There seemed to be a lull before the storm for about three weeks after that. And then the storm came with all its ferocity. It was an actual storm, not merely a metaphorical one. I can never forget THAT NIGHT.
THAT NIGHT it was absolutely dark. Not an iota of the moon was visible. Gradually clouds were gathering in the sky; making layer after layer like the ranks of an army filing in one behind the other in rows to attack the enemy. It was hot and humid, with crickets trying their best to remind the clouds that they were supposed to burst forth, not only stand in a place making their fortress stronger. Some owls flew hooting and screeching from one shady branch to another to find a safer place. They seemed to provide a variation to the pitch at which the crickets sang. Now and again the odd, solitary, toad croaked and then paused lest he seemed out of place in the setting. An old woman was heard telling people on the streets to go indoors. Everything was building up to a cloudburst. Good things of daytime had hidden themselves and the night was having her day. Then gradually it became windy. The wind built up its tempo slowly but surely; it whistled, it howled and it roared. A tree was uprooted and catapulted, electricity poles unable to bear the pull of the swinging wires began to bend double in defeat, tin roofs broke up into small parts and flew all over and hit whatever they encountered. It seemed as if the world was coming to an end THAT NIGHT.
The more I tried to bolt the doors and windows the more they rattled and seemed to break open. From one of the window panes I noticed a strange phenomenon. I saw fire-balls of lightening rolling across the skies. I had never seen this kind of lightening. The heavens were disturbed if ever they were. People on the roads could easily have been killed if hit by the flying objects. So many shrieks and screams were heard. Then it seemed as if someone knocked at my door and I heard something which could well have been Sonali’s voice. She seemed to be saying ‘Sanjeevji help! Help Sanjeevji!’ I couldn’t believe that Sonali of all people could have ventured out in the storm. But I ran towards the door and tried to open the door by keep my body close to it. On opening the door, I only found several people shouting and running about to save their kin.
I managed to step out of the door and somehow bolt it from outside. It took all my strength to do that. I went out to look for Sonali somehow. My eyes were full of dust yet I tried to continue the search somehow. Then something came crashing down and before I could move out of the way something hit my head and I fell down. I was unconscious for several hours in spite of the rain that must have poured down to quench the storm. I was still drenched when I got up on my feet. I saw everything wrecked, trees fallen, poles warped, houses without their tiled roofs.
The first thing I did was to go to where Sonali and her friend, Neela, lived. The doors of Sonali’s room were flung wide open when I reached there. Neela had gathered some neighbours and was in tears as she told them about her missing friend. It was quite a shock for me to learn that she was not to be found. Neela said that she had seen Pran knocking at Sonali’s door, from her own window pane, just when the storm was getting violent. But she had noticed that Sonali had not opened the door for him. Then the lights had gone out and it was then that she must have opened her doors. I was stung by what I heard. I ran towards Pran’s room and found that locked. Then I went to Manoj’s and so was this room locked. The three were missing. I searched, the university authorities searched, and then the police searched but none of the three could be found. I felt like crying my heart out. Sonali had come to me for help and I could not give her the help in time. I would never be able to forgive myself. But the three were missing at this point, and we needed to hear some good or bad news to learn more about them.
The newspapers were full of these three for some days. Others had been undone by the storm but not to the extent of disappearing entirely. For days together the mystery of the missing students occupied nearly every mind on the campus of the university but it did not occupy anyone more than it did me. I was totally shattered and lonely. I even began to find my fascination for Existentialism hollow and academic. I wanted to see these people alive, or at least get to know what happened to them. I had been very fond of Manoj. And Sonali, let’s not talk about her. The interesting thing that happened now was that I began to think even of Pran very fondly. All his tricks and wicked little acts seemed to amuse me. I decided I’d write a story on these three. By doing that my mind was bringing the three to life. The story stretched itself out into a novel and I began to write extensively. Then I understood that I was actually a writer more than anything else and so I continued with my thesis as a mere formality. My heart was in the writing, and the thinking, about my three companions that were lost. I tried to bring them back to life by painting minute details about them. But then came the point in the novel when they disappeared mysteriously. The novel had a beginning, and middle but its end was missing. I thought and thought and thought about where they could have gone on that horrible night. But everything remained at the level of thought, till one day when I had a dream. It was a morning dream. I saw a silent, serious looking Sonali inviting me to follow her in a certain direction. Her look was strange. She was Sonali no doubt but she was very different. The human body does make a difference. It provides the livingness to an empty soul.
