Musings:

Ghosts - for and against

by Padma Edirisinghe

During my sojourn in London, one of the books I bought was, Ghosts of London. According to it, this famous city sprung on river Thames just seethes with ghosts. Not only lords and ladies and kings and queens (mostly of the Court of Henry V111) begin to trot the earth in ethereal form after their earthly demise, but much more lowly critters, such as bar maids, scavengers join the group with even cats and dogs trailing behind, all fresh from the graves.

Sri Lanka does not boast of this species in that same dimension, but, now and then and here and there, is a weird sprinkling often highlighted in the local papers and cause much sensationalism. For example, there was once a feature on the girl who suddenly emerged by the village well only to disappear. She or her ghost was identified as the girl who drowned in a nearby well.

Experience

As for my own experience with ghosts there are two. One was in a hotel at Nuwara Eliya. No, I was not touring, though, Writing a birth certificate of N Eliya was penned here. I was on circuit. At dinner I felt rather eerie getting the smell of putrid corpses and inquired from the waiter boy whether somebody had died here.

The boy gave a queer smile and said, very few get sensitive to the smell of death here.

'Lady, you are one of the rare ones', he said.

The place was very quiet that day or night, and the waiter boy relapsed into a long or tall story about an English woman who had jumped from the upper storey and committed suicide.

"That evening, she had got news that her two sons had been bombed in the First World War"

She had nothing now to live for though her husband had plenty to do, by way of quelling the independence movements. That is my guess.

Encounter

I had little sleep that night, not because of the chilly cold embracing me, but because that mother kept haunting me in her agony. She was oceanic miles and miles from her family and friends with nobody to console her in her insurmountable grief.

My other encounter with a stranger from the other world was at Thalduwa off Awissawella in my own blessed island. Here, in Sitawaka of Tikiri Kumaru Rajasinghe 1's fame, it was an environment far different from the luxury of N'Eliya, for everything here was so dismal.

The roving family was not provided quarters, not even a temporary lodge. We have never lived so frugally. On a huge bed the six of us, siblings slept, I, the eldest at the ridge. The wall opposite was dirty and on a table glowed a chimney lamp as electricity was a non-existent force.

That night I turned and twisted on the bed and then I saw the man. He was almost crawling along the dirty wall and his dress was strange. It reminded me of a sarawita karaya who in his strange attire and jingling bells haunted temple festivals.

Nonsense

The time was about 10 pm. I began to ponder what the man was up to here, till the brain wave hit my head that it was a creature from the other world.

I grabbed the lamp and did a dash to my parents' room where, instead of a cuddling, I got a berating that I was talking nonsense about a fantastic sarawita karya and frightening everybody.

I looked back and there was the man still doing frisky rounds.

He stayed with me mentally however, till I gave the news to a classmate the following day.

"Ah, that is ......................." she said nonchalantly. "Many have seen him"

She gave more details, to grasp which, the background has to be given. The dirty house lay by the side of the Kelani Valley rail line and just behind it was a level crossing.

Peeris, (we will call him so) had got into the habit of selling betel chews here to commuters. If the trains did not slow down, he had a habit of running behind them and in one of these ordeals he had ended his life.

To make his business more attractive he used to wear the frilly sarawita kit, made flamboyant with scarlet frills.

Many have seen him in his ghostly form and I was probably his last spectator.

I often wonder from where he got that kit. Perhaps from a shop in the underworld! It is indeed a strange world! And my parents, so materialistic minded, refused to accept his extra terrestrial existence though the daughter did go ga ga on the fantastic show.

You too could be of that genre.