Motherland Ghost Stories Issue

100

Ghost Stories

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3 CONTENTS 6

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SOLDIER OF FORTUNE From Punjab to Sikkim span the tales of a young army recruit who became an exemplary ghost soldier.

DIVINE INTERVENTION In Manipur, a community of female mediums, considered to be the purveyors of the gods’ messages, is an important part of local society.

14 CHASING SHADOWS How a paranormal investigator is working to extinguish people’s fears of ghosts.

18 CITY OF DJINNS In a rapidly developing Delhi, faith healers carry out exorcisms using age-old methods in shrines and mosques tucked away in the urban landscape.

26 THE THING In 1995 a family in Assam moves into a house only to be plagued by something unseen.

32 VADE RETRO Need to ward off evil? A selection of common talismans and amulets to do just that.

34 GHOSTS FOR HIRE With the growing use of the Internet in India, ghostwriters have emerged as entrepreneurial, online entities.

38 HOME ALONE Set in a house on Delhi’s outskirts, a fashion story showcasing pieces from contemporary Indian designers where our model plays the part of a woman possessed.

46 THE END IS NIGH How a little village in Kerala got swept up in an apocalyptic panic, their idea of the end of days a hybrid of Christianity with some Eastern elements thrown in.

52 RAMSAY INTERNATIONAL How the Ramsay Brothers became Hindi cinema’s doyens of gory low-budget horrors in the 1980s and where they are today.

62 PHOTO ESSAY: DAK BUNGALOWS The haunting spaces of remote, colonial era rest houses.

76 WHO’S IN YOUR PHONE? A perspective on how increasingly complex mobile phone technology can make us think there’s a ghost in the machine.

96 URBAN LEGEND In the winter of 1994, in Kashmir, during the conflict, a “witch” descends upon neighbourhoods in Srinagar.

100 THE INDIAN SPOOK DIRECTORY Ten archetypal ghosts and spirits of the subcontinent.

COVER: Photograph by Bharat Sikka CREATIVE DIRECTOR: V SUNIL JOINT CREATIVE DIRECTOR: BHARAT SIKKA MANAGING EDITOR: ANNETTE EKIN STAFF WRITER: ANNALISA MERELLI ADVERTISING: MARINA AZCARATE PRODUCTION: HARISH BAMBA ASSISTANT ART DIRECTOR: ROSHAN VERMA ILLUSTRATIONS: RESHI DEV ART: HITESH VERMA Published and distributed by: Mohit Jayal, on behalf of W+K Publishing, B 10, DDA Complex, Sheikh Sarai Phase 1, New Delhi 110 017 Editorial enquiries: annette.ekin@wk.com Advertising and distribution enquiries: +91 99990 64820, marina.azcarate@wk.com Subscription enquiries: 011 4600 9549, subscribe@motherland.com www.motherlandmagazine.com © 2012 Motherland. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine can be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher. While every effort has been taken to avoid error, the publisher is not responsible for the consequences of any action taken towards the publication. The views of the authors of the content published in this magazine are not necessarily the views of the publisher.

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80 OFFICIALLY DEAD How a widespread scam in Uttar Pradesh is cheating people out of their lives and land rights and has turned them into spectres of society.

Maps and images of mainland India depicted in Motherland are an artistic illustration and do not purport to represent any geographical or political boundaries or territorial jurisdictions of the union of India. As an artistic impression these images are not to scale. Motherland does not warrant any accuracy of these images and is not responsible for any errors and omissions in the magazine contents or artwork.

4 Whether you’re a believer or not, the terrifying thought of seeing a ghost has probably crossed your mind. While home alone late at night. After watching a scary movie or hearing a spooky tale.

But what would happen if you actually met one?

In this edition, we uncover how belief in ghosts in India persists in different ways, and we set our sights on the more unusual stories that can give shape to an idea of ghosts to bring together contemporary perspectives of how ghosts can be understood today.

We see how “interactions” with spectres have moulded certain professions, from Delhi’s traditional faith healers who operate in shrines and mosques against the backdrop of a modernising, urban landscape and tend to people believed to be possessed by spirits, to the self-styled, new-fangled paranormal investigator who uses electronic gadgets to explore alleged hauntings – and attempt to communicate with spirits – and has become something of a small-time celebrity as he’s taken his brand of ghost exploration to the small screen.

We also see how the growing use of the Internet has given rise to a different kind of unseen entity – ghostwriters.

Taking a post-modern approach to how technology can play ghost host we examine how, in the context of increasingly complex technological advances, the mobile phone can be seen as a totem animated by spirits.

Other contributors step back in time to canvas more personal accounts of haunting experiences. Through the prism of a memoir one writer unravels the safe environment of a home as he recounts the strange happenings and a mysterious late night visitor in his family’s house in Assam when he was a child. Another story takes us to Kashmir in 1994, during the conflict, when the coming of a “witch” created terror among people in the neighbourhoods of Srinagar.

5 In a stunning series of black and white photographs, photographer Dileep Prakash takes us through the unsettling, often dilapidated spaces of dak bungalows – the traditional rest houses of government employees situated deep in the hills – as he revisits and evokes memories associated with these places.

Other contributors have looked at how supernatural beliefs have taken hold of entire communities, from the preoccupation with doomsday predictions and how a little village in Kerala got carried away believing the world would end in 2000, their version of the end of days a peculiar combination of religious beliefs, to Manipur’s community of mystical female mediums whose perceived ability to communicate the gods’ messages has earned them a veritable standing in society.

We also look at social interpretations of what being a ghost can mean. In eastern Uttar Pradesh, we encounter “dead” people; the victims of a chronic land-grabbing scam where living people are declared legally dead by their relatives wanting to take their property, the social ramifications of which are far-reaching even when their lives are reinstated.

The idea of spooks is further explored in popular culture and in one piece we meet the legendary Ramsay Brothers, the pioneers of the horror genre in Indian cinema with their low-budget films of the 1980s featuring all kinds of monsters, demons and girls. We get the backstory of their journey and see where they are today. And we’re excited to include our first fashion story, where our model assumes the role of a woman haunted, or possessed.

How something as old as a belief in ghosts has evolved to survive is mapped out in our “Ghosts Issue” where we bring together the more shape-shifting, surprising perspectives on spooks and haunting phenomena of today.

Annette Ekin

6 SOLDIER OF FORTUNE HOW A YOUNG RECRUIT WITH THE INDIAN ARMY HAS ASSUMED SUPERNATURAL PROPORTIONS DECADES AFTER HIS DEATH.

TEXT

JOA N NA S U G D E N IMAGES

KARCHOONG D I Y A L I

BABA HARBHAJAN’S SHRINE at Baba Mandir, Sikkim.

7 Baljinder Singh looks around his uncle’s bedroom, picks up a pair of shoes from a collection of footwear lined up by the door and smiles. The brand new beige lace-ups are entirely unremarkable but for the white markings on the black rubber soles and the fact that the person for whom they were recently purchased died over 40 years ago.

To an untrained eye, the white splodges look like the work of a paintbrush. But for Baljinder, 27, and his family, they are evidence that the spirit of their relative Harbhajan Singh has lately been walking around in Kuka – their village of two dozen sand-coloured houses smudged on green wheat fields in Punjab. “We bought these for him recently and he’s been using them,” adds Baljinder, who helps his father, S Rattan Singh, take care of the bedroom.

At 22 years of age, Harbhajan died on October 4, 1968, while serving in the military. Since then, his shoes have become a recurring theme in the paranormal tales told about him.

It’s February 8, the day before the 46th anniversary of Harbhajan’s enrolment in the 23rd Punjab regiment, and the family are keen to recount the story of the afterlife of their beloved uncle and brother – a tale which was let loose by the Indian army. Sightings after his death, haunting experiences among the ranks and the inexplicable muddying of his army boots have all contributed to the conviction that Harbhajan is in service as a ghost soldier.

The legend built up around his name has become a morale boosting tool for the soldiers facing isolation in the unfriendly terrain of the Himalayan foothills, the top floor of the world.

There, on the inhospitable border with China in East Sikkim, Harbhajan lost his footing and drowned while collecting water for his regiment in a fast flowing stream in the mountain pass of Jelepla. After searching for three days, his fellow soldiers allegedly found his body and rifle after Harbhajan appeared in their dreams telling them where to look. He was cremated, his ashes scattered in the Ganges at Uttaranchal and a small shrine built for

THE SHOES OF BABA HARBHAJAN which his family allege he has recently used

him where his body was discovered. Within a few years his regiment had moved on. But rumour began to take wing among those stationed in the region that Harbhajan remained as an extra pair of (unseen) eyes and boots, that stalked the border and woke up sleeping sentries with a slap.

The army, it is claimed, rewarded him for his work by sending him on annual leave, building him his own barracks and paying him a salary. In later years he was also granted promotions.

Some clues as to why Harbhajan’s death should have resulted in such practices and how belief in his supernatural presence began lie with his family in Punjab.

Back in Kuka, S Rattan Singh, 62, a slight man with a ruddy face and a long grey beard that matches his kurta, points out his brother in a grainy black and white photograph hanging on the bedroom wall. Harbhajan, beardless, turbaned and with a softer expression than his compatriots, looks uncertainly out of the regimental picture taken at Meerut Cantonment.

“He wasn’t going to be a soldier,” Rattan says. “He worked as a farmer like our father but then there was a drought so everyone suggested he should join the army.”

He recalls how his sibling would visit the gurudwara every day. “Baba Ji was a very brave person and a religious person,” Rattan says.

One of the youngest in his regiment when it was sent to Sikkim in early 1968, Harbhajan was known as “Baba” among his fellow recruits because he was so devout. His unit’s deployment was part of a concerted effort to bolster the Indian army’s presence along the border with China after the humiliating 1962 defeat in the Sino-Indian War.

On this page, image by Joanna Sugden.

Turning the shoes on their side to expose the marks in question to the fluorescent strip on the wall above his head, Baljinder is confident of their significance. “This indicates that he’s living here,” he says standing next to a turned down bed and glass-fronted wardrobe with a military uniform hanging neatly inside.

8

A soldier polishes the bells outside Baba Mandir.

After Harbhajan’s death, it was interactions with the Chinese that first cemented the initial hearsay of his ghost among Indian troops. The Chinese reported seeing a figure in Indian army uniform riding a white horse on their territory, Rattan says.

the event of a planned invasion by the Chinese, the deceased soldier would write a warning to Indian militar y commanders. This reported omnipotence has transformed the ghost into a deity for those soldiers posted to the border with China.

“The Chinese army wrote a letter to the Indians asking ‘Who is this person doing the horse riding every night?’ ” Rattan says. “The Indian officer had a dream in which Babi Ji told him ‘I’m not going to harm them [the Chinese] however if they want to catch me they can try.’ They never caught him,” he says with a smile that betrays a lasting pride in his elder brother.

A dedicated temple complex called Baba Mandir has fortified the deification of the ghost soldier, who has become known as “Baba Harbhajan.” The mandir started off as a small monument before, in 1982, it was moved to

As his legend developed in army circles there, Harbhajan was given a seat at flag meetings between the two countries. “Once a Chinese official tried to sit in that seat but Baba Ji threw him off,” Rattan says.

Army personnel also told Harbhajan’s family that in

BUT RUMOUR BEGAN TO TAKE WING AMONG THOSE STATIONED IN THE REGION THAT HARBHAJAN REMAINED AS AN EXTRA PAIR OF (UNSEEN) EYES AND BOOTS, THAT STALKED THE BORDER AND WOKE UP SLEEPING SENTRIES WITH A SLAP.

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Harbhajan’s army jacket in his temple in Sikkim.

its current, more accessible location near Nathula Pass, the heavily controlled gateway between India and Chinesecontrolled Tibet. It’s here on lunar like territory that the mandir perches at 14 000 feet.

This series of buildings operates as his barracks, housing his bedroom, study and shrine; a member of the military who is posted there to look after Baba Harbhajan serves him breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and supper each day. The dead soldier’s laundry is also taken care of.

It’s here that yarns have been woven about the sheets on his bed becoming crumpled when no one is near them.

Beside his bed sit his boots which are polished each day by his army attendant. Legend has it that they become dirty overnight – proof for devotees that the Baba has been out on patrol.

From his barracks the army sanctioned two months off for Baba Harbhajan each year. A jeep festooned

with yellow placards bearing the words Baba Harbhajan Singh in red lettering carried his portrait, uniform and belongings down the steep winding road from his mandir, stopping along the way to receive donations from Sikkimese villagers.

A seat was reserved for him on the Lohit Express to Jalandhar Cantt in Punjab. The Singh family still has the tickets on which the age of the passenger oscillates from year to year, suggesting perhaps that the army was not keeping a close record of their ghost soldier’s advancing years.

All leave for soldiers serving in the Jelepla area was cancelled when Baba was “away” because the army feared they were more vulnerable without him. According to his family, as he rose through the honorary ranks an officer and a junior soldier accompanied him on the journey and escorted him from the station to his family home in Kuka.

10 In that Punjabi village, Rattan admits being sceptical when the army initially sent the uniform of his deceased brother home “on annual leave.”

“When he [Baba] first used to come here alone on holiday he came in the dream of our mother and said ‘I don’t have a room to stay,’ ” says Rattan. “[But] I wouldn’t believe unless he came and told me himself.”

A few nights later, when he was in bed, Rattan says that he too received a visitation.

“The covers were pulled back and it was Baba Ji saying ‘Are you happy now? I’m sitting on your bed, you make a room for me where I can live.’”

Harbhajan’s blind mother Amar Kaur also reported hearing footsteps and a voice saying “THE CHINESE ARMY WROTE A LETTER TO THE INDIANS ASKING ‘WHO IS THIS PERSON DOING THE HORSE RIDING EVERY NIGHT?’ ”

‘Mum it’s me,’ Baljinder chips in. “And we heard the sound of running water from the taps at two o’clock in the morning when he used to take a bath,” he adds.

But when their Baba Ji is referred to as a “ghost” the family bristles. “We think he is a very holy spirit, not a ghost,” says Rattan, whose smile has now vanished. “He is everywhere now, wherever we need him, because he is retired.”

In 2006 Baba Harbhajan was sent on leave for the last time, Rattan says. The army told him that they had retired his brother at the rank of honorary Captain when he asked why no vehicle arrived bearing Baba Harbhajan’s portrait the following year. The payments into his mother’s pension were also curtailed after she died the same year; the fabled ghost salary was in fact a pension payment to the next of kin of a deceased soldier – normal army practice. The Singh

A regimental photograph taken at Meerut Cantonment. Listed as “Bhajan Singh”

11 family still have the books detailing these pension payments.

Baba Harbhajan’s abrupt retirement, in the year he would have turned 60, came after the start of a civil court case challenging the army’s credence in supernatural beings in October 2005. Most servicemen and women, except at the highest ranks, retire at 58, suggesting Baba Harbhajan’s late retirement was initiated for expediency in the face of an embarrassing court case. Ex-serviceman Subedar Piara Singh sought a mandatory injunction against the Defence Ministry’s “superstitions.” He cited the case of Harbhajan Singh but he could just as easily have picked on Rifleman Jaswant Singh Rawat, said to BUT WHEN THEIR BABA JI IS REFERRED TO AS A “GHOST” THE FAMILY BRISTLES. “WE THINK HE IS A VERY HOLY SPIRIT, NOT A GHOST,” SAYS RATTAN, WHOSE SMILE HAS NOW VANISHED. guard the Sino-Indian border in Arunachal Pradesh 50 years after his death, or Om Prakash, who apparently appears in the dreams of soldiers stationed on the Siachen Glacier in Jammu and Kashmir.

The army declined to comment on the importance of these figures or on Baba Harbhajan.

in the photograph, Harbhajan is in the second standing row and third from the left.

For troops posted near Baba Mandir, belief in the Baba has given rise to certain rituals that mark out their time in Sikkim. Out of respect, soldiers there refrain from eating meat and drinking alcohol on Sundays and Thursdays and a langar is held on Wednesdays.

Image courtesy of Baljinder Singh.

After at least four hearings the case was dismissed, the army having claimed that there was “absolutely no correspondence available … of the deceased with regards to his promotions” and that two soldiers, believed to be his escorts making the journey from Sikkim to Punjab by train, were themselves actually “on leave.”

12 ONE OF Harbhajan’s train tickets

Images on this page by Joanna Sugden.

A BOOK DETAILING pension payments made to Harbhajan’s mother

The harsh conditions, proximity to the enemy and long dark nights of lonely sentry duty make such “morale boosting” beliefs necessary, according to a serving officer in Sikkim. “It’s a firm belief of the people who are here that his soul is still around and that he is giving protection to everyone,” says the soldier who does not wish to give his rank or full name. “It’s not just soldiers who believe, it’s everyone up to general,” he says, sitting beside Tsongo Lake, just a few miles from Baba Mandir.

The officer insists however that faith in Baba Harbhajan and acts of devotion do not equate to reliance upon him or exempt soldiers from doing their duty. “[The] army is not superstitious,” he says. “If we were not doing our work and banking on Baba that would be superstitious, but we all believe in gods and local deities. They don’t have anything to do with the workings of the army.”

As the officer talks, a senior army official on his way back from a personal visit to the shrine stops in for tea. “I have tremendous faith in Baba Harbhajan, all the army does,” he says, declining to be named. “I was stationed here between 1988 and 1992. Belief in Baba Harbhajan strengthens you and gives you courage to stay here and do your job.”

THE GHOST SOLDIER’S bedroom in Kuka, Punjab

Almost 10 000 feet below, in Gangtok, where the distant Himalayas look like ghostly apparitions indistinguishable from their background, the army legend of Harbhajan Singh has been appropriated by the tourism industry to attract visitors.

Despite the dramatic natural beauty of East Sikkim, compared to the west of the state there are few specific attractions for visitors and Baba Mandir is an obvious vein for tour operators to tap. Around the town, shop windows advertise day trips costing Rs 2 800 to Tsongo Lake, Nathula Pass and Baba Mandir, where devotees leave bottles of water to be blessed with healing powers. In high season about 600 jeeps a day plough the tourist route on winding perilous road from Gangtok.

There is very little evidence of Baba Harbhajan or his legend on display otherwise. But ask the locals and most have heard of or are curious about him. Many believe the various stories about him but generally refer questions about him to the army.

Satnam Singh, the gyani in charge at the Station Gurudwara Sahib who is also a serving member of the

13 “IT’S A FIRM BELIEF OF THE PEOPLE WHO ARE HERE THAT HIS SOUL IS STILL AROUND AND THAT HE IS GIVING PROTECTION TO EVERYONE,” SAYS THE SOLDIER WHO DOES NOT WISH TO GIVE HIS RANK OR FULL NAME.

Singh’s name and the fact he died on duty at Kupup, the spot where he was found, far from home.

Army convoys passing through the area began stopping at the stone to pay their respects by leaving money.

The regiment collected the donations and used them to do up the memorial and even open a tea stall.

A plaque commemorating the death of two of three pilots in a plane crash was erected near Baba Mandir, he says. The third pilot survived. “Baba had a way of telling him to jump from the plane and he did and the others didn’t.

The unit replacing them went even more overboard and attached brass grills to the mandir. Dorjee continues: “This is believed to be the story of how Baba really got commandeered. A General came visiting in 1975 and reaching Kupup noticed the memorial looking like a guard’s room. He ordered it to be dismantled because he said the army does not believe in all this. As he was speaking a truck passing filled with troops ran off the cliff but no one was killed. The General took this as a sign that the Baba was getting angry so he said ‘We should respect it.’ ”

“[And] whenever people ridicule Baba Harbhajan, then bad things happen to them, like accidents,” Singh says soberly.

Only on returning years later did Lieutenant Colonel P Dorjee come to hear of the things being said about his former underling.

And it was an accident that really began the stories of Harbhajan’s ghostly presence on the border, according to the son of the man who found his body washed downstream after he drowned.

“He didn’t believe all these stories,” says his son. “But he wasn’t going to challenge it as a superstition because sometimes people need these things to stay sane in a place like that.”

army, suggests why belief in Baba Harbhajan might have caught on with the people of Sikkim. “He has a way of warning and believers who can hear him get saved and if they don’t [hear him] then bad things happen,” Singh says.

