The Eerie Encounter

In the year 1996, I was working at Wangdichholing Primary School in The Happiness Country called Bhutan. A bachelor, I had taken the two rooms on the ground floor of a two-storied, solitary house on rent on the way to Jambay Lhakhang (temple) some fifteen minutes away from the school. My South Indian friend, Ashokan, stayed with his family opposite my rooms. The first floor was occupied by a company. The few employees working there stayed till 4.30 in the evening, then everyone left.

At the beginning of the new academic session in March 1996, Ashokan got transferred to another Dzongkhag (district), leaving me well neigh broken and battered.

I missed him and his family so much after school that for some days, I didn't feel like getting back to the house. Right after school, I'd go down to the market, some half hour's distance from my school on the other side of the town and try to drive away my loneliness by having a bottle or two of Eagle, an Indian-made beer.

That evening I was joined by my friends from U/dee Carpentry Workshop. They were plumbers from across the borders and used to call me "Bhattacharjeeda" or "Masterda". Within no time we had consumed two cases of beer. As it was getting late, I got up to go. Uttam, the leader of the pack, a young, handsome chap, stopped me," Why do you want to go back to that desolate house, Bhattacharjeeda? Come to our cottage. We are cooking chicken tonight."

In those days, chicken was a rare commodity in that part of the world, so I couldn't resist the temptation.

Later, we were playing cards, joking, pulling each other's legs, and having a gala time while some others were busy preparing dinner on a rusty bukhari (a kind of locally-made, multipurpose oven), when the owner of U/dee Carpentry Workshop, one Mr Ugyen Dorji, the father of one of my students, invited us up to his room for a movie on TV.

It was a ghost movie and had us all shaken to the roots. We got down to the cottage at around 11.30 at night to have dinner. While enjoying the delicious dinner, we chatted about the movie. I don't know why I remembered an important lesson with a class the next day right then and decided to get back to my lonely den. My friends protested and cajoled me for staying the night there and leaving early in the morning but I was adamant.

Uttam then handed me a torch, and made sure it was in working condition as I bade them all 'Good Night".

It was springtime. The sky overhead looked pristine with the full, silvery moon shining down on the valley with the golden paddy fields on one side, the majestic, hypnotic mountains on the other and the concrete road in between. I was enjoying the walk when all of a sudden, the moon got hidden behind the clouds. Everything turned black at the same instant. I took the torch out of my overcoat pocket and tried to light it. God! It didn't work at all. I tried my level best but the torch wouldn't budge an inch!

That was when I had my first feeling of unease. By then, I had reached my school, halfway between my house and the carpentry workshop. I recalled then that the chorten (a kind of structure made of brick and mud with a lot of valuables supposedly buried underneath) was just opposite the school gate. The warnings of my students started haunting me. They had told me several times not to come anywhere near that place after dark. The place, they told me, was haunted after dark.

I had an eerie feeling then that someone was behind me. Like someone wearing a pair of slippers, was walking behind. The slippers dragged as I kept walking, stopping as I stopped. Now, when I was a child, I heard a lot of ghost stories from one of my aunts. She would tell us that the greatest mistake one could make at such times was by looking back. But I just wanted to see if there was anyone behind me or it was my mind playing tricks. I finally made up my mind to turn my head backwards. As I slowly did so, I could see the silhouette of a shadowy figure wrapped in white. Two burning, glaring eyes unnerved me, keeping me gaping for a second before I started running for my life. I ran like the wind till I found myself in front of the wooden door of my house. I unlocked the door, scurried inside, latched it from inside and switched all the lights on. I had stopped quacking and panting by the time I retired to my bed.

That's not how the story ends. The next day, there was a volleyball match between our school and Jakar High School. I had to accompany the boys up to the high school at the Headmaster's request. As the match was going on, Mr Saha, the Economics Teacher, was seated beside me on a fallen log. At some point in time, he turned his head towards me, jumped up and ran like he had seen someone possessed!

After a while, I saw him coming back, accompanied by Mr Pandit, the Physics Teacher-cum- Health In-charge. They came down to me, looked at me from a distance before Mr Pandit, shaking his head, remarked: "You are right, Saha. Bhattacharjee has chicken pox."

Mr Saha should know as he had lost three of his close relatives, including his father, on the same day due to the dreaded disease.

The only thing troubling me since then has been how I got afflicted with the disease when I had it in my childhood. And people are believed not to suffer from chicken pox more than once in their lifetime! Was it because of the eerie encounter of the previous night?