Sonali had come to me after more than forty years and that too in a dream. I had been through the thick and thin of life, a chronic bachelor, and become an author of some kind. I was managing to get published but was still a minor novelist. The novel of my innermost being was still only half written and I felt all these years that if I could write the novel that contained Sonali’s story, it would be my masterpiece because it would help me to unfold my crumpled up soul. Time has stopped moving normally for me after that fateful night and my unfinished novel would capture this aspect of my deeply felt experience. It was, after all, closest to my heart. The mystery, however, was still unsolved. The dream could have been a prelude to my re-association with Sonali. But there was a problem; I had grown old, having crossed seventy, and the Somali, who visited me in my dream was still as young as she had been at the time of her disappearance. If we were to meet now, it would be a rather incompatible relationship, as odd a relationship as could be imagined. The same dream again, and then again several times disturbed me. I saw her come repeatedly and invite me to follow her in a particular direction. She never said a word in any of my dreams but her silence was so deafening. I got totally unhinged. After some inquiry I was told by someone that in Bairana, a locality in Allahabad, there lived someone who was writing a book on spirits and could explain this recurring dream. I went to him and what this tantric told me opened my eyes to what was going on.
‘This spirit, it seems, is ripe for rebirth. But it is still stuck in some fold of time. It cannot extricate itself from this fold and is seeking your help to escape from there.’
‘What is a fold of time?’ I asked.
‘It is the moment of a premature death, a death that has occurred without fulfillment.’
‘But how can I help such a spirit?’
‘I am still not certain of that. Perhaps the spirit will lead you on to that.’
‘But the spirit comes in my dream. How can it expect me to help it in a dream?’
‘Ha, ha, ha, ha! You think it is a dream but actually it is not. Just go along with it to wherever it takes you. Why are you looking so shocked?’
‘You are saying something shocking. How can I go somewhere with a spirit? And how can I believe a dream to be reality?’
‘Ha, ha, ha, ha . . . nothing is the reality and nothing is a dream. They are all mixed up. It is the mind, the intellect that insists on separating the two into neat, distinct, parts. When she invites you this time, just get up and go with her.’
I was very confused by what the tantric had said. He seemed to be a loony. How could a dream and the reality be one and the same thing? I had probably wasted my time by visiting him. I went back thinking about the fraud I had gone and met and chuckled at his cheek to try and pull such a fast one on a man as old as me. If he had to tell me about spirits he ought to have told me about them rather than telling me about life itself; I had read enough of that in philosophy.
When I reached my place I was stunned to see that there was a photograph of Sonali, the beautiful and young Sonali, kept on my table. It was a black and white picture that I had taken in the Philosophy Department, on a day when she had come to ask me to give her some time and help her with some problems in understanding Axiological Intuitionism. I was seeing this photograph after so many decades. Where had it been all these days? And, how did it come on my table? The next thing that happened was even more disturbing. There was a note from Sonali, written on my pad that had been lying on the same table. On seeing the note, I trembled with fear.
‘I need your help. Follow the tantrik’s advice. Walk out of your dream and step into my world. I need you.
Sonali’
I could feel my hair stand on end and my blood felt as though it were freezing. What was happening to me? I felt as though I had no guts left in my stomach. I ran out of my house into the sunlight. Suddenly I developed a phobia of solitude. I had loved being alone but now I felt an inexplicable need for company. Even a child or an old woman would have been like a police force at that time.
My newspaper man was standing outside when I opened the door. He asked me why I was looking so terror-stricken; I failed to say very much to him. The only words that could come out of my mouth were: ‘Please don’t go away. Stay with me.’ He had come to give me the monthly bill and to take the payment. I promised to pay him five times the bill if he agreed to stay that day and night with me.
