He screamed loudly and burst into tears much to the amazement of others!
It was an inky black night. The moon had not yet made an appearance and it was chilly. The boy was seated at the dining table along with his brother intently listening to his mother narrate a spooky tale from a time many decades ago when she was a young girl.
Her grandmother had recently passed away. She was just 7 years of age. Too young to grasp the enormity of what death meant. The image of her grandmother on an ice slab troubled her greatly. Won’t she be cold? She asked once, twice, many times but got no answer to. Her mother was distraught beyond belief. She hadn’t stopped crying since she got the news and they rushed on a long road journey to reach by the night.
The next few days were a blur as the palatial home was filled to the brim with relatives and strange rituals which seemed alien to her were carried out. Then one of the nights, her grandmother’s sister who had the reputation for being weird as she carried strange potions in her bag and believed in ghosts and witches came by to speak with her mother. She consoled her mother and said that she could summon her late mother’s spirit to talk to her. My mother, who was clearly not thinking and too overwhelmed with grief, jumped at that offer. She was after all not at her bedside when her mother had passed away, something that pained her immensely.
So the paraphernalia was assembled. There was a large piece of white paper with letters of the Hindi alphabet written on it. Some other images were drawn on it. The room was dark except for the tiny flicker of candles. And some inverted steel bowls were place on that paper. Children were shooed out but she found a vantage point at a crack in the door. Then the strange lady started chanting something. She started summoning the spirits and her face positively looked scary. Her hair was open and fanned out untidily on her shoulders. She looked like a witch from a Ramsay movie just with very bad makeup. Anyhow, after a few minutes, she placed her hand on the steel bowl which started moving quickly across letters. Someone started jotting down the letters to form words. Apparently, thr grandmother’s spirit was now communicating with her mother. Having been completely spooked out, she ran away from the crack in the door from where she had been watching with fascination. She was now terribly scared and that night she had terrible nightmares of ghosts and scary spirits.
As she finished her tale, her sons who were quiet till then started asking questions. Do the spirits exist? Are there ghosts? The mother truthfully said that she could not say for sure but she did not believe in them. Just then the elder son started playacting. He waved his hands with a flourish as if summoning a black witch from one of the stories he had read. He had just uttered a few words when his younger brother who was watching mesmerized screamed.
He screamed loudly and burst into tears much to the amazement of others!
The mother jumped up from her chair and hugged him wondering what caused that? At the entrance of the dining room stood a very baffled dad who had just slipped in quietly into the house, late as he was from work that day.
He could not fathom why his younger son gave such a shriek of horror on seeing him. On understanding the comical situation, every one dissolved into laughter. The younger son joined in slowly as well.
This is a true story. 🙂 It happened a couple of weeks ago at my home.
Rachna says 
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