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Ghosts
     Ghosts are one of the spookiest and eeriest beings in the Universe after Michael Jackson. However unlike Jackson, ghosts do not grab their family jewels onstage as if they are applying a tourniquet to their family jewels. That is because ghosts do not have family jewels. I am merely assuming this because I have never really bothered to stand around long enough to verify it. Let's face it, ghosts scare me... not as much as CPI(M), but still, they come pretty close.
 My experiences with ghosts started in my childhood when my society "friends" (har) told me, that the building that I stay in, was haunted and they had seen this particularly terrible ghost. I knew it could not be true. Most likely, these guys had to have seen Prashant Pradhan. Prashant Pradhan did not look like any ghost. He was way too scary. He was about 5 feet tall and just as wide. He also had a bald patch which started at the base of his neck and ended near his eyebrows. Prashant's eyebrows did not belong to him. They actually belonged to the "Guiness Museum of Anthropological Wonders". Enormously dense, it was a wonder that he was ever exposed to sunlight. Above all was his absolutely horrendous singing, which was to impress Anjali Dave. If Anjali Dave could ever be impressed by this singing, she should have been exhibited in the aforementioned museum too. So I could not really blame my friends for their conviction that my building was haunted.

No ghost would ever inhabit our building as long as Prashant was resident there. If they had ever seen him, probably they themselves would have touched their turned-back feet to their non-turned bottoms and fled for their...er.well...death. Having said that my friends made sure that every evening when I climbed my staircase, I died a thousand deaths. Any rustle or wind in the staircase felt like a potential spirit. The trees that I could see from our ventilated stair case, seemed to morph into some hideous creature. This was not helped by the fact that almost every evening after we had finished our cricket, our conversations sounded like 

Sunil - "...and when he opened the door, he could only see a headless body inviting him in"

Me - (gulp)

Vivek - "All you have to do is show him my Nagad Baba's amulet and that would have finished off the body"

(Vivek knew all this Babas, Maharajs, Swamis etc, whose sole means of livelihood was to dispense amulets like bus tickets and to this day I wonder how does one "finish off" a headless body)

Sunil - "Nope, my cousin tried that. It didn't work"

(Sunil on the other hand had tried all these amulets. Had Vivek told him that he should have tried stapling his double chin to his chest and hopped around on one foot naked, smeared with a pregnant yak's blood, Sunil was sure to have already tried that out too)

Me - "He ..He..., I am sure your cousin ran like hell and today stays comfortably in a place where everybody has a head"

Sunil - "No unfortunately that body ate him. But he still comes out every Wednesday at 8 PM" (If you ever had to take a census of India all you had to do, was to ask Sunil the number of his relatives that had been devoured by ghosts)

Vivek - "OK Guys, that reminds me , it is 7:45 PM and I have to see the Wednesday Chitrahaar. Bye"

With our conversations having ended this way, I used to climb up our building with the constitution of a chicken brought up on laxatives. Once the body in the above mentioned story was replaced by a woman in a red sari, who used to carry her head in her hands. I was racing up the steps fast enough to enter the orbit. Mrs Gokhale, who was climbing up ahead of me did not share my enthusiasm for speed. As I rounded a flight of stairs, I saw her fanning herself with her red sari having climbed up 2 floors. The resultant scream was definitely far more powerful than Nagad Baba's or any other Baba's, Baby's, Babu's amulet.

Since then, this fear/thrill/rush still haunts me. To make things worse, I have this masochistic pleasure of watching horror movies. Whenever the camera starts following the heroine, I narrow down my eyes so tight that I have to use a crowbar to pry them open later. Through that narrow gap, I watch nervously as the music becomes more and more eerie. My muscles go taut untill you could cut them with a finger nail. Till the instant the ghost shows up, I have goose pimples the size of ping-pong balls. The night I see these movies, I sleep soundly i.e. making all sorts of sounds to scare off any ghosts who might be getting ideas.

Villages seem to have more than a fair share of ghosts. Each one of my friends claimed to have ghosts in their native Konkan villages each scarier than the other. I presume towns are too expensive. According to my friend Shridhar Pendse, it is so because ghosts prefer places which are not crowded. This is a load of crock because if ghosts preferred places without people they would have all been falling over each other to be resident in our public sector offices. (Note, I don't know whether ghosts actually fall but I presume it would be difficult to trip them over). Secondly I am not so sure that if a ghost stays resident in any place, that place is going to be crowded for long.

Some people at the other extreme say that ghosts do not exist and claim to have spent a new moon night, frolicking in remote graveyards. To be honest I don't know whether they are wrong or they are right. If there are loony guys out there who have no qualms about spending a night in graveyards, I know of a way to make them spend the rest of their lives in there. The rationalists are always out loudly pooh-poohing any such ghost tales. I don't know whom do we need more. The rationalists or the ghosts ? I prefer the ghosts. Why ??

Well, for the simple reason that sometimes some madness is needed....to lend sanity to life..

 
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