Lieutenant Colonel P Dorjee was commander of Harbhajan’s regiment when it was stationed at Jelepla.

His son, Pema Wangchuk Dorjee, is the editor of Sikkim Now, a local English-language newspaper.

“My dad found the body. He wasn’t told anything in a dream,” Dorjee says taking a drag of a cigarette in his office in Gangtok.

Harbhajan’s death in the lonely outpost was the first casualty that the newly formed regiment had suffered.

The other soldiers were deeply affected and began waking up in the middle of the night saying strange things. “In the barracks one guy would wake up saying ‘I’m Baba, I died here, I was a nice guy, leave something behind for someone to remember that I was here,’ ” Dorjee says.

Soon other soldiers were experiencing the same dreams and becoming “possessed by Baba’s spirit” says Dorjee. “[My dad] did not really believe these things initially,” he says. But these episodes soon turned into a “mass hysteria” as more and more boys woke up in their barracks voicing similar pleas. The Lieutenant Colonel agreed to place a small engraved stone bearing Sepoy

14 CHASING SHADOWS A paranormal investigator is preaching new ways of understanding ghosts. By Jen Swanson

It’s about 11 pm on a cold, windy night in February and Gaurav Tiwari along with three of his investigators are in the outer limits of Delhi’s north, in the neighbourhood of St Nagar, a locale comprising small concrete houses and empty plots of land straddling a busy highway. The team is setting up equipment in the singlestoried house of Anurag Sharma.

Sharma, 33, who runs a convenience store, lives with his parents, wife and child in the small, cramped one bedroom house. Inside, the smell of sewerage hangs thickly in the air and turquoise paint peels off the living room walls revealing concrete underneath. The sole bedroom is windowless, there is mould in one corner and sad-looking children’s toys are scattered around. Attached to the bedroom is a storeroom with old mattresses piled high inside and a plastic doll that stares unblinkingly at whoever enters. Sharma claims that he’s being troubled by a ghost – egg trays mysteriously tumble off the counter, his mother says she has been pushed from the flight of stairs leading to the terrace, lights flicker on and off, and objects, most recently his school certificate, allegedly vanish before his eyes.

Tonight, Tiwari, a tall 28-year-old man with a bowl haircut, big eyes and the gait of a cowboy, is here to see if he can find any paranormal evidence. As the head of G.R.I.P. (Ghost Research & Investigators of Paranormal), he directs his team to install infrared cameras in six spots around the house and terrace. The cameras are hooked up to a small television, next to the living room, that projects fuzzy black and white images. Base readings for temperature, humidity, and electromagnetic fields (EMFs) have already been taken. Anything contrary that shows

up could be counted as evidence of a spirit. Some orbs flash across the television screen. Tiwari dismisses them.

That’s what new ghost hunters get excited about but they’re probably just dust particles, he says.

The team place other equipment inside the bedroom.

There are two camcorders, one has an infrared night vision lens and the other is a full spectrum device.

According to Tiwari as spirits manifest themselves at night it’s possible to capture them on camera. On the bed sits a laser pointer which projects a grid of green dots on the wall that is refracted by anything, human or otherwise, that moves in front. They also have other tools in tow, such as a K-II metre, which mea sures EMFs and looks like a cheap remote control with five, tiny, coloured LEDs. And there’s an EVP (electronic voice phenomena) recorder that picks up voices pitched too high for the human ear to hear. Most of their gadgets were sourced in the US. Throughout the night, they’ll continue to gauge the temperature; Tiwari says spirits leaving or entering an environment draw energy from it, which causes a sudden dip or spike in degrees.

While the investigators set up, Sharma listens attentively to Tiwari talk about spirits – he calls them the “consciousness of a dead person” – and the two main types of hauntings: those of “residual” spirits, which are only visible to some people and are wrinkles in time, like a “tape on playback mode”; and “intelligent hauntings” when a spirit makes contact with humans through noise, touch and by moving objects around.

Sharma himself seems somewhat attuned to strange activity, of which he says the neighbourhood has seen its fair share. One of his neighbours

around the corner claims to have seen an old man on the street dissipate before her eyes and another one says she opened the door to a child’s voice only to see a cow that “converted” into a dog.

It’s time to start and everyone sits silently in the living room. The doors and windows are closed. Dogs growl outside. Tiwari and Ayesha Mohan, an actress from Bombay who has joined the investigation for the night, are in the bedroom. Tiwari starts to speak out loud in Hindi asking the spirit, if there is one, to show itself in any way possible. Soon after, the camera in the bedroom falls from its perch, the door to the adjoining storeroom closes; Mohan comes out. She says it’s spooky inside. But the investigators are excited that these incidents could signify a presence. Tiwari continues talking in the dark bedroom alone.

About an hour later, two investigators come down from the rooftop saying they’ve made contact with a spirit using the K-II metre. They say the spirit has answered two lights or three to questions about their sex (male) and if they want to be friends (yes). After exploring every nook and cranny, at about 4 am, the team starts winding up the inspection. Later, at their office, they’ll analyse all the footage and data they’ve gathered to figure out the cause of the alleged haunting.

Each month, Tiwari and his investigators carry out two to 20 on-site investigations. On average, they receive about 40 enquiries a month, sometimes much more, from people reporting spooky happenings in their homes. Most problems are resolved over the phone or email.

Tiwari and his team may not be the first in India to explore the paranormal, but Tiwari views himself

as decidedly modern, because of his techniques – involving up-to-date gadgets – and his didactic approach to ghosts. In a country of myths and superstitions, he says he’s here to teach the public about what are “real haunting phenomena” and propagate the idea that ghosts are as harmful as a “honeybee.”

“Our mission,” he says, “is to educate people – get them rid of their fears.”

Tiwari prefers to be called a “paranormal researcher” as opposed to a “ghost hunter.” He explains: “We do not like to be called ghost hunters because we believe ghosts were human too; we would not want to hunt them down, other human beings.”

Since beginning his undertaking in 2009, Tiwari has worked hard to achieve some degree of public attention. Through the aggressive use of social media and hyping up claims about busting certain ghost myths, such as the one about Bhangarh – their investigation was televised by India’s most-watched Hindi news channel Aaj Tak – Tiwari has managed to carve out an identity as India’s modern-day paranormal investigator.

Born and raised in Lucknow, Tiwari says he met his first ghost in 2007. He was living in Deland, Florida at the time, training to be a commercial pilot when one evening while sitting alone in his shared house he heard footsteps and a voice whisper his name in his ear. That was just the beginning of a scary week: he and his housemates heard scratching on the windows and saw pebbles fall from the ceiling; one girl allegedly saw an apparition.

The events led Tiwari to reconsider his stance as a “hard-core non-believer.” To explain the experience, he embarked on a period of intense study, which included

The tools depicted in this story are illustrative examples of hand-held devices, available in the marketplace, used by ghost hunters to measure gauss units (electromagnetic distraction) – spikes and high readings are believed to indicate a ghost. Illustrations by Reshi Dev.

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16 certifications in paranormal investigation with the academic arm of ParaNexus – a Florida-based association of researchers and investigators of anomalous phenomena that was established in 2008.

About an hour later, two investigators come down from the rooftop saying they’ve made contact with a spirit using the K-II metre.

Tiwari brought his new skills back to India in 2009 and founded the Indian Paranormal Society (IPS) in Delhi as the first Indian chapter of ParaNexus. At the same time, Tiwari started the association’s ghostspecialist squad, G.R.I.P., which currently has nine core members including himself as the lead investigator. Thirty-four part-time researchers who carry out investigations around the country complete the network.

“India is a land of wars,” says Tiwari, “with many storybook places said to be haunted because people died there. But most of these places have a myth in the story. Few of the places have real paranormal activity.” Ninety-five percent of the team’s explorations haven’t yielded any ghostly activity, says Tiwari, including at Bhangarh Fort, the abandoned Rajasthani town long touted as the most haunted place in India. Others have proved more fruitful, such as a deserted army building in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, where Tiwari says he was pushed by an unknown force and other team members recorded strange noises and apparitions on their instruments. Some of the group were touched by spirits, he says, describing the sensation as one of extreme coldness.

People contact G.R.I.P. through their website, their active Facebook page, or after watching the YouTube videos or coming across media coverage. Based on his experiences, Tiwari says “most people

in India don’t understand the difference between the natural and unnatural causes [behind hauntings].” In other words, there are often logical explanations for what are perceived to be ghostly disturbances. He cites creaking floorboards, bad wiring, rodents and gas leaks as “natural” reasons behind goings-on that lead people to believe there are ghosts in the house. Other clients show signs of mental instability and they are referred to G.R.I.P.’s resident psychologist or to a doctor.

Two days after the St Nagar investigation, Tiwari sent Sharma an email with a “thank you letter” and a link to a video showing findings from the night: an apparition, the momentary fading of the laser dots, an orb before the camera falls, and a woman singing or crying in the background – all of which are virtually impossible to discern from the grainy clip. The report states that there are two spirits, possibly of a couple, who might have died in an accident. The report further explains that the spirits are stuck in the house because of its “negative vibration and energy.” To help them leave, Tiwari prescribes establishing “harmony and order.” To do this, he advises Sharma to sell off all the old objects, “old dolls” and repaint the house.

Yet someone like Tiwari, whose reputation as a ghost expert has grown, faces a curious dilemma. He says his father still helps him financially, and most of his team members are volunteers with day jobs. He conducts investigations at the behest of people for free in keeping in line with “i nt e r n a t i o n a l p r o t o c ol.”

Occasionally he may ask his client to reimburse travel expenses. Since there is no direct money involved, he has diversified into various money-making methods: selling, on their e-store, t-shirts and jackets with the G.R.I.P. logo; offering online certificate courses for Rs 25 000; investigating haunted locations for TV channels.

In 2009 Tiwari was approached by MT V to play the resident paranormal expert on Girls Night Out, a 13-episode thriller reality television series that offered

17 a five lakh rupee grand prize to the contestant who proved to be the bravest after spending the night in a haunted location.

make it in the right way it will work.” Mohan, who herself believes in ghosts, says: “I’m sure there is an audience out there who wants to see the way things really happen.”

“They knew they were going to take three girls to haunted places,” says Tiwari about the show’s producers, “but they weren’t sure where or what different risk factors were involved.”

Besides finding new partners and sponsors for his projects, Tiwari hopes to leverage his growing profile by setting up his own production house, so he can make exactly the shows he wants. Some of those projects are already in the works, including one with Robb Demarest, the former lead investigator of Ghost Hunter International.

So G.R.I.P. scouted out 40 to 50 places in India with rumoured levels of paranormal activity – abandoned jails, bungalows, forts and even a movie theatre that burned down in 1988 killing patrons inside – which producers whittled down to 14 locations featured on the show. “We investigated and then we sent in the girls to experience the haunting,” Tiwari says. The show aired in September 2010, and in early 2011 won two awards

“We do not like to be called ghost hunters because we believe ghosts were human too; we would not want to hunt them down, other human beings.” for its pilot season, including “Best Reality Show” at the Asian Television Awards, Singapore. Season two was under discussion at the time of writing.

The show gave Gaurav’s brand a boost, particularly within India’s television space. “We were flooded with offers after Girls Night Out,” he says, although most of the networks wanted to make “some spicy, horror, fabricated ghost hunting shows” that didn’t resonate with IPS’s aims.

Since the MTV show however, Tiwari has also observed the springing up of investigative groups started by college-going youths. Some of these groups have been begun by younger people, including one in Hyderabad led by a 13-year-old boy. Sometimes they get in touch with Tiwari for advice. Tiwari seems happy to see this hobby take off, but expresses concern that these new groups don’t follow G.R.I.P.’s standards and could damage the reputation of “legitimate” investigators.

But for the most part, the emergence of groups interested in the paranormal as well as the interactions he’s had with people through IPS and G.R.I.P., have led him to believe that attitudes toward ghosts are changing.

“Earlier, people used to think that spirits and ghosts were always evil, that they would always harm you,” Tiwari says.

“Now people dig it,” he says. “People go to haunted places for fun now. So the fear factor has come down.”

Ayesha Mohan, 28, who was at the St Nagar investigation, is a Bollywood actress-turned-director working on a mockumentary about djinns in Delhi. Mohan believes that Girls Night Out was a good concept, but she says she found the show’s final edit baffling. “I wish they had kept it more genuine, you know? If nothing is happening in a house, fine,” she says. “You don’t have to put sound and foley [reproduced sounds such as footsteps, creaking doors and breaking glass] in every little sequence to make it more dramatic.”

She believes there’s a market for investigative shows that communicate the subject of the paranormal in a genuine way. “It’s a sellable subject,” she says. “If they

Annette Ekin contributed reporting to this article.

18 CITY OF

DJINNS Tucked away in Delhi’s shrines and mosques, traditional faith healers are on hand to exorcise unseen spirits from the possessed.

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Daya, a well-built woman in her early 40s wearing a salwar kameez and headscarf, sits on a low wall surrounding the small shrine of Khwaja Moluddin Chishti in south Delhi. As she calmly speaks, nothing about her suggests that her body and mind were once taken over by a supernatural entity called a “djinn”.

“Shortly after my marriage, about eighteen years ago, I had an abortion. I already had one daughter,” says Daya, who only goes by her first name. “Something went wrong in the procedure and in the following months I would not stop bleeding. It was then that the djinn possessed me.”

At the start of her ordeal, nothing she tried would help and Daya refused to follow several doctors’ advice of removing her uterus to stop the bleeding. A family

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friend suggested visiting the shrine to consult the faith healer there. She was doubtful, but soon after her first visit the bleeding stopped. The djinn, she says, took much longer to exorcise.

Daya doesn’t remember that turbulent period, which lasted more than a year. “She screamed a lot and used bad language,” says her brother Raju, an electrician, who accompanies her. “She was also very strong. Once, she just lifted up the bed.”

But slowly, Daya was restored to her normal self.

“Baba cured me,” says Daya, referring to the saint who is buried here. She points to a teenage boy sitting beside her. “I had a son after that. Ever since, we all come to this place every Thursday.”

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DAYA, a woman in her early 40s, sits on the wall next to the shrine of Khwaja Moluddin Chishti in Delhi. She claims to have been possessed by a djinn and subsequently cured by the saint buried here.

20 From the perspective of mental health, Daya’s condition could have been diagnosed as psychosis following a traumatic abortion, and the djinn dismissed as superstition. In Daya’s case, visiting the faith healer was a last resort, but for the many who believe in spirit possession, such traditional healers, who perform exorcisms, are often seen as the first step toward a cure, and may just offer significant social and therapeutic value for the afflicted. Today, even in a fast changing city like Delhi, various kinds of spirits are believed to exist, and the people believed to be able to master them, who belong to an age old profession and are usually the scions of Sufi clans, are kept in demand.

“There are at least as many cases as twenty years ago,” says Ali Khan, the caretaker of the Khwaja Moluddin Chishti shrine. He became the Sajjada Nashin – a title assigned to those considered to be descendants of a Sufi pir or saint who usually serve as the caretaker of that saint’s shrine – when his father, the previous caretaker, died in 2000.

The shrine is just a ten minute walk from the green, wide roads of south Delhi’s af f luent Diplomatic Enclave neighbourhood. It lies at the end of a sandy track that runs through the dense Central Ridge forest, with treasures along the way such as a centuries old well concealed by spiky bushes. Nearby is a Tughlaq era hunting lodge, carefully guarded by monkeys, and the old walls of a reservoir from the same period from the late 1300s. The impressive quantity of garbage around, serves as a reminder that even these seemingly isolated monuments have some interaction with the mushrooming city.

The shrine itself is about 800 years old and used to serve the inhabitants of a village called Malcha, which disappeared when the British made Delhi their capital in 1911. The villagers are said to still be haunting the area, something you are reminded of with every sound of a leaf or twig cracking underfoot, or unexpected monkey scream. Even spookier are the dozens of matkas, earthen pots, which are spread out under the bushes immediately surround-

ALI KHAN, the caretaker of the shrine of Khwaja Moluddin Chishti.

21 ing the shrine. These grounds serve as a jail where 800 years worth of djinns and bad souls are held, with the latter being kept in the pots, Khan explains.

and bangles, during free evenings, in another south Delhi neighbourhood where he lives with his wife and two young sons.

But unlike the surrounding monuments, this shrine is more than a relic of the past. The saint’s grave, housed in a relatively new, small, green and white structure with candles and incense burning inside and out, continues to serve dozens of devotees from across Delhi every week. Daya and her family come all the way from Badarpur, almost 30 kilometres away.

Until his father’s death, Khan worked full-time as a storekeeper at the US Embassy – barely one kilometre away, but a world apart from where he now spends most of his time in the quiet company of a small goat a nd t wo chickens. It was always expected that he’d take over from his father, who taught him all he knows and who himself had learnt from his own father and grandfather. Three graves next to the shrine remind Khan every day of the generations of healers before him.

The 33-year-old caretaker arrives at the shrine in a shiny white Maruti Alto, wearing a woollen sweater, black trousers and shoes, before changing into his uniform of a white kurta pajama and cap. He comes here every day to serve the saint, receive devotees and assist in their prayers for various requests, and organises the occasional qawwali (devotional music of Sufism) night. He says what he receives in donations is very modest, and that his main source of income comes from designing Rajasthani shoes

The young Sajjada Nashin speaks with a voice of authority about the supernatural forces that, he says, surround him. “It is the souls of people who died an untimely death that create physical and mental suffering in people,” Khan says. “They roam around the place of their death, looking for a body to enter.” The same goes for djinns, those entities that according to Islam are created by Allah out of

A CHAIN hanging at the shrine’s entrance is believed to have the power to drive spirits out of someone who is possessed when they touch it.

22 smokeless fire. Most djinns are good, according to Khan. But the malignant djinns, he says, are usually sent by people using black magic because of reasons such as envy. “They are strong and cause people to shout a lot, use bad language and force,” he says. But he also says while someone may appear to be possessed, it isn’t always so, and this is when he relies on the saint’s judgement to let him know. “If it’s not a case of possession, ‘Baba’ will advise me to send the patient to hospital,” says Khan, adding that the saint speaks to him at night when no one else is around.

A djinn or soul is not captured with a simple click of the fingers. Patients need to follow certain rituals, such as walking around the shrine while their family members and Khan recite verses from the Qura n out loud. Often, they just need to spend time with the saint. Even then, it can take months, sometimes years of praying and weekly visits to the shrine to weaken the spirit sufficiently in order for it to be fully exorcised from the body. Meanwhile, the subject may continue to demonstrate the under-

stood symptoms of possession – weakness, physical pain, hallucinations and mood swings. The spirit is also blamed for any bad luck the family encounters, such as illness or financial loss.

Similar stories are told in shrines and monuments across Delhi, from the peaceful shrine where Khan serves, to the chaotic crowds at the mausoleum of Nizamuddin Auliya, to the small, twin shrines of Sarmad and Hare Bhare in the buzz of Old Delhi, from the sur prisingly quiet Fatehpuri Masjid on Chandni Chowk to t he beauti f ul r ui n s of Feroz Shah Kotla that are believed to be in habited by thousands of, mainly good, djinns. People with all kinds of ailments and desires are attracted to the power believed to reside in these holy sites.

Although none of these places in Delhi exclusively specialise in exorcism – unlike some temples and dargahs across India, such as the Balaji temple in Rajasthan, or the Hazrat Sayid Ali Mira Datar shrine in Gujarat – the healers there can perform the task. It is in these spots that

Syed Mujahid Ali Nizami, seated in his office, performs exorcisms at the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya.

23 people, a majority of them women, can be found banging their heads, growling, murmuring indistinct words and rolling around on the floor. While they might otherwise behave normally, this behaviour which occurs only in holy places is said to indicate that the spirit inside them is having a hard time as it wrestles with the power of the saint.

Nashin, according to his business card, at the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya, is also employed at the shrine for services such as cleaning and distributing flowers. For his traditional healing skills, the sufferers’ families often pay him money, which he calls a “donation,” ranging from Rs 11 to 1 000 a visit.

Spirit exorcists like Khan say they have acquired their power partly through birth, but mainly through loyal devotion to God and the saint. And they claim to employ different methods of controlling spirits.

