It was a dark and stormy night— just the kind of night you would associate with ghost stories. I was at home, all alone. My parents were out, attending some party. They had prodded me to tag along with them, but I refused, cherishing the one very prominent millennial trait— a strong affinity towards unsociability. It was a hot summer evening, and the dusk had fallen half an hour ago or so. Sighing with disappointment at the suffocating humidity, I went over to the window and sat down, facing the dark silhouettes of a score of mango and coconut trees— them, breathing a sight of relief at the impending prospect of a probable rainfall, and me, brushing beads of sweat off my forehead.
The impromptu breeze amidst the humidity gave way to a pleasant interlude of a light storm, but soon it gave way to a whooshing ghastly storm, threatening the leaves of the coconut trees, swaying wildly in the untamed display of nature. Moments later, just as I was feeling pleased with the storm brushing off the humidity, as if invoking a spell of the nor’westers, I heard an unlatched window pane of the neighbouring apartment building hitting the sill hard, shattering the glass pane instantaneously. I got shivers down my spine and goosebumps on my arms at the shattering din of the glass, and at the shards hitting the floor and shattering further, a fraction of second later. It was as if the shattering sound had hit my soul and spoke out the truth I was afraid to hear— the sound of a thousand shattering dreams. The fact that I was alone, and didn’t have any parental company, something which I normally find irritable, wasn’t much of a help.
I was, in an instant, transported back to a time in the distant reality, a time that was lost and which could only be recuperated in the broken shards of memories— that of the juvenile bliss, of an ignorant childhood encased in a comforting bubble of dreams. I was transported to the summer nights, when, during the thunderstorms, we often had power-cuts, and even if we didn’t have one, my father and I would switch off the lights and fans, and read out pages from the ghost stories , of either the books I had, or from the periodical vernacular magazine, Anandamela, in the flickering, nostalgic yellow light of the candle, comforted by the breeze.
At the realisation of the time having passed fathomably from a childhood of flipping through different editions of ghost stories written by the favourite Bengali authors to a time when the soul of Akaky Akakievich started roaming around eerily on deserted Russki streets, claiming the mortals’ overcoat of mortality, a tear trickled down my cheeks. As if to break the reverie, raindrops started sprinkling on my face, sprinkling reality back onto me.
Where had those evenings gone when I found pleasure in closing my eyes and listening to my father narrating the ghost stories and adding sound effects, to scare my mother and me, and then sharing the warmhearted laughter of togetherness? When was that first rainy evening when he didn’t narrate a story? When was it that I didn’t remind him to resume the tradition? When was it that I stopped counting?
At times, I feel like this adulthood was the ghost which was enwrapped and served on a silver platter. It is this “growing up” that we looked up to, and desire with the whole of our inexperienced, innocent heart, and feared simultaneously, unknowingly, while reading those ghost stories and hearing those creaking doors deep inside, which would eventually lead us to this darkness.
The rainfall grew in its intensity and the patter of the raindrops on the leaves and the tin roof sheds from houses in the locality tried consoling my heart. somehow, I wished in this darkness, in this eerily torrential rain, I didn’t feel so afraid of the ghosts I dreaded in my girlhood days, anymore.
On the contrary it felt rather comforting to be reminded of the make-believe creatures, when with the sudden lightning and the thunder that shook me to my bones, the power went off. One of ‘those’ things— and now I was all alone. All alone from the inside. Completely alone as all my imaginary friends and imaginary ghosts had vacated me long ago. I wondered how or when was it that I stopped feeling from the heart, despite trying hard to feel; feel from the heart. One of ‘those’ evenings it was, with the silhouette of the trees spread out against the Prussian blue of the sky— or, did I merely imagine that? For it was dark and cloudy, and raining hard.
I didn’t feel afraid of the ghosts anymore, for, I knew they didn’t exist like that, and definitely not in those hideous forms that we imagine and derive a sadistic pleasure from them, to be. Somehow, on the contrary, I wished for this ephemeral ethereal supernatural creature to be alive, and comfort me. I wished for the ghost— plasmic, or cloudy, or however we imagine them to be, to come to be, tap on my back, and talk to me. For then, I wouldn’t be so alone anymore— alone in the darkness, not just from without but equally from within, as I dreaded being alone, all alone with me, and a stupid smartphone for company.
But as I picked up the phone in my hand, a sense of sheer loneliness crept all over me, just as the bright white screen lit up and blinded me, momentarily. My phone told me that 354 of my “friends” were online, but there was none I wanted to talk to. I wished and wished for the creature I had so dreaded in the past, to come and keep me company— to induce some feeling in me, of ecstasy or fear, for I was exhaustibly scared of my thoughts as well as mine own fine self. It hit me and frightened me again, how, as the adding years count up to say, I had grown up, and on growing up, realised that there is no world of fantasy, to take refuge in, or to elope from, as a refugee. Adulthood, responsibilities and reality succeeded in scaring me more than the ghosts ever could. And, as if in a trance, as if to feel something, driven by the unending quest for the spark in life, I went up to my terrace. I opened the door and walked out into the rain and thunderstorms. The raindrops felt hot and cold on my skin, as I was continually being flushed from inside with a heatwave of feelings, nostalgia, fear and longing.
I had no one to talk to, or luxuriate in a silent nothingness with, but my head bellowed to be felt alive and be comforted by some empathising company. The sky was being illuminated with lightning and threatening thunders, but it never came— the bodiless sold I kept searching for, with lidless eyes and a toothy grin, clutching a blackened, dead rose in between. Looking up at the sky and closing my eyes to feel how the rains were washing my outsides, I longed to be refreshingly bathed from the insides, much the same way. I wished for the lightning to strike me, or the thunderbolt to jolt life back into me, as I felt done, merely existing.
The lightning never struck me, it never electrified my dead insides, and the thunder kept on rumbling, as if chastising me; till a moment when the divine growls coalesced with a more mechanical, metallic rumble and a yellow lighted was cast on the wall. I went over and saw, much to my dismay, that it was the car. My parents returned. And somehow all the vigorous vulnerability volatilised and vanished. An unwelcome mask of reality and lies, very paradoxical in itself, armed me up. I suddenly didn’t feel the longing for my parents as they returned, for they would never be able to truly listen to the ringing of my heart, or understand it. I had to, therefore, think of more lies to take shelter in, to reason my drenched state. I crept quickly into the shower. When they ask, I would say, “It was too hot so I decided to take a shower.”
Life is a stage and we are all performers, had once said a famous bard. It was time for me to get back in character. But at least, the dread of being alone with myself was over. I would be getting irritated at petty stuff soon again. It was over, the dark and stormy night— just the kind you would associate with ghost stories.