Real Ghost Encounters: The Mute Girl in the Yellow Sari

A light, cold wind of eleven degrees Celsius touches my skin, and it feels as if time has stopped, exactly as it stopped in 1998 on the bank of the Ichamati River at Sirajdikhan. Some memories lodge in a person’s mind so firmly that they float up like straw even in the silence of an unknown city a thousand miles away. If you sit down to work out the account of life, you will find no tale stranger than life itself. This is one of the most unusual real ghost encounters I know, and it is my own.

The Bush Behind the Mango Tree

Because of my father’s transferable job, we had to move around a great deal from childhood. That time we settled in Sirajdikhan thana. In front of the thana there was a field, and beyond it a large pond. Behind it, hugging a four-storey tin quarter, flowed the Ichamati River. To the left of our home stood a broken-down, spooky building, and to the right were thick bushes. In those bushes was an old mango tree. All along its branches hung small polythene bundles. My father used to say they were evidence. Clothes of people who had died unnaturally, pieces of bodies after the post-mortem, hung up there to serve as witnesses in court. When the wind made those bundles sway, and the name of Nabi was mixed up with that evidence.

Nur Nabi lived in the sweepers’ quarter. He had no equal at lifting bodies and digging graves. Since there was nobody my age, that sweepers’ quarter was my kingdom of play. Marbles, making clay dolls, my black-and-white number three football. In the afternoon came hide-and-seek, which we called palapali in our area. I was a bit shy and bookish, so it was always me who had to be the seeker. One day I thought of a trick and hid in the thick bush behind that mango tree, right under the branches that held the evidence. Just then my heart skipped.

On the far side of the bush stood a young woman. She was at most eighteen or twenty. She wore a strange yellow sari with a red border. She was looking at me without blinking. In fear I put a finger to my lips and signalled, don’t tell anyone I’m here. She did not move and said nothing. But in the depths of that silent gaze was such trust that I felt she would not give away my secret hiding place to anyone.

After that I saw her often. When Mother was working in the kitchen, she stood on the other side of the window. I would say, “Mother, look who is standing there.” Mother would scold me sharply, “Where, who would come at this hour of noon?” Nobody saw her except me.

The River Ghat in the Rain

The most intense and frightening feeling came on a rainy day. Mother, the aunty from the next quarter and their children were all bathing at the Ichamati ghat. Suddenly my foot slipped on the weeds and I sank. Deep in the river I was running out of breath, muddy water was entering my lungs, and I was sinking toward the dark. Just before I went under, it was as if someone from below the water caught hold of my mother’s foot. Mother startled, and pulled me up. I told Mother, “Mother, that girl came, held your foot, saved me and went back under the water.” But Mother was so absorbed in chatting with her friends that she did not even listen to me. In my hurt and resentment I threw the soap into the water. That day Mother gave me two slaps on the back with a plastic mug. She did not understand that that day it was not a person but an eternal, silent compassion that had lifted me out of the water of the Ichamati.

The Dhanmondi Mess and the Black Shadow

After finishing university, when I started my first job, I took a room in a mess in Dhanmondi with Masum bhai, an older boy from my school. About two months later, one morning Masum bhai said with a pale face, “I will not stay in this room with you any more. In no way.” Surprised, I asked why, and his voice began to shake. He said, “For a few days now, whenever I wake up suddenly in the deep of night, I see a pitch-black shadow hanging over your face, bending down. At first I thought it was an illusion of the dark. But tonight, when I went a little closer, a lifeless dark face came out of that shadow and looked straight at me. I will not stay here a moment longer.” Masum bhai left. I was forced to change my place too, and came to a mess behind Krishi Market in Mohammadpur.

Read more: [LINK: Real Haunted House Story: Three Cousins on a Rajshahi Rooftop]

The Mohammadpur Mess

In this cheap mess everyone was a bachelor. But the moment I set foot there, a primal unease swallowed me. The events seemed ordinary at first, but slowly turned into terror. Whenever someone went into the bathroom, it would suddenly lock from outside. Someone would bring a bucket and leave it in front of the door, though nobody in the mess had done it. From the roof in the middle of the night it felt as if someone was kicking the wall. The switches turned themselves on and off. One of our seniors was very stern. A wooden chair was kept on the balcony for smoking. One day he sat in his room cursing these disturbances in very foul language. Suddenly, by some supernatural force, that heavy wooden chair flew through the air and crashed right in front of him. The words stopped in his mouth.

A few days later, small mounds of sand began to appear in corners of the rooms, just like the way small children build houses with sand on a riverbank. And the most irritating thing was the water in the bathroom. After coming back from the office at the end of the day, I would find wet-cloth stains across the whole floor of the mess, water from the bathroom spread over the entire room. It felt as if someone had wrung out wet clothes and walked all over the room.

One Thursday we were all sitting at the tea shop downstairs. We had bought groceries for the night’s cooking, and I told the youngest boy in the mess, “You go to the room and wash the fish and vegetables, we’re coming.” Exactly ten minutes later came his phone call. His voice was shaking, and he said in a tearful voice, “Brother, come quickly. Everything is finished.”