Khan says he traps them in matkas, as his forefathers did. A pir of the Sarmad shrine says he buries them at a nearby cemetery, while others “convert” them into good spirits or help them proceed on to the next world.

Musharraf’s business card, however, is not the only indication that the pirs of Nizamuddin run professional healing organisations rather than charities. Several offices next to the shrine’s entrance – one called “Head Office” another called “Main Office” – compete for the attention of the sick and possessed.

As spirituality is widely perceived as a godly and immaterial practice, most pirs insist that they perform healings and exorcisms more as a good deed, a nd less for the money. This humble claim allows them to have another career on the side. For instance, Syed Musharraf Ali Nizami, 52, a Sajjada

The office next door houses Syed Mujahid Ali Nizami, a healer in his 50s with shiny green-stoned rings and a green cap, whose business card advertises services to assist with, “Strong Problems, Business, Black Magic, Body Pain, Marriage and Love Illness.” Although he says his real business comes from the hotel he owns in Nizamuddin, Mujahid seems eager for clients and publicity. He is quick to tell the photographer that she needs to be cured as somebody has cast the evil eye on her. “Please men-

A patient pushes their fingers through the latticed wall of the exorcism room inside the Nizamuddin dargah which is particularly busy on Thursdays.

24 tion my address [in your story],” he insists, “and don’t forget to write that I also help the poor.”

The overt marketing of such pirs is a source of suspicion among some community members. “These are not pirs. You have to sacrifice and surrender to god to be blessed with the power to heal. They are one in millions,” says Samiur Rahman, the Executive Director of the Nizamuddin-based NGO, The Hope Project. “The real pirs will never ask for money or goods for healing.” The NGO runs, among other projects, a clinic in the neighbourhood. According to Rahman, it’s an uphill struggle to establish faith in modern medicine within this community, as people tend to rely on the saint for every little complaint. “Superstition in modern cities is getting less,” he says, “but it persists in the countryside, and with rural migrants arriving in Delhi every day it’s a continuous effort on our part.”

The heavy influx of rural migrants from all over India into the city is probably why the healers’ stories show slight variations in the appearance, temperament and

behaviour of a spirit. The healers, however, agree on a few basic points such as djinns being as numerous as the city’s population of people, and that most djinns are good. Where bad djinns are concerned, the opinions are divided on why they might possess, and the reasons differ, from djinns being envoys of black magic, to inhabiting a human because they find them beautiful or fall in love with them, and therefore resist leaving the body. While most say possession is indiscriminate, Musharraf is of the opinion that “healthy and good” people are usually immune. Evil souls, all agree, are those of people whose demises were untimely, whether by accident, murder, suicide or disease.

Sudhir Kakar, an Indian psychoanalyst who runs a practice in Goa, does not personally believe in spirit possession as a supernatural phenomenon. Rather, he has identified both social and personal reasons for why an individual might be deemed possessed. He researched this belief along with various traditions of exorcism in the country for his book, Shamans, Mystics and Doctors (1982). He says, across regions

The AREA surrounding the Khwaja Moluddin Chishti shrine serves as a “jail” for djinns and evil spirits which Khan says he traps in earthen pots.

25 and religions in India, what lies at the heart of what is understood to be possession is essentially the same.

“The names might be different, but the symptoms and causes are similar,” says Kakar, in an interview in Delhi’s India Habitat Centre. “The majority of [those believed to be] possessed are young women, which is because they have the most difficult time in the family,” he says, referring to women who are unable to cope in a rigid social structure. “Being ‘possessed’ gives them the freedom to abuse their husbands and mothers-in-law, and even show all kinds of forbidden desires, including sexual.” According to Kakar, adopting a state of possession usually manifests subconsciously. Another common scenario says Kakar, is where a Hindu believes that he or she is possessed by a Muslim spirit and demands to be fed meat.

When it comes to exorcism, Kakar explains why he doesn’t discount it as a practice. “Generally, exorcism works as therapy, just as well as my method [psychoanalysis] works,” he says. “The effectiveness of a certain type of therapy is completely related to the beliefs of the patient.”

Kakar believes that exorcism will remain relevant in India in the foreseeable future, and offers a cultural explanation for this. He says in the West, people are more inclined to focus on “the self” and therefore the causes of a mental disorder are understood to be connected to the individual, whereas in India, many believe that such problems originate from external entities.

In other words, if a spirit is believed to be the alien force responsible for a malady, than exorcising it might be the most effective cure. “This [reliance on exorcism] will not change until people accept that problems come from within,” Kakar says.

But even if belief in spirit possession persists, the question of whether the next generation of faith healers will embrace this profession remains to be seen.

While expressing some pride of their knowledge and mastery, none of the healers interviewed seemed particularly keen for their sons to take the family tradition into the future.

“If one of them would really be interested I will surely teach them,” says Khan, whose sons are just

three and five years old, but he doesn’t seem convinced. “First, they need to finish school. Education is most important, and they can study what they like.”

Musharraf is more frank when he says that he would prefer if his son, who is now 21 and in college, went on to pursue an alternative career. “Everybody dreams of improvement,” Musharraf says. “My son could become more wealthy as an engineer, or a doctor.”

26 The Thing Revisiting a childhood experience of living in a haunted house.

In 1995, my mother had started teaching at a college in Jalukbari, so she, my brother and I moved to this locality that was then on the outskirts of Guwahati in Assam. As we were moving into the new house, my mother announced that there was something unusual about its design. It was a gabled tin-roofed structure, with a living room, a large bedroom meant to accommodate two king-sized beds and a dining room with blue coloured walls. But the strange thing about the house was that each room had four doors; as if it was not designed to live in, but to escape from.

Each of those doors led us to a different world. The front door opened into the living room, which provided us with four other exits: the door straight ahead ushered one to the backyard where a guava tree bore fruit for most of the year. The door to the right opened out onto the exterior of the house of our landlords – an elderly couple. And the one on the left led to the dining room.

We covered most of those exits, or entrances, with tall, broad wooden bookshelves. Only the front door and the door leading to the backyard were left unblocked.

But there was also a curious appendage to the

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house: a lone, thick, towering bamboo plant stood next to the kitchen, its body pressed against the wall. “Who plants bamboo just beside a house?” I remember Ma had commented.

On windy nights its branches thudded against the tin roof and once I watched the plant shaking her head during a storm, like a crying woman who had just lost her husband.

The thing, returned soon enough, knocking and making other sounds, with more intensity on Tuesday and Saturday nights – the days of the week that people here believe spirits are at their strongest.

to the mysterious visitor. But then the knocking sounds started moving around the house, coming from the windows, the other doors and the walls. We could hear a man’s voice calling out, “Ganesh!” It lasted for hours.

The next day, while having tea with the landlady, my mother asked her if one of her four sons was called “Ganesh.” The landlady stood up suddenly, her face pale. But my mother hadn’t noticed. Laughing loudly, Ma said, “The two girls were so scared. I told them to not worry, and said maybe it’s someone from the landlord’s house.”

The landlady said she didn’t know anyone named Ganesh. But she looked uneasy.

Almost immediately after we moved in, strange, inexplicable sounds started to descend upon the house at night, which were different to the thudding of the bamboo branches. These terrified us, as did the more disturbing incidents where an unseen “thing” that we started to blame for the happenings, made itself more known – once attacking a guest as he slept. We felt that this thing must’ve been there before we came, and it was as though it didn’t like that we’d blocked the doors, somehow curtailing its freedom to move in and out of the house. Back then, I was 11 years old and, with my father based in Shillong with his job, it was just the three of us living in the house, along with two girls, Swapna-baideo who cooked, and Bhabani-baideo who cleaned. Mostly, we endured eerie noises, and during those terrifying nights, Ma, my brother and I would huddle together in the bedroom, while the two girls lay awake in another room. None of us would be able to sleep.

The thing returned soon enough, knocking and making other sounds, with more intensity on Tuesday and Saturday nights – the days of the week that people here believe spirits are at their strongest. My brother and I were petrified. We tried to ignore the sounds. But my Ma, clever and brave, wasn’t scared, and she began to concoct explanations for what made those noises: the tapping on the roof, she said, was just the birds that were nesting in the bamboo plant hopping around, or it was bamboo leaves rapping against the tin. But when we heard what sounded like handfuls of sand, pebbles or water being thrown onto the roof, and then sharply trickle down, she grew silent. She had no explanation for this, or for the unseen something that moved around the dead of night, slowly knocking all over the outside of the house.

The first incident happened the very night we moved in after all but the two doors were blocked with wooden almirahs. Someone knocked on the front door. As it was midnight, Swapna-baideo and Bhabani-baideo who were sleeping in the living room didn’t open the door

It wasn’t long before Ma decided we’d had enough, and she and I went to visit her colleague from the college, a Brahmin she trusted who knew certain protective chants.

“Don’t tell anyone in the house about this visit,” she said.

“You are the man of the house in your father’s absence so you will have to be brave.” She said this again on the way

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back, when we returned with a packet of charmed mustard seeds. Ghosts, she said, are afraid of mustard seeds, iron rods and the smell of fire-roasted red chillies.

The charmed mustard seeds worked and we slept peacefully for five nights. But the sounds returned on the sixth night. My mother and I hurried back to her colleague. He asked her to check whether the mustard seeds had germinated; on the third night, there had been rain. How beautiful the light green, curved shoots were, I still remember.

Things took a sinister turn when Baneshwar-da, one of my mother’s favourite students, came to stay the night to attend a job interview in Guwahati the next day. That evening he turned in early. He’d travelled a long way and was exhausted. We set up a bed for him in the living room and the girls moved into the dining room for the night.

In the middle of the night we woke to his screams.

Ma instinctively thought a robber had broken in, and started shouting, trying to alert our landlords. But that wintry, foggy night was too powerful and trapped people in their dreams and quilts.

When we heard what had happened to Baneshwarda, none of us slept for the rest of the night.

“I couldn’t breathe for a long time. He was hairy, heavy, red eyed, long nailed, too-tall-too-tall,” he said, sitting up in bed, drenched in sweat, though it was such a cold night. “It was only after I promised that I would sacrifice a black goat in Kamakhya Temple that the thing took his hands off my neck.” Ma later explained to me that you could appease angry spirits by sacrificing a goat at this temple in Guwahati.

Ma tried to reason with him, saying that he must’ve imagined it all, and he was just tense because of the next day’s interview. But he wouldn’t calm down. He jumped up and started to pack his bag to leave as soon as

the sun rose. “I’m sorry I won’t stay here anymore.

That thing kept calling me Ganesh. There is something in this house. Someone has committed suicide or has been killed here.”

That weekend, my father came to visit from Shillong. It was the first time he had visited since we’d moved into the house, and it was only now that he was told about the strange incidents.

The sounds that night were different. We could hear a woman outside weeping incessantly. Then the sounds started to sound like they were drawing closer to the house. It was around midnight, and my father got out of bed, irritated, tying the knot of his loongi as he walked outside into the courtyard. “Oo ghost, come out, let’s have a conversation: one on one.” Swapna-baideo watched him, terrified that the thing would kill him. But my father’s making light of the situation gave my mother courage, and she started to laugh and joined him. “Oo ghost, where are you? How many legs do you have?

What do you wear? Diapers or trousers or a royal turban like the Ahom kings?”

The sounds died away, weakening like echoes. And I felt relieved; there was nothing to be afraid of now because my father was here.

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We cooked fish the next night for dinner, and the smell emanated from the kitchen window, out past the bamboo plant and into the cold night air. As we sat down to dinner we heard the sound of a galloping horse outside. Then suddenly, every door and window in the house burst open, swinging outwards with a swift, synchronised movement and with great force. Shocked, we all jumped out of our chairs and moved into the kitchen, deliberating what had just happened.

“That thing kept calling me Ganesh. There is something in this house. Someone has committed suicide or has been killed here.”

The kitchen window overlooked a murky pond with snaky hydrillas clumped inside. There is believed to be a type of ghost called a “baak” that inhabits quiet, swampy ponds, and is fond of fish. An hour must’ve passed before someone wondered out loud, “Could it be a baak?” And when we walked back into the four-doored dining room the fish was gone, and someone had left a clump of curly hair on the rice; hair that my mother would pull from her brush, and roll between her palms before throwing it away.

My aunt who knew how to deal with these things, was called first thing the next morning. After my mother hung up the phone, I faintly heard her saying to my father in another room, “You will be happily living in the land of clouds, but what am I to do with these young kids?

One day you will find all of us dead of a heart attack.

Do whatever you need to but solve this before leaving for Shillong. I have tried once, and now it’s your turn to take stock of things in the family.”

When she arrived, my aunt thoroughly inspected the house. I told her what had been happening. It couldn’t be the wind, added my mother. And when we told the landlords about the doors opening, she said they told her that as the house had been built so long ago the doors loosened in the wind sometimes. The sounds

on the roof, they said, were made by vultures that lived on a nearby hill or by bats that would come to eat the guavas.

And they simply didn’t believe we’d heard a galloping horse.

My aunt took my parents to visit a bej, a man who knew the art of dealing with spirits and supernatural creatures and who lived in a remote village. My parents returned after dark from their visit. My brother and I had been scared to stay inside the house and our eyes had darted from door to door, worried something would burst through one of them, toppling an almirah in its wake.

My aunt told us the story the next morning, while Ma and Swapna-baideo were digging four holes around the house, to the east, west, north and south, to bury four porcupine quills that the bej had charmed with holy water and crocodile teeth. The quills, he’d assured, would keep away the spirit – one that had many things to fulfil for it had left its body far too young. “It’s a teenaged boy who worked as a labourer during the construction of this house,” said my aunt slowly in a low voice. “He hung himself in this house.”

“We went to the bej’s house,” my aunt continued, “but he initially turned us back because the steel plate where he sees the past and future only sticks to the bare back of a man whose sun-sign is Libra. He tried on your father who’s a Leo, but it wouldn’t stick. So we got your cousin who’s a Libra; it stuck to him immediately.”

“Did you look into the steel plate?” my brother asked.

“No we were too scared to see, even though it’s just like any steel plate you serve rice on,” my aunt replied.

“But don’t worry, if it is the boy’s spirit, or whatever else, the thing won’t be able to trouble you anymore,” she said,

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a slight quiver in her voice.

My mother wanted to ask the landlords why they’d hidden this secret from us. But father told her to let it go, saying asking questions may lead to more trouble. Many things remained a mystery – why the voices oscillated between a man’s and a woman’s on different nights, what could’ve happened to the fish. But the sounds and incidents stopped right after the charmed porcupine quills were buried.

My aunt took my parents to visit a bej, a man who knew the art of dealing with spirits and supernatural creatures and who lived in a remote village.

We lived peacefully in that house for a couple of years. But trouble with the landlords eventually did come. They wouldn’t fix the damages and increased the rent by many times. Toward the end, we were almost not on talking terms with them and we wanted a change from the suburban life of Jalukbari. We were looking for a house more centrally located in Guwahati, where my father’s workplace was now based. Shillong was a thing of the past, of the days when the “thing” was around. By the time we decided to leave the house, I was still scared of ghosts, but I was no longer 11 years old and was thinking about girls, not ghosts, at night.

A day before we left, the mother of Sajidur, my brother’s friend, came to visit. She was a ruddy-faced woman, who almost always chewed betel nut and wore a red-bordered cotton gamusa around her neck. She said she was sad to see us go.

That day Sajidur’s mother told us about the boy. “We have only heard that your landlord’s family was somehow responsible for driving the boy to suicide, you know,” she said. “Your landlord was a police officer, isn’t that right?

He apparently suppressed the case from the public. It’s a mystery why the boy hung himself. His soul hasn’t gotten any peace, and that’s why he takes on different forms

and disturbs anyone living in this house. That’s why the house lay abandoned for eleven years. We were surprised when you all had come. We thought, don’t these people know?”

We left that house some time in 1997, leaving it the way we had found it when we first moved in, with the doors unblocked and open, banging slightly in the wind. Before leaving, I went to have a look at the remnants of what used to be the tall, thick bamboo plant. After the porcupine quills were buried, the bamboo had shrivelled up until nothing but its roots remained. I still remember the landlady fighting with my mother and accusing her of poisoning it. “Poisoning a bamboo shrub? I am sorry, how does one even do that?” Ma had said.

While driving toward the city with our packed belongings, my mother stopped the car at Kachari, on the banks of the Brahmaputra River. She opened a small packet with soil and the porcupine quills. Before throwing the contents into the river, she said to us: “The bej had said we would not be able to keep the thing away from the house forever. If we didn’t return his usual hideout he would haunt us everywhere we went.”

In 2002, my parents returned to Jalukbari to attend a wedding. There my mother met two sisters who’d lived in that house. “How did you all stay there for so many years?” they asked her. “Sajidur’s mother tells me you didn’t have any problems.” They relayed their experiences with the noises at night, someone called Ganesh, and reported that in the last five years not a single tenant had been able to stay for a sustained period in the house.

31

People would leave before the lease was over, or as soon as the lease expired. In one year, four families came and left. My mother just listened, but she was only too eager to visit the house to see what had become of it.

So she and my father visited for one last time, and what they saw, she later told me, was that the bamboo plant was at the prime of its life, all grown up, better than before and much healthier.

32 VADE RETRO

* A selection of common talismans and amulets bought around Mumbai

outsidedargahs,templesandchurchesforanythingbetween20and150rupees.

By Asmita Parelkar

BABA KA GHODA, Baba’s horse, come as a pair and are tied on either side of the inside of a house’s front door, usually hidden behind curtains.They protect the house from evil spirits or najar, the evil eye.

NAAL is a horseshoe often nailed to the outside of themaindoorofahouseortoshopfrontstoprotectthoseinside from evil spirits as it is believed to bring good luck.

HIFAJAT KE KHEELE are protective nails with Quranic verses inscribed on them. They are buried in fourdifferentcornersaroundthehousetoprotectagainstevil spirits and also attract wealth.

NIMBU AND MIRCHI consists of seven chillies symbolising the seven days of the week, strung together with a lemon and a small piece of coal by wire. A protective charm, it is tied to the outside of main doors of houses, shops and vehicles.

THE HANUMAN CHALISA is the narration of Hanuman’s great physical, mental and spiritual powers. Divided into 40 verses, each of them has the power to remove difficulties from the lives of those who recite them: singing the praises of Lord Hanuman helps overcome obstacles, reach goals, drive away evil spirits and usher in good health.

THE TAVEEJ consists of a little metal box containing a small, folded piece of paper with Quranic verses written on it. It comes in different shapes and sizes and is worn as a pendant or tied around the arm for protection from evil spirits, or for good luck.

HOLY WATER. Christians and non-Christians alike use holy water as protection from ghosts and evils of all kinds.

Available outside many churches, the water is also sprinkled in the air to purify a place during exorcisms.

THE BLACK DOLL is a fabric, stuffed doll usually tied to the outside of shops, houses and sometimes to vehicles to ward off the evil eye and bad luck.

*Latin for “go back,” what priests say during Catholic exorcisms.

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34 Ghosts for Hire

How increased Internet connectivity has brought about the emergence of India’s first wave of career ghostwriters. By Annalisa Merelli On a bright Sunday afternoon in late February, the exhibition hall of Delhi’s Pragati Maidan is busy and crowded. Milling about are people of all ages wearing anything from saris to business suits to jeans, all united by one common denominator: books. Love to read, love to write – the 20th Biennial New Delhi World Book Fair attracts thousands of visitors.

Among the book lovers, publishers, agents and curious visitors is Rahul Bhatnagar, in a black round neck sweater, trainers and baseball cap. A friendly man from Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, Bhatnagar is at the book fair to make business contacts and meet distributors as his first book, Journey to Genius, is out in March.

With a background in engineering, Bhatnagar has always been fascinated by what makes people successful.

This interest turned into a research project, and over a decade he collected and analysed data on the subject.

He then organised all his findings with the intent of publishing them, but what he ended up with wasn’t a book. It had the contents of a book, but not its form.

Bhatnagar was aware that his English writing skills weren’t strong enough, and that the data he’d carefully compiled needed more elements of storytelling to be interesting, and therefore useful.

