In late 2003 I was traveling to Nepal from India. When I was already on my way there, I had to stop for a few days in Darjeeling, to wait for a wire of money to arrive, to cash it out.
I spent the first morning and afternoon in the streets. Well not just the streets, at the most unbearable sun of noon I went like four hours inside an arcade. I was kind of feeling uptight, having to pay constant attention to my backpack. Even though the arcade was deserted, and there were just several shops open, I felt paranoid.
I had made transportation arrangements and was going to leave the next day. It didn’t feel right to spend the night in the street, so as soon as my line of credit opened, later that day, I searched for a hotel as the sun was going down.
The first one I chose, the Hotel Mahadeva—I think it was called that—allowed me without asking for any upfront cash. This is, of course, customary, but in most hotels in India, I’ve been asked for upfront payment.
The room was tiny and in a bad condition. It had a private bathroom and that made me see it as above average. It was cool to just be set for the night and I didn’t have anything to do for the rest of the day, other than thinking about what lied ahead, for me, in Kathmandu. It wasn’t late, but I was dog-tired after the trip from Kolkata to Darjeeling, and I had as much street as I wanted while I was waiting to cash out the whole day while the sun was up.
I thought that it was wise to go to a hotel and not to try to rough it in the street, much less with a freshly funded wallet like I was by then. As soon as I had left my backpack in the room and came down for a meal, a storm broke.
That night I expected to taste something delicious. Yet, the meal of the Mahadeva hotel did leave a lot to be desired. It was a very unmemorable supper. It must have been the dullest Indian thali I have ever eaten. A thali of which the only thing I remember now was that one of the courses was a papad plate.
After dinner, there was nothing to do in the hotel, and they did close the door very early at night. I went to sleep.
I fell asleep fast, because that kind of trip always got the best of me, and I was sapped. At first, I slept relatively okay, but I awakened in the wee hours of the morning feeling a quenching thirst. I dressed up, took my plastic bottle, and went downstairs to the place where I’ve seen the water filter.
I filled the bottle and started walking back to my room. I don’t know if it was a hallucination or a real witnessing of a non-organic being. What I’ve seen was a ghost the size of a fist. It had two little baby-like legs. Yet, that is where all human resemblance ended. What I would call a total creep.
From what it’d be its waist upwards it was a mess of formless flesh. It looked as if whatever was over those legs had exploded. I saw (did I?) that thing walking, moving its tiny little doll legs in a step of the staircase before disappearing into the thin air.
Now, you’ll notice that this story may pass for a regular or above average ghost story due to the originality of the entity involved. I could leave it at that and not go into deeper detail that due to its strangeness can make this story less believable and more sounding like a fib.
I don’t care, I will describe the entity in detail because, even if it sounds kind of ludicrous, it’s what I saw. And I saw this thing form no more than one or two yards away.
I said that it was a pair of baby-like legs because, in fact, they possibly couldn’t have been called baby legs. The round and fleshy form of a baby’s pair or legs was there, but the proportion was much smaller, I’d say that I could grasp the whole pair of legs with a single hand if I wanted. That was the size from the feet to the waist of the whole legs, a tad longer than the width of my palm.
The thing that was from the waist up was utterly disgusting. It was a flap of gray flesh open like a flower with smaller flaps of equally irregular, hanging, tendril-like, tiny pieces of flesh. To witness such an aberration walking made the vision all the more odd and fantastic.
If I must define what that entity looked like, I’d say it looked like it was a fairy that someone had forced to swallow a big, powerful firecracker, and letting outside only the fuse, lighted it. The firecracker went off, totally pulverizing the upper torso, arms and head of said fairy.
See, the last three paragraphs may sound far-fetched, but that is the whole story, including the things I thought about it for many years.
