Ghost at the gym

Stronger arms at the Rani Jhansi park, Karolbagh, New Delhi

Oh no, a ghost! Goodbye

Don’t follow the ghost lights

Spontaneous night lights appear in wetlands across the world, in places where human-made night-lighting still has low reach. This phenomenon has existed for a very long time, given its place in the folklore of several cultures.

The centuries of human understanding that preceded discussions of bioluminescence, lit methane and organic decay have been populated by narrative understandings of this phenomenon. These are folk tellings that made sense to people for who, the end of daylight each evening meant being swallowed by an unrelenting darkness, relieved only by the meagre light that human endeavour could produce. 

It is no wonder that the imaginations of such people should inscribe meaning into strange and unpredictable lights in the great darkness. In the Sundarbans, the vast delta forests through which the enormous river Ganga falls into the Bay of Bengal, these lights are called aleya. Aleya are commonly understood to be the souls of those who died in the marshland or forest. The souls are trapped, and, angry at their usually violent deaths, and the fact that they are unable to move on, they want to lure other unwary travellers to their deaths. If you follow the lights, you may never be heard of again.

In this understanding, the aleya structurally falls into the revenant, or return, paradigm in a wider area of the paranormal. However, the revenant paradigm is populated by ghosts that wait generations for revenge—a very personal motivation. In the context of such tellings, the aleya can be better compared to the sirens of Greek mythology. They sang their songs, and if you were caught unaware, well, then, that’s your story. As the stories tell it, the aleya is, by and large, impersonal.

The two common folkloric qualities of these lights as they are seen in different cultures around the world, appear to be the following- first, that they are impersonal, and second, that they are attractive, in the sense that they attract people to them. The Jack o lantern is literally Jack carrying a lantern through the night—and who can resist following a man with a lantern when all the other paths are dark?

English folklore advices you not to follow the will o the wisp. They inscribed the idea of something that you follow to your peril, and made a literary trope out of it. Finnish folklore talks of the virvatuli, which has a creation myth remarkably like the aleya of the Sundarbans, and a spin that makes them possible keepers of treasure—a characteristic shared by werelights in Mexico. In parts of Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, the luz mala or evil light populate folktales with examples of what not to do if you’re walking in the dark and there are unknown lights in the distance.

The werelight myths are an interesting inversion of the rhetorical function of light. Light is invested with so many positive qualities— home, love, warmth. Darkness is considered it’s opposite—cold, remote. You move towards the light, you see the light, you are bathed in the light. But in the werelight myths, it is the light that will get you in trouble. So stay quiet and still in the dark night, and there is a chance that you may be safe.

#paranormal #supernatural #ghosts #willothewisp #jackolantern #deltafolktale #folktale #paranormalfolktale #dark #darkness #Indianfolktale #sundarbans #folktalesaroundtheworld

The Aleya of the Sundarbans, 1

 

Imagine this. You are a fisherman. You have a small hand-rowed boat, because that is the only kind of boat you can afford. Besides, even low-power motors scare the fish away, and you cannot afford to scare the fish. You earn from day-to-day, so you must catch as many fish as you can, everyday. Fortunately, fish are plenty where you live, which is on an island in the delta of a massive river. You have heard that the river starts in the faraway high mountains called the Himalayas, but you’ve never seen a mountain, so you don’t quite know how that is. Near where you live, in the Sundarbans, the river breaks into hundreds of tributaries and streamlets, winding its way between islands of mangrove trees and wild animals.
One of these animals is the mighty tiger, the king of the delta forest. It is said that the tiger always knows where you are, whether you can see it, or not. You are in trouble only if it shows itself, because then it has plans for you. Tigers can swim, too, through currents that even experienced swimmers find difficult, so when you are on your little boat in the shallow straits, between islands shadowed by dense thickets of mangrove, you must be very, very careful.
Tigers are a good reason to always finish packing up your nets and crab-pots before dusk. You have heard, all your life, that dark must not find you outside, on a boat, surrounded by water and marshland. You must be home, in the warmth of family and cookfires before darkness turns the world outside featurelessly black. In your world, the only light at night burns in homes. There are no real lights in the marsh forests.
But tigers are not the only things to fear outside, in the dark. You have heard stories of the ghost-lights that sometimes burn in the waterways and islands. They are not real, and you must not follow them. They are the spirits of fishermen who died there, and the spirits cannot move on. They are trapped in this world, sorrowful and angry, and since they cannot exact revenge on the things that killed them, they must exact it on the living. The only living who traverse the narrow streams after dark are fishermen who stayed out too long. You must never, ever, be one of those fishermen.     You have heard the lights described, but never seen one, not clearly. The winking lights that you sometimes see between the roots of the mangrove are like large fireflies. They did not call out to you in any way, and you certainly felt no compulsion to follow them into the tangle of mangrove roots.

The tides are not always predictable. Sometimes, they roll in a little early, sometimes a little late. The monster of the open sea comes gushing in through the inlets and streams, drowning some of the further reaches altogether. Sometimes, high tide brings storms. Even where you set your nets and pots, further inland, your boat can get swept along as the channels fill. You usually get home before high tide, but when you get caught, you sit it out and hope that you will be able to find your way back, well before dark. That has always happened.
  One evening, you are tired. The gush of seawater down the channel takes you unawares, and your net gets swept away by the tide. Your boat drifts down channels you have not seen before—there are always channels you have not seen before, and the landscape shifts during high tide. Rowing has no effect. It is getting dark, and you are getting worried.
The forest darkens around you, night sounds and deep shadow. The water is still reflecting the last light of the sky, so you know you still have a little light to get out of the forested areas. The only problem is that you are lost. Nothing looks familiar, no bend in the waterway or large clump of trees that you can steer by. It gets darker.
You try to steer by the moon and the stars, but there is nothing but darkness above and below you.
You keep rowing, exhausted, heartsick. There must be settlements nearby, even a few houses. You’ve been rowing for hours, and it feels as if the direction is roughly right. Then you see a light far away to your left, beyond a bend. It’s burning steadily, as if it could be from the open door of a hut— that’s what you see in your mind’s eye, an open door, lit from inside, water to drink, and food. You’ll row back home tomorrow morning.
Joy filling your heart, you turn towards the light. As you get closer, it goes out. There is complete darkness. Another light comes on, but this is a little further. You are not thinking now, just rowing towards the light, wherever it is. A little further, your mind says, a little further, and there will be light. And maybe, with the light, there will be home.

In the stories they tell, this is how those who see the Aleya of the Sundarbans die.

[Illustration by Rob Alexander and the Wizards of the Coast, 2004]

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