So he looked for help. Through the online freelance marketplace Guru.com he found Radhika Sachdev, whose profile tagline reads, “I can power all your word dreams.”

He contacted her, and after deciding to hire her, he handed

over his research and a table of contents and let her work her writing magic.

Two months later, the book was ready to go into print.

Well edited and written in a voice Bhatnagar recognises as close to his own, his notes had become a narrative he was quite pleased with, although he would have preferred the final product to have had a few more dramatic touches. He blames the lack of coup de théâtre on the writer’s mindset.

“The problem with the writers is that they write so (sic) boring contents that you know, it’s very hard to read,” Bhatnagar says.

Sachdev wrote the book, but ask Bhatnagar whether he considers himself the writer, he doesn’t hesitate to answer that of course he does.

His reply is layered with stupor, as though he can’t see how it would be otherwi s e . To his mind, he is the author of the book as he came up with the idea and collected all the material for it.

In Bhatnagar’s book, Sachdev is credited as editor, but for most of her other assignments she gets a pay check, not an acknowledgment, for completing her work.

Sachdev is a ghostwriter, a “ghost” if you will, as these writers call themselves. She writes on behalf of her clients and remains an anonymous entity, contractually bound to not reveal her clients’ identity or anything that could link her to the project. And she doesn’t just

35 eight-year-old daughter and every day, when she sits at her computer to work, the flat becomes her office too.

As a single working mother, Sachdev needs flexibility in her work schedule. Ghostwriting, she says, has allowed her to become a “one-woman outfit” which in turn has enabled her to have full control over her timetable and better paid work hours. “I enjoy being my own mistress,” Sachdev says. “You know, this makes me an entrepreneur,” she says with great enthusiasm.

Sachdev secures her clients online, through US based platforms Guru.com and Elance.com which are Sachdev, 45, has been ghostwriting for about eight marketplaces for 350 000 and 1 300 000 freelancers reyears. She began moonlighting as a freelance writer to spectively, where she advertises herself, under the alias up her income as a reporter to support her family during of Write Solutions, as a “wordsmith.” The idea of writing a period of financial difficulty. She listed her services as a craft and not as a literary pursuit comes across online in 2007, reaching out mainly to interstrongly when speaking with Sachdev. Words national clients. Over time, ghostwriting like “inspiration,” “talent,” or even “creaprojects became the most prominent of tivity” are absent from the vocabulary her commissions and the good earnshe uses, indicating a mindset that’s ings coupled with the desire to stop immune to the more commonplace Ghostwriting, she says, has working for someone else motivated writers’ predicaments. For her, there’s allowed her to become a “oneher to become a full-time ghostwriter no search for the muse, no procrastiwoman outfit” which in turn has in 2010. nation, no last minute delivery. Her enabled her to have full control process is organised and controlled In India, where it has developed over her timetable and better to the point that it can be monitored paid work hours. thanks to the growing use of the Inlive by her clients who are often in the ternet, the ghostwriting industry is only US, Australia or Europe. When she’s about a decade old. With the increased working on a project obtained through web connectivity and Indian rates for Elance.com, she has to use a tracking program content ghostwritten in English remaining low that sends her client randomised screenshots of her enough to entice overseas clients – where the demand desktop; if the sent screenshot contains non-work related and better paid assignments have traditionally pages the hour is counted as idle time. come from – these factors have made being an indeA device that would scare most writers – who may pendent ghostwriter armed with vocabulary, an see satisfying a random curiosity on Wikipedia, stalking Internet connection, a word processor and online an old flame on Facebook or playing a round of Tetris or self-marketing skills, a viable business option.

Solitaire as ways to get the creative juices flowing – the tracker seems to pose no difficulty for Sachdev, who says Sachdev lives in Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi, on she would be in any case writing constantly for a client the ninth floor of an apartment building that brings to during work hours. mind the kind premium property one would receive a On Guru.com, the parameters of Sachdev’s expertise promotional SMS about. The elevator opens out onto and writing talent are translated into a series of numbers. an outdoor landing filled with plants, where with the For instance, potential clients are able to view her test strong wind and an impossibly blue sky as backdrop, it’s results for “U.S. word usage” (49 percent) and English hard not to feel a faint sense of vertigo. Behind the front vocabulary (34 percent for the UK test and 29 for the US door of Sachdev’s apartment lies a neat, modern, homely version) as well as her earnings. Since she started using space with simple wooden furniture and a few colourful Guru.com in September 2007 she has earned US$ 37 748 decorations. She lives there with her parents and her through the website.

Illustration by Reshi Dev

write books or speeches, as one might typically imagine, but manuals, essays, papers, and booklets of all kinds.

As a former journalist, Sachdev often takes on assignments that focus on similar topics to what she covered for the news, such as marketing, media and business.

Some of her projects are more unusual. Once she was commissioned to write a book for a foreign woman who claimed she could communicate with her dead son, and wanted to gain credibility as a “paranormal consultant.”

36 Sachdev is not interested in the potential limelight that comes with the recognition of being a writer.

Obscurity for her seems to simply be part of the job description, and one that’s not even difficult to accept. “It’s equally rewarding and satisfying to leave a client happy,” she says, explaining that the excitement of seeing her byline in print had worn off long ago, when she was working as a journalist. Oftentimes, she doesn’t even see the final product of her work when it’s printed, nor is she particularly curious about it.

“I see myself as a midwife. I have to deliver somebody’s baby,” she says. “[It’s] his or her personality that should shine through … I’m lending my words but I cannot let my personality seep through the work in those words.”

in the newspaper that … the Americans are outsourcing knowledge processing into India because it is expensive there,” he says with the unmistakable zeal of a businessman talking about their successful idea.

“Outsourcing knowledge” evokes the idea of call centres, and indeed Ghosh’s enterprise shares a few analogies with them. While call centres offer spoken English at cheap prices, Ghosh’s agency plugs written English at low rates. If a call centre measures its productivity in the number of calls per day, Writer4me does so in the quantity of pages – up to six in a ten hour working day. And just as phone operators at call centres undergo accent training, Ghosh’s ghostwriters learn how to write like an American. “The Indian style of writing and the American style of writing are very different so in the first two weeks we give them a lot of training to adapt to the American style,” Ghosh says.

While Sachdev maintains her one woman enterprise, others, such as 38-year-old Pinaki Ghosh, have taken this business Words like “inspiration,” idea to a bigger platform. In 2005 “talent,” or even “creativity” Ghosh founded the ghostwriting are absent from the vocabulary agency Writer4me in the literary hub she uses, indicating a mindset of Kolkata. He has given his agency’s that’s immune to the more website the slogan “world’s most popucommonplace writers’ lar ghost writer service” which is based predicaments. on the heavy web traffic they get.

In early 2004, Ghosh was teaching English, and also juggling various freelance writing assignments, including writing copy for customised greeting cards, when he was approached by a British-Indian leadership trainer who asked him to ghostwrite his book. A month later, his first assignment as a ghost was complete, and he was paid US$ 500 for the job. He then listed his services “for a humble two dollars per page” on Elance.com.

As he kept writing, he became faster at it, the volume of work grew and thanks to the reputation he was building so did his rates, going up to US$ 25, even 30, a page.

By the end of the year he’d amassed enough work to scale up and start a company. Today, Writer4me employs 12 to 15 full-time writers in the company’s office and 60 freelancers, who altogether churn out 35 to 40 projects and books a month; about 1 400 completed assignments since the agency opened.

“It’s the financial thing that gave me the main inspiration to start this,” Ghosh says. “I had been reading

Despite declaring his passion for writing – “I will write till my last breath,” he says – while speaking about his business Ghosh doesn’t waste a second to promote its convenience, saying the reason for its success is its competitive rates. If Sachdev’s work is priced at about half the standard US price, Writer4me’s rates go down until a fifth, and the emphasis placed on budget output is evident on the landing page of the agency’s website, which looks similar to that of a webhost promoting deals on web space. In Ghosh’s bu si ness language, written words become numbers, prices, pages, lengths.

Because of its size, Ghosh says the agency can accommodate most clients’ needs, no matter how specific. But he draws the line at writing pornography and people’s theses. “We get a lot of offers to write theses but we do not write them because we say that a thesis should be written by the person itself,” he says.

Writer4me’s young employees – the average age is 30 – are former journalists or writing professionals who have decided to ghostwrite for something other than the need for flexible schedules or entrepreneurship – they do it for the money. His ghostwriters, explains Ghosh, “are coming with the mindset that ‘I’ve come here to earn money and nothing else.’ ”

37 For some of them, however, not being credited for their work is disheartening. “Sometime[s] it’s tough,” says one employee who writes under the pen name “Zak.” He says: “You give everything to create the characters … you create their entire life and at the end of it you have to let go of it. It feels like you’re giving up your own child.”

This feeling must be common among Ghosh’s employees if he says he provides “counselling” to new recruits to ensure “they understand that less than one percent of people can earn from writing.” Ghosh says: “A lot of people are writing but most of them are not earning anything.” He also encourages his employees to publish their own work – he has set up a small publishing house for this in what looks like an attempt to satiate their need for fame.

That more substantial works are commissioned to a reputed ghostwriter from outside also indicates that while homegrown talent might have the expertise, reputation also figures heavily into the equation. Saugata Mukherjee, a publisher with Pan Macmillan India, says although he’s heard of agencies such as Writer4me, he’d be hesitant about commissioning a writing project to them. “Most publishers in India would shy away from such an organisation,” he says.

Indeed, the young, business-led ghostwriting industry in India is met with some disdain within more established publishing circles. When asked to comment on it, several published authors asked not to be even mentioned in this context, and editors and publishers of both large and smaller publishing houses in India and abroad declined to comment as well. “There is some Since the time they started, Sachdev and stigma attached to it. They [people in the Ghosh have written primarily for interpublishing industry] don’t want to asnational clients, often professionals sociate themselves with ghostwriters He also encourages his such as doctors and dentists, looking or ghostwriting because they feel it’s employees to publish their for public validation (and higher damaging their credibility,” Mukherown work – he has set up a rates to charge) by publishing a book. jee says. small publishing house for this However, in the last year, both have in what looks like an attempt to That may explain why, for some seen growth in the local market, with satiate their need for fame. ghostwriters who aspire to become entrepreneurs and company heads recognised writers, being linked to contacting them mostly to have their ghostwriting is seen as problematic. autobiographies and professional stories Zak, for instance, who is working on his written. It’s a function of the economy: the autobiography and wants to publish under more successful businesses, the more successful his own name, didn’t want to disclose his real businessmen who want to publish books with their identity when interviewed for this story. “I have a very stories, even though they don’t have the time or the illustrious profile [as an entrepreneur] which is extremely skills to write them. visible on the Internet,” he claims. “I don’t want that to But successful, prominent Indians don’t stop at the get affected from a story that says I’m a full-time ghostlocal options when it comes to finding a writer for writer,” says Zak, believing that, in his case, it’s better to their books. keep the man separate from the ghost.

“A lot of my clients are from places like India or Africa or the Middle East, where they speak English well enough to talk to a ghostwriter but not enough to write a book,” says Andrew Crofts, who is one of Britain’s best known ghostwriters and is considered an authority on the profession.

Crofts has been ghostwriting books, especially people’s autobiographies, how-to books and works of fiction for the past 25 years. He is often approached by high profile clients and is currently working on a book for the Indian Premier League’s founder Lalit Modi.

Home Alone An interpretation of the clichĂŠd stereotype of the beautiful woman who is haunted, or hunted, in thriller and horror fiction, showcasing pieces from a selection of Indian fashion designers.

Photographs by Bharat Sikka

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Styled by Ameet Sikka Production: Manoj Adhikari Hair and makeup: Ratul Boro Model: Kanika Dev Photography assistant: Vikas Maurya Plate 1 Cotton shirt by Freefalling Design Studio Plate 2 Cotton skirt and top by Freefalling Design Studio Plate 3 Vintage leopard print tie up blouse from Love Birds Plate 4 Draped shirt dress by Nandita Basu Plate 5 Cotton appliquĂŠ top and skirt by Nandita Basu Plate 6 Knit dress and felt embroidered cape by Namrata Joshipura Plate 7 Embroidered long knit jacket by Namrata Joshipura Plate 8 Silk organza dress with feathers by Varun Sardana

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46 THE END IS NIGH

Why we’re obsessed with the end of the world and a trip back in time to 1999 when a little village in Kerala found itself caught up in a panic about the apocalypse.

An hour away from Thrissur, in central Kerala, lies a little town that, to use a popular Indian usage, I call “my native place.” The town of Pavaratty is best known for the massive warehouse-like shrine of St. Joseph, a bustling local pilgrimage centre. The shrine looms over the town with a population of about 11 000, emotionally, geographically and architecturally. Distances are measured from the shrine. Events are remembered in reference to the shrine’s calendar of feasts and festivals. In Pavaratty the shrine is pole star, magnetic north, prime meridian and equator all rolled into one. This pivotal presence of the shrine imparts a certain intensity to the religion of the local Christians.

It is not a hostile intensity – the kind that leads to xenophobia or agitation. Quite the opposite. It is the benign intensity of Star Trek or Star Wars fans who, while acknowledging the unassailable superiority of their own beliefs, are quite happy to play along with your own under-educated biases. So while my grandfather had no doubt that Christians were God’s chosen people, he still

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believed that the great Hindu temple at Guruvayoor, 30 minutes away, was a source of divinity and power.

There is also a thick syncretic vein that runs through the Christianity of the region. Over the centuries, customs and rituals have changed hands between religions more times than many like to admit. For instance, each year before the shrine’s major annual feast on the third Sunday after Easter, a flag is hoisted up the pole in front of the church. The flagpole lines up almost exactly with the crucifix above the altar inside. But is slightly shifted to one side, out of deference to the deity.

Temples in the region do the exact same thing before their festivals. Flags are hoisted on flagpoles placed in the temple courtyard that line up almost exactly with the idol in the sanctum sanctorum, but not quite. Out of deference.

And all this intensity, devotion and syncretism came together in the winter of 1999 when we began to prepare for the impending end. In the last few months of that year there was a kind of apocalyptic frenzy among some of the

47 terribly Catholic, god-fearing, and all round well-meaning inhabitants of Pavaratty.

Mankind has been obsessed with the end since the very beginning. Every culture and religion in every corner of the world has its own version of the end of days. It is as if no religion is complete without a concept of genesis and a concept of armageddon. And every now and then this concept of armageddon has a knack of driving believers into a frenzy.

In Pavaratty, the frenzy came at the end of several years of anticipation and anxiety. At some point in the run up to the end of the last millennium many of my relatives – not just senile granduncles, grandaunts and grandparents, but also an alarming number of young and middle-aged folk – came to the conclusion that the world would come to an end in the year 2000. Every semi-devout Catholic I knew began to talk about the year 2000 with some apprehension.

I recall asking many of them at the time why they thought so. What religious or scientific proof did they have for these convictions? While the Bible itself warns of the impending apocalypse in spectacular terms that are begging to be made into a summer blockbuster, there is nothing remotely like an approximate date mentioned in the holy book. All it tells us is that: 1.

The apocalypse is imminent;

2.

The apocalypse will come without warning;

3.

The apocalypse will be spectacular;

4.

If you aren’t in God’s good books you’re going to get your ass kicked;

5.

Most people will get their ass kicked.

No one could tell me the origin of the rumour. But then the Christian faith has always had a thing for millennia. Much of this obsession is thanks to Chapter 20 in the Book of Revelation that talks of a reign of Christ for 1000 years after which Satan would be “loosed out of his prison.” There is plenty of literature, most of it hotly disputed, according to which much of Christian Europe was caught in a great apocalyptic panic in 999 AD, ahead of this satanic turn of events.

The verses from Revelation are hardly convincing by themselves. But by late 1999 I remember being subject to all kinds of dubious documentaries on things like the

prophecies of Nostradamus that seemed to vouch for impending doom. The Y2K crisis merely added fuel to the speculative fire. My grandmother made it a point to tell every visiting NRI Malayali that they should avoid flying on the night of the 31st of December. “The computers will not work and the planes will crash,” she would say, trying to sound casual but failing.

They saw proof everywhere. “Look at that statue of Jesus,” an older cousin told me once when we went to St. Antony’s Shrine at Chettikad near Ernakulam in the south of Kerala. The shrine is very popular with ill pilgrims. One of the highlights of a trip there was browsing through hundreds of letters from pilgrims framed and hung from tubular metal racks. Many of these letters had explicit photographs of scars, wounds and surgeries.

They were often quite morbid.

The freshly painted statue my cousin pointed to was of a shimmering Caucasian Christ with a long but not emaciated face framed with flowing chestnut hair. The statue had its right hand up in a sign of blessing, the palm facing outwards. The first and middle fingers roughly

While the Bible itself warns of the impending apocalypse in spectacular terms that are begging to be made into a summer blockbuster, there is nothing remotely like an approximate date mentioned in the holy book.

48 pointed vertically upwards, the other fingers gently curved inwards into the palm.

elevated to heaven, while on the bottom right damned souls are being pushed down into hell.

“What do you think the statue is saying with those two fingers?” my cousin asked before answering with a whisper: “Two thousand.” Did a shiver go down my spine?

I don’t remember. But it probably did.

When I went to the Sistine Chapel last winter, the painting left me with a disproportionate sense of dread.

Given that the painting is about good and bad souls being judged, one expects to experience reasonably equal feelings of good and bad. But this is not so. Apocalyptic Christian art like The Last Judgement, almost always draws you towards hell and the damned. You linger on the demons and the pitchforks and the poor sinning wretches getting their guts ripped out.

One central aspect of the Christian version of the end of days is that it is going to be horrible for almost everybody. The paintings and scriptures all talk of sound and fury and torture.

Michelangelo Buonarotti’s The Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel in Rome is a case in point. While Michelangelo’s spectacular ceiling is what draws tourists to the Chapel by the coach-loads, The Last Judgement on the wall behind the altar is no less a masterpiece. The fresco is a spectacular, massive and intense piece of art.

Squint your eyes a little and it looks remarkably like a “Where’s Wally?” painting for the Renaissance. In the centre is the Christ and around him unfolds the agony and ecstasy of the last judgement, a critical phase of the Christian faith’s apocalypse. On the bottom left good souls are being summoned from their graves and being

Why is this so?

Perhaps it is because most of us are so well aware of our own duplicities, follies and pretences. We know, the religious amongst us in any case, that barring some very liberal judging by the almighty, or a last minute intervention by a cracking defence lawyer-cum-saint of some kind, our destinies are infernal.

Perhaps it is because human beings, then during the Renaissance and now during the Justin Bieber phase of our cultural history, are fascinated by the macabre.

Compared to the slash and gore of hell, heaven’s ecstasy, harmony, milk, honey and incessant singing of god’s

“What do you think the statue is saying with those two fingers?” my cousin asked before answering with a whisper: “Two thousand.”

49 praise seems terribly lame. Indeed I wonder if one of the rewards awaiting the virtuous in heaven is a 24-hour video feed from hell.

But that is the entire point of the apocalypse in Western religion. To scare the sin-prone mortal onto the path of righteousness by convincing him that while his evil ways may yield rich rewards in this life, the terrible agonies of the final judgement are inevitable. So don’t worry if you keep seeing good things happening to bad people and vice versa; God won’t forget.

In Eastern eschatology, there is a greater sense of the fact that things will get a lot worse before they get better.

Before they get worse. And this cycle of life will restart all over again. In contrast to the Christian tradition, which promises one cataclysmic end followed by one new beginning and then stasis, the Hindu and Buddhist concept of the end of days is all about cycles of birth, death and regeneration. This world will end. And the one after it. And the one after that. There is little you can do but be good and enjoy the ride. Things, in a sense, are less climactic here in the East.

Perhaps this is why, while many Indians say that we are living in the Kalyug, or the last period of chaos before the end of this world, you don’t see this fervour leading to doomsday cults. In the East the doomsday is seen less as an examination and more as a rite of passage. And surely there is always a pooja you can do, or a sacrifice you can make, or a pilgrimage you can complete that secures your salvation.

And because everything is cyclical, the East always gives you a second chance. This, I think, has a profound impact on the way even Christians like my grandmother approached the “end”. For instance, the Western idea of the “Rapture” has God spiriting away all the good people, leaving the naughty ones to be tormented by Satan.

