At that time I was in college. I used to stay at my mother’s cousins’ house in north Kolkata. The house was quite near to the River Gauṋgá. There was also a cremation ghát́ nearby. The house had three levels. One of the two rooms on the top floor housed a child-Krishna image, and I used to stay in the other one. A portion of one corner of the former room was closed off with red curtains, and there the elder of my male relatives used to practice Tantra sádhaná. That section of north Kolkata was extremely densely populated. One could easily reach twenty-five or thirty houses by crossing from roof to roof. In case someone might climb onto the roof and enter the third floor, and from there try to enter the house, after finishing his sádhaná at night my relative would lock from the inside the door to the stairwell which connected the second and third floors. That is to say, at night I was cut off from the remaining members of the household. Day and night corpse bearers would pass by the house as they came and went along the road to the cremation ghát́.

I’ll narrate what happened one day. At that time it was deep into the night. My sleep broke to the eerie shouts of Bol, Hari bol! [“Chant the Lord’s name!”].⁽¹⁾ I forgot to mention that there was no bedside light-switch in my room, that is, I would have to get up and go to another corner of the room to turn on the light. That night, after my sleep broke I became aware that someone had lifted the mosquito net from the outside and was holding my left foot… Paralysed, I lay still and felt the person’s ice-cold touch. After a while I looked up, but there was no one else inside the mosquito net. Then it seemed someone was outside the net pacing in circles around the cot. I remained lying inert. Afterwards I slowly fell asleep.

The next morning I narrated all that happened to everyone in the house. They said, “We don’t like you sleeping in that room. Why is it necessary for you to sleep alone on the third floor?” But I was not willing to give up the room since it was convenient for my studies. The next night they asked our cook to sleep in that room.

Starting halfway through the night the cook would not let me sleep. He started to ask over and over, “Sir, are you sleeping? Are you sleeping, sir?” I realized he was dreadfully frightened. The next morning I saw that the cook and my household members were talking together in hushed tones.

The gist of what I could overhear was that in the middle of the night the cook woke up suddenly to a noise. Then he looked and saw that in the middle of the room, the dead body of a woman was hanging with a noose around her neck. Next, through her strangled throat, that same woman told him to get up and leave the room. Seeing something like this the cook got terrified and immediately woke me up.

After listening to him, one of my mother’s cousins said she had once taken an afternoon nap in that room. Her sleep had broken suddenly. Looking toward the switchboard she had seen a woman standing with a noose around her neck. Out of fear she had immediately fled the room. As she told the cook, it is for this reason that they did not want me to stay alone in that room at night. The cook had been told to stay with me in that room in case I got afraid while alone.

The next night, though extremely unwilling, the cook came to sleep with me, but this time he no longer stayed inside; he slept on the veranda that faced the room. The next morning the cook informed everyone that he had been hearing thudding sounds all night long from inside the room, and would under no circumstances sleep on the third floor again. If because of this he had to give up his job, fine.

My family would not consent to let me stay the night there at all anymore. I said, “At least let me stay tonight, because tomorrow I have my Bengali exam. I’ve not studied Bengali at all. So if I can study alone in that room my reading will go better.” Despite being thoroughly unwilling, they agreed. It was true that I had not studied Bengali at all, so I resolved to study quite well that night.

It was late into the night, and the city of Kolkata was sleeping… There were no sounds of buses or trams, nor the hustle and bustle of pedestrians. I could hear only the sound of my own reading.

What an eerie feeling – as though someone else had come into the room and sat down next to me. Who was it that seemed to be saying, “Oh my, you’re up studying so late – you’ll get sick at this rate! Go to bed.”

I said, “Tomorrow’s my Bengali exam.”

The person said, “Don’t worry, you’ll pass,” then added that I should memorize certain lines from Michael Madhusudan’s poem, “Niiladhvajer prati Janá”. I did as the person said, and afterwards fell asleep sitting up.

Much to my surprise, the next day I found that the question paper required me to write down from memory those exact lines from that poem.

[Author’s explanation:] Jiṋánaja ávesha [Literally, “Self-hypnotism arising from deep knowledge”]

Footnotes

(1) A common devotional chant, in this case being repeated in the context of a funeral procession. –Trans.