They who live up there

That there were more ghosts in Bangladesh than there were people in India seemed to be one of those numberless statistics that ruled my childhood, as decisive in my choice-making as the knowledge that pressing a switch would lead to some change, a bulb coming alive or a fan panting to a stop. At an age where it was difficult to tell the difference between a Bangladeshi and a Bengali ghost, I understood that all ghosts spoke in Bangla. Maya- mashi , who worked in our house, enumerated their characteristics from time to time. Much of the dissemination of information depended on her mood and temper — if she was angry, the ghosts became even more dangerous. I could make these wise inferences much later, well past my young adulthood, and then, too, not completely without fear.

Here comes the king: A depiction of Bhooter Raja,from Satyajit Ray’s film, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne

The stories emerged as she cut vegetables with a boti . Often, when my parents were out on work, she was the only adult at home. That at four feet something she hardly looked like an adult didn’t mean anything — aware of that herself, she’d extol the virtues of the ghosts and say, “Don’t think they’re short like me. When I die, my ghost won’t be short. It’ll be taller than Lombu.” Lombu was the tallest man we knew — he was a fishmonger. As she collected fish skeletons from the day’s trash, she reminded us of how fish, not fire, would torture us after we died. And yet, it wasn’t the bones or the sad skeletons of bata fish that I was scared of. It was the drumsticks — shojna . Long and corrugated, she dangled them from her hands and rolled her eyes upwards. The damp skies of our holiday afternoons, bleached of light, amplified the horror of that sight. Crinkling her voice to a sharp pitch she’d playact: “ Aami shojna bhoot, aamaye khajna dao (I am the drumstick ghost; pay me my taxes)”. We didn’t know what khajna was. Too afraid to ask our mother, we asked our grandfather when he visited us. Unsure about taxes — we heard the sound of that word escape from our father’s lips just around the time of our annual exams in March — we thought it some adult activity. About one thing I was sure. Only an adult was entitled to become a ghost. I’d have to wait.

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As I grew slightly older, I realised, from Maya- mashi ’s tutorials, that it wasn’t the male ghosts I needed to be as scared of. It was the females. They were called petni — the name generated greater fear than the rather monosyllabic thud of bhoot . Petnis lived mainly in trees and sometimes in water. There were more petnis in a village than in the city. I gathered as much information as I could. At times I wished that it was a subject that was taught in school. What was the use of knowing silly things like latitude and longitude? We needed to be prepared to identify petnis so as to be able to escape from them. Like a bad scientist, Maya- mashi did not give us identifiable characteristics except that they lived on trees, and that their feet and toes pointed in the direction opposite to what it was in humans.

When I went to Hili, the village on the Indo-Bangladesh border where my father’s parents lived, I looked at people’s feet and not their faces. In the evenings, when I had to go to the toilet by myself, I chanted ‘ Bhoot aamar poot/Petni aamar jhi/Ram-Lakkhon sathe thakle/Korbe aamay ki (Ghosts, both male and female, are my children/ And they won’t come near me when I am protected by Ram-Lakshman)’, ran closing my eyes, all of these performed like a decathlon, with the kind of speed whose breathlessness returns to me as I write about it even after nearly three decades. Where are the ghosts, my mother demanded. I wouldn’t spell the words out, in case that brought them into being, out from those trees by the pond where I was certain they lived. A ripe jackfruit fell with a thud one night — I discovered that only in the morning, for all night I’d wondered whether petnis too broke their bones from falling off trees. Like love, one must keep one’s fears to oneself, and so I suffered. I waited to be an adult, when I’d be the equivalent of petnis — which adult was scared of ghosts, after all? I was wrong. Just a few days before we were to return to our town, my youngest uncle screamed and then fainted in fear in the courtyard. Everyone woke up, even I, though I wasn’t sure whether it was really my uncle or a ghost who had taken his form. He’d seen a kola-bhoot , the most common kind of gachh-petni , ghosts who live in the banana plant.

Different folks: In Bengal and parts of Bangladesh, the humble drumstick (shojne in Bengali) tree is believed to be the abode of a ghost (shojne bhoot)

My area of research and investigation shifted from women’s feet to trees. There were many banana plants in the old Siliguri where I grew up. A dark night, a light breeze, my stretched bladder — that was all it needed to turn the flapping leaf of a banana plant to transform into a female ghost with a ghomta , the end of a sari wrapped around her head. I stopped drinking water after sundown. But it soon turned out that there weren’t only female ghosts who lived in trees. On Doordarshan every Saturday afternoon, I watched Vikram Aur Betal , where Betal, the ghost, hung from the branch of a tree. When Kamalesh- jethu , my father’s friend (and our encyclopedia), visited us after his many trips around the world in a time of pre-budget airlines travel, I asked him for details. He was a storehouse of obscure information that he passed on to others in dramatic fashion — it was the reason my brother and I adored him. Nang Mai , he said, that was the name of the Thai female ghost who lived inside trees. I decided I’d never go to Thailand. I’ve kept that promise to myself in spite of the great temptation of getting a foot massage.

Watching a terrible animated version of Thakurmar Jhuli (a collection of folk and fairy tales) with my nephew last year, I was struck by his awe and adoration of the shakchunni whose special mantra he’d replicate with his baby interpolations. He had a question for which we had no answer: Why does the shakchunni live in a tree? Watching the slightly weird song-and-dance of the ghosts and their king in Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne , his question returned: Why do ghosts live in the forests? And then, to my father, who told him a story about the behmodotti — why does this ghost live in a tree too?

Though I haven’t been able to answer his question, I’ve told him about other spirits who live in trees: The dryads, shy nymphs who live inside oak trees; the Japanese kodama which looks like an ordinary tree but often bleeds when cut; the ash, the holly — all of them are supposed to house some humanoid creature, the holly, in fact, housing a ghost-like being called the ‘treeman’. There are spirits who live in the forest and whose appearance and soul(!) are a hybrid of their human and plant beings — the Huldra who moves around in Scandinavian forests and who, in spite of her alloy-like body of human, cow and plant features, seduces men like mermaids at sea; in Germany, from where I’m writing this, I’ve just got to know from a colleague about the Moss Folk, short creatures with moss-covered faces and bodies. Here is a poem about them written by Archibald Maclaren towards the end of the 19th century:

A moss-woman!’ The hay-makers cry,

And over the fields in terror they fly.

She is loosely clad from neck to foot

In a mantel of Moss from the Maple’s root,

And like the Lichen grey on its stem that grows

Is the hair that over her mantle flows.

When my nephew watched a video of Ali Baba and 40 Thieves and asked why the houses were being marked with a cross, I promptly told him about wood wives, spirits in the forests of Germany, who do the same to mark out safe trees. There were also the tree houses where both of us wanted to live. I suddenly remembered — though I didn’t tell him this, for he hasn’t read the comics — about Phantom’s (‘The Ghost Who Walks’) tree house. In Thailand, where the imagination seems to have settled on the arboraceous dwelling places of ghosts, there live the Nariphon , miniature women who grow as fruits on a tree.

What happens to the ghosts when they cut the trees, my nephew asks.

I’m ashamed of my answer but I say it anyway: “That is why they live in old houses in cities where there are hardly any trees.”

Sumana Roy is the author of ‘How I Became a Tree’ and ‘Missing’

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