This happened when I was 80 years old in my grandmother's house in Kunongolom. It was an old, gnarly-good-style home, too large for three people living in it, with long corridors, red oxide floors and wooden doors that never shut properly. My mother had gone to Kuchi for a few days to help my aunt after a surgery, so I stayed behind with Amama and my uncle Suresh. At night, I slept in the small room near the Pooja room because Amama said it was cooler here.
The first night, I woke up because I felt watched. I was not frightened at first, just hyper-aware. I opened my eyes and saw someone standing near the foot of my bed. I thought it was Amama.
The figure was thin and still, draped in something pale. I remember the moonlight coming through the window bars and laying stripes across the room. The figure stood in that distorted lightscape. I called out softly.
Amama? It did not answer. I pushed myself up on my elbows. Its head was been slightly to one side.
The face looked wrong. I could not see features clearly, but I knew where the eyes were. They called what little light there was. Two dull glints fixed on me.
I pulled the sheet over my face. I lay there sweating under the sheet, listening. I expected footsteps. A whisper.
Breathing. But there was nothing. After what felt like hours, I pulled the sheet down. It was closer now.
Not at the foot of the bed. Beside me, its face hung above mine. And I smelled mouldy jasmine. The smell that comes from flowers in a woman's hair when they have gone off by morning.
I saw its mouth. It was stretched too wide. I screamed until my uncle came running. The figure vanished.
My uncle slapped the light on and checked on me. A mama also came in, muttering prayers. I told them what had happened. They said I was having a nightmare.
A mama told me a prayer to fend off scary thoughts and slept next to me for the rest of the night. I suppose some nightmares can appear real. But the theory was proved wrong when it came again. I would feel the same pressure in the room, open my eyes and find its standing there, sometimes near the door, sometimes near the window.
Ones crouched in the corner with its head bowed. I would utter the prayer that a mama had taught me and it would vanish. Its arrival became less frequent soon after. I thought I had banished my spectral enemy.
Then one night I woke. And it was already lying beside me. I turned my head slowly and saw the outline of a woman facing me. Hair spilled across the pillow.
One arm lay across her waist. She looked like someone asleep. I ran before I could scream. I ran into the corridor, into the dark, into a mama's room, and pissed myself on the floor while banging on her door.
Fortunately, my mother arrived the next day and took me away from that dreadful room and the ancient home that had become a place of immense misery. I learned years later that many decades ago a young woman had hanged herself in that side room. A cousin by marriage, newly widowed. She had been made to sleep there while relatives decided what to do with her.
On the third night they found her hanging from the ceiling.