Old gosts don’t have the H, as one has recently learnt. They, like gossip and myth making, come from an ancient part of our collective memory, and still hang around, even in these most modern of times.
The H, I suppose, is recent, from when they began haunting. I have only come across benign ghosts. Why did the others begin these scare tactics and build a bad rep for them all?
We don’t know yet, but this late late night issue number 77 of season 5 of Bombay Daak welcomes you, and I assure you no further haunting persists beyond these lines. The modern ghosts are too busy on chat screens scaring blinking cursors; modern day ghosts, hover over haunted screens, scrolling DIY exorcism tutorials.
The Haunting at The Bear
Doors might be my favourite episode of The Bear’s new season, but Sammy Fak’s segment in Children is the best of TV in this year. The Fak family haunting is in my heavy recency bias the best tangent on a plot and I am willing to picket on the streets demanding a Fak family spin off of all the family hauntings1
A poet’s complaint
Pushpanjali Kumari2 has a bone to pick with Keats’s Ghost
Your death lingers, unfortunately, Whenever the nightingale sings Outside my window, And I am forced to contemplate How sounds must emanate from the bones Of fragile beings For them to be heard over The footsteps of death’s confidants In the endless commotion of their materiality.
Japanese ghosts always find a second life in their art
Oiwa’s husband wanted to remarry his rich neighbor, but his wife was still very much alive. He first tried poisoning Oiwa, but it disfigured her horribly rather than killing her. Then, he threw her into a river to drown, which was indeed successful. But later, when he returned to that river, Oiwa’s ghost rose from the water to haunt him no matter where he fled.
The Last of the Ghosts
One summer, I saw a ghost for the last time, except I didn’t know it then. I always expected it to be a constant in the dark rooms, and the thick passages of backyards, lightless narrow lanes and and mirrors in lonely houses. The eventual disappearance of ghosts foreshadowed (ironically) what was to come; of familiar faces disappearing from ones life one day silently, such that you can’t pin a date to the last time you saw them.3
Sohrab Hura’s Ghosts in my Sleep4
Women carrying a maternal current haunts this prodigious (and ongoing) series of gouache paintings on looking at the past, besides souls - ghosts and children, both lonely and lost.
I’m curious to see where this amalgamation of the uncertainty of events and the elasticity of time leads to and if it can help me hold on to a part of my life that I’m afraid I’m losing touch it, for just a little bit longer.
He writes; art after all is how we cage time.
Schoen House, Woodhouse Road
Growing up, we always had stories of ghosts and haunting safely placed within the confines of Aarey and the back hills and unfinished buildings of Goregaon. In the decades since then Goregaon has become a proper hub for the up and coming and lost its ghostly charms, although the winter chill still holds that past within it. Never for once did this old ill maintained bungalow opposite the YMCA in Colaba ever come up in our rumour sessions, despite providing the perfect setup. The building of course has more litigious nuisance to contend with than those of dead spirits, but always worth a visit to glimpse a forgotten past5 of the city.6
Along with A Complaint to Keats’s Ghost above, The God in the Hearth, are two of the better poems I have read this year. Pushpanjali Kumari is some talent, and I wish to read more of her work
This is your cue to read Daak 042 - Old Friends
And this your cue to read 041 - Old Haunts