A few days with a Ghost                                                                   by Adv. Janardhanan venkitachalam 

A few days with a ghost

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 Preface

The story is totally imaginary and the characters and names are also imaginary. We Indian have a feeling that only our culture is unique and sacred while assailing western culture or westernised living. The paradox is that there are as many cultures as there are states. Each state compete each other claiming that its culture and language is superior to others . It is good to respect others but not to be chauvinistic.

This story revolves around a young girl , a social activist , who has been falsely insinuated. Present young generation have to think beyond the retrograde practices prevailing in the society like caste, creed etc and should be able to come out of the tentacles .

An attempt has been made to picturise the various practices and traditional displays of art form prevailing in North Malabar. I request my readers and patrons to continue reading and register your views.

Continue reading……………………….Published in my face book as well

 Adv. Janardhanan  venkitachalam 

                                                     A few days with a ghost. 

beginning of winter:

It was a winter evening in December , precisely on the day before the Christmas. when I decided to go for a stroll to enjoy the snow. I felt as if the nature had covered the whole place on the earth with  cotton blanket.  The trees were wearing white spongy flowers and the road was completely covered with snow. Unless you are fully protected with snow shoes it would be difficult to walk along. But this never affected the routine life of the people and they have taken it as part of their life. As I walked carefully, my legs went down in side the spongy snow.

 Being a journalist I had to travel a lot and I was representing CNN and stationed at Munich in Germany. I had been here even earlier and that was during  Summer. Summer is equally beautiful with people wearing free dresses. All the shops offer summer discounts and good attractive short dresses were available in all stores. During winter people have to wear layers of clothes to protect from the freezing  cold and probably  they feel happy to wear short

dresses in summer and enjoy. Girls looked beautiful and very attractive in their short dresses and if it were in our Country spate of rape incidents would have been reported. In India the law enforcing agencies blatantly blame the dress habits of girls which they consider as  provocative for such incidents. It is shame on our part who eulogises our culture and look down upon the western culture do not have the decency and decorum in protecting the modesty of our sisters. I used to walk along the lake in Munich where I have seen people both ladies and gents enjoy the sun in nude, totally nude, of course for exposing their skin to the sun for vitamin D. We don’t behold our  tounge in criticizing  the western culture whereas what we show is totally barbaric.   

I heard a murmuring  behind me , or my fantasy to imagine things!,  a feminine voice though I could not find any one nearby. First I thought it to be the visualisation of my crazy mind.  Again the same murmuring. I didn’t heed any attention to that, thinking  that, as it was windy, this might be of the cold wind  that blew against my dress and might be the muffling of my dress. Now it became clearer, a woman’s voice trying to speak or welling. I have heard of ghosts especially in Europe. I had been to Romania and visited some of the castles there. It reminded me of the castles in Dracula story. In fact I had been to a Fort named 'Draculla Fort'. I was told that it had nothing to do with Dracula the blood sucking vampire. I picked some of the Romanian words like ‘bun’,forte bun’ while I was in Romania. I tried to figure out the word I heard. “ No, it was not Romanian” . The accent was some what like malayalam my own mother toungue. How in this world far off in this European city some inanimate object talked in malayalam . Can it be a ghost? whether it is a Malayalee ghost?. If it is a malayalee ghost , how it has come to Europe following me? .

                                                                                                       coninues