SPOOKS AND SPIRITS

As the sun dipped and disappeared leaving behind the faint hues of crimson and yellow, the sheet of darkness engulfed the city of Nainital.

The house never looked this disheveled. If someone happened to come through the door, they might think that a gruesome storm swept through the living room.Nishtha was sitting amidst the sea of books and journals when her inner conscience spoke up, “Thinking of it, moving to a new house does not seem so amusing once you actually realize what a pain it is to sort through years of unwanted garbage that your house bestowed upon you.”

Nishtha continued going through the books when she came across the battered cover of the journal (a brown coloured hand written diary, the one her grandfather gave her two days before his mysterious death). This was the first time she opened this diary, suddenly intrigued by what her dadu must have written, given that he was a man of great wit and word.

Her fingers ran through the yellowish, worn out pages, but her eyes got stuck on one particular page as she recognized her dadu’s handwriting. The title caught her interest ‘She seems to be everywhere I go’. Knowing that her dadu had schizophrenia, the title did not suggest anything unusual but the words on that page seemed too real to be one of his psychotic episodes. As she started reading, a shiver ran down her spine, the room suddenly felt too small and suffocating and the hustle of the city outside the walls of the house seemed to subside replacing the place with an eerie silence that allowed her to hear the loud thumping of her heart. The words on the page began describing a presence her dadu felt everywhere he went, one blurred presence of a woman draped in a dull red fabric. He described a husky voice always trying to talk to him when he tries to sleep. While these words settled in, Nishtha felt a strange sense of deva vu. She remembered that one instance from when she was about 6 years of age and she happened to wander off to the outer courtyard of her childhood home at 2 one night. She remembered hearing a husky voice of a faint shadow of red asking her if she was lost or not. She answered in her baby voice, ” Yes, I am, will you please help me back home?” But before an answer came, her mother ran towards her and scooped her up in her arms and scolded her for going out all alone at that odd hour of the night.

Nishtha’s blood ran cold and her face turned pale as she heard the same husky voice whisper near her ear, ” Maybe I can help you get back home now.....the way I helped your dadu.“..

Maybe her dadu was not hallucinating.