The version of the apocalypse we prepared for in Pavaratty in 1999 was entirely different. Here we would be left alone, while around us sinners would get obliterated.

Afterwards the few good people left would be allowed to carry on as before, albeit in a world free of evil.

The challenge, then, for people like my grandmother, was to figure out how to not get caught in the crossfire.

There was no doubt in her mind that her family was virtuous. But was there a way to ensure that when the apocalypse unravelled in 2000, we would be safely on the

side of the good? Were there any strings we could pull?

The Hindus have their poojas and mantras.

What do good Christians have?

If only there were an instruction manual to lasting the apocalypse.

There was, of course.

At some point in early December 1999, merely weeks away from the “end,” someone went to all the homes in our neighbourhood and distributed a free instruction manual for lasting through the apocalypse. I remember this document being a small piece of teal coloured card, the size of an open passport, that had been cyclostyled with black ink on both sides.

The little teal guide to the apocalypse made for ominous reading. The most important thing to do, it said, was to stay indoors and keep all windows and doors shut at all times. On no account were true believers to step outside. Even, the guide said, if we heard our neighbours or friends or even our own family being tormented outside by the forces of good or evil. They had spent their lives in sin. Now it was time for them to suffer.

Instead we were supposed to spend the whole time in prayer. Outside, the manual said with unflinching authority, there would be terrible noise and light. Thunder and lightening would come and go in sudden waves.

Balls of fire would fall from the skies. And most of all there would be the incessant sound of wind. Meanwhile,

50

The little teal guide to the apocalypse made for ominous reading. The most important thing to do, it said, was to stay indoors and keep all windows and doors shut at all times.

heavenly marauders would chase down the sinners and infidels and destroy them. All in all, it would sound like the last 20 minutes of a Transformers movie. But with less agony for everyone involved.

The manual was instantly incorporated into the family prayer session each evening. My grandmother carefully kept it beneath the coffee table in the living room, along with all the other hymn and prayer books.

Even my usually reasonable cousins began to prepare for the end. “Don’t laugh about this Sidin,” they would say, “what if the Y2K bug made a plane fall down on top of the nuclear reactor in Chennai and it exploded and killed everybody?”

“So are you sure the world will end in 2000?” I asked my grandmother and an aunt. They had both taken to reading the “apocalypse manual” on a daily basis. “I see from

your nodding heads that you are tentatively certain. Then in that case do I have to give all these exams?”

It wasn’t a particularly original quip, I admit. But the response – they told me to go study – shows that by the 20th century people had become more... rational about their approach to doomsday predictions.

For a country that still takes astrology, numerology and other pseudo-sciences fairly seriously, India also harbours an ability to laugh at charlatans. Television astrologers and fortune-tellers routinely make fools of themselves predicting celebrity pregnancies or cricket tournaments. It is a calculated risk for these frauds. If their predictions come true they can leverage that into more income and perhaps even a small cult. Fail miserably and they know that after the immediate humiliation the public will forgive and forget quickly. The dichotomy of living in a country where almost nothing real works

51 and everything unreal is supreme is that people believe in everything, but trust nothing.

This is why, while praying every evening in preparation for the end, my grandmother and the rest of my family carried on living as usual. They continued to buy shares, enrol in colleges, build homes and make travel plans as if this prediction wouldn’t come true. Which was just as well. Because none of them do.

In 2011 Harold Camping, a Christian radio broadcaster from Colorado in the United States was the butt of worldwide belly laughs when he predicted that the “Rapture” would take place on May 21 and the world would end on October 21. Both these events, as far as we know, have not taken place. However hundreds of Camping’s followers, many of whom sold their homes and gave up their jobs, did experience their own private apocalypse of sorts.

the bottom of the stack of daily prayer books, then into the stack of prayer books for special occasions, before disappearing altogether.

I myself spent New Year’s Eve lumbering around a bonfire outside a seedy youth hostel in Kodaikanal, eating chilli beef out of a plastic bag and drinking vodka out of a plastic bathroom mug. Or vice versa.

As a sinner of reasonable frequency and a victim of my fair share of perverse tastes, I will not be disappointed at all when the Mayan prophecy will also be proved false in due course of time.

Or will it be? Who knows? At least I recall most of an instruction manual to deal with the apocalypse.

What about you?

In October, after the end had not materialised, a disappointed Camping reportedly told a reporter that “God has not given anyone the power to know exactly when the Rapture would come.”

The latest doomsday prediction of choice, and one no less ludicrous than previous ones, is the Mayan prophecy. This prediction, that the end will unfold on December 21 this year, is based on nothing more profound than the fact that the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar purportedly ends on this day. A 5 125 year-long cycle, or b’ak’tun, ends this year and the Mayans, it is said, believed great transformations would take place after this.

Unfortunately my grandmother passed away a few years ago, and was robbed of the opportunity to worry about the Mayan prediction. It’s likely she would have come across it on television, done some background reading of her own, before augmenting her daily routine with some anti-Mayan prayer of some sort. She would have enjoyed the fracas tremendously.

The good thing about an apocalypse prediction that goes bad is exactly that. Yay! Nothing ended! Nobody died!

I suppose my grandmother took to the morning of the 1st of January, 2000 remarkably well. In much the same way that she would be utterly convinced of a daily newspaper horoscope one morning, but seem unfazed the next when she did not “make a large sum of money overnight.” The teal guide slowly got relegated first to

But the response – they told me to go study – shows that by the 20th century people had become more... rational about their approach to doomsday predictions.

52 RAMSAY INTERNATIONAL With the slick horror films of today’s Hindi cinema, we meet the original kings of horror who created an empire – and a cult following – in the 1980s with their low budget productions packed with sleaze, gore and terrifying creatures.

While shooting their first horror film, the Ramsay Brothers accidentally dug up a body. “Half a body,” says Tulsi Ramsay. It was October 1971. They were filming, appropriately, for Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche (Two feet beneath the ground), India’s first zombie movie, at a graveyard near Mahabaleshwar in Maharashtra. “People working there had shown us where to dig and said: ‘nothing will happen here,’ ” Tulsi recalls.

But something did – angry villagers who lived nearby surrounded the crew. They managed to pacify the villagers, and then they reburied the body and, as a gesture of atonement, lit an earthen lamp where it lay.

Tulsi, who was co-directing the film with his brother Shyam, asked the crew to pack up. It was 2.30 am when he started walking back to his guesthouse alone, about a kilometre away, to clear his head.

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“I’d barely left the graveyard when leaves on a tree next to me started rustling: ShhShhShh.” His eyes light up when he tells a scary story. He punctuates sentences with sound effects.

We’re sharing a sprawling sofa on the 15th floor of a posh Lokhandwala high rise. There’s an overarching view of suburban Mumbai beyond. Tulsi’s grandchildren run around the flat, peeking in occasionally to listen to their grandfather. Above us, a slow ceiling fan casts shadows on Tulsi, his faded blue-striped collar t-shirt and his palm that he’s shaking to the tune of those leaves.

“I heard heavy breathing and footsteps: Cheu, Cheu, Cheu,” Tulsi continues. “I thought it was some aatmavaatma (a spirit) from the graveyard.” He prayed and ran to his guesthouse. When he arrived, the heavy breathing had stopped. “It was me,” he says. So were the footsteps. As he then realised: “The soles of my chappals had come loose.”

Tulsi, 67, has created something of a life around it as a director of 29 horror movies, but this is the closest he has come to a paranormal experience.

At a time when the average Hindi film took about a year and 50 lakhs to complete, Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche was shot in 40 days on a budget of Rs 3.5 lakhs.

Here’s how it was done: seven brothers boarded buses with small-time actors, a sparse film crew, their wives and their mother and father and drove to a government guesthouse in Mahabaleshwar that cost Rs 12 a room – they took eight rooms. They didn’t spend on sets because they shot on location. They didn’t spend on costumes because these were picked out of actors’ wardrobes. The cameras were all borrowed.

The eldest brother Kumar wrote the script. Tulsi and Shyam directed (most Ramsay films bear the directorial credit “Tulsi-Shyam”). Kiran worked on sound. Gangu was the cinematographer. Keshu assisted him and handled production too. Arjun helped with production, but mainly worked on the edits. Their mother Kishni and her daughters-in-law cooked and helped with makeup.

“We would sleep for four hours a day and shoot for eighteen,” Tulsi says. When it was complete, they publicised the movie on radio, mostly with faux-scary voice ads.

Film stills and posters courtesy of Deepak Ramsay. On this page and facing page, stills from Mahakaal (The Monster), 1993, which is based on the Hollywood production Nightmare on Elm Street.

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54 The film ran to full houses in the first week after its release. It made Rs 45 lakhs.

The brothers repeated this model – Tulsi calls it “a picnic,” their father called it “tiffin box productions” – to make 35 more movies, which epitomise the lower depths of 1980s Bollywood sleaze and gore, but which have secured their place in The brothers reHindi cinema’s hall of fame as peated this model the pioneers of horror. The – Tulsi calls it “a “Ramsay Brothers,” as they are called, have in these films, and picnic,” their father called it “tiffin box in India’s first horror show on productions” television, featured ghosts, ghouls, monsters, zombies, witches, vampires and every conceivable version of things that go bump in the night. Mostly, they’ve been the first to do so.

And mostly, the Ramsay movies were hits. Some, like Purana Mandir (1984), were ranked among the biggest moneymakers of the year. Tulsi remembers bigger film families, like the Kapoors, viewing their rise in the 1980s with unbridled curiosity: “They would keep laughing at us and wonder what we brothers were doing. But they

would watch our movies.” While few mainstream filmmakers followed the Ramsays’ lead, the popularity of their films spawned a sea of C and D grade filmmakers who made cheaper, crasser horrors, with practically no plot or production value, that could possibly be ranked among the worst films in cinematic history.

In the 1990s the Ramsays moved to the small screen, finding success with the Zee Horror Show that ran for eight years. In the 2000s, the horrorscape was taken over by slicker filmmakers like Ram Gopal Verma and Vikram Bhatt. The brothers are mostly semi-retired, and rarely work together anymore. Shyam Ramsay has directed three films on his own in the last decade. And Tulsi has produced a horror movie directed by his son Deepak, 38. They weren’t anywhere near as successful as the Ramsay releases of the 1980s. Elsewhere, these earlier films have been resurrected. Deepak has sold some film rights to YouTube where they register lakhs of views each, and to Canadian DVD brand Mondo Macabro, featuring “the wild side of world cinema.” Four decades after they started making movies, the Ramsay Brothers are being re-received as camp.

Tulsi Ramsay in his plush apartment in Lokhandwala, Mumbai.

55 Ramsay House, at Lamington Road, Mumbai, is where Deepak says “it all began.” The building is a ghost of its former self. A siris tree twice its size, spreads its branches out across the dilapidated three storied structure, covering faded French windows and a sloping tin roof that seems about to cave in. Among all the newer buildings, it looks out of place, as though belonging in a small town rather t ha n a metropolis.

The shutters are down on the ground floor office that’s been closed for 18 years. The props and costumes of 36 films have been locked away in a godown at Malad. On the office façade are large black sign boards that say in peeling red and white letters: “Ramsays” and “Ramsay Films” in English and Hindi.

Fatehcha nd U Ram say, a Sind hi, had planted that tree when he moved here from Karachi after the partition in 1947, with his wife, two daughters and four sons; the three other sons were born in India. A radio

engineer, the foreigners he dealt with anglicised his s u r n a m e f r o m R a m s i n g h t o R a m s ay. With his electronics company doing badly, he decided to try his hand at the movie business. He co-produced Shaheed-EAzam Bhagat Singh, India’s first film on the martyr, in 1954. It flopped.

His second film in 1963, for which his older sons were enlisted, was a historical epic called Rustom Sohrab. It did well, and the Ramsays decided they were in show business for good.

India was a strictly socialist state back then and to be part of a film team one had to belong to a film workers union. So over the course of the two films, F U Ramsay got his sons union cards according to what he felt each had a knack for. Gangu, for instance, was a good photographer – so he would assist a cinematographer, Kiran liked music – so sound assistant, and Kumar as the most educated – “a double graduate” says Tulsi – was tasked with screenwriting. The Ramsay family unit became the Ramsay film unit.

Arjun Ramsay surveys the ground floor office in Ramsay House. The office has been closed for about 18 years.

56 F U Ramsay’s next film, seven years later, was Ek Nanhi Munni Ladki Thi, a family saga starring Prithviraj Kapoor. It bombed at the box office.

Tulsi and Shyam visited theatres to figure out why.

They saw audiences filling otherwise empty seats, even bribing ushers with a fraction of the ticket price to catch a ten minute sequence where the same Prithviraj “Seven of us would share Kapoor steals a valuable two rooms on the first artifact from a museum. floor of Ramsay House Only, Kapoor, at six feet in those days. After work two, wears a hideous mask, we would keep planning, armour, black boots and discussing scenes, talka long black cape – “just ing business, telling each like Dracula,” Tulsi says. other ghost stories.”

When the police shoot him the bullets bounce off. “Thayk, Thayk,” demonstrates Tulsi. “He’s like a ghost. A monster.”

It was evident what audiences wanted. They wanted that jolt of horror. And the brothers, as fans of this genre, particularly of the British “Hammer Horror” films such as Dracula and The Curse Of Frankenstein, set about

convincing their father to let them make a horror film that they would write, direct, shoot and make almost entirely among themselves. A three month long workshop followed, with film books (the brothers swear by The 5 Cs Of Cinematography by Joseph V Mascelli), on a houseboat in Srinagar. Then a Sindhi “workshop film” called Nakuli Shaan shot mostly within a Chowpatty flat.

Then Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche. After the success of the zombie film, their father “let us brothers run the show,” Tulsi says.

“Seven of us would share two rooms on the first floor of Ramsay House in those days. After work we would keep planning, discussing scenes, talking business, telling each other ghost stories.” He lays a bet: who can come up with more ghost stories by the time a cup of tea is over?

He claims he can do five.

When I visit Ramsay House paints peels off a narrow concrete flight of stairs leading up to the first floor. There’s no doorbell or knocker, so I slam the door latch. After ten minutes, Arjun Ramsay opens the door with tussled grey hair fringing an otherwise bald pate, a benign smile

THE EXTERIOR OF RAMSAY HOUSE and the stairs leading up to the first floor.

57 and a crumpled shirt. Arjun, 64, is the only brother who stays at the house now. He’s moved to the second floor.

He calls the ground floor office a “bhoot bangla (haunted house)” because it’s been shut so long.

His craziest memories are in that office. He recalls how the brothers dealt with a film distributor, who was cynical about the success of their second production, Darwaza — India’s first “creature horror,” a sub-genre of film featuring a terrorising supernatural monster. Tulsi had to convince the distributor that it would work in order for him to fund the filming. They’d already invested heavily by spending Rs 72 000 on the monster’s costume and makeup, designed by legendary British makeup artist Christopher Tucker, and inspired by the hunchback of Notre Dame.

On the day the distributor came for the meeting Arjun wore the costume and waited in a room while Tulsi and the distributor negotiated next door. In between arguments, they heard monstrous grunts and

the clanging of chains. Then Arjun, with a horribly disfigured face, protruding teeth, hairy arms and legs, giant talons and dragging chains that seemed to have just been snapped, rushed into the room, roaring at t he distributor. “Tulsi had said: just attack him,” he remembers, laughing. The distributor shrieked, then fell to the floor and, as Arjun puts it: “his heart had nearly stopped beating.”

A huge crowd gathered outside the office to watch. “I knew then that I had a star in that monster,” Tulsi says. “I had Rajesh Khanna, I had Shah Rukh Khan.”

They got the funds and made back much more, when Darwaza was released in 1978.

Tulsi advertised it on the radio offering Rs 1 000 to anyone who would watch it alone.

Purana Mandir was the next creature horror to rock the box office, released alongside the big-budget film Lawaris, starring Bollywood’s favourite tall man Amitabh Bachchan. It beat its collections to become the second biggest hit of 1984. Made for about Rs 2.5 lakhs, Purana Mandir grossed about Rs 2.5 crores.

A WEDDING PHOTOGRAPH of Tulsi Ramsay’s wife lies in the abandoned ground floor office.

58 This time the Ramsays had a different star, their own tall man: Anirudh (screen name: Ajay) Agarwal, a six feet seven inch tall civil engineer who played Saamri, a super demon who rapes and disembowels newly wed brides and mutilates and eats children and corpses.

The Ramsay Brothers’ films comprised mostly newcomers a nd character actors, They got the funds and became a launching pad and made back much for some (F U Ramsay had more, when Darwaza cast Shatrugan Sinha, when was released in 1978. he hadn’t done any films yet, Tulsi advertised it on in Ek Nanhi Munni Ladki the radio offering Rs Thi; the brothers cast Shakti 1 000 to anyone who Kapoor in Darwaza). The would watch it alone.

Ramsays had t heir ow n, unique criteria for what they perceived as promising talent. They rarely enlisted stars, and in part because of their tawdriness, the Ramsay films were not perceived as the kind where an actor would get a big break. Few from their large band of actors really made it to Bollywood’s A set.

Hemant Birje, who was in many Ramsay films after launching his career with the B-movie Adventures Of Tarzan, refuses an interview. Instead he sends this cryptic SMS: “Bcoz ramsay film i loss my cariyr.” Aarti Gupta, now Aarti Surendranath, an ad film producer and Mumbai socialite, was the Ramsays’ “scream queen.” She recalls endless jibes about her being a “Ramsay horror actress” from those in her circle, but laughs them off.

“The Ramsays were like family to me,” she says.

What made them consistently successful during the course of the 1980s, Pritish Nandy, a film producer and former film critic says, was their propensity to produce films in quick succession, making their presence equally dominant compared with big budget productions. “You could call the Ramsays tacky, or any number of things,” Nandy says. “But the regularity and consistency with which they made these movies made them a brand. And they had a serious connect with the audience.”

Most of the Ramsay following came from small cities and towns, where the films ran – some continue to do so – for years. And many of the films were set in small towns with haunted havelis (mansions). This is one of the

A SMALL WITCH DOLL which normally hangs on Arjun Ramsay’s bedroom wall lies on his bed. Arjun is the only brother that lives in Ramsay House now.

59 reasons why Shyam, 60, often called called the creative head of the brothers, feels their target audience relished their movies. “[They] could relate more to our films because of these locations contrary to an urban setup. Also the fear element can easily be accomplished in far off remote corners rather than cities,” Shyam says.

The Ramsay movies mirrored beliefs prevalent in rural India, such as a chudail (witch) whose feet do a 180 degree turn before she reveals herself or a medieval curse that holds true in present day. The Censor Board would order a disclaimer preceding some films to rubbish any superstition they might encourage.

The Ramsays mixed and matched from horror movies from around the world. Their movies are full of influences for a horror aficionado to spot. Gothic horror sequences with an overdose of smoke and diffused blue light.

Stuffed animals from Alfred Hitchcock and Hammer movies. The use of primary colour filters from Italian

horror maker Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath and Blood And Black Lace. Chase sequences from American slasher films like Black Christmas (Bob Clark) and Friday The 13th (Sean S Cunningham). And an obsession with Bram Stoker so that coffins house creatures of every faith, even those vanquished by an Om sign or Shiva’s trident. The brothers’ films rarely matched these movies in their execution, but the lodestone of Ramsay horror, the gore – rolling heads, blood baths and ghastly faces – often helped mask the lack of technical expertise or inability to sustain a mood.

Arjun credits Shyam for devising most of the horror sequences and Tulsi with adding the Bollywood masala, a formulaic medley of slapstick comedy, sex, song and dance, action and melodrama. According to Nandy, this mix made the movies more “comic book horror – not so much the horror that would scare you, as horror you would enjoy.” And when a film didn’t work, Tulsi remembers his father criticising them:

A DECREPIT ROOM on the ground floor of the brothers’ house where the Ramsay film enterprise was based.

60 “You should have put more masala,” he would say. “I didn’t get any jhatkas (shocks).”

