You dont need ghosts to scare you

Don’t you get scared to live in that rattling old huge house with its garden whose limits you cannot see whose walls panthers, marauding monkeys, intruders, snakes and other threats can easily scale?
And out back, that muslim cemetery facing the plot? does that not give you the shivers?
This i am asked about staying for many weeks in a friend’s old house in mahabaleshwar.
But let me tell you, what gives me the creeps. And this is not just me being funny-cute-antisocial.
It really does thoroughly chill me to hear suddenly in the night or day, a resigned jingle-clop-jingle-clop-jingle-clop on the forest road. No, not dancing ghosts. But the sound of 2 luckless camels – whose fates got tangled with a human being. Who thought it great sport (and a good source of income of course) to export these camels so far away from their place of origin, high up here, to entertain holidaying humans up here in the hills.
Even the monkeys have stopped exclaiming at this unlikely animal’s presence, so far from its habitat; the monkeys stop their chatter and clatter in the branches, and fall silent, as if in deference to the walking dead, when these two camels pass jingle-clop-jingle-clop up and down the slopes with glum been-there-done-that children bouncing sullenly on their backs.
And another thing that creeps me out more than any potential panther or python, is the inability of guests in the hotel next door, to be. They must be served – and the once clean night air is testimony to this – their curries and kababs, and addressed as ladies and gentleman over a PA system, and serenaded by some singer (who like the camels has been imported here from god knows where), who desperately sings rafi, then mukesh, and then taking account of the meagre applause, breaks out into a last ditch Jai Ho. So that his supper is sung for.