A VISITOR IN THE NIGHT

“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.” 

― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

A period lacking in enlightenment is called the Dark Age, a particularly gloomy twenty four hours is a Dark Day, a secret to be embarrassed about is dark, morally corrupt deeds are dark, dark is evil as in 'dark currents of religious and ethnic hostility'  and comedy which employs farce and morbid humour is called dark or black comedy.  Infact no one likes to be kept in the dark, and the British took it to extreme levels by ramping imperial pursuits to ensure that the sun never set over their empire. 

Skotia or darkness occurs 16 times in the New Testament and has connections with ungodliness or immorality( John 3:19), evil ( Luke (22:53), death ( Matthew 4:16) and even hell ( Peter 2:14). Much earlier, the ancient Egyptians associated light with truth/order and darkness with evil/chaos and portrayed its God Apep, the rival of Ra or Sun God, as a serpent. Trivia, a Roman goddess of Night was also the  goddess of sorcery, ghosts, tombs, death, and torches while her Greek compatriot Hectate doubled up as goddess of magic, witchcraft, moon, ghosts and necromancy as well. 

Darkness is actually demonised not for what it is, but the  fear of unknown it conceals and the impending threat it is the harbinger of. The scariest part of the horror movie is not when we see the real villain- an assassin or a ghost or a monster- but before it when darkness, floating and swirling diaphanous sheets of smoke, ill- formed silhouettes, moving apparitions, swaying chandeliers, a dim light source, and  some dark music  ( like Dance Macabre by  Camille Saint Saens) heighten the scare factor and make us  frighteningly edgy. The fear of the unknown hardwires us to imagine what could frighten each of  us individually- that is why, different people fear of different things in darkness. It could be fear of animals, of  loneliness, of thieves,  of ghosts or of any other thing. 

Of course, not all ghosts come during night. My wife has an aunt whose  maidservant's morning visits would be followed by a rain of charcoal and twigs .  I have  a friend  who claims to have held regular daytime trysts with ghosts in National Library, Kolkata.

In Paheli, the ghost of Shah Rukh appears during the day in full Rajasthani regalia. Infact, the glorification of ghosts was thought to be so typical of our culture, that it was selected as our nomination for Oscar in 2005. It  pipped, ironically, Black, otherwise a record holder with an unequalled eleven Filmfare Awards, because, as opined by Satyameve Jayate Khan, the depiction of the teacher  Debraj Sahai  slapping the student Michelle McNally  would have showed us in poor light . Of course, how was he to know that a decade later, the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor would go  to JK Simmons, the maniacal teacher in Whiplash?

However, the preferred time of the ghosts has been the  dark. It is during night that the demon possessed  Regan( in The Exorcist) who killed her babysitter. A bewildered Ashok Kumar chases the haunting sound of aayega aanewala.. aayega on a windy dark night in Mahal. The ghosts in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Richard III, and Macbeth  also appear, confab, and scare during the dark hours. My wife, exposed to the nocturnal delights of planchette in her childhood, has a cousin in  the corridor of whose house a ghost comes and pins down any person out there. It was pitch dark in the middle of a night in 2013 that a ghost knotted up my  limbs and almost choked me to death in a room in The Royal Residency in Bodh Gaya.

Effects of such 'spirited' encounters have been known to leave even the strongest a bundle of nerves. Bhaiya, of the six foot frame and tabla fame, absolutely fearless otherwise, sleeps with lights on when alone. Darkness is great leveller of people's reputation and  self confidence . I can illustrate this no better than with the story of my Chhuttu Bhaiya though cricket connoisseurs may prefer to hear the stories of Haris Sohail who was spooked in a room recently in Rydges Latimer, Christchurch or even the one in which a scared Shane Watson fled from his room at the Lumley Castle Hotel in 2005, thereby losing all chances of captaining Australia.

Much older than us, Chhuttu Bhaiya was an ISM alumnus, an assistant manager in one of the BCCL collieries and the Big Brother by a long shot. We felt  safe with him around us and on the assumed assurance of his support,  we even fought with colony chengras and chhechhras  who would have otherwise  beaten us to pulp in no time . He took his three cousins of half pant infancy all around on his Black Yezdi and was warmly indulgent - cinemas, rides, eating joints and what not. He was a jolly good fellow and we would hold competitions at either ends of the alimentary canal. If he shouted at us or scolded or boxed our ears from time to time, we never seemed to mind. Those were the good old days when cousins and uncles and aunts didn't make a distinction  between own and others when it came to scolding or beating.

This story is of a monsoon night, probably in the year the Loknayak  kick- started his Sampoorna Kranti  or the following when the  Hockey World Cup team triumphed at Kuala Lumpur. My uncle had just been transferred to our town, so we were a larger, noisier and happier bunch with the addition of three  cousins. That night , in the drawing room of our upper floor house in Dhanbad, we slept on two big charpais - six of us including Chhuttu Bhaiya- enveloped by two mosquito nets strung on strings shooting to different corners of the room for support. He  had come back home late after a heavy dinner at  his friend's Ratolia's  house , drenched and tired. 

It was in the middle of the night when I was woken up by a clap of thunder to see Chhuttu Bhaiya awake, his body slightly raised, looking towards the window which was wide open. 

" Kaun hai bey?" he croaked probingly and nudged me to join the interrogation and search.

It was dark inside the room, the much waned moon  provided a faint light  which filtered through the grills to show the  silhouetted outline of a  crouching burglar at the window. The folds of the mosquito net, rippling  under the fan, created an illusion of movement by the burglar. I  was, for a moment, petrified, but as happens in such moments, one leaves the decision of taking action to the senior most. I kept quiet, in no mood to break this hierarchy. 

"Gulshanwa, dekho toh," he passed on to  Gulshan Bhaiya,  his junior of almost fifteen years, panic forming up within him.

The thief had by this time changed his position, his left foot was now pointing towards us  and the right arm was  oscillating intimidatingly. By this time all of us were awake and very alarmed as the thief sat there, unmoved, unperturbed and waiting for his next move. The frozen howl of a hound made it  even more macabre and Bunty, the youngest amongst us, clutched  fearfully at Vikas who was himself in a comma-like curl. 

"Chhuttu Bhaiya, aap kyun nahin dekhte", Gulshan Bhaiya whispered back his refusal to the  command of his senior, more out of fear than defiance.

" Hum hi buddhu hain ( am I such an idiot) ?" Chhuttu Bhaiya's  growl brooked no correction of his frank self -assessment and dashed any hope we had of him tackling the intruder.

I don't quite remember whether it happened in a sequence or simultaneously, but there was a snickering laugh by Manoj and in a flash Gulshan Bhaiya tore through the mosquito net and lunged outwards. No, he did not lunge to confront the thief but , instead, to switch on the bulb with a Biblical 'let there be light' flourish.

None of us saw when the thief vanished. But at the place he was crouching and marking his time and prey a second earlier, we saw Chhuttu Bhaiyya's shirt and trouser, hung on a hangar nailed to a window door - the trouser swaying  and the empty sleeves flailing-  smiling at us. The breeze outside also joined the fun, letting out slow hollow laughs. The window flapped noisily on its rusty hinges to complete the comic and the rains increased their pitter patter in a rousing applause.

The mood immediately lightened up. The comma straightened up into a bouncing exclamation mark. The laughter went on for a long time, well into the next day when the matter was narrated to Papa and Mummy. The story was told to all those who cared to listen. It was recounted with wonderful variations and spicy additions. We finally moved on to something else after relating it to his fiancee during their  engagement ceremony a couple of months later.