There were unrelated subplots where martial arts exponents showed off their skills or ones for comic relief, for instance, a parody of Bollywood blockbuster Sholay in Purana Mandir. The humour was often crass and in the same film Jagdeep accuses Lalita Pawar – an actress with an eye defect – of winking at him. And for music, the likes of Kishore Kumar, Asha Bhonsale and, most often, 1980s disco king Bappi Lahiri were roped in for some films.

Then there was the sex. “You can’t deny that sex sells,” Shyam says. “Of course, if shot aesthetically.”

There are endless camera zoom-ins on parts of the female anatomy for so long that, as reviewer David Austin writes: “you’d think you’re watching a Japanese game show.” Lewd jokes abound. Romance is used as garb for injecting vulgar innuendo.

This time the Ramsays But even with their A rating the Ramsays fought had a different star, their own tall man: Anirudh shy of crossing over into porn. There’s no kissing or (screen name: Ajay) Agarovert nudity. Aarti Gupta wal, a six feet seven inch tall civil engineer who is the centrepiece of a played Saamri, a super shower scene in Purana Mandir where her shower demon who rapes and disembowels newly wed sprays blood instead of brides and mutilates and water, and eyes shut, eats children and corpses. she lathers herself. Yet a modicum of modesty, so characteristic of 1980s Bollywood, is ensured in that she is, inexplicably, wearing a bathing suit.

“We work around a well-balanced script to offer a completely entertaining package,” says Shyam. “Script and content are most important.” Predictably, at the heart of most Ramsay scripts is the idea of family. The crux of a classic Ramsay horror plot is that a demon or witch doesn’t have anything against the protagonist, but a score to settle with their dead ancestor. And the climax of a Ramsay horror is nearly always preceded by melodrama: a father giving up his life for his daughter, a man for his best friend. Tulsi believes this sentimentality distinguishes Indian horror from that elsewhere in the world. “In the foreign movies you don’t have people sacrificing their lives for one another so readily,” he says.

When the horror arrives “everyone is running alone.”

By the late 1980s things were beginning to slow down on the big screen for the brothers. Keshu, who passed away a year and a half ago, branched off around that time to make action blockbusters. Kiran joined him. All the brothers, except Arjun, had produced or directed their own horror films under the Ramsay Brothers banner.

But the last big Ramsay hit – Bandh Darwaza, with Ajay Agarwal playing a burly vampire – was in 1990.

“I don’t think the Ramsays not making any more movies was a matter of changing tastes or a decline in audience,” says Khalid Mohamed, a film critic and director who knew the family. “I think it was because the brothers didn’t work together anymore.”

In the early 1990s Tulsi and Shyam tried their hand at other genres like action movies and also a children’s adventure movie featuring the Yeti, called The Magnificent Guardian.

“In the 1990s we diverted towards the small screen as it has a huge audience,” Shyam says. “We made over 700 episodes of The Zee Horror Show. The Ramsays became a household name with this show.” Every brother, other than Keshu, was involved and Tulsi’s son Deepak directed 200 episodes.

Later renamed Anhonee, it ran for eight years. The show cut out the gore and sex but had its fair share of hooting owls, creaking doors, screaming dogs, blood, a black cat driving a car and a woman’s head cackling on a plate. All the ghost stories the Ramsays had filed away came in handy. “Once my servant from Bihar told me about very interesting ghosts in his village,” Tulsi says.

“A few episodes came of that.”

With the lukewarm response to the few films the Ramsays released in the 1990s, Arjun puts the fading popularity of their movies down to the clones they spawned in the previous decade. Clones, like Vinod Talwar and Mohan Bhakri, who made cheaper, more vulgar films and released them mostly in non-metros (the B centres). These clones spawned other clones in turn, who would release only in small towns or really low-cost theatres. “The horror genre got crowded and mixed up,” Arjun concludes. “The Ramsays were clubbed with everyone and people got sick of it all.”

With the 2000s came the multiplex – with ticket prices five times higher than they were previously – that

61 completely redefined Indian cinema. Films which took months to make up their money earlier would now do so in a few weeks in the multiplexes. The chunk of profits from cinema today is made up from urban middle class audiences, for whom films have to be palatable, unlike the 1980s when the small town and rural viewers contributed equally to a producer’s kitty. “The audience is now clearly fragmented,” Nandy explains. “There are the rural masses, who have greater links with the past, and the intelligent urban audiences who have a greater disconnect with the past.” The Ramsays have been unable to capture the latter.

“You need ‘flame,’ ” Tulsi says. “We had ‘flame’ when we started out. Like Raj Kapoor had ‘flame.’ Like Ranbir Kapoor has ‘flame’ now. Shyam and I keep talking about this. We have to get the ‘flame’ back.”

MOVIE POSTERS on the outside of the Ramsays’ ground floor office.

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Photographs by Dileep Prakash/Photoink

In 2007 I began photographing dak bungalows, the traditional rest houses of travelling government officials, located throughout the isolated, hilly and mountainous areas of Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and West Bengal. A legacy of the British, these bungalows, built in the architectural style of the colonial era, were constructed as far back as the late 1800s along remote routes used by the empire’s administrators.

I embarked on this photography project to try to capture and revisit some of the memories and emotions I associate with dak bungalows, and to also document these spaces. In this series, I have sought to document only the bungalows – some now quite dilapidated – which still retain their original character.

My memories of dak bungalows go back to the 1970s and early 1980s when, up until I was about 16, I’d accompany my parents to these rest houses – my father’s post with the Uttar Pradesh government took him regularly around the hilly regions of what is now Uttarakhand – where we’d typically stay for one or two nights. The bungalows were often poorly connected by road and we’d have to journey by horseback, jeep or on foot to reach them.

These spaces always seemed very lonely, and haunted to me. The bungalows normally consisted of two or three rooms, a veranda orientated towards a picturesque view, and an outhouse for the staff and horses. Most of them did not have electricity or running water and they were often not in good condition as it was difficult to maintain such remotely situated properties. But I liked their handmade nature, the unevenness

63 of the lime plastered walls, the locally sourced wood and stone used in their construction and the way cobwebs and spiders would hide in room corners. These were stark spaces, and when night fell, for a child sleeping in the pitch black in their own room surrounded by the eerie quiet of the forest, the rustle of a breeze, the scampering about of a wild animal outside or pine leaves falling on the roof could be unnerving sounds.

Animals such as leopards were not uncommon in these elevated areas, and it wasn’t safe to be outdoors after sunset. And once one was ensconced in a room at night, the idea of something wild lurking about outside, coupled with the creaky spookiness of the indoors, could bring on a sense of there being no escape.

The chowkidars, the caretakers of the bungalows, who were solitary characters with the pronounced idiosyncrasies of people who have spent days on end without any company and have done so for many years, would recount stories of haunted souls. I recall staying in one bungalow located by Dodital, a lake in Uttarakhand that was said to be haunted. In those days, it was forbidden to swim or boat there because it was said that the souls of people who’d once stayed in the bungalow and had drowned would pull you into the water. The chowkidars’ stories carried similar strains, and were centred on death, sometimes very violent demises, and would occupy my thoughts while lying in the dark. It was only when I started taking my own children to stay in dak bungalows that their uneasiness at night replaced my own.

Of the scores I have stayed in, I have only photographed about 15 rest houses. If they have been renovated, as it has happened to bungalows along the tourist trail, under the initiative of the government bodies managing them, I won’t photograph them. Most of the ones I have photographed have remained untouched and unvisited for weeks or months.

The journey to a bungalow is very important to my photographic process. The way I get to the place – following hazy directions, driving along unpaved roads, sometimes in the dark or through rain or sludge, often without any phone signal the deeper I go into the forest and rarely encountering a soul along the way apart from the odd person who can provide directions or may ask for a lift – builds up a mood for what I will find and photograph when I arrive. Without that journey, I may not connect with that bungalow. I stay for one or two nights and then head off.

When I look at these images, some feel purely documentary, and others, the darker ones in this series, bring to mind certain things I felt when I was a child. Even the images taken in the daytime, with light coming in through a door or window, remind me of the way the shadows of branches would play on the bed sheet at night. I will often head out to a dak bungalow when it’s nearly a full moon to maximise the amount of natural light. I photograph deep into the night with very long exposures and in this way the moonlight can sometimes capture strange shadows and inexplicable reflections.

As told to Annette Ekin

(This series is a work in progress.)

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76 Who’s in your phone?

As mobile phone technology gets more accessible yet increasingly complex, it provides a touchstone to think about a ghost in the machine. By Aditi Saxton My mother’s hand-held has a hold on her heart. Recently, she realised that not only does she speak through her phone, it actually speaks to her. Each time she picks it up, the phone shows her a special time. Though this communication is in a shorthand even seasoned texters may find abrupt, to her it has a telling significance.

Without probing the probabilities of chancing only upon combinations like 05:55 or 21:12 on a 24-hour clock display, she accepts it as oracular even if this Delhi avatar is as abstruse as the Delphi one.

Because she accepts it, she needs to have it be accepted as well; that’s just human nature. To this end, she records and registers every recurring correspondence. In a tactical, show-don’t-tell tale that novelists can only aspire to, I was presented on maybe 20 or so separate instances, evidence of symbolic sequences.

Some at rather inconvenient hours, others moments after the moment has passed, but by and large at seemingly significant or special times. I was persuaded, or at least exhausted enough to concede my conviction.

Empirical data is the mother of superstition. All good ghost stories insist upon a liminal number of finely observed facts, data points with which to spring load our weighted convictions and catapult them to a supernatural sphere. Before that can happen though a critical mass has to build, a detritus of details to shore up a belief in what we don’t see or cannot explain. Which is why the relatively recent incursion and deep penetration of the mobile phone make it the touchstone for translating the transcendental into technology.

That my mother does not hold an aberrant belief is easily substantiated through lifestyle media’s documented fascination with dying, death, and the undead. The “dial these digits for death” story has seen multiple iterations but perhaps few as effectively headlined as Hindi newspaper Nayi Duniya’s: 09415817683. Though the story ran in April 2006, online comment forums still show, perversely, a live interest. I can spare you the compulsion: the number no longer exists and I still do.

Earlier this year, the Telecom Regulation Authority of India estimated that our mobile phone subscriber base

is approaching 900 million. Digging into that projection may yield some garden variety Indian ghosts; the spirits of dual SIMs, the dead souls of defunct users, the spectres of double counting. It’s a ghost story to prop the great Indian growth story. Despite those shape-shifting statistics, it’s undeniable that our mobile phones are multiplying at an astronomical rate. When the global population hit the seven billion population mark, there were rumours about the present living outnumbering the past dead. Arthur C Clarke’s 1968 figures were nearer the mark, “Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts,” though with population booms since, our ghostly garrison has dwindled to approximately 15 per person.

The wider technological accessibility has, if anything, increased an interest in the inexplicable. In a culture where ancient mythologies are alive and accepted, and local and tribal practices are assiduously assimilated, the paranormal is pretty normal. A statistical study to separate supernatural from religious beliefs in India would have to account for a staggering number of variables to achieve any interval of confidence. The phone is both the token totem, imbued with significance that is not entirely understood and the fetish object, wanted not for its own value but one ascribed to it.

Herbert Spencer, in Chapter XXI: Idol-Worship and Fetich-Worship of The Principles of Sociology, Volume 1 (1876) defines: “Thus the unusualness which makes an object a fetich, is supposed to imply an indwelling ghost – an agent without which deviation from the ordinary would be inexplicable. There is no tendency gratuitously to ascribe duality of nature; but only when there is an unfamiliar appearance, or motion, or sound, or change, in a thing, does there arise this idea of a possessing spirit.”

I have an old cell phone that has possibly outlived its expiration date. It will not work, even with its new (okay, resuscitated) battery bought at the seconds electronics market at Nehru Place in New Delhi. “You tap it hard, three times,” says Subhash, all-round fixer-upper, when consulted. If my technical advice has attained over-

77 tones of the psychical, it may be because many of the goods obtainable here are in various stages of reincarnation. Still, I’m inclined to disregard this “rap the table to summon the spirit” answer, but he presents an incontrovertible argument; three rounds in the school of hard knocks and the battery bars begin to climb.

“Not magic, science,” asserts Subhash. The bromide he tosses in the air though, lacks gravitas. His opinion is based in faith and personal experience rather than any scientific rationale he can elucidate. Subhash is savvy about his work. On a neatly printed business card, he has even replaced his last name with phone digits, to better build a brand with. But, “This is how it happens,” is the most I’m able to elicit when I lean on him to draw on a claimed 12 years of experience. Apprenticed, but not schooled, Subhash’s understanding extends only as far as it needs to.

Instead, his is the blanket belief about how coils and chips work that exists in most lay minds. Aided along by some mental elision, it suffices as explanation. Wires – blank blank – tapping... dot dot dot... working. A kind of lingering guilt about not paying more attention in science class closes the circuit. Though there is more happening than meets the eye, there is no impulse to attribute this prosaic tapping procedure to paranormal activity.

Vis-à-vis my mother, an accumulated corpus of putative proof, if it doesn’t result quite in a corpse like Nayi Duniya’s claim, are at least attributable to a spirit.

Reason, science, and technology can sometimes collude to banish such banshees; no, actually, as seen on the call log, you did pick up the phone at a banal 12:07 as well.

As per Subhash, no gloss is necessary since what is, is.

Technology as a vast, gray, amorphous blob that sops up many superstitions can’t seep into spaces clearly demarcated and defined like Subhash’s work. There is, as Spencer said, “no tendency gratuitously to ascribe duality of nature.” The two anecdotes, my mother’s and Subhash’s,

fly in the face of that established, inversely proportional relationship between education and superstition, which anthropologists of the previous century had such a predilection for documenting. That sort of missionarypropagated scientism claimed that with the message of the enlightenment, the ethers of the netherworld would dispel. They failed to acknowledge that our superstitions can only occupy the space we allow them.

Some will recall their first close encounter of the third kind via the chain letter; those lovingly, laboriously hand-copied missives mailed with instructions to re-send and threats of dire consequences. The once in a while postal dispatch became a daily deal with the advent of e-mail. Surprising chinks in the armours of sceptics were revealed, with declarations of “this happened to me” appended to stories of haunted houses, eerie effigies, poltergeists in paintings. SMS monetised the fad, though an earlier flurry of auras visible on blurry phone clicked photos seems to have flagged. The things your phone can now do seem otherworldly indeed. Even as it competes in this sphere of the supernatural, it becomes Spencer’s “agent, without which deviation from the ordinary would be inexplicable.” The technology enclosed within the phone becomes the convenient catch-all for those phenomena. Technology, in this glossed version, is a teleology with an explanation of its causes in nature. The mobile phone is just a prop in the ghost stories that connect us all.

The worship of oddly shaped stones and pots and pans (mundane objects imbued with ritual significance) was an atavistic bulwark against death. Popular tales feature objects that are difficult to put a utilitarian value to, but easily anthropomorphised, like dolls and paintings. The morphology of these relies on animating, ancestral spirits but what keeps them compelling is that they are allegorical. The tropes, quite consistently from ancient to modern times, are couched cautionary catechisms. From the doll that moves in the night (spot the misplaced feminine virtue) or the dead guy hitching

78 a ride on a deserted road (strangers, bad, bad, bad), ghost stories adapt to changing social orders and the anxieties they create. There’s definitely one about Gurgaon malls in the making now.

As society evolves, Spencer’s change, in “unfamiliar appearance, or motion, or sound” is also much manifest.

The expectation that our phones will do unexpected things has gotten fairly entrenched. If India were the Wild West, Upkar Singh, a 23-year-old chauffeur, would be the fastest gun in town. He can change the double-SIM cards on his device sooner than most folks can locate the button to release the cover. Attuned to his phone like a new mother is to a crying infant, he answers calls before it shivers with the first vibration. When I talk about the technology, he rattles off the name and relative merits of each of the service providers but looks lost when I mention satellite signals. “Like cable [TV]?” he shrugs. Asked if his phone ever acts weird, Upkar says it sometimes does, but that just means it’s time for an upgrade. Preferably to a model that will “change the world.”

While he may have gotten that line off an ad campaign, Upkar’s world has certainly changed. His phone is the medium that manages the spectral shift. Quick Response codes are a case in point, small squares of printed ink that can be scanned and decoded by a phone to link to an online experience. Flatly rendered on paper they’re as comprehensible as hieroglyphs but via a phone they offer access to an altered world of virtual reality.

A world as envisioned by McDonald’s, or the makers of Ford, or the manufacturers of Cotton World, all of whom have incorporated them as a means to push products.

It’s as interesting an exercise in perspective as blotting the moon with your thumb. That little square of bits and bytes opens up to reveal a three-dimensional model of a car, or grabs you discounts on your garb. Other platforms and applications have impacted everything from the way a Punjabi farmer tills his soil to how a Tamilian fisherman gets market price for his mackerel. The radii for the intersecting circles of want and need are drawing closer.

The compact, cellular phone has expanded to fill the converging centre.

Chronicles of the afterlife have to emerge from this life – it is all we know. On a mundane level, our lay, everyday engagement with our phones generally seals them from the supernatural. But within the realm of discourse, the mobile phone really begins to assume the

entire spectrum of its identity – as a touchstone of this world, as a fetish for the worldly, as a totem of the otherworldly. It is not the first appearance of a ghost in the machine, which has in assorted aspects endured over time. The phrase, first coined by mid-20th century British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, was popularised by Arthur Koestler’s book of the same name, published in 1967. It is a treatise on how the human brain interprets inputs and operates on multiple levels, gathering a sort of spirit of its own with its layered interactions. The premise was the forerunner for many apocalyptic artificial intelligence stories. Do the machinations of our phones parallel the animations of our brain? In the grip they have on our lives and their perplexing workings, mobile phones can claim a similar status.

It would be a tall claim if technological innovation hadn’t already been transposed onto the language of biological evolution. Since the late 1800s, when American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan in his work, Ancient Society, matched the pace of technology to the steps of evolution – “With the production of inventions and discoveries, and with the growth of institutions, the human mind necessarily grew and expanded; and we are led to recognize a gradual enlargement of the brain itself, particularly of the cerebral portion” – this analogy has held. It’s a startling formulation. Our tools are not evolving with us, they are evolving us. “Smart” is something we may be, but our phones definitely are.

Regenerating with slightly modified traits of earlier forms (iPhone 4 to 4s), vying for gigantisation (larger screens, more memory) and miniaturisation (smaller chips, lighter weights), and creating memes of utility (applications), terms like diversification, path dependence and extinction are now bandied in both spheres. The ghosts of ancestors may have lived in stones but our more rational, advanced spirits need the phone.

As long as we have possessions, we’ll stay possessed.

80 OFFICIALLY DEAD In Uttar Pradesh, an activist fights a chronic land-grabbing scam where living people are declared legally dead by ruthless relatives; a phenomenon which has far-reaching social ramifications.

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ABHIMANYU KUMAR SINGH IMAGES

A D I L H A S A N

Lal Bihari, the activist helping “dead” people sits in the living room of his house in Amilo, which also serves as his office for the Mritak Sangh. Meticulously kept files lie on the shelves as do a few citations, including a 2003 Ig Noble — the US-based prize honouring “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think” — for three accomplishments including “waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureacratic inertia and greedy relatives.”

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Fifty-seven-year-old Lal Bihari has spent a significant part of his adult life being dead on paper. In fact he grew so used to his expired identity that he became known as Lal Bihari “Mritak” – “dead man.” In his village of Amilo, Uttar Pradesh, people on the streets simply call him “Mritak.”

Bihari is not the only mritak. He is among the thousands who have been unlawfully registered as dead in government records by their relatives in order to capture their land and property. This often happens with the connivance of local officials.

Bihari fought for 18 years and managed to reclaim his identity in 1994. His fight hasn’t stopped. He became a fulltime activist to help those who face the same plight that he did – being stripped of an identity and land rights.

In February this year, on the eve of assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, Bihari received a response to a Right to Information (RTI) petition that he’d lodged about a month earlier. The government informed him that 221 people across the state had been reinstated as “alive” – they were no longer deemed to be “dead.”

The released information also stated that officials who were found to have colluded with the victims’ relatives would be prosecuted. And those signed back to life would be entitled to their rightful share of family land and property.