‘Stay with you? I have lots of work at home. I’m sorry,’ he said, looking at me suspiciously.
I was left alone and without the courage to go back into my own house. Suddenly the place felt uninhabitable. I don’t know where my strength had disappeared. My legs began to feel as if they were made of rubber and would not bear my weight. The same Sonali that I had always craved to meet had made me virtually wet my pants.
I didn’t want the day to pass. But it had to and evening was drawing near. Soon it was dark again. Darkness was becoming like a living presence, the only presence to keep me company. It was not as dark as that fateful night when everything in my life changed. But it was dark enough. Who likes the company of a bachelor who is in his seventies? Most of my friends had kicked their buckets more timely than I was to. I could not find even one person to persuade to sleep in my room that night. I decided not to sleep. For not to sleep was not to dream and if I did not dream she wouldn’t come. I bolted the doors and windows tightly as if Sonali could be blocked out by doing that. I wanted complete silence because I feared that she could hide behind some noise and enter into my consciousness. I kept my weak, old, eyes open. I went to the kitchen to make some coffee for myself. That could have kept me awake. When I lighted the stove and put the water to boil on it, I thought I heard someone say in a whisper, ‘I too like coffee. Make some for me too.’ I looked around in panic. I heard her giggle, just a second and then there was silence. I left the kitchen, with the pan on the stove, and came into my study. I forgot that I had put the water to boil. In the study I felt that the black and white picture of Sonali was moving slowly on the table. Again there was a giggle and before long the photograph had stood up erect, and she was giggling more and more loudly. Each giggle made my stomach seem hollow. I found my mouth drying up and my heart thumping against my ribs.
‘Sanjeeeeevjeeeeee!’ she said and her voice seemed to come from somewhere outside the room in which I sat. The chair on which I sat began to shake and wobble and I shot out from it and ran towards my bed. She probably pushed me with force on the bed, though I did not see her. I fell on the bed and hurt my back. My bed also shook and wobbled as if an elephant had got under it and was now trying to lift me on its back. I fell this side and then rolled to the other side but I could not get up from the bed. I thought I was heading for a heart attack. But then I heard her say, ‘Sanjeeeeevjeeeeee!’ again. Then the sound of a woman laughing was heard. The feminine laughter soon melted into a male’s sardonic laughter. I was almost dead with fear when I felt the presence of the spirit very distinctly in my room. Before long I could see that this was not Sonali’s spirit, it was Pran’s.
‘And you thought I was Sonali? Hee hee hee! I know she’s more worthy of your attention. But you should sometimes think of me as well.’
I now remembered that Sonali was to come in my dream. But this Pran had come even in my wakefulness and pretended to be Sonali. He had grown into a wicked ghost. I had to surrender to my fate and wait to see what was to happen next. I was shit scared. When Pran was alive I had felt bullied by him; now I felt scared of him. My blood pressure was shooting up and my face must have given out that I was dying of fear because at that moment Pran said something that revealed that he was not all bad.
‘What’s wrong with you? I haven’t come here to eat you up! You’ll get heart-trouble if you are so panic-stricken. I haven’t really hurt you, have I? Good God he is fainting. I think I’ll have to leave him today.’
Saying that he left and when I woke up it was morning. I had been lying unconscious on the floor. I found that all traces of his presence in my room had vanished. I realized that I had got into an awful mess. Who would believe me if I told people about what I was going through? They would think I needed to be admitted into a mental asylum.
Let me return to the fact that Sonali was coming in my dreams. She came only in my dreams and she never said anything at all to me except asking me to follow her. This pointed to two things: First, that she was my dream girl. I had been seeing her in my dreams both when she was alive and now after so many decades. Second, something was troubling her and she wanted to share that with me. It began to dawn upon me that there was something which she wanted from me and which also concerned Pran because of which both the spirits had decided to enter my this-worldly existence from the other side of Life.
