I grew up in a small village named Titabor. We lived in a
rented house or you can say a hut. It had a ceiling with a wide hole in it.
During summer the owner would cut off the current supply to save his
electricity bill. The bathroom was far away from our little house. My
Mom had to work hard to manage the house hold. Most of my childhood went by
playing on haystack with my friend. Her name was Mamu.
We lived in that village till I was four or five years old; old
enough to attend school. Though I was very young, I still have clear memories
of many incidents. Some were good, memorable ones like going to picnic in a
truck, my birthday celebration. Some were not so good like a snake almost
falling on top of me or being separated from my friend forever. But the most
vivid memory that I could recall was the memory of a nightmare. A nightmare
that I had seen night after night, till my last night in that house.
The nightmare started with me going deep into the forest behind
our house. The forest started where the village fence ends. My friend and I
would always venture into it. We would listen to the song of birds and
occasionally find woodcutters chopping down trees. In my dream, I would find
myself walking deep into the forest. There I would find a well and suddenly,
water starts pouring out of it. The next moment the entire area was overflowing
with its water.
I never told about it to anyone, not even my mom and never thought
much about it. One day, as Mamu and I were playing, we saw some
people from our village going to the forest with axe. So we followed them. It
was a nice sunny day. We went further than we usually go. There was huge tree
and some of the men climbed up and started chopping down the tree. We watched
in awe, how a huge thing was brought down by some small beings.
Suddenly I saw a large shadow pass by us. Too large for human and too
small for a tree. I didn’t think much and we came back home after a while. That
was the last day that I was with my beloved friend. Since that day, Mamu wouldn’t
stop crying. She wouldn’t eat or sleep but kept crying. Finally her parents
took her to some Ojha (witch doctor or someone
who performs an exorcism). But that’s what people from my village
said. Her parents moved away from that village as soon as they could. I haven’t
heard of her or seen her since. There were rumours in the village about her
strange behaviour. Some said that she was behaving violently, that she was
possessed by some spirits while we were in the forest. Some even claimed to
have seen her eating up a cock from the neighbour. But these were rumours. If
something strange happens in the village there would be people making up all sorts
of things. But the shadow that we saw and the eeriness of it was
something that I could forget.
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