It is Bihari’s long, arduous and largely solitary battle against the administration – both in and out of the courts – that has prompted the state government to become serious about tackling such cases.

In early March, I went to meet Bihari in the small

village of Amilo, in eastern Uttar Pradesh’s Azamgarh district, a region that is infamous for being the native place of notorious gangster Abu Salem. Known for its culture of crime, this eastern belt is commonly called the Badlands, and has been the setting for gritty Bollywood movies such as Omkara, which tell the stories of men who end up on the wrong side of the law. In the recently held assembly elections, about one third of the total candidates had criminal charges against them. Some of them won handsomely.

Posters of candidates who contested these elections dot the walls in Azamgarh along the dusty road to the marketplace in Amilo. As I pull up in an autorickshaw, Bihari flags it down. A short, stout man dressed in a wornout safari suit, Bihari’s manner is brisk and business-like.

He takes me along to a barber’s shop where we have tea.

Inside the shop men read newspapers and discuss the election results. People are friendly towards him. Bihari is well-known in these parts, a hero for some. But for the local officials and the families of the dispossessed that he challenges, he poses a menace.

According to the government’s RTI responses to petitions filed by Bihari – the other was in 2008 and indicated that 335 dead people had been declared “alive” – over 500 people have been recognised as living individuals.

“I suspect that many more have been declared ‘alive’ but they [the government] are not giving information about all the cases officially to save guilty officials,” Bihari says.

Three decades ago, after he was declared dead by the local administration, Bihari founded Mritak Sangh

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(meaning “Dead Man’s Association”), a banner under which he fought his own case, and which has latterly served as a nodal point for other “dead” people. “Sometimes they contact me on their own. I have my own ways to find out about such cases too,” he says.

He remains its sole full-time member, keeping tabs on fictitious deaths, fighting on behalf of these living dead by assisting with court cases and guiding them through the bureaucratic processes, and working tirelessly to keep the issue burning.

It’s Bihari’s commitment and the ludicrous nature of his own case that has earned him the attention of the media and citations for his work in human rights. As an expert on this matter, his fame has travelled beyond the region. A few years ago, there were talks of Satish Kaushik, a Bollywood film director, expressing interest in making a film about Bihari’s life. “I have also been consulted by a Supreme Court lawyer who was fighting a similar case,” Bihari says.

But from the time of his own “death,” Bihari was plunged into a Kafkaesque administrative and social nightmare, one which he can’t completely escape because of his dedication to the “deceased” as an activist, which is rooted in his own personal story of suffering. “My children call me crazy because I could not do anything for them. They tell me that no one respects me, neither the government nor society. My time to earn money is already over. My son is particularly upset because I sold some of my land also to finance my struggle,” Bihari says.

And for the other individuals like Bihari, the social stigma and other complications caused by the admin-

istrative wrongdoings are hardly erased by the government’s decision of pronouncing them alive, and continue to impact their lives.

Born in the village of Khalilabad, Bihari lost his father when he was an infant. His mother took him to the neighbouring locale of Amilo, her birthplace, about 20 kilometres away. As a child, he was married, and worked as a manual labourer in one of the village’s many small factories where some of the finest Banarasi saris are produced.

When he was in his early 20s, he returned to Khalilabad to collect property records for his share of his father’s ancestral land as proof of identity to apply for a bank loan.

Through the government clerk who maintained records, he learned that his paternal relatives had registered him as dead, and now owned his land. When he went to meet these relatives – his uncle and his family – they refused to recognise him. “On 30 July 1976, I was declared dead in the case number 258 by the district court of Azamgarh,” Bihari says.

This is how the deaths are filed: the relative goes to the registrar’s office, files an application under the Registration of Births and Deaths Act and provides the intended victim’s proof of identity and a medical certificate confirming their death to obtain a death certificate. This certificate is then presented at the Land Registry Office and the land is transferred into the relative’s name. Often, a nominal amount as bribe is paid to the officials involved.

Declaring a relative dead with the aim to usurp their land is a chronic practice in rural Uttar Pradesh where, for the poor, land is more than solid ground – it is often

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In rural Uttar Pradesh, usurping land is the reason why relatives register the death of a living family member before the government.

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Jagdish Prasad Gupta, in his 40s, lives in Mohamadabad, Uttar Pradesh, not far from Varanasi.

Gupta, a sweetshop owner, spent a year of his life as a non-existent man because his step-grandmother had declared his father did not exist and therefore Gupta could not exist. She then took his land. With the help of Bihari, Gupta’s existence became legally recognised.

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the only source of livelihood and the trigger for dispute.

Bihari roughly estimates that in the state there are about 50 000 victims; it’s a form of corruption that largely goes unchecked. Of the thousands of “officially” dead men and women in Uttar Pradesh, many belong to Azamgarh district. The condition of unlimited population and limited land has ensured that nobody is safe from being cheated out of their life.

Bihari fought. Like a man possessed. He tried everything.

He kidnapped one of his cousins hoping that the family would file a police report indicting him, and the issue would come to the government’s notice. But the family didn’t react so a week later he returned the child. He asked the government to pay a widow pension to his wife, hoping they would rectify the mistake upon seeing she was still married to him. “They wrote that the applicant is wearing vermillion in her hair,” he says. And nothing changed. He grew desperate to publicise his cause. He threw leaflets in the Lucknow assembly, fasted at the Boat Club – the then designated protest venue in Delhi – and in the 1988 parliamentary elections stood as a minor candidate against V P Singh, who would later become Prime Minister.

“I went crazy. People called me a ghost, a spirit, a demon, when I walked down the street. This is why I added Mritak to my name in 1980 and founded the Mritak Sangh, to spite the government, which would consider me neither dead nor alive. Whenever my case came up the judge used to smile, accept that injustice had been done, but would not write it down in the judgment,” Bihari says.

While fighting his case, he and his wife continued to live in Amilo. But with his “death” now public knowledge, he was not pitied but completely debased, becoming the target of mockery. “We stayed inside our house mostly lest someone insult us outside,” Bihari says. “All day I would run from pillar to post in sundry government offices. When I would come back home, my wife would cry.

We had no place in society. It was as good as being dead.”

In 1994, after years of anxiety and humiliation, the local administration gave Bihari his life and his land back. In return, he sued the local Azamgarh administration for their mistake, claiming a compensation of a few crores in the Allahabad High Court. That case still goes on.

The broader issue of bogus deaths first came to the notice of the higher authorities, namely Allahabad High Court, in 1999 after Time magazine carried an article about Bihari’s case. Taking suo motu notice of the article, the court issued summons for a probe to the state government and a directive to the National Human Rights Commission in the year 2000 to monitor it. The probe confirmed that such cases existed, following which the Uttar Pradesh government began to act and slowly started to reinstate people’s lives.

Bihari takes me to meet Paltan Yadav, 58, a former dead man and native of Amilo. He lives in splendid isolation in a small hut on a little patch of land. Yadav wears saffron robes to express his renunciation of the world. Yadav used to work as a daily wages labourer in Assam and two decades ago, while visiting Amilo, he discovered that his brothers had declared him dead, and had taken his share of land.

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“My family betrayed me. When I returned, they started to make things very difficult for me. They beat me up and broke my bones. They left me half dead,” Yadav says.

As he’d been away for so long, he was seen as an outsider, and the villagers largely sided with his relatives, whom they knew. “No one spoke in my favour,” he says. “The police did not bother with my case. I was penniless and would go hungry for days on end. But I never ran away.”

Assisted generously by Bihari, Yadav’s life was reinstated in early 2000 and his share of land was returned to him. He later sold most of it off for money, retaining just a small plot to live on. But for Yadav, and many like him whose lives have been legally restored, their situation doesn’t necessarily improve afterwards – the stigma of having been declared dead lingers on, shrouding their lives with disgrace and insecurity. Yadav remains in the village as a pariah.

Still, he has decided to stay on, instead of returning to Assam where his wife and children continue to live. Having regained what he already once lost, it is too much of a risk to leave again, and lose his bearings once more. And it isn’t safe to bring his family to Amilo as he is still on hostile terms with his brothers. His young nephews and nieces, however, visit him sometimes.

“They are children and they had no part to play in it,” he says. Yadav makes it a point to attend funerals in his extended family although he skips the marriages. “I am a dead man but I get out of my grave to bury others,” he says, standing outside his dilapidated hut framed by shrubs, the spring sun illuminating the creases of his haggard face.

To the east of Azamgarh lies Mau district, where the little village of Mohamadabad is situated. Dhiraji Thakur lives here, a frail old woman in her 80s and another former dead person whom Bihari has assisted. Her glasses stick out from her small face as she sits, shrivelled, on a bed in her daughter’s house. Living here is a source of great shame for Thakur. As a Hindu woman, she says she finds it degrading to live in her married daughter’s home and to be dependent on her son-in-law’s charity. She divides her time between here and her elder daughter’s house.

But she has no other option. Of all the people I met, her situation stood out for its absurdity. Her relatives on her dead husband’s side not only registered her as dead, but also that she had remarried before she passed away.

Her husband died two decades ago while working at the Eastern Coal Fields in Burdwan, West Bengal. She was hired in his place. While living in Burdwan, she maintained contact with her husband’s relatives. She would send money for fertiliser and seeds to support their subsistence farming, says Mansa Devi, who is Thakur’s younger daughter. Thakur would also occasionally visit her husband’s family during holidays.

However when she returned after retiring in 1995, those very same relatives disowned her – they claimed Thakur had remarried, and had subsequently died. The second part has now been corrected, with Bihari’s help, but the first remains as it is.

“We have filed RTIs to get the administration to tell us who she is married to, but they have no response,” says Om Prakash Sharma, Thakur’s son-in-law. Sharma

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Dhiraji Thakur, in her 80s, lives in Mohamadabad and became a victim of the bogus deaths phenomenon after she’d retired from her job working as a grade four employee — the lowest level within government services which often involves manual labour — at the Eastern Coal Fields in Burdwan, West Bengal. Both Bihari and her son-in-law, a barber whose salary barely makes ends meet, have helped her reclaim her life on paper.

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Paltan Yadav, 58, lives in Amilo, and is an outcast in the village. Having been declared dead, and later undead, his family who betrayed him continue to be hostile toward him. He sold part of the land that he reclaimed after being declared alive, and a school has since been built there.

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has since withdrawn her case from the courts as it would take too long to settle, but he hopes to reach a resolution with the local administration.

“They have blackened my face in this old age,” Thakur says.

It is noon in Khalilabad, Bihari’s paternal village, and he goes to visit his uncle’s family – the relatives who once betrayed him. His uncle has since died, but unlike many of the other undead, he has made peace, albeit an uneasy one, with his aunt and two cousins. Even during his ordeal, he would occasionally visit them for family functions although he says he never ate their food. “They could have poisoned me,” he says and laughs. After he reclaimed his land rights, he gave his farmland back to his cousins, aware of how dire their circumstances were.

Bihari has long gotten over any bitterness. His work has gone far beyond his own cause. The man known as “Mritak” has come to signify a notoriety that for many in Azamgarh district rivals that of the infamous Abu Salem. Bihari, in a somewhat bemused voice, gives this example: “Once there was an exhibition in the town,” he says. “They put up my picture along with his, as in two famous people from Azamgarh. Below his picture they wrote that he turns the living into dead. Below mine – he brings the dead back to life.”

90 divine intervention Manipur’s maibis, a community of mediums, lead a mystical existence, relaying oracles deemed to have come from the gods and serving people ranging from politicians to housewives.

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Ima Dhoni, a maibi, provides offerings to various gods during the Lai Ikouba ceremony, wherein a male god is summoned from the water to be worshipped and to communicate oracles to the maibis.

THINGNAM A N J U L I K A S A M O M

91 Ima Dhoni, a woman in her early 60s, sits cross-legged on a plantain leaf, her head and body enclosed within the folds of a white cloth. She sits at the foot of a little temple in Singjamei Maisnam Leikai, a small Meiteidominated locality in Imphal, in the northeastern state of Manipur. In front of her, on the temple’s raised wooden platform, are two golden-faced deities – representing a male and female supreme being – that smile benignly, seemingly pleased at the brass platters of rice, fresh fruit, seasonal vegetables and local sweets vying for space at their feet. Smoke quivers from the rows of incense sticks and candles burning on the temple steps.

The deities are the patron gods of this neighbourhood. The concrete temple itself was built with mone-

Ima Dhoni is a maibi, a woman believed to be “gifted” with an extraordinary sensory capability making her a “medium” between the human world and the Meitei gods.

The epithet Ima, meaning “mother,” denotes the reverence given to hundreds of maibis by the Meitei people.

In Meitei belief, the tradition of the maibis is closely linked to the creation of the world. In the creation myth, when the god Sanamahi, as instructed by his father, the supreme god Atiya Guru Sidaba, started creating the world and human beings, his younger brother Pakhangba destroyed everything as soon as he made it.

Sanamahi created the goddess Nongthangleima who beguiled Pakhangba with her charm and dances, thus allowing Sanamahi to build the world. Nongthanglei-

FRAMED PHOTOGRAPHS OF IMA BORAMANI, along with images of Shiva and other Hindu gods, hang on the walls of the Royal Palace’s Maibi Loishang (meaning “institution” in Manipuri), where Ima Boramani is the head maibi.

tary contributions from surrounding households. Though the Meitei people, the majority community in the state, were converted to Hinduism about four centuries ago, temples like this one, dedicated to gods from the pantheon of the original Meitei religious tradition watching over either a locality or even individual families, are common sights across the state.

In the mid-morning sun, Ima Dhoni, surrounded by about 40 devotees, starts to ring a small brass bell, slowly at first then gaining tempo as she sings an invocation to these patron gods to bestow on her the divine language – an archaic, pure form of Manipuri – so that she can convey the gods’ messages to those gathered.

ma is regarded as the first maibi.

Today, this community of about 1 000 maibis across the state continues to play a significant role in Meitei society and religion, and serves people from different social echelons. Their oracles are regarded as sacrosanct, whether they are addressed to an individual or to the state as a whole, and often predictions about the state of affairs for the year ahead – whether it’ll be peaceful, filled with turmoil, or whether calamities will befall political leaders – are part of their oracles. It is believed for instance that the annual oracles of a maibi worshipping the patron deities around the Manipur State Assembly area during the last few years foretold the death of many sitting MLAs

92 of the previous state government. While the veracity of such oracles actually taking place cannot be wholly confirmed, it is a fact that seven sitting MLAs died in the last government term – three of them in 2011.

Apart from being religious counsellors and providing oracles, maibis, with their knowledge of the functions of various herbs and vegetation found in Manipur – which they learn from more experienced maibis, although some claim to have discovered plant uses through a divine power – also act as healers and midwives. Maibis are also carriers of the oral lore and myths of the Meitei community through their dances and songs.

Uttara Shanglen and the Kangla Temple Board. It is however difficult to know the exact number of maibis in the state, as these lists often overlap, and many younger maibis in their initial awakening stages do not come out to register themselves and perform their religious duties.

The ages of those registered range greatly, from the maibis as young as in their early 20s to those in their 90s.

Ima Dhoni was born during the first bombing of Imphal during the Second World War. A frank, welcoming and soft-spoken woman, she still recalls her first experience with the supernatural at the age of ten. One evening, she was sweeping the courtyard of her home, when she

Ima Boramani, 95, the head maibi, is photographed in the small courtyard in front of the Maibi Loishang.

“During the Lai Haraoba ritualistic festival, the maibi performs various dances – some like the loiching jagoi and khuttek mathek dances detailing the creation of the world and the human body,” Ima Boramani explains.

Other dances deliver blessings, such as the mikon thakonba, which she says “is performed for the well-being of the community.”

Ima Boramani who is 95 years old is the Maibi Asuppi, the head maibi and about 400 maibis are presently registered under her at the Sanakonung Maibi Loishang, a maibi institution housed in a hut-like structure at the Royal Palace of Manipur’s titular king. Around an equal number are also listed under two other institutions, the

suddenly saw a beautiful woman floating mid-air in the sky. Overcome by the vision, she stopped and sat down to stare at the woman. “The vision vanished when my elder sister came back from the river after fetching water and for days I was very angry with her, childishly crying to her to return me my goddess,” she says. After that, she says she had many more such “visions,” sometimes of this mysterious woman, and sometimes of snakes – the symbol of the god Pakhangba. Often the trances would leave her in a convulsionary fit, gasping for breath.

Frightened that their young daughter’s frequent trances and visions were a sign that she was losing her mind, her parents chained her feet to a wooden stake driven into the earth floor of their house and she was

93 kept locked up in a room. Her father and his friends took turns guarding her day and night. One night however she found herself with inexplicable strength and she was able to break the chains and, as her father and his friends were fast asleep, she escaped and ran all the way to her Ima Guru, many miles from her house.

“I had never seen or heard of this maibi, I was hardly twelve years old then. But that night it was as if someone walking in front of me was guiding me to her; she was my chosen Ima Guru, the maibi who had been destined to be my teacher and mentor,” Ima Dhoni recalls. After the episode, her father let her learn the trade and ways of the maibis – it is now her profession and calling in life.

then no one will marry her. Even though they’re revered, there are superstitions linked to maibis, for instance, one is that the husband of a maibi will not live long. The family’s fear is fuelled by the fact that maibis consider themselves married to the gods, and although many of them get married, or become awakened after marriage and having children, the call to serve their gods often supersedes their roles as wives and mothers. While some of them may continue to live with their husbands and children, many often leave them to live at the Sanakonung Maibi Loishang or at a temple.

Chongtham Budhi, a social anthropologist formerly with Manipur University describes the contradictions

On thE STEPS of the temple of Singjamei Maisnam Leikai, in Imphal, sit long-handled brass bells and langthrei leaves which are used by the maibis to connect with the gods.

The life of a maibi is a difficult one. In most cases, when the initial signs of a maibi begin in a girl, the family consult a maiba – a powerful male shaman who, unlike maibis, acquires his knowledge from mystical texts and not through divine inclination – to “suppress” the awakening. At this point in time the woman’s education and social life become heavily curtailed because of her erratic behaviour which is similar to madness as she speaks gibberish and suffers from bouts of fits and trances.

in how maibis are perceived in the wider community as stemming from their achieving a “sort of celestial position in the Meitei society as they mediate between the heavenly and terrestrial worlds.” The resultant transcendental mode of thinking of the maibis, he says, means they don’t abide by accepted social norms, especially when it comes to what is commonly seen as the ideals of womanhood.

Because of this behaviour, the awakened woman in the nascent stages of becoming a maibi is often stigmatised. Her family will keep her hidden from public view out of the fear that if her awakening becomes known

When they finally start leading the life of a maibi, their Ima Gurus perform a number of rituals and initiation rites, after which they are said to be able to gain control over their trances and convulsions. They are also

“To the common observer this creates confusion in their perception of the role and status of the maibi,” Budhi says.

94 instructed in the various lores of the pantheon, the dances and conduct of the rituals, and they start wearing white, distinguishing them from other Manipuri women who normally wear brightly coloured clothing.

According to Ima Boramani, a maibi has to observe various restrictions to her diet and family life. She is forbidden to eat certain varieties of aquatic fauna including prawns and various eel species, vegetables and herbs that are believed to be incarnations of the god Pakhangba in Meitei mythology. Doing so is believed to temporarily sever the link with the gods and the severance will take its toll on her – either making her ill and shortening her lifespan or causing her to become so mentally unstable that she ends up insane.

I would hear the voice of gods asking me to come out and dance and in a trance-like state I would go out and dance. I spoke a different language during these bouts, so my husband told me. Those days I saw humans as monsters and the gods as my companions,” she says.

An ongoing study at the Department of Clinical Psychology, Regional Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) in Imphal into the personality of maibis, with specific focus on their mental health conditions, found striking similarities between the maibi phenomenon and Western scientific explanations of schizophrenia and dissociative disorders, especially the trance and possession syndrome.

Assistant Professor Lourembam Roshan who has been conducting the study, adds however that the be-

Ima Dhoni delivers her oracles in Singjamei Maisnam Leikai.

