The Parish Ghost

Illustration by Copilot Designer

Fiction

Father Joseph woke up hearing two sounds. One was his wall clock striking the midnight hour. The other was totally unfamiliar, esoteric. Like the faint sigh of someone too weary to knock at heaven’s door. Father Joseph thought it was the wind. Until the scent of jasmine, oddly out of season, began to haunt his bedroom in the presbytery which was just a few score metres from the parish cemetery.

“Is someone there?” Father Joseph asked without getting up. He was more than a bit scared. He never liked this presbytery which was too close to the cemetery. But he had to endure it until his next transfer.

“Yes, father,” an unearthly voice answered. From too close, not outside the room. “Pathrose.”

“Pathrose who?”

A family name was mentioned in answer.

“But that family…” Father Joseph’s voice quivered, “no one of that family is alive as far as I know.”

“You’re right,” Pathrose said. “We perished because we were too poor to survive what our poor people’s party called bourgeoise neoliberalism.”

“Are you a Marxist ghost?” Father Joseph could have accepted a ghost, but never a Marxist though one of his philosophy teachers, a Catholic priest, had declared Jesus as the first socialist. “If you have two tunics, give one away. Doesn’t the Bible teach us that sort of socialism?” Joseph was too young to accept that sort of philosophy in those days. Even as he grew up, he couldn’t accept Marxism at all. When he was a small boy, his father had taught him that Marxism was the eighth deadly sin. “Remember son, Marxism teaches people to worship equality instead of God, to replace the Church with the State, and love with revolution.” No philosophy could erase such teachings of his father from Father Joseph’s memory.

“Your party never did any good,” Father Joseph made his dislike of Marxism clear to Pathrose the Marxist Ghost.

“Ah, no, Father, it did. It did much good to the top men of the party. They all became big, powerful, rich. They moved from their original huts to rich bungalows, and travelled in luxury cars. And had partymen to do their slave work. I was a partyman too and I went and killed one of them leaders one day just because… “

“Because of jealousy,” Father Joseph was quick to judge like his counterparts. 

Pathrose laughed. That laughter rattled Father Joseph. It was like glass shattering in an empty church. It echoed in the emptiness of Father Joseph’s soul. The priest thought so. Dear reader, I’m no one to judge the priest at all. I’m a sinful layman whose place in hell is predetermined. When I say things like ‘emptiness of someone’s soul’, it’s just a literary metaphor.

“A starving man is not jealous, Father. He is greedy at best, if at all you want to name the sin. Your catechism writers never understood sins properly. They would see a poor soul’s hunger as gluttony.”  

Father Joseph didn’t like this blasphemous ghost, a semiliterate Marxist who dares to question the wisdom of the Fathers of the Church. “Why don’t you go and sleep in your grave, Pathrose?”

“I’m sleeping all the time, aren’t I? And it’s all so lonely down there in that poor man’s grave in the coldest corner of your cemetery. And I thought you must be lonely too.”

“Solitude is not the same as loneliness, Pathrose. At any rate, I wouldn’t like the company of ghosts. Honestly, I’m scared.”

Pathrose laughed again. Glass shattered in the emptiness of the church again. Dear reader, that’s another metaphor.

“Are you afraid of God?” Pathrose asked.

Father Joseph didn’t answer. Though he wasn’t brilliant enough to get admission to an IIT, he was sensible enough to get the direction of the ghost’s argument. Moreover, this is a Dalit ghost in addition to being Marxist, and so one has to be more cautious.

“If you can’t love a spirit who is so near to you, how can you love God who is so far away?” Pathrose asked the same question that Father Joseph had anticipated. “The Church never loved us,” Pathrose went on. “Because we were too poor and low class. Now even Heaven doesn’t want us.”

There was silence.

There was a sob. A sob that petered out. The odour of jasmines vapourised instantly. And then silence. Like eternal silence. Dear reader, have you ever experienced eternal silence? Go to a cemetery in the middle of the night, if you wish to experience that. By the way, this is not a metaphor.

Father Joseph got out of bed and dried himself of all the sweat. I’m not sure whether he was able to sleep again that night.

The next morning, the sacristan called him out unusually and said, “Someone has broken a windowpane of the church.”