Female ghosts and spirits

First of all I must admit that I hunted in vain for one single word for female ghosts. Even in my own language Holman (ghosts) and Bhootha (spirits) seem to be a genderless species. Now I come to a tantalising tale of two of this species.

My first encounter with a female ghost was not in my own land but in a foreign country.

Years back, I was walking down a corridor of the London Tower. Twillight was just setting in. I had overstayed in the rooms exhibiting the fabulous crown jewels which explained the delay in exit. The place was almost deserted. Only the royalty presented via figurines adorning the walls and flanking the passage kept me company. Then I felt a shadow closing upon me.

No. It was no ghost but a tall white man trying to overtake me. He seemed amused at my sight.

“Sure you don’t belong to the Western tribe, Miss.”
I wished to say that my skin colour advertises that fact but was too perplexed.

But the man went on despite my dumb act.

Anne Boleyn

“No female of our tribe will brave this corridor at this time for it is haunted by a queen of Henry the 8th. Anne Boleyn, is her name.”

I refrained from telling him that I knew about Anne Boleyn as much as him. European history was not only my mainstay in the academic world but I had regularly digested any written material dealing with it. Yet, I let him go on.

“He murdered her in the way he got rid of his other wives, six in all. They all went to heaven. But not Anne. She stayed on to haunt this corridor. A terrible sight, hair all loose, blood tricking down her beautiful body. Teeth gnashing.”

“Have you really seen her in that form?”
He seemed less sure this time.
“Not exactly. But there is so much hearsay”.

Legends

“When it comes to hearsay and legends Western countries are not much different from our tropical lands,” I said.

We heard a stir and then a pathetic groan and we both ran out of the corridor not daring to look back. It could have been a canine but neither of us was volunteering to check. Later, I met him in the café outside. He was still shaking with fright but managed to boast that he is a Russian Prince on his seventh visit to England.

“That sure was Anne Boleyn,” he managed to say from time to time with chattering teeth.

Seventeen years have passed since that episode and now. Landlocked, I had a brush with another sensational female in my own country. She lives in the outskirts of our metropolis. But something makes her special. She is suffering from the hallucination, that she is the re-incarnation of Ehelapola Kumarihamy, the consort of Ehelapola Maha Adikaram.

Popular tale

To state briefly facts unknown to “the uninitiated” of this popular tale, our last king Sri Wickrema Rajasinghe to take revenge on her husband’s treachery had her drowned in the Bogambara Lake that beautified the city of Kandy.

Her name is Thilaka and vocation, freelancing plus mothering and then grandmothering. A function she attended in the Pali and Buddhist University of Homagama changed her life. She began to identify herself with Ehelapola Kumarihamy.

How did that begin? At a function she made friends with an Assistant Lecturer there who a few days later called her to inform that she dreamt that Thilaka was being carried to a lake to be murdered. The image in the dolava (palanquin) kept changing from the Kumarihamy to Thilaka and transforming back again to her own self. The caller herself had been watching the scene from the Biso Seemedura of the Kandyan palace. Now the hallucination that grew within her was fed by other factors. For example, her phobia of large reservoirs and of the sea and lakes that grew on her from childhood.

Soon she became obsessed with the tragic end of the Kumarihamy while her fame itself spread and mementos came pouring in, as a photo of the Ridee Havadiya or silver waistband of Ehelapola Adikaram and even news of the jewellery box of the Kumarihamy. Thilaka writes in her letter to me informing these details, that so much has happened in her life that this jewellery box was of least importance to her. But she tried to sort out with her own memory, what had happened to the Kumarihamy after her death.

Death by drowning was the most painful of death forms and wrath churned within her propelled by the background circumstances. So, she never earned a comfortable re-birth.

Drowning

Instead she had passed on to the world of Bootha or spirits. Her date of death by drowning had been May 17, 1814 ,year before the British dominion of Ceylon made feasible by wrath of a populace over a very cruel act by the last king ie. massacre of a whole family. And for nearly 200 years (1814-2014) that is taking the average human span of life as 60 or so, the period accounts for about four births in a human’s life. In 1814, 1874, 1934, 1994, But sprits don’t die and get re-born. So this birth that could have occurred in the 1950s or so seems to end her life as a spirit.

Thilaka is a writer herself, but instead of pouring curses on the king and trying to defend her husband, strangely she turns tables. She has the audacity to insinuate that the perpetrators of the whole crime was not the king but the Radalas or the aristocrats and had the courage to write a feature on her line of thinking to the Sinhala press.

Thilaka argues that the last king should not be degraded for being foreigners for when they ascended the Lankan throne they were prepared to act as authentic Sinhala Buddhist kings loyally serving the country and religion. Fearlessly she argues that Parakramabahu the Great, one of our greatest kings as regards hydraulic feats and foreign policy was the grandson of a Pandyan king.

Thilaka may or may not be the reincarnation of Ehelapola Kumarihamy but she wields a bold pen even on her husband, Ehelapola Maha Adikaram. Within a year of her drowning, he had re-married and even got a dole from the British government for wedding expenses. She quotes Anura Manathunga’s book on the Adikaram.

The Adikaram had been given a week of reprieve by the king to remove his family from Kandy but it had fallen on deaf years. Tables turning and that by a re-incarnated spirit.

And Anne Boleyn never forgetting her wretched murder as she runs along the corridors of the London Tower. It is indeed a strange world!