Dear All
Having thought that I had read most of Kipling's Simla tales, it is only
today that I confess that I read "The Phantom Rickshaw". What a wonderful
story it is. It tells us much about life in Anglo-India and yet it is a
fabulous ghost story too.
However, from a writer's perspective, one of the things that worried me
about the story was were the protagonist engages with Mrs Wessington's ghost
towards the end. Kipling has the protagonist, our man Pansay, state: "What
we said during the course of that weird interview I cannot - indeed, I dare
not -- tell."
The modern reader would ask "well, why not tell?" Did he just run out of
ideas at this point, did his imagination fail him, or did he run the risk of
offending religious people?
At the risk of being controversial, I believe that Kipling didn't have a
clue about what the conversation between Pansay and Mrs Wessington's ghost
was about. Having got as far as he did with the story, he knew what he
needed to capture (as a writer he must have known this), then realised he
couldn't get there. So the cop-out "I dare not -- tell".
So I would be grateful to anybody if they have an insight into why Kipling
didn't go the extra bit and deliver that important conversation.
regards
Geoffrey Maloney
Brisbane, Australia
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