Carlos Zafon - The Midnight Palace

T hose places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, realise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses .

Maybe it was this same wisdom that lit Lahawaj Chandra Chatterghee’s path during his final moments, making him realise that he had fallen inexorably into the prison of his own damnation. Perhaps, in the deep solitude of a soul condemned to revisit, time and time again, the wounds of the past, he was able to understand the real value of the lives he had destroyed, and of all the lives he could yet save. It’s hard to know what he saw in his son’s face seconds before he allowed him to put out the flames of bitterness that blazed in the Firebird’s boilers. Perhaps, in the midst of his madness, he was able, for one brief second, to muster the sanity that his tormentors had stolen from him ever since his days in Grant House .

The answers to all these questions, as well as his secrets, discoveries, dreams and expectations, disappeared for ever in the terrible explosion that split the skies over Calcutta at daybreak on 28 May 1932, like the snowflakes that melted even as they kissed the ground .

Whatever the truth may be, I must record that, shortly after the burning train sank into the Hooghly, the pool of fresh blood that had housed the tormented spirit of the twins’ mother evaporated. I knew then that the soul of Lahawaj Chandra Chatterghee and that of the woman who had been his companion would rest in eternal peace. Never again would I see in my dreams the sad eyes of the Princess of Light leaning over my friend Ben .

I haven’t seen my friends in all the years since I boarded the ship that was to take me to England that very afternoon. I remember their frightened faces when they said goodbye to me on the wharf on the Hooghly River as the boat weighed anchor. I remember the promises we made to stay in touch and never to forget what we had witnessed. I have to admit that, even then, I realised that our words would be lost in the ship’s wake as soon as it departed under the flaming Bengali sun .

They were all there, except for Ben. But none was as present in our hearts as he was .

When I look back on those days, I feel that each and every one of my friends lives on in a corner of my soul, a corner that was sealed for ever that afternoon in Calcutta. A place where we all continue to be sixteen years old and where the spirit of the Chowbar Society and the Midnight Palace will remain alive as long as I do .

As for the fate that awaited each of us, time has effaced the footprints of many of my companions. I learned that after some years Seth succeeded the rotund Mr de Rozio as head librarian and archivist of the Indian Museum, and that in doing so he became the youngest man ever to hold that post .

I also had news of Isobel, who married Michael years later. Their marriage lasted five years, and after their separation Isobel went off to travel round the world with a small theatre company. The passing of the years didn’t prevent her from keeping her dreams alive. I don’t know what has become of her. Michael, who lives in Florence, where he teaches drawing in a secondary school, never saw her again. To this day I still hope to spot her name topping the bill at some show .

Siraj passed away in 1946 after spending the last five years of his life in a Bombay prison, accused of a theft which, until his dying day, he swore he didn’t commit. As Jawahal predicted, what little luck he’d had abandoned him that day .

Roshan is now a prosperous and powerful businessman, owner of a good number of the old streets around the Black Town, where he grew up as a beggar without a roof over his head. He’s the only one who, year after year, keeps up the ritual of sending me a birthday letter. I know from his letters that he married and that the number of grandchildren who run around his properties isn’t far off the figures that make up his fortune .

As for me, life has been generous and has allowed me to journey through this strange passage to nowhere in peace and without hardship. Shortly after I finished my studies, I was offered a post in Dr Walter Hartley’s hospital in Whitechapel. It was there that I really learned the job I’d always dreamed of and which still earns me my living today. Twenty years ago, after the death of my wife Iris, I moved to Bournemouth, where my home and my surgery occupy a small comfortable house with a view over the salt marshes of Poole Bay. My only company since Iris departed has been her memory and the secret I once shared with my companions in the Chowbar Society .

Again, I’ve left Ben to the end. Even today, although I haven’t seen him for over fifty years, I still find it hard to talk about the person who was and always will be my best friend. Thanks to Roshan I heard that he went to live in what had once been his father’s house – the house of Chandra Chatterghee, the engineer. He moved there with Aryami Bose, who never quite recovered from Sheere’s death and was plunged into a long deep melancholy that would eventually close her eyes for ever in October 1941. From that day on Ben lived and worked alone in the house his father had built. It was there that he wrote his books until the year he disappeared without a trace .

One December morning, years after we all, including Roshan, had given him up for dead, I was standing on the little dock opposite my house, gazing out at the marshland, when I received a small parcel. It had been postmarked by the Calcutta Post Office and my name was written in handwriting I could never forget, even if I lived to be a hundred. Inside, wrapped in layers of paper, I found half of the pendant shaped like a sun that Aryami Bose had divided in two when she separated Ben and Sheere that tragic night in 1916 .

This morning, as I sit writing the last words of this memoir in the early light of dawn, the first snow of the year has spread its white mantle before my window and the memory of Ben has come back to me, after all these years, like the echo of a whisper. I imagine him walking in the crowds, through the fevered streets of Calcutta, among a thousand untold stories such as his own, and for the first time I realise that my friend, like me, is now an old man and that his journey is about to complete its circle. It is so strange to think how life has slipped through our fingers …

I don’t know whether I’ll ever hear of my friend Ben again. But I do know that in some part of the mysterious Black Town the boy I said goodbye to that morning when it snowed in Calcutta lives on, keeping the flame of Sheere’s memory alive, dreaming of the moment when at last he’ll be reunited with her in a world where nothing and no one can ever separate them .

I hope you will find her, my friend .