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On 12 August 1999, I found an article that I thought was worth investigating further. The article had appeared in the knock-and-drop Chatsworth Sun and was written by Frank Nair, who usually covered the paper’s paranormal beat. It involved an encounter with a ghost. As was often the case with the free community papers, the article was short on details. However, one sentence caught my attention:
“The apparition appeared to be green in
colouration and smelt distinctly of syringa berry leaves.”
The next day, I
called Frank Nair at the Sun and convinced him to give me the telephone
number of Gona Naidoo, the man who had reportedly seen the ghost. I lied to
Nair and said I was a sociology student and that this was for a research paper
I was working on. Nair revealed that he had been struck by the unusualness of
the story. “Where you heard of a green ghost before?” he had asked.
Arranging an interview with Gona Naidoo
was simple enough. He agreed immediately to a meeting and seemed eager to share
his story with me. We met on 16 August at Kara Nichha’s, a takeaway located
just outside Chatsworth’s Bangladesh Market.
Naidoo, a Tamil, was short, dark-skinned
and a little overweight. He wore his grey-flecked hair closely cropped, and
kept a cigarette behind his left ear. His eyes were bloodshot, his nose squat
and his teeth stained by nicotine. He came dressed in a Manning Rangers FC
T-shirt, grey track-pants and a pair of Jack Purcells. I was struck by how much
he perspired, even for Durban; he was constantly wiping his face and hands with
a small, blue terrycloth.
Naidoo was friendly, if a little shy at
first, and open to all my questions. He seemed pleased when I mentioned my
plans to submit the interview to Bhoot, and asked that I make a printout
of it for him when I was done. We sat at a corner table and ate Kara Nichha’s
famous grilled cheese sandwiches while we talked. I tape-recorded our interview
and what follows is a transcript of that conversation.
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