Beloved Strangers by Maria Chaudhuri Read Free Book Online Page B

was the nature of shame: it never left me because I never allowed it to. I held on to my shame, tightly, desperately, afraid that if I revealed it, I would fall further into its abysmal pit. Shame urged me to grow inwards, to become invisible. And I learned that if I stopped noticing myself, others did the same. If I didn’t feel my body any more, then it stopped taking up any space. If I stopped listening to my feelings then I could no longer hear the toll of shame. People saw me as shy, quiet, introverted. But I wasn’t as shy as I was invisible. Not as quiet as I was keen on not being heard. Words gurgled up to my lips but I pushed them back down, refusing to give them shape or form. For I chose to remain invisible.
     
    The Naked Ghosts were discovered by Shonali, our one-eyed ayah. Shonali, who had been with us since I was a baby, wore her blind, bulging blue eye as a mark of her supernatural wisdom. With her blind eye she claimed to see things that a normal eye could not. There was one corner of our roof where a mango tree leaned forward to create a cool green shade. There Shonali squatted every evening, sucking on a bidi, betel juice dripping from her mouth, while ghosts galore visited her. Some of them were torsoless, mere heads floating about aimlessly and some had Himalayan forms reaching the skies, their eyes as big as headlights. Despite the terror they provoked in us, we loved listening to Shonali’s descriptions of those visiting spirits.
    One evening she detected, through the dense foliage of mango leaves, a pair of nangta bideshi bhooths – the naked ghosts of a white sahib and memsahib. This piqued our interest immediately. Naveen and I joined Shonali in the shade of the mango tree every day after dark in the hope of seeing two naked white ghost-bodies. Shonali was aghast to find that they did not return, not even for the benefit of her prophetic blind eye. ‘I saw them I tell you,’ she protested, ‘the memsahib had breasts like long thin mangoes and the sahib, oh my God – sweeties, promise you won’t tell your mother – the sahib was hung like a bull!’
    Naveen expressed her disgust, ‘Watch your mouth Shonali, what kind of talk is this!’
    I secretly wanted Shonali to continue. What else had she seen? Did ghosts copulate?
    A few weeks later, when the foreign ghosts still failed to appear, we lost interest and left Shonali alone. But she hadn’t lied to us after all. Months after she had first located the bideshi bhooth couple, she came running to our room and urged us to follow her to the roof. That night, we finally saw the mythical Naked Ghosts.
    Naveen and I strained to see through the gaps in the leafy darkness. A young white woman with short blond hair, completely naked, leaned over what seemed like a table and appeared to be chopping something. A man came up from behind her, also completely naked, and handed her something which she added to her preparations. What Shonali had not perceived with her one-eyed vision was the shape of a window, framing the young couple cooking in the nude. What Shonali had seen, correctly, was the sahib’s bull-like endowment. ‘Do you see it?’ she cackled demonically, unperturbed by the fact that her ghosts had turned into humans. ‘Do you see how his manhood sways and swaggers?’
    ‘No,’ I said, equally animated, ‘Where? Where? Show me!’
    But Naveen was already pulling me away from the sight of the Naked Ghosts. ‘They’re not ghosts, you idiot,’ she wailed, ‘they’re human beings. And we should be ashamed of ourselves for staring at them.’
    When Shonali wasn’t smoking bidis or ghost-hunting, she turned her attention to Amol the cook. She cracked jokes to make him laugh and made up all sorts of affectionate pet names for him. She sat on her haunches while he worked, telling him long, painful stories of her childhood in the hope of gaining his sympathy. Amol routinely rejected her warmth, engaging her in fights more readily than