A Tale From Bengal

I worked at a call centre a couple of years ago. I had flunked a term at college and I didn't want to spend the year at home being a parasite. This was about the time that BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) Centres had begun springing up in my city. Foreign companies wanted to save up on costs, so they outsourced their lesser divisions to developing countries like the one I was in - India. I was working as a low-level mortgage underwriter for a well known English bank. My job was to sift through income documents, identity proofs and bank statements, occasionally talking to a customer in Liverpool, who would sound surprised when told that his mortgage documents were being processed in India.

We worked a 2 to 11 p.m. shift to be in sync with the GMT. BPO's were popular because they pay a lot more than what conventional jobs would have paid. Owing to which, I got to meet people from varied job backgrounds and ages. There were 52 year olds who had failed in their restaurant business, college hopefuls like me who treated the job as a stop-gap arrangement and housewives who needed the extra income.

Our facility was situated on reclaimed swamp land. Everyone had to have a slice of the money that BPOs generated, including real estate developers. Commercial establishments for BPOs were sprouting up everywhere, and in a city like Bombay with a population density of 50 people per square foot and starved of space, they had to conjure up land from somewhere. Reclaimed swampland meant dumping tons of gravel and concrete into swamps to ensure that buildings could be constructed over them.

The allure of a high paying job which required no skill other than decent English, bought people from all over the country to Bombay. I met Dhruvin on my first day at work. He hailed from a little village near Calcutta in the state of Bengal. He had run away from home at 16 and had come to Bombay to find his luck. We got on fairly well, although I always thought of myself superior to the village dweller, and constantly reminded him of it.

Dhruvin came from a family ingrained into Hindu folklore. I liked him. My Hindi wasn't fluent enough and his English was passable. We didn't have much in common, except for the fact that we both had an interest in the occult. I enjoyed taking an interest in the occult in the same way that a guy enjoys a rollercoaster ride. Dhruvin however, took a stronger view of it. When our shift was done, he used to scoot over from his seat, from all across the work floor, over to where I was and talk about our favourite subject. We were mostly the last ones the leave.

I asked him one evening as we were finishing our shift as to why he was such a believer. He was quiet for a moment, and then said:

"Until I was 16, my family followed a queer tradition. It was common for villages to have their own deity. Our village deity was a large banyan tree (the Indian strangler fig), situated a good 45 minutes away from the village in a small clearing. The sacred banyan tree symbolised the Hindu trinity of Lord Vishnu, Brahma & Shiva, and we had three framed photographs of the Gods strapped to the trunk of the tree.

"The tree towered over us at 20 feet. If you've seen a strangler fig, you'll know why it's called so. The plant is an epiphyte. It depends on a host tree to prop it up and entwines its way around the host tree until you can't tell them apart. Its fruits germinate at the branches and send down roots as long as the trunk of the host tree itself, so that it looks more ancient than it really is.

"We made our pilgrimages to the tree every fortnight - either during a full moon or a new moon. The lunar cycle was another one of those little sacred nuances of Hinduism. My father used to carry with him offerings of fresh fruits, vegetables, incense sticks and for some strange reason - a hen. We travelled through the night, either in the full glare of the moonlight or in darkness. It didn't matter to me whether there was a moon or not. I was terrified by the sounds of the night; the rustling and crunching or dead leaves underfoot, the rattle of crickets, a stray hooting or muffled flappings of bats.

"Once we got to the clearing, my father used to light the incense and place the offering at the foot of the tree. He would then slit open the hen throat and let it bleed while we chanted our prayers. Now that I think back to it, I should have questioned what my father did. I had seen hens slaughtered for dinner, but never before had I seen one twitching before you while its blood gushed out through its throat. After we were done with our prayers he used to pick up the dead rooster and smear its blood all round the trunk, circling it thrice so that the bark gleamed and dripped scarlet.

"There was always that eerie feeling I had, whenever I prayed in the clearing. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand. I always felt as though there was someone peering at me through the dense foliage of the tree, scrutinizing me. I was puzzled. I should not have had that feeling in God's own dwelling place. Every trip we made, the uneasier I felt. I questioned my faith. I questioned my father. He warned us never to visit the tree outside of our preplanned nights. I should have found that odd too. After all, a God was supposed to offer you peace and tranquillity, and you should be able to visit him whenever you wanted.

