It is instructive to see that darkness which stands metaphorically for intuitive and irrational knowledge, superstitions or bigotries are seen settled and sedimented deep in the remotest parts of our mental apparatus. Troilokyanath’s caustic remark pointing to the ghost’s origin in darkness alludes to this, but perhaps more importantly problematises the link by tangentially identifying the locus of the concern in the human mind. Thus, the psyche is rendered to one domain, spaces of which are intrinsically occupied or pre-occupied by the never-ending monochromatic order of a blinding darkness. But, there was light. The feeble wicks of the lamps did burn by the site of knowledge or so we learn. ‘There was no gas then in the city and no electric light. When the kerosene lamp was introduced its brilliance amazed us. In the evening the house servant lit castor-oil lamps in every room. The one in our study room had two wicks in a glass bowl’.[3]

Couched in its incandescence is a sleepy little Rabindranath, his master en-lightening him with Peary Sarkar’s first book, reciting the virtues of his other pupil Satin (who would rub snuff in his eyes to keep himself awake) until the clock struck nine. His eyes dazed and mind drugged with sleep, the boy would finally be released. But the dimly burning lantern that swung from the ceiling of the narrow passage leading from the outer apartments to the interior of the house had a firm grip on him. The passage that Rabindranath passed everyday stands as a metaphor of a transition when ghosts were gradually shoved back to those quarters, to those unilluminated realms of women and children or to remoter regions where enlightened views had yet to penetrate. So, the ghosts, he tells us took refuge under the thick-leaved badam tree in the western corner of the house, the shankchunni, greedy of fish, hovered around the kitchen while certain ‘Things’ were said to inhabit the misty, dingy, dark rooms of the household stuffed with huge water jars. But even their days were numbered if we were to believe the words of this heavy-hearted old man. His eyes, now wide awake, grieved for the creatures he dared not to see when he was a little boy. The septuagenarian now realises ‘vividly the change that has taken place between those times and the present’[4] with the brahma-daitya having fled the badam tree unable, as he were, to endure the modern air of excessive learning or the roofs of modern houses deserted by men or ghosts alike.

It is indeed a pity that indigenous ghosts who comprised the stuff of grandma’s tales had vanished in a twang. The little magic done, the ghosts were displaced and re-placed by so-called reason. Yet the sense of the absence of those who were not physically there, yet very much there seem to haunt the places of our life. Places are personed by ghosts as it were. So their eviction constitutes a logical impossibility. Would it be ‘un-reasonable’ on our parts to experience that flood of images of people long gone, or people when they were younger, while revisiting an old ‘haunt’, as we say? Wouldn’t it be unfair not to have that very warm feeling of almost being able to see your friends from when you were seven jostling to grab a ball as you walk past the neighborhood park where you grew up? Who had after all not had that sense, while creeping into some room where one really should not have been, that someone unseen was watching? Or otherwise, a septuagenarian Rabindranath wouldn’t have cared to seek brahmadaityas in roofs of modern houses.

Subject to the dialectics of forgetting and remembering the memory of ghosts is indeed a subject of inquiry. In today’s world blinded by disenchantment, yesteryear’s ghost tales typically framed in an uncartesian order, of tales of ‘once upon a time’[5] can still functionally create an a-historic past through narration. It is a past which is remote and inaccessible and can yet be experienced in homely, familiar terms. It is ‘an-other’ past but not strange and therefore recognisable. In fact, the unworldly creatures seem to share a homologous world as structured, stratified and hierarchised as the Bengali social universe. A phantasmagoric exercise involving the antics of yesteryear’s ghosts in language and hermeneutics would still ask of us whether we have supposedly, ‘surmounted modes of thinking belonging to the prehistory of the individual’. In some ways then, ghosts of yesteryear persist as workable tropes for the reformulation of our everyday living. The ghostly encounter then is more than a mere case of retrospection; it also provides ways for a possible introspection into our very belongingness in the Bengali social cosmos.