While cooking there are certain types of wood and reeds that she cannot use for firewood, as legends say that the gods fear these trees. She must prepare her own food and ensure that she lights the fire for cooking at either three or seven strokes of the flint, though now matchsticks are used. If she’s married, on the 1st, 11th and 21st days of the month on the Meitei lunar calendar she must not have sex. At night, she also sleeps on the right side of the bed, which in Manipuri society is normally the husband’s side.

Ima Boramani herself became a maibi at the age of 18.

“I was already married with a child when the symptoms came. I refused to eat for months. Sometimes in the night

haviour of maibis cannot be equated to the above explanations in toto. “There are many things still unknown and unexplained by science in the maibi phenomenon.

More studies such as on the maibis’ capability to control their oracle giving and the genetic factor also need to be studied to fully understand it,” he says, explaining that many maibis speak about having some other maibi in their ancestry.

Still, even though so much about the maibis’ gifts remain a mystery, in the largely spiritual and religious Meitei culture, these women who are seen as a direct link to the gods are venerated, and their predictions are respected, almost fearfully so.

95 Under the morning sun, women, mostly elderly, and some men sit in small groups at a respectful distance behind Ima Dhoni, their ears cocked to hear if they can decipher the archaic language she utters in a trance. The older women, more familiar with this ancient form of Manipuri, can understand much of what she says, and translate for the younger people sitting beside them.

“O daughter, hailing from northern side of where I sit, I have received the flowers and fruits you have gifted and liked them. I hear your query on whether flowers will bloom in your garden. I see how your husband comes home and speaks harshly to you for this reason. Separate the evil spirits from your household and I will gift you sons and daughters …” she chants, her oracles for different people pouring out one after the other, while her upper body shakes rhythmically in a circular manner.

Over half an hour, Ima Dhoni’s oracles address people in the audience, ranging from a young girl wanting to pass an exam looming on the horizon, to an older woman worried about frequent quarrels in her household, to a young man who is warned about future competition at work. She gives clues as to whom the oracles relate to, providing indicators pertaining to age, sex, where they live, their order among their siblings. And with each message she offers guidance as to what offering – such as a tri-coloured flag, three types of flowers, a fish, a hen or candles – should be given to the patron gods as a remedial or preventative oblation for such problems.

Ima Dhoni however maintains that she has no recollection of the messages which have such a profound impact on her listeners. “When we invoke the gods, the god enters our consciousness and what emerges is the laibou – the divine word. It is like speaking in our sleep. I am not me anymore, and my thoughts and mind just vanish ... as if someone, some voice or some presence, decides what to say and utters it,” she says.

“I only come to my senses when the other maibi attending sprinkles water with tairen (Cedrela Toona /Indian mahogany) leaves on my head.”

She ends her prophesying by speaking about the calamities that will befall the state in 2012. “This year, there will be epidemic of rashes in children,” she says.

“Also lots of wind and thunderstorms will come.”

96 Urban Legend At the height of the Kashmir conflict in 1994, many remember the coming of a witch. By Zahid Rafiq

Someone in our neighbourhood was killed that night. It wasn’t unusual for people to get killed. Somebody died all the time in those days, in our neighbourhood or in the next one over, or the next. Bullets. Grenades. Encounters. Every time the dead bodies arrived, the neighbourhood reverberated with pro-freedom slogans and women would sob songs of lament for days. However, the morning after this death things were much quieter. It was the winter of 1994. I was a nine-year-old boy living in Kashmir when the witch was born.

People said it had long iron claws and could break doors and windows with a single blow, and climb several stories high with demonic ease.

They said the dead man’s son had seen it leap away from his father’s body. They said its dark face was hidden behind long black hair; others said the dark face was actually a mask. By evening there were already several versions of what it looked like but nearly everyone agreed that it was a witch.

Almost every Sunday, my friends and I would play cricket at a nearby empty plot of land, and we’d discuss the events of the past week for hours. Each of us had a favourite local militant and we’d often argue about who was the bravest and who looked the best. But that Sunday after the neighbour’s death, we spoke only about the witch – its clothing, its boots, its possible hiding places.

I had watched a movie about ghosts on video earlier that month and I repeated the story to different groups of friends. By evening, we had turned our local witch into a celebrity, and I became, with my ghost story and descriptions of how the ghost sees his victims in negative images, much sought after. It was a good day – the witch had given us so much to talk about.

The witch remained the topic of conversation at dinnertime. Grandmother, who was a firm believer in

witches and ghosts, spoke about the plight of the dead man’s family and the mounting fear of the witch in the neighbourhood. She had heard from someone that earlier the witch had appeared in villages but was now in Srinagar. She wanted the lights turned off by 8.30 pm; the lights, she said, might attract the witch.

One of my uncles, however, didn’t believe in the witch.

He told Grandmother to stop scaring us and dismissed the whole witch affair as nonsense. It was soldiers from the Indian army, he said, wearing special gloves, masks, and dark clothing trying to scare Kashmiri people. Yousuf, my older cousin, quickly added that the witch’s boots were fitted with special springs which explained

how it could jump easily onto terraces and the second floors of houses. I too wanted to say a few things about the witch, the film and night vision goggles that the ghost wore, but Mother tapped me on the leg signalling me to stay silent. They kept talking about it until everyone left for their rooms.

Every night I would wait impatiently for Mother to wash all the dishes and clean the floors before we could go to bed, but that evening with the lights to be switched off early, she finished her chores quickly. We laid the mattresses and quilts on the bedroom floor.

In her haste, Mother had forgotten to bring up a glass of water so she told me to pack my schoolbag while she went downstairs to fetch it. I was left in the room on my own. Father was not at home. He was mostly away, posted to police stations in far off villages. I was thinking about all the new details about the witch that I would share at school the next day, when the window

97

I tried to look away and started to mumble whatever fragments of verses I remembered from the Quran. I wanted to run but my legs were numb. The door was all of a sudden so far from where I was, and the room felt immense. How could I run across it? I looked at the windows. I could make out its arms. Mother had been gone for what seemed like hours and I felt as though the witch was coming in from all sides and closing in on me.

I don’t remember running out of the room, but I found myself in the dark corridor. I had even bolted our door. I stood on the dark staircase ready to run at the slightest sound. Then the stairs began to thump. It was Mother. She was annoyed that I’d left the room instead of packing my bag. It had already been five minutes, she said. I didn’t tell her about the witch – I thought she’d be scared.

For years, almost every night, I would have a recurring dream. Somebody – a teacher, a soldier, a stranger, a faceless man – would chase me through the attic, the schoolyard or the playground and I could never run away as I wanted to. My legs were always numb in those dreams, as if they were not there, and I’d try to drag them along but never succeeded. The dream always ended with me falling, head first, from our attic, and I’d wake up mid-fall; I think it was in that winter that I first dreamt this.

At the time, we lived in an old house whose windows rarely allowed in enough sunlight to brighten up the walls with green paint f laking of f them, and the poorly lit corridors. Back then, electricity was rare in Kashmir and the silent winter nights, lit by flickering candles, would stretch on for far too long. In that darkness the witch ruled.

One day my uncle brought home a dagger, and he started sleeping with it tucked under his pillow. Grandmother started keeping an iron rod under her mattress.

Everyone in the neighbourhood started sleeping with hammers, axes and knives, and the window grill makers suddenly had a lot of work on their hands. Mother didn’t

want anything in our bedroom, but I still kept a pair of nail clippers that I’d swiped under our pillow. That was all I could lay my hands on.

With every week, there were new stories about p e o ple’s encounters with the witch; many of these stories were variations of each other. In one, there was a stampede at a wedding after someone saw the witch at a window; the bride tumbled down the stairs. In another, a man in a village set fire to his curtains when the witch attacked him; they said the witch burned with the house. And in another story, the witch threw a man from his second story window, and his skull cracked open; though some said he fell after suffering a heart attack.

In the dead of night, all of a sudden, a tin roof would begin to thump with the banging of sticks and batons.

This meant that someone had seen the witch around their home. These sounds were in defiance of the witch.

The pounding would grow intense as adjoining tin roofs

Illustration by Reshi Dev.

creaked. The old windows often creaked but never so loudly and ominously. I stared at the windows. They didn’t creak again. But on the terrace outside, beyond the glass panes, a large shadow was moving. I knew instantly what it was. It was her.

98 joined the music. The sounds moved across the neighbourhood: one roof paused, another played. A quiet night in no time turned into a heavy metal concert.

But beneath that defiance there was fear. It was not the witch alone that frightened people; it thrived on the fear and terror that people lived through in Kashmir at that time. The early morning crackdowns, night raids, military curfews, arrests and tortures, disappearances and all those other words that had suddenly become part of Kashmiri language, instilled paranoia among the local population. In 1989, Kashmiris had picked up arms en masse to fight off an unpopular Indian rule, and to counter the insurgency the Indian Government heavily militarised Kashmir with hundreds of thousands of soldiers, of which 700 000 still operate across the state today. By 1994, the conflict had already intensified to the extent that thousands of Kashmiri people had lost their lives. Newspapers in those days only wrote about death, and every morning the pictures of dead bodies looked like jigsaw puzzles.

It was amidst all this violence and intrigue that the witch arrived, and soon people began to say that the only witches were the soldiers. During the day, Yousuf and I would see Indian soldiers on the streets and their faces would later haunt us as witches. We dreaded the nights.

One night, while Mother and I were sleeping, we were woken up by Grandmother knocking on our door.

She said in a hushed tone that there was somebody in the attic. Grandmother was carrying an iron rod, my uncle an axe. My aunt too had something in her hand.

Mother whispered in my ear to stay in the middle of the group. She seemed angry with me for answering the door and not feigning sleep. Everyone carried a candle and it was bright in the attic as we never usually lit so many candles at once. My aunt saw something – a shirt had fallen off the clothesline. Grandmother began to murmur verses from the Quran while my uncle examined the clothesline. Pigeons were cooing in a corner. There was nothing there, nothing behind the tall old trunks, nothing behind the coal drums. They decided it must have been a cat, but we were all too afraid to go back to our rooms, so we gathered in Grandmother’s room.

My uncle then called out from the corridor shouting that it was in the bathroom. We went out and found him smiling near the bathroom door. The door was ajar and

had been pushed open by a bucket that had fallen off its peg on the wall; somehow, everyone had heard the noise come from the attic. Everyone laughed at how worked up we’d gotten, and we returned to our rooms.

We lived with much the same fear during the nights, until my father came one day to take Mother and I away. We moved to Udhampur, a district in Jammu.

I soon realised that not only did my classmates not know about witches, they also didn’t know much about guns or “wireless sets,” and had never heard of terms like “ambush” or “third degree.” Suddenly there was nobody left to have all those conversations with. Yousuf rarely called, but whenever he did he’d talk about the clanging of roofs and new militants. He said he still slept with something close by, just in case.

Sometime over the next two years I spent there, I found other things to talk about with my new friends and forgot about the witch. But at night, in my dreams, I continued to fall from the old attic.

100 The Indian Spook Directory A brief glossary of archetypal ghosts and supernatural creatures believed to haunt the subcontinent.

Baak

by Gitanjali Das

with the exception of donts, a type of baak which, says Deka, is aggressive and will kill when displeased. Stealing a baak’s net and burying it under a mustard plant is according to Deka, the only way to control this spirit.

Gitanjali Das is a staff writer at Seven Sisters Post

The Bachelor/Bachelorette Ghost

by Kuhu Kochar

Wet and cold like fish, baaks are territorial spirits that haunt water bodies, according to Pranavjyoti Deka, author of the Jyoti Bilingual Thesaurus (2007), a compendium of Assamese terms and their descriptions on subjects ranging from punishment to agriculture to ghosts. Baaks are believed to mainly inhabit the region of Lower Assam, in places such as Kokrajhar and Barpeta.

These spirits are said to have twisted arms and legs although there are believed to be different variations, like baaks ghorapaks, which according to Deka are headless and have their eyes and mouths on their stomachs.

Some people say these baaks look like horses, and have a tendency to create whirlpools. Baaks are obsessed with raw fish, and their sole purpose seems to be catching or pilfering fish from fishermen, which they keep in the net they carry. They also trail fishermen at night, occasionally causing a fright, although they’re mostly harmless,

“Kunwari/a hi mar jayegi/a” (“You’ll die a bachelor/ette” ) is a disparaging remark that does the rounds in many Indian households. But if an unmarried young man or woman should die, their disgruntled ghost, as the belief goes in certain coastal villages of Karnataka, will stay on in their village, haunting it and ushering in bad luck. Spiritual healers in these villages claim to have seen the spirits of unwed girls catching those of bachelors, and to have heard their loud crying during wedding ceremonies. A wedding between two unmarried ghosts, involving all the traditional ceremonies, and

at times even a dowry, is believed “to protect the village from these ghosts,” says Mahesh Yadav, who attended a ghost wedding in the village of Polali in 2010. The union, Yadav explains, allows the spirits to proceed on to the next world as one and they therefore cease to disturb their village.

Curuni Bira GD

In Assam, the curuni bira – curuni meaning “female thief” and bira being the Assamese version of a poltergeist – is a compulsive stealer of things from people’s homes, especially food from kitchens. According to Pranavjyoti Deka, it makes shrill sounds, somewhat similar to the loud meowing of a cat. Some believe that the curuni bira was a story cooked up by women who, while preparing a meal for their families, couldn’t help but eat a portion of it and when asked about the missing food, blamed it on a ghost. More commonly talked about a few decades ago, accounts of this spirit’s presence are

101 rare nowadays, however it is said to still visit the homes of joint families.

Only an oja, a kind of traditional ghost buster, can expel this pesky ghost with the help of incantations.

Kolli Devva

by Prathibha Nandakumar

or possess you or even cause you to die by coughing blood. Sometimes it can sneak up on a person: if it chances upon someone in need of a match to light a beedi, the devva’s hand will appear out of nowhere to light it, or, if it sees a lone person, it may appear as a man asking for a light. The would-be victim should ignore the request, but if they oblige, then they’ll see the head and face of the “man” start to dissipate once the beedi is lit, and the unfortunate human may be tormented thereafter.

Meccho Bhut KK

steals fully prepared meals. Believed to dwell around the coastal areas of West Bengal, there are even stories about this spirit asking people to hand over their fish. Refusing, unfortunately, is not an option, for it would lead to the ghost inhabiting your body and cause food poisoning: vomiting is believed to be a way for the spirit to forcefully expel the food you denied him of from your system. The meccho bhut is a greedy spirit and the only ways to keep him at bay and to save a meal are to tie amulets onto one’s own ankles or boats or to soak the fish in curd.

Mohini PN

Should one be walking through the forests and fields of Karnataka or Tamil Nadu at night and see a torch bobbing up and down through the trees in the distance, they should run, and never look back, for it could be a kolli devva. A kolli devva (in Kannada, “kolli” means torch, “devva” means ghost) is believed to be the ghost of a man who died an untimely death due to illness, murder or accident, that roams through forests, oscillating between being corporeal or incorporeal, with his burning torch of wood and cloth.

This devva enjoys dancing and even if this suggests it’s harmless, one should avoid crossing paths with it – if it notices you, at best it might just scare you, at worst it may choose to torment

With macch (fish) being an intrinsic part of Bengali culture and cuisine, it shouldn’t be surprising that fish hasn’t only got a place in gastronomical delights, rituals and ceremonies, but also in the heart of a ghostly creature. The meccho bhut is believed to be a big, burly, arboreal male ghost that loves fish, and not only robs fishermen of their catch but also, much to the horror of Bengalis, enters kitchens and

Mohini is an enchanting female devva that preys on men, and is said to inhabit South India, haunting old wells, tamarind and coconut trees, forests and wandering along lonely stretches of road. It is believed that girls or women who commit suicide without having found a romantic partner or experiencing physical pleasure return as

102 this vengeful spirit. In Indian cinema, the Mohini devva is often depicted as having long hair blowing in the wind and floating about in a white sari while singing haunting melodies. These sad-natured ghosts spend most of their time crying but when they see a man they like, they’ll turn on the charm and will allure him with the tinkling of anklets, bangles and by laughing and whispering sweet nothings into his ear. A smell much like incense marks her presence. She can seduce a man with her beauty or by tempting him with food that she prepares by setting her legs on fire and cooking on them.

Once the meal’s ready, she’ll extinguish the flames and take the food to him.

The only thing a man can do to ward off this evil spirit is to spit three times on the ground or ignore her and never look at her – if he does, he’ll become bewitched. When that happens he’ll start withering away, growing thin and losing interest in life and at night, her strong fragrance will emanate from the room where she stays with him, the walls becoming stained with the betel nut she chews and spits out, until the man dies, spitting blood.

Naale Baa PN

fooled by this ruse, was after a while discouraged from returning ever again, and the naale baa has since slipped out of existence, and no longer bothers anyone anymore.

Rantas

by Motherland

Th e naale baa, mea ning “ come tomorrow” in Kannada, is a female ghost with messy hair and tattered clothing that about 50 years ago was said to frequently knock on people’s front doors asking for alms and anything else she could get her hands on. Opening the door to this vagrant ghost spelt bad luck, even death, for the people inside that house. It was also believed that she might enter the house and never leave, and just hang around being a nuisance. Shouting out “Naale baa!” was believed to be the only way to get her to go away, although she’d return the day after. To combat this persistence, people started writing “naale baa” on their doors, in charcoal, turmeric or with paint, beneath a drawing of three fingers which symbolises, “mooru naama,” meaning “three lines on the forehead” which is slang for “you get nothing.” It is believed the ghost,

In the forests of the mountains of Kashmir is believed to lurk a kind of female djinn called a rantas. With long toenails, her feet turned backwards, hair to her knees and breasts draped over her shoulders, the rantas , an unsightly supernatural creature, is feared because she is said to come at night to steal young men and take them to the hills and turn them into her husbands. Needless to say, the poor men would never be seen again.

Shahzada Parveen, 52, who is a resident of Srinagar, says as a child she remembers people being terrified of them whisking away a brother or newly-wed husband. They also have the power to disappear and appear at will. Parveen says when her great

103 grandfather, who was a pir, a Sufi scholar, was sent to spread Islam in a djinn-infested village of south Kashmir, he encountered a harmless, one-legged djinn (who supposedly still lives in that village in a tree), a ten headed monster and a rantas. When the rantas tried to attack him, as a pir he had the power to repel her – her breasts burst into flames and she ran back into the hills.

Since the time she was a child, Parveen says it is believed that the rantas has stopped kidnapping young men , although people continue to believe she lives in the mountains.

Ret-ro-pret KK

Krishnan, a former professor of history at the University of Rajasthan. The retro-pret is a shape shifter that gathers sand to take on abstract forms. It camouflages itself in the desert by making its surface mutate into different patterns, such as ripples for instance, to mimic the terrain. The most effective way to evade it is for one to never allow their clothing to blend in with the colour of the sand, because the spirit considers this a sign of submission and will engulf the body. It’s for this reason that Rajasthanis avoid wearing “safari” colours in the desert, and instead choose colourfully patterned fabric for their clothing and bright-coloured trinkets for their camels. Worshipping water and the sun are also believed to be ways to prevent ever encountering the ret-ro-pret.

float above the ground and thirst for blood, much like a vampire. In ancient times she would be encountered mostly deep within forests, but these days she is believed to lead a more widespread existence. She lives atop tall palm trees and her presence is indicated by the blooming of pala trees. At night, she takes on the appearance of a gorgeous woman, seduces men and takes them to her tree, which thanks to her powers of illusion looks like an ancient Keralan home. Once a man enters the home – actually reaching the treetop – she kills him to drink his blood. In the morning, pieces of the man’s bones are found scattered around the foot of the tree.

The yakshi can’t be fought off, but to keep her at bay one must carry a knife covered in lime, which stops her from getting too close.

Yakshi

by Annalisa Merelli

The sand ghost, commonly known as ret-ro-pret in Marwari, is the most feared spirit in Rajasthan. People in villages attribute carcasses found in the desert to the work of the ret-ropret, as well as the occurrence of mirages. “Till today many villagers in remote Rajasthan believe that shifting dunes, sandstorms and droughts are all because of these ghosts,” says S

Argua bly the most notorious of Kerala’s spirits, the yakshi is believed to be the ghost of a woman who died a violent death. A yakshi is said to

Illustrations by Reshi Dev.

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