frequently took part as well, being possessed, they said, of the most strength of all the company. My dad has dim memories of those events and says he used to get quite frightened as a kid. Lights turning on and off, skylights opening and closing with a crash - that sort of thing. I'm as agnostic as they come, but I love a good ghost story. My great-aunt told us with great solemnity that there were certain rules to communicating with the dead. For instance, you shouldn't attempt to get in touch with someone who has been murdered. They wouldn't like being disturbed. That, of course, didn't deter my grandfather and co. from doing just that, with the result that the aforementioned lights turning on and off and skylights crashing occurred. Fun times indeed. Apparently planchettes had become such a commonplace at my grandmother's place that they once roused the dead just to ask where my great-grandmother had mislaid her closet keys. Once in the sixties they decided, Why not get in touch with John F. Kennedy? And so they did just that. There was much laughter at lunch at this point, as well there should have been.