By the Light of a Hurricane Lamp
One night, my sister and I followed a woman in white, and afterwards, my father would not let us eat
We lived in the lap of the fields, in a village, and in every direction, the land lay open and green, a carpet of paddy and grass that ran to the edge of the sky, and in the middle of it stood our house, a house of 2 storeys with a roof of thatch over the upper floor. Behind it lay a great pond, with mango, guava and custard apple trees leaning in close around it, and near the courtyard stood an enormous shirish tree, so full of birds that the air around the house was loud with them every morning and evening.
You have to understand what kind of time it was. This was the 1960s, and we had no electricity, so when evening came, we lit hurricane lamps and lived inside their small yellow light, and past that light, the dark was complete. The winters were bitter, with a mist lying over the fields in the mornings, and the day began by pushing up through it. I tell you the decade so that you do not mistake it for now. It was a darker world, and in a darker world, these things pressed closer against the mind.
I will tell you about the night before Saraswati Puja, the festival of the goddess of learning. My father, who was a doctor, had gone to his chamber, as we called his clinic, and my mother had gone out to do the shopping for the puja, so the house stood almost empty. One of my elder sisters was at home, because she was expecting a child then and could not go far, and I was with her, small as I was.
The day before, the landlord’s mother had died, and for her cremation, they had cut down a tree close to our house. The good wood they carried away, but the branches and the smaller stuff lay scattered where the tree had come down.
Towards evening, my sister said, “Come, let us put the rice on,” so we set it to boil and drained off the water, and then she said, “Come with me, I am going to the toilet, and you stand near the door.” I stood waiting for her in the twilight darkness.
And then, once my sister got done, we saw her, a woman in a white sari, white from head to foot, standing among the branches of that tree. We thought nothing of it to begin with, because there was no coal or gas in those days, and people from the other neighbourhood sometimes came to gather wood to cook with. A thief, we thought, had come for the firewood, so we called out, “Ke okhane? Ke?” Who is there? Who is it?
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We went towards her, but the nearer we came, the further she drew away, holding always the same distance between us, until she reached a place where the ground sloped away, and there, she thinned into the air and was gone.
When we could no longer see her, the fear took us both at once. My sister and I ran into the house and threw the bolt, and I will only say that God saved us that night.
Later, when my father came home, and we told him everything, he said, “You were frightened. Then there is no eating tonight.” I understood the reason only years later. They say that if you have met such a thing, you must not eat afterwards, or it can take hold of you, enter you and possess you, and that if you take food, or even water, that such a spirit has touched, its soul settles into you and stays.
So the rice my sister and I had cooked that evening was not for us. We went to bed hungry, said our Hare Krishna, Hare Ram, and that was the end of it.
This is still a mystery to me, and I have not been able to settle it in my mind yet.
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