My extensive affair in discovering the history, geography, and culture of the highly inaccessible areas in mountains has helped me witness many famous and lesser-known places of the Himalayan regions in India. Though I don’t master at it, I try to read and connect with local people I come across during my journeys.

With the current scenario of the pandemic COVID-19 taking the whole world through a storm, we all are in a month-long national lockdown. We are now supposed to stay indoors and avoid large gatherings. But, for introverts like myself and my husband, isolation is a bliss. As I am pretty good at maintaining social distance (by choice), I am never really bored 😛 . We have happily chosen individual parts of our home and limit to these areas – except for unavoidable situations like hunger/using the washroom, etc. 

By now, you would have understood that I do not do well with lengthy phone calls, hence after a mere 15 seconds of any call, I am out of topic for conversation. So for a change, I thought of doing something else, maybe connect more with family members and friends. After thinking a lot and seeing so many recent blog, I found a topic to extend the call duration to put my story telling skills at work.

The topic is GHOST, but I kept on repeating the stories with my husband, siblings, and a handful of friends. I ran out of ears. So, why not share the stories to a few more, who are also supporting lockdown.

My husband pointed this a few times, and I too realized. I am notably creative in my dreams. In one such dream, I saw the famous – Ravindranath Tagore. Coming from a Bengali family, Tagore seems omnipresent. He was in our education, our poems, our songs, and our syllabus too. There is no-way a Bong can escape from this legend, so-much-so, as I read, his soul has been highly targeted for planchet practice, poor soul. There is absolute “NO rest in peace” at all. 

So coming back to the topic, recently I read a blog on the types of ghosts, there are religions and a caste system in afterlife as well. There wasn’t a surprise for me, as since birth we have been brought up with the differentiation of boy-girl, dark-fair, 4 Varnas, CBSE-ISCE-state board, north Indian-south Indian, Bengali-Bangladeshi and what not. So, life is pretty much this or that. The differentiation of the “ghost system” is also bound with similar rules.

• Ghosts who are found only in a particular state (probably because other state people can’t pronounce the name, that makes the ghost angry) – Sankhchunni, Petni, Mamdo bhoot.
• Ghosts who are found only in water, land, or in the air (like national defense Army – Navy – Airforce) – Gecho, Mecho, Jal pisach
• Beautiful ghosts – Daayen
• Not so beautiful ghosts, but fond of bridal looks – Chudail
• Upper-caste bhoot – Brahma Pisach
• Ghosts who change forms – Pisach/Jinn
• Ghosts with a lot of unfulfilled dreams – Pret
• Ghosts addicted to smoking – Maachis bhoot (this is a recent type which  gave me sleepless nights)

I am not scared of these ghosts, at least I believe so. My husband has always been scared of these uncanny forms and avoids discussing them. But we humans love to do things which challenge us, drives us to change ourselves. So, we watch horror movies with one eye open or lights on. I do the same, honestly, and also enjoy scaring my husband with my made-up horror stories (until to the level, I don’t scared).

When I was young, I took part in some deadly challenges (in a spur of the rebellious moment and boiling blood) and have braved some so-called ghostly experiences. I am not inducing any superstitions here, but at least the society around me believed the presence of ghosts. When I understood my spouse is scared of these, I bragged about these incidents. Honestly, not 100 % of these experiences were false, but maybe I understood the trick to face it quite early. Staying close to cousins and siblings of all ages is fun and something I miss the most these times, far away from home. But they are equally challenging. We being the youngest in the group, were the scapegoats and the definite slave with no competition at all. 

In one such task, all my older cousins filled my ears with all possible horror stories and then I had to walk up to the cemetery in wee hours of a no-moon night (the formula followed by most Bollywood movies – to spice up any scene with an absurd item song). Honestly, I completed  the task (slow claps). But how? So here comes my trick – I pretended. I pretended to listen to my cousin’s horror stories and kept on imagining funny incidents in my mind. This helped me avoid capturing any of these ghostly stories in mind (in the institutional world, its called being un-attentive). So, I walked up to the cemetery, with my Sony Walkman and earphones, playing Sonu Nigam and Daler Mehendi as loudly as I can (yes I belong to that era), which helped me in avoiding all uncanny thoughts and intriguing sounds. This has been my trick ever after until I came across the Maachis ghost, which was unavoidable one night when I was destined to sleep in a room facing the jungle in a sparsely populated area in Garhwal Himalayas. 

Well, so many stories at once aren’t good. So stay tuned!