A cousin of mine used to write ghazals. His language and spellings not being correct most of the times, he often got them corrected by me. This, in turn inspired me to try my own hand at writing ghazals. One day I went to Universal Book Depot which is a renowned book dealers chain in the city and bought a brand new Urdu to English/Hindi pocket dictionary to learn new words which I could use in my ghazals. Often my elder sister would also consult it but for the majority of time it used to be with me only. I would keep consulting the dictionary for looking up various meanings, write a few verses and when sleepy, I would just slide the dictionary, the diary and the pen under my pillow and go to sleep. I would like to mention here that I napped twice a day apart from sleeping at night as well and as an old habit always went to sleep with any book I was reading under my pillow.
For the first three days everything was perfectly normal.
From precisely the 3rd day, I started getting recurrent dreams and visions. I saw a huge off whitish arched gateway set in green stoney grounds fresh after the recent rains - the type we have in rainy season in India - and just a few seconds later a small army of soldiers with harping spears in their hands and atop on horseback (around 30- 40 or maybe less men ) would come thundering in with a deafening noise and a mad rush. the army always appeared to be going to accomplish some vital feat and in great excitement and fury. Most of the soldiers held the reins of their horse in one hand while in the other they brandished the deadly looking spear.
It continued for 2 days; then the frequency of this dream suddenly reached an alrming pitch. I began seeing the same scene even without sleeping. I would merely close my eyes and see the thundering soldiers on horse back coming from the arched gate. In addition I also started seeing an elderly muslim poet wearing a brownish /whitish full length robe. His face was never clear to me but perhasps he had a long greyish beard too. He always appeared to be very sad.
Then another scene joined the list of visions; walls, white walls, yellowish white walls, high walls and all of them covered with huge urdu verses or words written boldly as we often see slogans written during election campaigns in India.
And then a dream in which I saw a storm blowing away so hard that it uncoveres a grave. The grave has a groaning moaning man still alive even though several years have passed since he was buried there; he now starts rising from the grave and is calling out my name.
I was truely perplexed now and was sure that something was wrong. I told my mother and to my astonishment she told me she too had been dreaming again and again about an old muslim man.
We still didn't think the dictionary had anything to do with this.
That night I could not sleep. At midnight suddenly the dogs in the street just outside my house started barking madly, really, really madly...! For some reason I was very scared and uneasy. As I got up to to switch on the lights I saw a hazy figure of an old man - perhaps the same whom I had been seeing in the dreams and the visions- in the room. I screamed and he vanished.
We all were really shaken now.
I randomly, gave the dictionary to my cousin and surprisingly that night he too saw a hazy old man figure in his room and dogs barking madly outside his house.
However odd and stupid it might seem, we concluded there was something wrong with the dictionary. We didn't want to throw it away for fear of insulting whoever the old man was, so my cousin went and sold the dictionary to a junk seller and with that money he bought an insence stick and burnt it offering our appologies to however had been offended.
Since that day all those dreams and visions stopped abruptly.
All possible explanations for this incident seem downright crazy. How can a brand new book, a dictionary at that, can be infested with spirit or ghosts? I do know of stories and films featuring ghostly incidents related with books but you will agree those books are old or have some sort of bloody or tragic history. This surely. cannot apply on this dictionary as it was brand new; I had bought it myself and the book store is pretty reputed one that doesn't sell old or second hand books. In any case, the dictionary even looked like brand new therefore I am quite sure it did not come to me after being used by somebody.
Someone offered an explanation that Urdu is such a language that certain alphabets even if written differently can conjoin to give a different meaning, means, I may have, by mistake, written a word or something which could have invoked a spirit; this definitely, cannot be true because I do not know urdu; I can neither read it nor write it. My usage of the dictionary remained firmly limited to flicking pages randomely, glimpsing a familiar word in Hindi then discovering its meaning in English. Maybe whoever wrote the dictionary put it under a spell .......!
And why those particular images and visions? Who was the old man? Did the images mean something specific or were they trying to tell me something?
I believe I will never know.
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