They are omnipresent at night. In the farms, gulleys, rail tracks, banana groves, rubber plantations, pala trees, everywhere … They can enter any house effortlessly. If you see a movement where the darkness is profuse, be afraid! Some take the guise of a woman wearing a white sari, her feet not touching the ground. Others may be that of a man with hooves of a buffalo, asking you for a box of matches, or even a bat or an amorphous flicker of light … They can appear in front of us in multifarious ways: Yakshi, Maruta, Arumkola, Chattan, Rakshas. They have many names and forms. As a child, I referred to all those spectres as pretam or ghosts.
The stories of ghosts were widespread in those days. The children suffered the most. The spirits of the dead haunted them at night. When we lived near the Chovvara railway gate – between 1990, when I was five, and 1994, when I turned nine – the bloodied remains of those who jumped in front of trains would be scattered around our front yard. Though I had never seen a corpse shattered to smithereens, the dead ones would loiter around me in the form...
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