Ghosts on the Madras Road

Every evening I watched the setting sun send out a signal in the waning light. The fruit bats that hung like black, pregnant leaves in the ancient banyan tree across from our bungalow awakened and lifted in unison. Hundreds of dark silhouettes filled the sky as they flew off to begin their nocturnal foraging.  Banyans are the lords of Indian flora. Their sprawling, twisted branches grow both downward and upward and are believed to be inhabited by the souls of the dead and possess mystical powers.  I learned that the mystical is often nothing more than a mirror of the physical. It reflects experiences that are outside our realm of knowledge and supplies answers to events we don´t understand. I had come to a country where the paranormal and spiritual permeated every aspect of life. I became aware that there were signs that not everyone could see, and transcendent whispers that only some could hear. Most of us willingly discount what we have never seen - and because we haven’t seen something or heard of it, we close our senses and minds and say that it doesn’t exist. How do you describe the intricate tones of classical music to the deaf or the spectrum of a rainbow to the blind?  My friend Basha had seen a cobra in our garden one evening on his way home from the cinema.  When he told me about it the next morning, I didn´t have any trouble believing him and was very watchful when I went out in the dark, as I knew cobras existed and had seen them before. A few weeks later Basha had an encounter of another kind. When he told me about it I was skeptical and thought that his imagination had gotten the better of him.

Mike and I lived on the outskirts of the village. We usually sat and talked after dinner, wrote letters or read and then turned in early.  Life slowed down as the dust of the day settled. Oil lamps shed a faint glow in the cottages and cow dung cooking fires spread an acrid haze over the tangle of lanes and alleys in our part of Kolar. The nightlife consisted of an open air cinema in the market place with a temperamental projector and rows of uncomfortable wooden benches. For a couple of rupees you could watch a four reel movie while you swatted mosquitoes and flies and shelled boiled peanuts. The films were mostly standard Bollywood, with singing and dancing unconnected to the plot and with slick mustached heroes and trim dancing heroines. They were a variation of the same theme, boy meets girl, trouble along the way, and in the end all obstacles are overcome and everybody lives happily ever after.

Our friend Basha loved the films and saw at least two every week.  Our door was always open and he burst in one evening out of breath; the mischief that usually glittered in his eyes was gone. It was new moon night and according to superstition, a time when the spirits of the dead were restless. He told us that he had been walking home along the Madras Road after the show and that a ghost had materialized.  He explained that a few days earlier there had been a traffic accident and a young woman and her child had been struck by a lorry and killed. Now her apparition could be seen standing in the shadows holding out her open, beckoning arms to young men who were passing by, enticing them to follow her. We tried to assure him that ghosts existed only in the imagination and that the dead didn't rise up and walk around, but we couldn’t convince him, especially when Mani our housekeeper said , ” it is so, there are spirits who wander until they find peace or enter their next incarnation.”  He continued, “it is believed that the woman was not prepared for death and her soul did not have time to properly leave this life. It is searching for a way into the next world.”

Mike and I were pragmatic and logical, skilled and efficient. We believed in what we could see and touch and account for rationally. We lacked the finely honed belief in the supernatural that Indians seemed to possess in abundance. Instead of persisting and saying, "that ghosts don't exist, it is just silly superstition," we waited until midnight and with flashlights focused on the ground before every step, to avoid the cobra that had been seen in the neighborhood, followed Basha and Mani out to the Madras Road.  We hid behind the wall of the traveler’s bungalow. It was a perfect place to watch for spirits, lonely and still, deserted in the night. I really didn’t know what we waited for or hoped to see, perhaps a visitor from another dimension, an ethereal being that wasn't only visible to those who believed, but also visible to doubters. Once we had watched a shaman try to raise a young village boy that had died suddenly from the dead, so waiting to see a ghost didn't seem that strange. After an hour's wait she still hadn't appeared. It seemed like a good idea when I said that we should climb up into the trees that grew along the wall and use them for camouflage. They were flame trees sacred to Hindus and in full bloom. The crimson blossoms were filled with sweet nectar: fare for monkeys, birds, insects, and in the darkness, fruit bats. All four of us climbed up, two to a tree.

A constable on his nightly round passed under us, heard a rustling, looked up and saw the unlikely sight of two Americans, a Muslim and a Christian Tamilian, sitting in the limbs. He twirled the ends of his well preened, waxed moustache, rapped his bamboo nightstick against the tree trunks and with the full authority that his badge, turban and well-pressed uniform gave him, demanded to know what we were doing up there, "you're catching bats to cook I suppose,” he said. According to rumor it was a custom that was practiced in the villages of the Ghats where the people believed bat meat was a remedy, for among other things, asthma. I explained lamely that I thought eating bats was repulsive and that we were hoping to see the ghost of the young woman that was killed recently and that was said to be haunting the Madras road. When I added "with all the noise you've made she’s probably been scared away," he lowered his voice and said in Kannaris, “go home now and don’t bother the dead; let them find their rest."

Even if there was a vast cultural divide, there seemed to be a recognizable symmetry between my life in India and the way I grew up. There were striking similarities between the two, and seen through the lens of my Catholic upbringing, magic spells or looking for a ghost in the quiet Kolar night wasn’t so far- fetched. Hindu deities and village superstition weren’t that far removed from the teachings of the Catholic Church. From an early age the Church filled my head with stories of miracles and tales of reward and punishment in heaven and hell, prayers for the dead and living, blessings and benedictions, angels and demons. Partaking in the ancient ritual of the Mass was like falling into a time warp. 

That night I fell asleep while reading and was awakened by the sound of a moth beating its wings against the bare lightbulb that hung from a cord over my cot. The struggling moth fell and flew up repeating instinctively its spiral towards the light source that would lead it to its demise. When I fell asleep again, I didn’t have nightmares of ghosts or migrating souls, but instead a surrealistic dream of swarming butterflies filling the sky like the petals of colorful blossoms blowing on the wind.