“But the town of Bettiah is 120 kms and it’s already midnight. It might get really dangerous for both the mother and the child”, Ramdeo Babu was in a state of dilemma and unlike his repute as a tranquil and collected person, seemed in stress.
“But we have to take this risk. Indeed, this child will be really lucky if everything goes well and it sees the light.”
It took another 120 kms, 3 hours of bumpy jeep travel and 45 minutes of surgical procedure to make me see the light. I was indeed lucky as both my Ma and I were unscathed. As the morning sun tinted the Bettiah skies ruby, I affirmed my arrival with my first cry. And they say it was more of a howl coming out of a wan child.
Ramdeo Babu or Babajee, my grandfather was the chief chemist at the Narkatiyaganj sugar factory and was responsible for testing the sugarcane samples. He was known to be a stringent chemist and only the best of sugarcanes passed his scrutiny. All of this testing had given him a strange habit of judging everything before giving his approval. It is said that when he hold me in his hands for the first time, he evaluated, scrutinised and analysed me for over ten minutes before flashing his smile of consent. People say, Babajee was quite rapturous about my birth and despite being known as a little too cautious of his pockets, distributed sweets worth 50 Rs. among the hospital staff. His son had arranged an air-conditioned cottage at Patna for the birth but destiny and a pre-mature arrival ensured that it was in the sleepy town of Bettiah that he held his grandson.
A quick telegram was dispatched to my Papa, my Ma’s family and a hoard of close relatives and as was typical in those days, it took me another week or so to announce my arrival at those places. While some of them will feature quite prominently in the later part of my story, let me introduce the one person who was as much the part of the painful process of my birth as me. Renu, my Ma was merely twenty two when she gave birth to me. She still says that despite all the pain, she never let a drop of tear come out of her eyes. Never except once. The moment she held the pink howling bundle called me, drops of joy leapt out of her eyes.
After getting discharged, the trio of us shifted to the house of my Bade Papa, my father’s elder brother, who was then posted in the same town. I was to stay there till my week long birth celebrations were over and my Papa had come to fetch us. It was in the drudgery hall of this very house that my first encounter with the Supernatural happened. In the last twenty six years of my existence, I have meandered a lot in the similar alleys of imagination and reality. This ‘encounter’ might have been the reason why I still tend to see the unknown in the gust of wind or the shadow of night.
Christian Quarters was set up by Anglo-Indians in 1879 after they received a grant from Bettiah Raj for curing the local ruler of his rare illness. For over last 100 years, this dusty row of colonial houses had witnessed births, deaths, revolutions and exodus. Every house had a story attached to it, sometimes pleasant but mostly creepy. The house in which my Bade Papa’s family lived then was said to be the eeriest of them all. The scariest and the most recent story about that house, was about a young lady doing suicide after she was found to be pre-marital pregnant. Many people had claimed to have seen a young English woman, dressed in an immaculately white Victorian gown, roaming in that house. Some had seen her singing lullabies to an imaginary baby, while some had seen her jumping from the roof of the house again and again. It might have been my mother hallucinating after a tough surgery or maybe she had conjured it all up to seek more attention but it was in this dilapidated colonial house that she, and maybe I, experienced something she never forgot.
I was just a day or two old and my mother was alone in the hall resting on a wooden cot. Suddenly, out of nowhere a young and striking English woman came and sat beside my cradle. There was an aura around her which seemed ethereal. Before Ma could shout and call others, she took me in her arms, kissed me and started singing a lullaby. My Ma was shouting as loud as she could but no one seemed to be hearing. Then the woman put me back in the cradle, turned to my Ma and said something in heavily accented English. Then she dissolved in thin air, just like that. No one has ever seen her since then.
Ghost or no ghost, what the woman did not realise was that my Ma didn’t know much of English and whatever she said held no meaning for her. Since then, I have grown up with speculations around me, some referring to her last words as angelic blessings while some terming it a green-eyed curse. I sometimes wonder what her words might have been and what was there in me that helped her get away from the clutches of this mortal world.
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