Maybe they wanted to tell me something. But if that were so they ought to have told me that clearly and left me in peace. There was something really mysterious about their returning to me after so many years. I was thoroughly doubt-ridden in addition to being terror-stricken. I began to believe that things do not get any better after death. There is no, ‘He died and then lived happily ever after as a spirit.’ Even in the world of the dead there seemed to be politics and the struggle for power and acquisition. I was not far from death myself and the anxiety that I was heading for even more trouble than people who experience just death began to preoccupy me. The question, ‘What happens after death?’ also began to bother me to a great extent. I began to think of “death” and “the dead” a great deal of my time. Of course I thought of these in the time when I wasn’t troubled by the fear of when I was to meet one of the spirits. Then the tension and trauma of the approaching encounter made me forget everything else and the suspense of what would happen next began.
After the nerve shattering experience of the night in which I had the benefit of Pran’s company, I had become a somewhat more experienced man. I had seen two spirits, one in my dreams and one in waking reality. Though the idea of seeing them again was none too inviting, I did begin to think of completing the novel I had commenced more than forty years back. My novel would turn into a horror novel, and I into a writer of horror fiction. I had remained quite an ordinary novelist till now and it seemed that this was the novel that would launch me into fame. I would be telling people about what happens after death very authentically if I survived my rendezvous with the world of the dead. It was this optimistic feeling that made me see light at the end of the tunnel, the silver lining in the shady other world. However, in spite of the Promised Land towards which I began to advance, there was something terribly frightening for me to pass through on a daily basis.
As a result of my slightly changed perspective towards spirits I went again to the tantric in Bairana and asked him the reason for the sudden appearance of Pran, in a visible form, and the reason for the silence of these spirits for so many decades. What the tantric replied was probably no more than his speculation on the subject. But he seemed to speak in a voice of conviction.
‘It is something like this: When spirits are about to take rebirth, they need to wind up and settle their accounts before beginning their accounts anew in the new birth. Any memories of the previous birth, unfulfilled desires, stresses and anxieties of the past life still weigh upon the soul. These need to be lightened and taken care of. They sometimes return for that reason. It is very likely that one of these souls is about to take rebirth and is therefore coming back to you as you were related with it in its last birth.’
‘But why are two spirits getting active at the same time?’
‘This I do not know. It may be a coincidence that two of them are about to take rebirth together.’
The tantric was merely guessing, it seemed, and my guess could have been as good as or even better than his, I thought. I returned home wondering what the coming night would hold for me.
I sat at my table writing the next part of the novel, writing and striking out the lines, not certain how to manage the supernatural parts. This was not like the earlier part of the novel that I had written in a register and preserved for over forty years. The paper of the register having turned yellow and brittle was beginning to pose problems. Now it was a different ball game. Writing horror fiction is so different to writing ordinary fiction, you always have the fear of sounding fake. I decided I would rewrite the earlier part as now my style had become mature and now I would do a better job. I made this decision, and then started working out the parts that I would fictionalize to make more interesting. I was totally engrossed and don’t know how I fell asleep in my chair. The sleep led to an immediate dream. I saw Sonali looking disturbed and now, having grown somewhat used to her, I asked her to sit. She seemed not to hear what I said. She pointed to the same direction that she had done earlier. She signaled that she wanted me to follow her. I did not feel like doing that. God knew where she would take me. Again my hair began to rise and I experienced a shivering sensation. It is difficult to describe the experience one has when near a spirit. It was like standing in a vacuum, on the edge of Time, though never crossing over to the other side. Then, suddenly, I felt as though I had crossed the Time barrier and was going along (moving without making any effort) with Sonali towards a place that seemed to be like Bailey Road as it had been when Sonali lived there. Close to where she had resided was a well, which is now nonexistent. It must have dried up and therefore filled up and used as a piece of land. Sonali had not said a word; she merely led me on to the well and then jumped into it. I woke up with a start and found myself still in my room. I was sweating and holding the arm-rests of my chair very tightly for a minute or so even after waking up. That whole night became very difficult to pass as I constantly apprehended that she would return. The dream girl had become a nightmare girl and I was trying to detach myself from the feelings that I had entertained for her. Swami Tulsi Das has said, of course in a different context, that without fear there is no love, but in this case I felt the opposite – with fear there is no love. Her terrorizing entry was taking away all traces of love that I had entertained in my heart for her some decades back.