We ran to the room. What we saw, no sane person could imagine. It seemed some unseen rampage had chewed the whole room up and spat it out. Rice and lentils were scattered all over the floor. Things from inside the fridge had been taken out and smeared on the walls. A horrible, violent scene of cooking oil all over the walls. The joy of finding a cheap place vanished in a moment like camphor.

What the Hujur Saw

With no other way, we went to the hujur (Islamic scholar) of Baitul Ashraf mosque next to the community centre. After the Friday prayer, the hujur listened to everything and asked us to meet him after Asr. After Asr, when we sat with him, the hujur closed his eyes and thought breathlessly for a while. Then he sighed deeply and said, “They are a mother and a son, and they live in that flat. The boy is very restless and plays with sand. And you are not good either. You go into the bathroom and do not pour water, and you curse them.” One of us burst out, “But hujur, why do they flood the whole room with water? We cannot bear it.” The hujur said calmly, “The boy’s mother is lame. She cannot walk on two legs. So when she drags herself out of the bathroom, water drips from her body and clothes across the entire room.”

Hearing the word “lame” felt strange to me for some reason. I gave a slightly dismissive laugh and said, “Is that even possible?” The hujur looked at me. His eyes seemed to read all my past in a glance. In an even graver tone he said, “You are laughing. You are blinded by an attachment. The girl who follows you in a red-bordered sari in the middle of yellow, do you know her? She is mute, she cannot speak. All your feelings and emotions are wrapped around her. Since childhood she has been with you. She has not left you.”

Hearing the hujur, my chest felt hollow. It felt as if a violent thunderbolt had shattered the real world around me. Before my eyes rose that mango tree at Sirajdikhan, the hanging bundles of evidence, that bottomless water. Yes, of course. I had always seen her. We met every day. Many words passed between us in my mind. Even if I saw her for just two seconds, it felt like a long unspoken story of ten minutes. She had entered my mind. She was not human. She was an unfulfilled, mute soul trapped in that bush of evidence, who had become the only companion of my lonely childhood and stayed on as my shadow.

After the hujur’s words, the air in the room seemed to turn heavy and freeze. A cold current ran down my spine. The rest of the boys in the mess stared at me open-mouthed. But in my ears there was only the siren of an endless emptiness. The hujur paused for a moment. Then, turning his prayer beads on the tips of his fingers, he said, “Listen, son. Between the world of jinn and the world of humans there is a fine curtain. Some souls, especially those who leave the world by an unnatural death or with unfulfilled longing, sometimes bind themselves out of love to an innocent child. That bush of evidence at Sirajdikhan was either the ashes of her pyre or the soil of her grave. When you played hide-and-seek as a child and hid there, she found a home in your innocent mind. You were not afraid of her. Instead you signalled with your finger to your lips, don’t tell anyone. That one gesture made her your shadow.”

The hujur sighed and looked at me. “She has done you no harm. It was she who saved you from the deep water of the Ichamati by holding your mother’s foot. But as you grew, when the people around you grew into a crowd, she went into hiding. But she did not leave you. The black shadow that Masum saw in the Dhanmondi mess was none other than her. She used to bend over your head and watch over you, just as a mother watches over her child. But her superhuman presence was too much for the people around you.”

In a shaking voice I asked, “Then what about the rampage at this Mohammadpur mess, this lame mother and restless boy?” The hujur smiled. But there was no amusement in that smile, there was a deep understanding of life. “That is another family. In that flat, a jinn mother lived with her child. When your mute, loving soul saw that the new residents of this house, that is, that jinn family, were harassing you and your friends in many ways, locking the bathroom, leaving the bucket, kicking the walls, she could not bear it. That Thursday afternoon, when you went to the market, a fierce fight between two unseen powers took place inside this room. The mute girl in the red-bordered yellow sari fought with all her strength against that mother’s son, so that they could not drive you out of this house. The rampage inside the room, the spilling of oil and spices, the dragging out of the fridge, that was no disturbance, son. It was a war, a war to save you.”

When the hujur finished, tears began to fall from my eyes. The scene that we had taken for a hideous, violent thing, shuddering in terror, had actually been the desperate fight of my childhood’s mute companion. I felt very guilty. She had been following me like a shadow for ages, had saved me, and I had mistaken her for a ghostly nuisance.

After this the hujur recited some dua and kalam and gave us blessed water, and said, “Leave the Mohammadpur flat. And Tamal, you pray for her. She is no bad jinn or evil being, she is only an unfulfilled soul who fell in love with a human child. But the union of two worlds can never be. She must be set free.” We gave up that mess.

A Cold Wind in Perth

After that, many years went by. The bustle of Dhaka, the rat race of corporate life. And as the wheel of fate turned, today I stand a thousand miles away, in Kings Park in Perth, Australia. Here there is no sweepers’ quarter. There is no muddy water of the Ichamati. There is no bundle of evidence hanging from a mango tree. When the light, cold wind of eleven degrees Celsius in this quiet, deserted park touches my body, my body shivers in some strange way. Just like a familiar touch.