Who’s afraid of Ghosts?

I

Each year, when my family hits upon any ground to get together—for some holiday, festival, birthday, special day, graduation, and sometimes, just because—when the special dishes are prepared and food and curry are cooked. The neighbours see smoke churns from the kitchen chimney, sky-bound from burning gas and incense; it is believed that the ghost of Pt.Ram Nath Shukla comes home to eat.

II

The fact that Pt.Ram Nath Shukla had been cremated, but people were not ready to believe that he was dead: he had been a tough man to die so soon. That he actually was cremated, the evidence of his wits forced everybody became suspicious of his death. His body lay horizontal, flat upon his backside, with his hands tied tightly with his body. The body-tied with the ladder that he simply cannot get up even with the help of some divine power, capable of changing the circumstances, the firm detention of his complete self, the sad gloom and deep quiet, made a body of confirmation, unfeasible to refute and he died without quibble.

III

Before any family members or guests are permitted to eat or even taste, my mother arranges a plate of food, her all the dishes — like steamy rice, vegetable noodles fried with spices and butter, steamed bread buns—and my father lights a large number of incense sticks.

Putting all the things on an altar, we all pray to the spirits of our dead and departed relatives and ancestors and invite them to the feast. These spirits are the spirits of our dead and departed relatives and ancestors, village people, my uncles and aunts, our priest and teachers, our business persons, our soldiers who died in wars protecting our motherland and off course Pt.Ram Nath Shukla. Some of them are the restless and unattended ones who cross-oceans and continents and died there, but felt safe, happy and comfortable on the foreign lands. They are the ones who unfortunately could not have the rites according to the Hindu customs and traditions while they were living.

IV

Whether it was by luck or by destiny, most of my family members remained safe. When Islamic and Naxal terrorism tore India, we got on a bus that drove us to safety and life. A bus, that brought us to Delhi, far from the blazing villages and the rumbling of bombs, breaching earth, but not distant enough to get away from the past that returns every moment and every year to haunt us and scare us.

On December 25, 1979, the Islamic terrorists and Jihadi invaded the Hindu villages, forcing those; they could not murder to walk for days to safe camps in Jammu. In distant places of the country, those who stay alive were forced to live in camps like beggars as part of secular leaders’ blueprint to build a classless, caste-less, secular, society and nation. But we are paying the price of that romantic exploration.

I was too young to bear in mind that time around some three decades ago, when my family was forced to leave our home, our land, our farms and our state, and our lives changed instantly and perpetually.

V

Pt.Ram Nath Shukla had not married. He was almost fifty and he had not yet married. His fair skin was not good reason (many men with his colour had married and it was added attraction for girls) nor wits it his name. That is the slightest significant stuff in marriage, and anyway, such men are occasionally called by the typical names of fruit: his one of the friend Mango had married last y Destiny? Misfortune? Or was it Pt.Ram Nath Shukla ‘s stubbornness which had rebuffed and constantly to decline to hoist the marriage flag on the head? Although it was almost necessary to hoist upon the time of young boy’s first appearance of a moustache on the face and it was expected in the society. However, Pt.Ram Nath Shukla had refused. His mother had begged, barren cried, hiding grin face, saying to his thin father, please does not. I don't want it.' His mother used to think that Pt.Ram Nath Shukla was self-conscious that everybody old and young person in the town should learn that he flat! Above family and society. Therefore, she discussed the situation with her husband, who understood everything and left Pt.Ram Nath Shukla alone.

Then Pt.Ram Nath Shukla knelt and hoist the temple flag on the top of the temple, thinking all the while that the town was small and gave up the idea of marriage that there were few lifeless humans and that there was no matchmaker. Pt.Ram Nath Shukla left all the hopes and never went down the stairs and moaning, sat down to await a knock at tile door.

However, he was dead -- yes; he was only serious, very ill. He had, casual, the suicidal indifference and did not seriously worry about himself, about the unusual destiny that had been destined for him. He was neither a philosopher nor a dreamer -- just a pure, ordinary human being talented, for the time being, with a pathological apathy: the appendage that he dreads outcome consequences with was stagnant. Therefore, with no special fear for his near hope, he went for the sleep and all was quiet with Pt.Ram Nath Shukla. Everything was over for him. There was no world for him.

VI

Nevertheless, not everything was normal. However, unusual things were going on in the clouds. It was a gloomy winter night, shot through with the occasional glitter of lightning noiselessly firing a cloud flying low in the north and threatening of a hurricane. These short, faltering lighting, created a frightening sharpness of the shrines and tombstones of the crematorium, which appeared to set them, dancing. It was such a horrible night in which no sober onlooker was probably to be wandering outside about a crematorium, so there were only a few mourners who were there, performing the last rites of Pt.Ram Nath Shukla, who also felt logically insecure.

Three of them were young orphans from an orphanage near the temple of Pt.Ram Nath Shukla; the fourth one was an old saint Prabhu das. For several years, Prabhu Das had been living in the temple as a kind man-of-all-work and it was his preferred wit that he was known to 'every soul in that area.' From the pattern of what he was now, doing it was understood that the place was not heavily populated as its record may have revealed it to be.

Outside the temple, at some distance from the temple ground, at a safe distance from the public road, where some people waiting for the items used in the last rites.

The work of cremation was very difficult because of the numerous religious rituals involved in it. The pyre is to be arranged very meticulously on the earth with which the wood and manure cakes had been loosely filled to let the air pass for quick and good fire so that the body is burnt completely and quickly. It is arranged at that time itself to burn the body quickly and was soon everything was over. Removal of the body from the ladder was not very difficult, but it had to be removed out, for it was a necessary, as the bamboos cannot be burnt with the body as per Hindu belief. People opened the cord very carefully as if Pt.Ram Nath Shukla was alive and laid it aside, revealing the body in white new clothes.

At that moment, the pyre was lit and it sprang to flame, a furious shock of noise trembled the bewildered mourners Pt.Ram Nath Shukla unperturbedly sat up. All the mourners with faltering howl fled in horror, each in a different direction. For nothing on earth could those mourners have been convinced to revisit. However, Pt.Ram Nath Shukla was of a different kind.

VII

In the early morning, the three orphan students, pale and exhausted from fretfulness and with the dread of their escapade still pounding in disorder in their heart and mind, met at the Ashram.

'Did you see it?' howled one.

'Oh, God! Yes -- what should we do now?'

They rushed to the rear part of the ashram, where they saw a cow, tied with a huge peepal tree, hold up to a gatepost near the entrance of the room of Pt.Ram Nath Shukla. Instinctively they entered the room. On a cot in the darkness lying Prabhu Das, He got up, smiling and rubbing his face and showing his teeth.

'I'm waiting for Pt.Ram Nath Shukla to get my monthly salary,' he said.

Inside the dark room, stretched naked on a big cot lay the corpse of Pt.Ram Nath Shukla, the head besmirched with blood and mud from a gust with a spade.

In the weary moonlight, Pt.Ram Nath Shukla raised his face to the sky as if looking for a place in the space and called upon God to be his protector and companion.

I wish I’d been there earlier. It might have made all the difference. So all I can tell you is why he was murdered.