A Rainy Night

Chapter - 3

She sat on the chair he was writing earlier and looked into the pages scattered on the table. She glanced towards Abhijoy once, who in the meantime was standing beside the chair, staring, reading her figure. He saw a tortuous scar on her left cheek, starting from the ear stretched up to the neck. It was scary, and it scared him. She guessed the fear.

"I know the presence of a stranger in the house raises questions," she smiled, "but, thanks for the sanctuary in this bad weather, I was alone and seeing you for so long, over the year, lost in books, working on your thesis, you were a familiar figure to me. So I surmised to come here and meet you," she smiled again and drowned the frightful atmosphere.

It was a beautiful smile unlike spirits that he was imagining earlier and her behaviour seemed to be contrary to the ghost and vampires are seen on television or read in books. But why was she sounding so assertive? Her comportment, her seeing him in the window, and what does it mean over the years?

His window opens to a small grove, and a big mango tree that provides refuge to birds and squirrels from the harshness of weather. He finds her talk mysterious, in an instant, the same childhood fear returned on his face which his ten years long education had taken to suppress; Spirit - Ghost - Apparition, clanged in his head.

She felt the changing colour of his face and answered, "You know it's very hard to overcome the beliefs you had faith once, don't worry I'm no apparition," she looked in his eyes, her frankness stuns him. Her anticipation of undergoing in his head was unmatched.

He moved a little towards the window, now and then, looking her pale face and the zigzag scar, he was again stupefied by her sudden remark, "the scar here holds a long story, it was given by the person I loved most. And the heinous part of this story is I still love him ..."

"The mind suspects simple things into extraordinary in fear," she said maintaining a smile, "withhold the judgment Abhijoy." He felt the familiarity in the sound of his name, it appeared to him he had heard this voice on a regular basis. He stopped his efforts, "education is futile if you start judging mere glimpsing a person," she said and continued, "to clear your doubt, let me clear, I'm not a term of some wild imagination of occult practitioner.

"The definition of a ghost is vast, no fence to demarcate what comes in it and whatnot, even people in real life gradually turns into a ghost," she paused and flipping the printed stapled pages said, "we mostly forget the centre, who is the centre? You or I? Or something else?"

Is she talking Derrida, Abhijoy thought.

"Don't worry I will quench the thirst of your curiosity," he looked more curiously towards her hoping to be satiated by some wild narrative including vampires, ghosts and spirits. But it was not what he hoped for, it was not what he had imagined. He was launched suddenly into a dystopian world that was morally corrupted, desolate and lifeless...