AVEEK SEN - ZEITGEIST
A perennial complaint made by the servants in my childhood home was that we treated our dead rather shoddily. We never did the proper rites after someone died, sending him or her off with a few songs and no keening; the ashes were often mislaid or left lying about the house; what we ate and wore remained the same; the memorial service was cold and godless; there was no feasting afterwards. So, the servants lived in fear of meeting the dissatisfied souls of their departed masters and mistresses in some dusky corner of the house. The ‘load-shedding’ hours during winter evenings were the most risky. This was when the major-domo, Nitai-dada, came upstairs with a lantern to fan the mosquitoes out with camphor-smoke and make the beds. All of a sudden, we would hear a crash, followed by a gasp and running footsteps. My grand-uncle would look up from his Agatha Christie. “I think Nitai has just met Rani,” he would declare, and go back to Miss Marple.
Rani was the grand-uncle’s late wife – a woman whose lightly bewhiskered somberness was actually an odd sense of humour in disguise. She was diabetic and childless, and spent a lot of time reading articles with names like “I am Jane’s ovaries” or “I am John’s prostate” in Reader’s Digest. She was an expert at injecting herself with insulin, and had taught us, the children, how to jab the rubber stopper of the little bottles without breaking the needle and draw the fluid into the syringe. Every now and then, in the middle of telling us how her father shot mad elephants, she would give us a blank stare and go into a hypoglycemic daze. But there was a jar of sweets kept ready by her side, and we had learnt how to pop one into her mouth when she passed out, without her choking on it. She would suck on it for a while out of some primal reflex, and come round again, give us a clueless smile, and carry on with her mad-elephant story.
Sometimes, she would get bored with her quasi-Charulata existence and devise little amusements for herself. Packets of cornflakes came, in those days, with ghost masks. Rani once hid away one of these and, at night, when everyone was sleeping, she put it on, wrapped herself in a white bed-sheet, tiptoed downstairs to the servants’ rooms, stood outside a window, and started pleading for fish in the high nasal whine of widow-ghosts whose hungry souls, or bodies, craved the food they were forbidden to eat.
Then, a few years after The Exorcist released in the Seventies, our house was full of guests who had come to attend my sister’s wedding. As a farewell to childhood, she and I decided to play a prank on the rickshaw-wallahs who slept under our portico at night. I had discovered that if you ran your fingers rapidly over the interior strings of the piano after opening the cover, then you made a low and fearful rumbling that sounded like the end of the world. So, while my sister made that sound, I did the blood-curdling voice of the demon Pazuzu, who possesses the girl in the film. The entire ensemble was recorded on our cassette-player, and played near the heads of those hapless sleepers at the dead of night.
There was an instant domino effect that neither of us had expected. The rickshaw-wallahs went berserk with terror. The servants heard them and thought we were being burgled. The great-uncles heard the servants and started shouting for the police, as gentlemen do when frightened out of their sleep. The great-aunts heard the great-uncles and ran valiantly out into the verandah, forgetting that they had loosened their petticoat strings before going to sleep.
So, when the wedding guests rushed out of their rooms, they saw a sight that must be etched in their memories like a primal scene endlessly rehearsed by some antique chorus. A row of august matrons stood frozen in the moonlight like the Vestal Virgins, but with their lower vestments around their ankles, facing their dumbstruck men in that shadowy realm between sleep and waking, where just about anything could happen.
