Chapter 2: The Warnings We Didn't Take Seriously
Before I get to that evening, I have to tell you about the warnings, because looking back, they were all there, laid out plainly, and none of us — not me, not my brother, not even the adults who should have known better — took them seriously enough.
The first warning came from Rotan Kaka, an old man who lived two houses down from my mesho's place and who had fished the same stretch of the Ichamati canal his whole life, the way his father had before him. Rotan Kaka had a bad leg from some accident decades ago and walked with a stick, and every evening he would sit outside his house on a low wooden stool, chewing paan, watching the world go by, and every evening, without fail, he would call out the same thing to my mesho as he passed with his fishing rod and basket: "Not too late tonight, Ashok Babu. The moon's getting thin. Bad time for it."
I asked my mesho once what "bad time for it" meant, and he laughed — a real laugh, easy and unbothered — and said, "Rotan Kaka's been saying that to every fisherman in this village for forty years. He believes a ghost lives in the canal and jumps on people's backs when the moon is thin. Don't worry about it, it's just an old man's habit, like touching your ear when you pass a temple."
I remember thinking that was a strange and specific thing for an old man to be superstitious about, and I remember asking Rotan Kaka himself, one afternoon when my mesho wasn't around, whether he had ever actually seen this ghost.
He didn't laugh the way my mesho had. He set down his little brass box of paan ingredients very carefully, as if he needed both hands free for what he was about to say, and he told me, in a voice much quieter than his usual booming greeting-voice, that he had seen his own younger brother carried nearly to death by the mecho bhoot in 1962, the year of the big flood, when the canal had swollen and swallowed half the fields around it. His brother had gone out at dusk to check the nets and hadn't come back by the time it was properly dark. When they finally found him, stumbling along the bank two miles from where he should have been, he was bent almost double, walking in a strange shuffling way, both arms clutched behind him as though he were carrying something on his back — though there was nothing there, nothing anyone else could see. He kept saying, over and over, "Bhari, bhari, khub bhari" — heavy, heavy, so heavy — and when they finally got him home and laid him on his cot, he slept for two full days, and when he woke up he had no memory of anything after checking the first net, and he never went fishing after dark again for the rest of his life, not once, not even during the good season when everyone else was out on the water every evening.
"The thing lets go once you're inside the house," Rotan Kaka told me, "if there's iron on the door, or if someone throws mustard seeds at your back before you fully cross the threshold. But you have to know it's there. My brother didn't know, at first. He thought it was cramp, then he thought it was his imagination, and by the time he understood what was happening, it was already too heavy for him to run."
I remember being thrilled by this story in the particular way that thirteen-year-old boys are thrilled by horror stories — a pleasant, safe kind of fear, the kind you can walk away from and immediately start making jokes about. I told my brother that night, exaggerating parts of it, doing a voice for Rotan Kaka's dead brother, and we both laughed ourselves half sick, and neither of us thought, not for one second, that we were laughing about something that would, within the same week, be standing — or rather, riding — on the back of someone we loved.
The second warning, which I only understood the significance of much later, was smaller and easier to miss. About four days before everything happened, my mesho had come home from fishing complaining, in an irritated but not yet frightened way, that something kept stealing fish out of his basket while his back was turned. Not a cat, not a dog — he would have noticed an animal. He said it was like the fish simply vanished between one moment and the next, sometimes even from a basket he was holding directly in his own two hands, and once, he said, he distinctly felt something brush against his ankle in the shallow water, something too smooth and too deliberate to be a fish or a floating branch.
My aunt, only half-listening while she cooked, told him he was tired and imagining things, that he'd been putting in long hours at the post office and staying out fishing too late on top of it. My mesho agreed with her, a little too quickly I think now, the way people agree with an explanation they want to be true more than one they believe is true. And that was the last ordinary evening before everything changed. The next evening, he went out fishing as usual, an hour before sunset, and he did not come back on time, and when he finally did come back, none of us — not my aunt, not my mother, not me or my brother, watching from the verandah with the particular held-breath stillness that children develop when they sense adults are frightened — none of us had any idea what to do with what we were looking at.