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The
city of Amritsar1
has a history of catastrophes. It has suffered the indignities
of the Partition in which human beings were butchered like chicken.
It has seen the two wars with Pakistan. And it has felt also the
blood-soaked footprints of death that rode on mobikes and carried
Kalashnikovs, used the rhetoric of religion, and received at last
death and devastation in return.
I spent
the better part of October in this city. The days were spent in
the Academic Staff College of the Guru Nanak Dev University where
I was taking a refresher course in English. The evenings passed
in the streets in search of the elusive clean dhaba2,
an imaginary place as I later discovered, in a city that is known
for its peculiar eating habits and prolific eating joints. After
ten days of exploration, I settled for a tolerable place at which
I could dine every night for an affordable twenty rupees.
I made
a real discovery during those evening strolls. I discovered that
the city has more people than appear to the eye. There is a whole
population of ghosts that haunt, harass and sometimes help people.
Could
these ghosts - that inhabit the invisible Amritsar - be the orphaned
children of that happiness which died dreaming? You too might have
heard, as I have, that the ghosts of those who die prematurely remain
earth-bound and in racking agony. From what I was now hearing, it
seemed that a sea of spirits had converged upon the city. One reason
could be that it is a holy city, and the lost and groping spirits
alight upon its old branches in search of grace.
I could
not, however, understand why these spirits must torture the living.
An old man whom I visited frequently with a friend told us tales
and tales of his chilling encounters with the ghosts that possess,
mostly, young and virgin girls. And I saw people coming to him to
seek his help to be delivered from the ghosts. They were all poor
people, mostly Sikhs, who claimed to have benefited from the old
man's intervention. He confided to us that he usually managed to
coax the possessing spirit to leave a person. Sometimes, though,
when a spirit was too stubborn to go, he had to come to terms with
it: the spirit would not inflict any pain or loss on the person
it possessed, provided it was allowed to stay undisturbed and unprovoked.
I visited
the old man's home quite a few times during my stay in Amritsar,
yet I could never set my eyes on a ghost. Of course, I had no burning
desire to see one, but the suffering and terrified faces and the
groveling and shrunken bodies of the people I saw there began slowly
to melt into specters in my imagination.
Back
in my town, I now recall the room where I met the old man and heard
the confidential tales of haunted homes and possessed people. He
sat on a high wooden bed. The supplicant sat at his feet, on the
bare floor. The old man would grab the person's forehead in his
hand, press it hard for a few seconds and then give her or him some
cardamoms and cloves and a pinch of ash. The suffering person paid
nothing - just placed a coin before a saint's picture on the mantelpiece.
On a shelf in a corner was a sooty lamp that burned rarely. Near
it was placed the old man's asana – his seat for meditation and
dialogue with those who inhabit the other world but are somehow
tempted to poke their spooky noses into its affairs.
I try
to reflect on why these ghosts should trouble only the very poor,
and why only Amritsar of all the places should have so many of them.
Does it have something to do with the traumas the people of the
city are struggling to overcome and forget?
One
thing seems to me certain. The poor never find peace. Sometimes
it is the armies. Sometimes the terrorists and the police. And sometimes
just ghosts. Everyone scrapes their bones to extract his pound of
flesh.
Notes:
1.
Amritsar is a city in the state of Punjab in India. It is on the
border with Pakistan.
2.
A typical Punjabi roadside eating-joint, the favorite haunt of
truck-drivers. Nowadays found all over India and in many other
countries also.
Copyright
© 2000 Rajesh Kumar Sharma. All Rights Reserved.
Rajesh
Kumar Sharma is a writer currently living and working in the state
of Punjab, India.
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