Ghosts and ghost stories: India
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Ghost stories
Tagore, Tarashankar Bandopdhyay
Indrajit Hazra | Why a good ghost story goes beyond `darr' |Oct 29 2017 : The Times of India (Delhi)
With bhoot chaturdashi behind us and Halloween before us, a look at the strange and primal pull of the genre
The ghost story, as any bona fide dead person knows, is one device by which we con front that uncomfortable certainty, death.
Take Rabindranath Tagore's chilling 1898 story `Manihara' (The Lost Jewels). On a dark and stormy night, a mysterious stranger tells the narrator sitting at a ghat about the one-time residents of the nearby dilapidated house, Phanibhushan Saha and his wife Manimalika, or Mani.Mani loves her jewellery , to the point of obsession, and Phanibhushan, who adores his wife, happily feeds her desire for jewellery .
That is, until Phanibhushan's business goes under. Mani fears that her husband will now sell her precious jewels and gathers all her jewellery , wearing as much of them on her body to proceed towards her parents' home.She had secretly asked a cousin to come and accompany her.
Phanibhushan returns home to find Manimala and her jewels (mani) gone. He makes enquiries, but Mani has disappeared from the face of the Earth. Without Mani, Phanibhushan descends into a dark, listless zone. Until one night, he is terror-stricken by a spectral figure bedecked in jewellery who comes to pick up one item of jewellery that Mani had forgotten to take.
The stranger's story ends there but not Tagore's. The writer has the stranger tell his listener, the narrator, that it seems he doesn't believe his story. The listener responds by asking him whether he believed his own story . “In the first place, Dame Nature does not write stories, her hands are already full with --.“ Before the stranger can finish his sentence, Tagore's narrator interrupts and tells the man the other reason for believing in his story: he is the man who [presumably with Manimala] was drowned.
Even as a period story , `Manihara' is `believable' with its familiar themes -lust for wealth and greed leading to tragedy . `Tragedies' in the real world that we regularly encounter are in the form of `crimes' and `accidents', news items on the nation pages of newspapers and on news TV . The lurid pull of these real-life deaths or `incidents' holding our attention before we move to `another story' is far more uncomfortable (and therefore `inconsequential) than ghost stories with their craft, and atmosphere.
The image of two young women left hanging on a tree in Baduan, Uttar Pradesh, in 2014 shares the same twilight light as Tarashankar Bandopdhyay's 1940 story , `Daini' (Witch). An old wizened woman lives alone, away from the nearby village. This `witch', with an “old wrinkled face, flaxen hair, toothless mouth, but eyes with the glint of a knife“ was once a young woman. Sitting at the steps leading to a pond, she had once “suddenly heard someone rushing down the steps and saw Haru Sarkar. He dragged her by the hair and flung her down on the old brick steps. His shout still rings in her ears, “Witch! You dared to cast your evil look on my son. I'll kill you.“
The low-caste old woman, unlike the young girls at Badaun who hang for eternity , survives the threat and many more over the years from the upper caste's fear of the `dayin'. She herself believes in her terrible powers and the ruin she brings on others who have strayed their way to her blasted heath on the village's edge.
Fear is only one of the primal emotions sought by the reader of the ghost story . There is also its `poetics', best understood in the context of a `haunting' tune or passage.
