Of ghosts and other matters

‘When the brain fever birds wailed in the silence of the night, we were shushed by our mothers for it was a bad omen for children, who were especial targets of the Lord of the forest. All this was part of our daily life and we believed in them as we did in ourselves.’ In this lay the substance of Unsung Stories of the Darjeeling Hills, a minor research project I embarked upon in 2010, with a handful of post graduate students and a colleague in Darjeeling Government College. Tut Fo would stop at several places for food and sometimes flew off course and took a long time to reach the appointed place, Panzaok, meaning a dense forest in Lepcha. There is no story of a successful hunt: In Mahanadi, Tek couldn’t bring himself to shoot a deer because it suddenly changed into a handsome young man; pheasant hunting also became impossible because the bird changed into another being once targeted, and something pushed the hunters out of the forest; Chandrabir and Saila found a beautiful boy with flowing hair in the snare they had laid for porcupine, which was enough to stop them from further attempts. Bedumaya, pregnant, abandoned, ostracised, drowns herself, and thereafter sits on a rock in the forest to entice the lone traveller, and ‘possesses’ young girls in her village, who go berserk at a certain hour of the evening.