"That night - a full moon, I remember distinctly - I decided to pay my fear a visit. He made us swear never to wander out alone in that clearing. But I did. I lagged behind after we were done with our ritual. I waited till my family were a dozen feet ahead, stayed still until they were out of earshot and quitely retraced my steps back to the clearing. I had to crouch to muffle my footfalls - my heart thumping away at my ribcage. I was terrified. I know that I shouldn't be here. But I had to know. I had to make sure. I didn't know what to expect, except that I knew that there was something terribly wrong about the place.

"I reached the edge of the clearing and chose a spot amidst a clump of bushes where I could be hidden from view. I didn't know who or what I needed to be hiding from, but every particle in my body screamed at me to stay hidden. I was worried that my father would burst in on me while I crouched here. But he never did. I still remember how still the night was. The moon bathed the clearing in its pale glow, silhouetting the tree. I crouched there, insignificant, my knees hurting and my calves in a cramp. I still had no idea what to expect and I nearly turned back; but what kept me rooted to the spot was my heartbeat. I feared that if I moved, my heartbeat would give me away. My heart would thump louder than me crashing through the undergrowth.

"About fifteen minutes in, I noticed one of the overhanging roots shift ever so slightly. Another odd fact about that night was that there was hardly any wind - not even a light breeze. I squinted at the place that I noticed the disturbance. It seemed as if there was a thick bunch of roots being lowered from the recesses of the foliage. I felt my teeth chatter and I fought to still my senses. What I thought were roots, was hair - human hair, a bunch of greying, straggly, long human hair. A head peeked into view; its hair stringy and lank. I could make out a shiny bald patch at the back of its head. From my vantage point, I saw it slowly descend down the trunk. It had pale arms which grasped at the bark of the tree. It lowered itself gingerly, as a chameleon would, measuring its next step. At this point my terrified mind would have believed that it was sniffing at the air around it. It crawled into my line of sight. I could make out that it was definitely human.

A human woman

"I had seen octopuses move. Extending a couple of tentacles at a time - letting the suction take hold, and then hauling their body forward. Watching a human woman do this, upside down, was unsettling to say the least. She kept her midriff elevated for some reason, so that her limbs were splayed out at right angles. She gingerly squirmed down to the point at the trunk where the blood was smeared. From the way her head bobbed at the back I could tell that she was licking at the bark. I stuffed a knuckle in my mouth to stop me from gasping. Thin rags hung from her body. She licked her way around the bark and that is when I found out why she took care not to crouch too close to the trunk.

"There was a foetus clinging to her underside - its tiny hands and legs grasping its mothers side as it suckled at a breast. I felt my bladder loosen and the stench of urine hit me. The warmth that soaked through my pants was oddly comforting.

My brain had shut down. I could not think. I was rooted. Adrenaline flooded me, yearning for me to take off, but I fought it. I fought it, till it hurt. The last image I saw was of the creature clutching the dead hen in her jaws - its severed head held by a string of ligament, flopping limply in her mouth. She scuttled up the trunk faster than she had descended it."

The office was quiet except for Dhruvin's last sentence which hung in the air. I realised that I had been listening to his story with my mouth stupidly ajar.

"What happened then," I whispered.

He grimaced. "I reached home stinking of piss. I told my parents that I had stopped to answer natures call and when I got back they had all left. My dad was in hysterics, but I never told them what I had seen. My dad knew. He knew it all along, but we never ever spoke of it. I fled soon afterwards."

"But," I pressed on, "There had to be a rational explanation."

He looked at me in the eye for a moment and asked me if I was familiar with the practise of sati.

Of course, I replied. Every kid who goes through school knew about it. Sati was an Indian practise where a a widowed woman would be forced to strap herself to her husbands funeral pyre and be cremated alive along with her husbands corpse. It was outlawed by the British settlers in 1829, and was declared punishable by the criminal courts as 'culpable homicide' amounting to manslaughter,' for which a death sentence could be awarded.

He nodded, and continued, "Until the practise of widow-burning was made a punishable offence, the number of widows sacrificed every year was appalling. In the 19th century, in Bengal alone, the number of such cases was about 1200 per year. About half of that number were accounted for by Calcutta alone.

"Even now you'll hear of a stray incident there. Traditions take a long time to die, especially in India," he shook his head sadly.

"There were so many rumors floating around back then. There were stories of sightings, whisperings of dead wives wandering in limbo. We lapped up everything. Maybe all that she was, was a jungle dwelling human who had to adapt to the wild. I don't know. I never went back to find out. How do you explain the foetus? Maybe if I think back now I'll say that I couldn't remember her casting a shadow in the glare of the full moon, or that instead of feet she had clawed hands. Who shall ever know?"

Who shall ever know, indeed.