Venkatesh K N. experienced and shares a reel like ghostly experience; a lonely street with no sign of anyone except a black cat crossing and the strange silence staring at you as you make your way through a graveyard.
Some days ago I was travelling in the night alone along the footpaths of Frazer town in Bangalore, however many do. There was no special importance for this travel apart from the point that I was going late, home of which I was getting used to these days. That day, obscured from my memory of calendar, is because I experienced a haunting experience of which I did not want to remember again. Most of the streets of Bangalore have street lights, but this particular road in Frazer Town running along the huge expanse of Christian cemetery is a road less travelled during night. I deliberately wanted to travel through this space because I was told this was such a haunting space and wanted to experience how was that feeling below my skin to experience of being hunted by ghost of which I did not believe in.
The darkness that occupied this particular road was so dark that even my shadow stopped following me. A surreal feeling preoccupied my mind. My shadow, projected by my presence in an oblique angle to me some times bigger and many times even smaller than me, had grown and conquered the whole space surrounding me, encapsulating its source-myself. I almost felt like a drug travelling inside capsule of infinite length, since I could not see any source of light anywhere. Apparently my mobile was also switched off. I could not do anything.
But all this was tolerable as they were created in my mind, I could have thought of any other surreal metaphor. The scary part was when everything went out of control. My mind failed to control what was happening outside of it. There was a sudden breeze, a whistling sound screamed around me, as if I was on top of some mountain. This was not an appropriate space for this sound. The leaves that were lying lifelessly on ground of which I was not even aware off started to hit my face one by one, with this came the dust. My knowledge about ghosts almost made me expect something in white to appear and haunt me. To my surprise this stereotype failed, it did not work. I had to walk for about a minute in the windy street of which I knew nothing because of my fear. Anything could happen here. An absurd Kafkaesque situation might be revealed in front of my blind eyes in such a network forsaken condition. There was no nostalgia here, everything was immediate, but the fear that I was coming to terms with would have been same even twenty to thirty years before. If this street is so deserted today it would have been even worse before. There would have been many people who would have faced similar fear. The fear that I was facing is new to me because I have not experienced this before, perhaps there were such spaces in Bangalore before it became ‘garden city’, ‘silicon city’ and other iconicity that it has gained now, where people feared to traverse. There were many spaces near my house which was believed to be haunted during my father’s generation but now they have turned into residential layouts with families who find salvation by working in corporate companies.
What brings us back to the haunted street encapsulated by my shadow of which we had diverted from towards the dwindling haunted spaces, is the sudden sound of a tree branches brushing with each other that embraced my ears. I almost sensed that this sound was coming from by back. I just turned back to see the spectacle, I lost the sense of direction for a moment I did not know from where I turned. How much angle should I turn to come back to the same position? All my rationality was shattered at this moment. If someone would have walked in a white sari, I could have easily believed in ghost. But still I sensed ghost in what was happening to my senses. Suddenly the sound of branches grew big and I heard a tree falling down. I could not understand any social necessity from this tree fall. How can a tree fall? Can I be surrounded by a group of gundas who will hit any minute? Are they looking for my rationality to go null? Am I the guinea pig towards addition of a new ghost to the city?
I was scared I just could not walk a bit further, my legs started to shiver. I suddenly saw an arch kind of an entrance of which I was very glad and rushed to save myself from my fears and hid behind a bench. The tree was still falling, I never saw it, it was only the sound that narrated its existence. By listening to the sound I was calculating how the tree was collapsing- The transformation of life to death.
To my happiness a light lit in front of my eyes, a cat was playing with a torch. I took the torch and glanced at the place to get to know where I was. To glorify my horrific situation I was in graveyard. The first thing I saw was R.I.P. Everything just went up my nerves. I was so happy that I did not see my name below R.I.P. Some graves also had images of person buried. Getting to know that I was somewhere in the graveyard, it became easy for me to fight the haunted location. I took the torch and searched for the watchman’s house. I knocked the door opened in the most normal way possible. The watchman after recognizing my face not matching any of his familiarity he started shouting at me for disturbing his sleep. I just could not think why I had come here. Was I searching for a human presence? I could not grasp my actions. Any way I begged him to allow me to charge my cell phone for fifteen minutes. After my job was done I left the place. I called one of my friends to pick me up which he did. I returned to the place the day after it, everything was normal; there was no sign of a tree being felled. The watchman in the graveyard greeted me.
