“Once upon a time there lived a ghost…” is not a myth anymore. When I am not a child anymore to narrate my far-fetched dream of a dragon or a monster, Mr. Hazarika is induced to believe in my encounter with a ghost; a living ghost. The ghost that I’m going to talk about is wildly spooky. It conquers and maneuvers a physical living body for an age–half a ten–and transfers to another in a consecutive array. It performs its killing and torturing spree in the scariest and most vicious but skillful way. Get ready Mr. Hazarika to assemble all your emotions at the core of your heart.
It was not a cold winter day and the sun was on, but not scorching. Ehh!! This is not how I should begin. In our village of Nalasopara people were very superstitious but not literally; they were gullible. People of the village had their miseries. This is a story of such miseries, unlike the mythical ‘happy village life’ tales. Narayana is a kind, amiable and amicable man who lives with his family near the Ganesh Temple. Just like a typical Indian village man, he is a very predictable farmer and cultivates vegetables and crops on which he lives…we live. The house…sorry, the hut in which he was living…From the word ‘hut’ itself you can imagine the condition in which the family was living, Mr. Hazarika; ‘from hand-to-mouth’ is the idiom that I can use to describe it. Well, it makes no sense to talk metaphorically, but I can't apprise the miseries in a straight flow, for it would pierce my heart. The birds were debarred from their nest; the tree was not a land for them anymore. These were all when nature turned against them. The ghost arrived once again in a more ferocious and horrifying manner. Narayan and his family were the target of the ghost that time.
The Lok Sabha election was just over and Mukund Gogoi was elected as the local MLA of the Palghar district. He was a good man as known before the elections and the best during his campaigns. In those days, he used to render social service as I give free advice to people. The simple, ordinary man turned into Krrish! heh...just a figure of speech Mr. Hazarika. The man became a politician.
So what do you think he is up to now? Ehh, let me tell you Mr. Hazarika. The politician is captured by the spectre. It seized the heart, mind and soul of the body. His actions were then controlled by the spectre. The politician surrendered himself to the evil spirit just after the election was over. His victory came with the companionship of the spectre in him. And with this, Gogoi’s victory turned into pathos for the villagers. The spectre began perpetrating crimes against them. The spectre in Mukund had his eyes on the land of Narayan. It had seemed to be a productive and fertile land. And the devil’s mind conceived the most iniquitous plan to confiscate his land. One day a letter dropped in their house. It was a legal notice sent to them to vacate the place within two days by the Pujaris of the temple that was just beside their house claiming that the land on which they were living belonged to the temple. Narayan refused to surrender his property. Ofcourse, he had nothing to lose beside that only land which had yielded him money and food.
One afternoon, a few people who seemed to be government officers came to his house with another notice and a bulldozer to demolish the small hut. It’s funny that a troop of army came with an elephant to kill a rat. The local MLA also came to watch the demolition. Narayan begged him to help him protect his land but the devil spectre in the MLA didn’t had any sympathy for the poor. Just in front of his eyes his house was demolished. And the land was evicted.
Mukund Gogoi was indeed a good person. It was the spectre that was evil. No politician is a devil in himself. It’s the ghost that we should blame here, Isn’t it Mr. Hazarika? I’m asking you, dear myself. Speak up. And I say, “every human being is a hypocrite and politics is the litmus test for it.”