Nirmalya finished his classes and was
thinking of going to the bus stand by a toto, the popular and ubiquitous
e-rickshaw, in order to board a bus for his return journey to Siliguri. The
university car was parked near the administrative building, and the young driver
Gopal Sahani was inside it, watching Hindi dubbed South Indian movies on phone.
This car was the only official vehicle to carry them from the main campus at
Siliguri to the second campus at Jalpaiguri in the morning, situated at a
distance of about fifty kilometres, and carry them back in the evening. Teachers
from the main campus had to come to this second campus once a week, commuting
more than hundred kilometres on both sides of the trip. Gopal told Nirmalya that
the car would leave only when other teachers finished their classes. Nirmalya
knew that, the car would wait till five o’clock, and it was not yet three. So,
he looked for a toto. Usually, one toto used to be available on the campus, but
today there was none. He saw his colleague BR Sir coming out of the ad building,
and he waved at him. BR Sir was quite senior to him, and had been teaching for a
long time at this university. He usually came to the second campus by his own
car. Nirmalya asked him whether he was going back to Siliguri, and BR Sir told
him to go with him. This was an option with Nirmalya, some days when their
classes fell on the same day, they usually travelled together in his car.
The Tata Tiago car was moving smoothly on
the four-lane national highway and they were heading towards Siliguri, and
Nirmalya told BR Sir how his mother had disappeared mysteriously from home
without telling anyone, and at that time he was just a kid, and till date there
was no information about her and also how all searches had remained fruitless.
BR Sir told him that mysterious things happened in his life also and that he
faced supernatural moments in life. And then told a story.
“It all happened when I was in Silchar,
way back in 1997, the nondescript but strategically important town situated at
the far-flung location of Barak Valley in Assam bordering Tripura, Meghalaya,
Mizoram and Manipur. The entire region of the so-called North East and the
surrounding areas of Silchar were politically disturbed and insurgency was at
its peak. Only Silchar was like an oasis of peace. However, Silchar being a
Bengali-dominated pocket area in the state, was mostly underdeveloped and lacked
infrastructure. And it was just a provincial town. It was at this town that a
central university came up in 1994. And I joined this university as a lecturer
in 1995 and started staying in this town and I stayed there up till 1998 when I
left the university. It was in 1998 that the university shifted to its new
campus in Dorgakona, but still without the quarters facility.”
Nirmalya knew that BR Sir began his
career in Silchar. So, he was not surprised.
“This story is related to my struggle for
finding a suitable accommodation and the agony at not being able to find one.
The university had its own problem of accommodation. It was running in two
buildings hired from the REC and the Polytechnic college. There was no provision
of any accommodation for the teachers. The teachers were asked to fend for
themselves. The town also lacked hotels and guest houses. So, the teachers had
to rent houses which were also not in sufficient numbers, because people did not
have any idea of such a demand for rooms and also possibly never thought of it.
It was only when the university came up, they started to wake up to the new
reality by building extra rooms for the purpose of rent.”
“Although
the people of Silchar called themselves Bengalis, they actually were Sylhetis,
and they spoke the Sylheti language. It was not just in language, but in various
forms of habits and manners they differed from Bengalis, and they took pride in
their distinctive cultures. Two features that were commonly noticed were their
deep love for ‘paan supari’ and a particular dry fish, and their love of
language. Their love of language resulted in the martyrdom of several people of
Silchar, a sad but heroic event in the murky history that was later observed as
‘bhasha dibosh of 21st February’ across the Bengali-speaking world.”
Nirmalya listened to him attentively.
“Good natured and highly cultured people
they were, they however had one fault, they were less kind to the outsiders,
possibly because of their having suffered in the partition and because of their
living in isolation from the mainland culture. And they were plainly prejudiced
against the bachelors. So, it was very hard for the bachelors to get a rented
room at the households where families lived. They usually preferred married
people as tenants.”
“Yes, parochial and conservative
mentality. I know it.” Nirmalya said.
“It was under these circumstances that my
ordeal began. First, I tried a lodge in the dingy market place, then got shifted
to the REC guest house for a week, then got shifted with a colleague from
Linguistics department to a nearby house in Fakir Tilla, opposite to the REC
main gate, after a few months of discomfort and suffering at Fakir Tilla, got
shifted to Daspara, and after a few months to another part of Daspara. There was
a severe shortage of electricity and water supply those days, and the ground
water contained high amounts of iron and therefore was not usable. Needless to
say, the lack of basic amenities was causing me severe distress and time
management was a nightmare to me. My days and nights thus were just going wasted
into some malignant black hole, without any gain in my studies and my teaching
arena. This lack of a proper accommodation was to haunt me for a long time to
come, even after I left Silchar and returned to my hometown Siliguri, and it was
one of the main reasons that I had never been able to progress in my career, it
just haunted me like a curse and often put me into despair. As if I was caught
into a time loop of shifting from one rented house to another, from quarters to
my parental house, and so on and so forth but never felt at home anywhere.”
