Skip to main content

Ghosts

Fiction

It was years since I had left Kochi.  Sitting on the shore of the Vembanad backwaters sipping beer with an old classmate, I remembered those days of my life as a college student. 

Professor Leela Menon wafted into our conversation as naturally as the breeze from the lake set the coconut leaves nodding gently.  “She retired more than ten years back,” said Mohan.  “She now lives all alone in a villa facing the Vembanad.”

I decided to visit her.  I was one of her favourite students.  I adored her poems as well as her lectures on literature.  I participated in every essay competition to which the college was invited; I participated more to please her than anything else.  Professor Leela Menon was a poet and a social activist.  She did not marry; her life was dedicated to social causes.  She was bitterly opposed to the kind of development and that was overtaking the city.  She hated people cutting down trees in order to widen the roads.  She deplored the roar of the traffic, the rush of insanity, and the illusion called progress. 

“People say that she bought a villa that was known to be haunted by ghosts,” said Mohan.

I was amused.  “All the more reason I should visit her,” I said.

The auto rickshaw stopped at the gate bearing the Professor’s name beneath the name of the villa: Valmikam

To my surprise, Professor Leela Menon recognised me instantly.  We discussed the same old issues that were her passions: environment, human greed, meaning of development and progress...  “The planet is dying,” she said.  “We are killing it.  We are blood-sucking ghosts fattening ourselves on the vital sap sucked from the planet’s veins.”

She went on talking and reciting poems.  About the market forces that had converted parts of the Vembanad Lake into resorts and commercial centres.  About the imminent death of the Lake.  About the endlessness of human greed.

As the sun began to set beyond the horizon, I said, “Somebody said you had a bought a villa that was haunted.”

She laughed gently.  “Stories people make.  I didn’t try to suppress them.  They kept people away.  I’m doing tapas in my valmikam.  I’d prefer not to be disturbed.”

When the rainclouds gather the peacock dances with all the brilliant colours of his plumes spread out.  The hen is attracted.  They mate.  Dancing, mating.  Eggs are the consequence.  More peacocks and hens.  More dances, more mating.  One day the peacock was tired of dancing and mating.  He said, O, God, let my plumes vanish.  I don’t want hens anymore.  The plumes lost their sheen.  But the hens continued to come.  Let me become an egg, prayed the peacock.  I want to do tapas

I remembered one of her poems.

“Why don’t you spend the night here and experience the ghosts yourself?” she asked when I got up to leave.

“I have booked a room in the hotel,” I said. 

“Never mind.  You can go there in the morning.”


When the light was switched off and I was in bed, I realised what Professor Leela Menon meant by the ghosts.  The light from the traffic that flowed relentlessly outside cast bizarre shadows on the walls.  The sound roared like ghosts.  Every now and then a train passed – too often, in fact, roaring monstrously, shaking up the very ground...  Ghosts, too many ghosts, I mumbled as I turned over in bed restlessly. 

Comments

  1. Being at peace... that's what this story inspires me to be.
    Ghosts are all in our mind, aren't they???

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow lovely to read

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Retirement thoughts are overpowering me, Chaitali. But my wife is scared that I might only sit and sip beer instead of doing the real tapas :)

      Delete
  3. Hi Tomichan, I remember of reading your piece long ago... you write so simple, so realistic, nothing surreal in it, yet so interesting :-)
    I wish to own a farmhouse someday and rhyme of Lucy :))

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My dream is not much different from yours, Anunoy... Let nature inspire me... May our dreams come true!

      Delete
  4. Nice one Tomichan Sir. You are very brave indeed. I am but very scared of ghosts. I can't even gather courage to read such a book or watch a ghost movie. I will die from fear. :P

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If you live in Delhi for a few years, you will learn to fear men more than the devils :)

      Delete
  5. Wow what a brilliant post. I've never seen industrialisation and urbanisation being explained in such an innovative way. Fabulous.. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Siddharth. We cannot save ourselves from these ghosts, however.

      Delete
    2. But we can learn to accept and adapt...

      Delete
    3. Of course. That's what we are doing. But some changes out there will also be needed. Our future generations may not even exist otherwise.

      Delete
  6. Ghosts indeed! :)
    You know I lived in a hotel that haunted by an Englishman's ghost. Really. I even blogged on it. Though of course I was ignorant of the fact it was haunted. I came to know about it much later.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's interesting, Indrani. Give me the link, please.

      Delete
  7. Ghost of the industrialized present....what better ghosts than human greed for more

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We can also be sure of one thing: these ghosts will never die.

      Delete
  8. Ghosts of technology and civilization... we are perishing the melody of nature with this malady of urbanization...

    I always find solace in Nature..it gives me an inexplicable peace of mind...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. SEZs, development mantra, globalisation... there's a whole range of ghosts and ghost-manufacturing industry waiting in queue, Maniparna.

      Delete
    2. Nooo...you took away my inspiration for my posts... (just kidding)

      Delete
  9. Simply loved this one. We need people like professor Leela else as you have said we are killing the planet. And we all including Me are responsible for the mayhem..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There are a lot of people like Prof Leela in India today, Roohi. But hardly anyone bothers about them.

      Delete
  10. These are ghosts who work 24*7 as well as overtime and are making this beautiful earth ghastly ghost world.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Missed your posts for sometime now. Making it up . Wish there was "like" option on the pages.

    liked :-)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...