Rudyard Kipling is currently not a very popular author because he is associated with the British Empire, an entity that has a hopelessly bad reputation although it catapulted major parts of this world into the modern era – for good or for bad, that depends on the outlook of the observer.
Anyway, I'm a sucker fort lost cases (Kipling) or causes (Empire), so yesterday I (re-)read Kipling's 1885 story The Phantom 'Rickshaw (don't ask what the ' is for, I don't have a clue).
It is the story of a man who has an affair with a married woman and breaks the affair of at some time, upon which she basically dies of grief. The 'hero', Pansay, on his pre-honeymoon in the Indian colonial's holiday retreat Simla, gets literally haunted by the lady in question, more specifically by the repeated appearance or apparition of the rickshaw she used to drive in, which, in turn, promotes his mental and physical decline and eventually his untimely demise.
It is a story about guilt and its tendency to gnaw at you, erode your confidence and, in the worst case, kill you eventually. This becomes most pronounced and irreversible when the person you did wrong dies before you could make amends. It doesn't necessarily have to mean that you actively or passively killed the person in question, the mere sin of neglect is enough to torment you for the rest of your days. At least that's what I took out of it.
You don't think that applies to you? Well, remember the old story of Mary Magdalene: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone."
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