Nirmalya looked at him with compassion,
so much misery and suffering could happen to life, which unless and until told,
could never be known.
“It was a big two-storeyed house in Kuar
Paar, at the outskirts of the town with no houses around, and a few Naga
colleagues of mine were residing there, and it was to be my final destination in
Silchar. It was the house of one Mr. Borbhuiya who worked in the Secretariat and
lived in Guwahati, and his brother-in-law one Mr. Laskar used to stay with his
family in an outhouse as a caretaker. My Naga colleagues were all bachelors and
they occupied the front portion of the ground floor, and the back portion was
vacant at that time and which I was to occupy. The Borbhuiya family kept the top
floor for themselves, because on holidays they used to come home with their
Maruti 800 car which was a luxury those days.”
“Mr. Laskar showed me the rooms. The
rooms were spacious, with large glass panes. The back portion was always dusky,
some big trees and rows of betel nut trees and a pond just near the kitchen. The
rooms appeared alright although signs of their being used were visible. It was
obvious that the Borbhuiya family used to stay at this portion of the house
before they completed the whole building and shifted to the top floor.”
“The weather of Silchar always remained
hot and sultry, because it was a landlocked valley surrounded by small hills or
mounds or tillas. The air was mostly dusty before the rain, which happened
nonetheless causing waterlogging at many parts of the town and causing mud on
the roads. The loadshedding and outages were frequent and sometimes we had to go
without power and water for several days. At night I had to sleep with my glass
window panes and a door open for better ventilation.”
“There was no respite to my woes. And to
add one more, it started to happen so horribly that it broke my morale to such
an extent that I decided to leave the place finally. It was a sultry night and I
was asleep, it was like being in a dream that I felt a strong gust of wind with
a flapping sound entering through my windows and some dark creature settling on
my back and pressed down on my neck. I had a peculiar sleeping posture; I was
always comfortable with sleeping on my belly. When I felt the dark creature
flapping its wings and sitting on my back to press my neck down, a strange
horror ran through my body while still in sleep, and the body impulsively
started to resist the creature and wriggled to escape it. I could feel it even
in my sleep, as vividly as in a dream, only thing was that I was not able to
move, I only felt a futile struggle of my body trying to wriggle out of the
creature’s heavy weight upon my back. Unable to do so, I tried the only other
option, to wake me up violently from my sleep, which after several desperate
attempts, I was able to. The frozen sleep melted slowly and I felt the weight
falling off from my back. I woke up, all my hair and body hair risen and
standing, my throat dry and a sensation of horror devouring my body. I got out
of my bed, closed the door and windows, kept the light on, and burned incense
sticks. I could not sleep several nights after the incident. I was afraid of
sleeping, I started to fear going to sleep.”
“What do you think? Ghost?” Nirmalya
asked. BR Sir continued, apparently too much engrossed to hear that.
“Mr. Laskar told me that I needed rest
and vitamins, which was however correct because I suffered from malnourishment
in this foreign land with nobody to take care of me. The doctor gave me some
medicines and supplements and called it sleep-paralysis. I was in that house for
a few months after the incident. It was repeated many times, the same gust of
wind and a flapping sound and a dark creature sitting on my back and holding my
neck pressed against the bed. As if it was playing with me. My body was in a
wreck, it was weakening with every such incident, and my mind was in horrors.”
“But what about your Naga colleagues?
Didn’t they help you?”
“My Naga colleagues tried to help me.
They invited me to their parties which they in fact held every other day. Their
good friend, one Dr. Sochen from Assam Rifles and some female friends used to
visit them and they threw lavish parties. They offered me fried rice with beer,
pork meat with mushroom, Naga-style spicy fish curry, boiled cabbage and plenty
of salad. They used to take beef, but they never offered it to me. They were
Christians, and one Sunday they took me to their church where I listened to the
preacher telling the story of wrestler Jacob, and they knew that Hindus did not
eat beef. Once I tried to eat a roasted hornet which they called their favourite
food, but the hornet could not pass through my throat and I vomited. However,
their sumptuous meal was in sharp contrast with my rice and curry type of meal.”
“But nothing helped me much. I had to
leave, in order to save myself. One night I woke up with cold perspiration and a
death-like sensation, looked outside through the windows in the dark, a glimmer
of darkness was visible near a dusky tree, the distant lights appearing in its
twinkling eyes. Crouched in my bed, I waited for the daybreak, and as soon as
the sun appeared on the horizon, got my things packed and left the house, never
to look back.”
“Even today the memory of the incident
fills me with loathing, and my body hair especially at the neck get risen and
stand on the end in terror.”
The car was approaching the state highway
now, and was about ten kilometres away from Siliguri. BR Sir was silent, and
concentrated on his driving. Nirmalya was thinking about the liminal spaces of
the sleep world and the death world and how human consciousness was unable to
cope with them.