Dark nights with a shiver on the wind. Bamboo thickets. Tamarind groves whispering. A huddle of villagers around a dying fire. Something white glimpsed vaguely in the gloom outside the comforting circle of light. And so the stories start: so and so saw so and so by the pond with a kolshi around her neck and she tried to drown him. A shankhchunni shook her white bangles at Ramu라이브 바카라 Ma and she was never the same again.
In Sanskrit the word bhoot means ‘element’, one amongst earth, air, fire, water and ether. The Vedas ignore bhoot—there are no references to the souls of the walking dead in the early sacred books. The first reference comes late in Sanskrit literature. In fact, the first mentioned ghost is the brahmadaitya, the ghost of the erring Brahmin complete with sacred pigtail and thread. The moment the reference occurs, a whole pantheon of ghosts begins to appear, obviously triggered by the influence of folk tales on literature.
Arundhati Nath's The Phantom라이브 바카라 Howl brings together a series of eleven ghost stories written by well-known and not so well known Bengali authors—though she kicks it off with the story of her grandmother라이브 바카라 encounter with a poltergeist as a child. Tagore라이브 바카라 The Famished Stone and the not so well known Skeleton about a talkative female ghost come together with Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay라이브 바카라 stories—the author of Pather Panachali had a passion for the supernatural, testified to by his Taranath Tantrik series to name a few. Most of the stories centre on old houses and the deadly spirits that lurk there waiting for the unwary. The reader is led on to discover exactly how the houses are haunted and the stories of the spirits. In most cases the spirits are aroused by the protagonist라이브 바카라 determination that ghosts do not exist or the fact that a rambling old palace must be haunted despite the fact that the tenant has not seen a ghost in two years as for example in Niradchandra Mazumdar라이브 바카라 The Signal which unleased physical terror. Most of them are not gentle, barring the wraith in Paternal Legacy and perhaps the girl in the boat from Inside the Water Spinach Forest Marsh.
What comes through in the translations is the Bengali라이브 바카라 love for nostalgia and willingness to have his or her flesh creep. Arundhati Nath's translations are lively and the story selection is rather unusual giving readers access to many that they might not have met before. The list of ghosts that currently exists in Bengal is as long and complex as the famous song in Goopy Gyne, Bagha Byne. There is yet time for an anthology that covers stories of the different types of bhoots in Bengal if someone does the research involved.
The Phantom라이브 바카라 Howl by Arundhati Nath
Publisher: Speaking Tiger
Cost: INR 399/
