Shakchunni, p.28
Shakchunni, page 28
Or was the only person Dada ever loved was his own sweet self? An affront to Soudamini was an affront to him. A violation of Soudamini was a violation of him. A woman leaving him for another man was an affront to him.
I will never know. I realize I did not like Dada, never had, which is why you will guess which of these two choices I take to remember him.
The last time I spoke to Soudamini, I remember being scared for my life. Addled by the stories and whispers, I thought she was there to warn me to stand aside from her husband’s path. Caught up in the madness of the times, I believed I was being threatened by a demoness.
With the truth in front of me, I now realize what she warned me about. Or rather, who.
Her husband.
I believe Soudamini knew who had killed her mother-in-law. She might have seen her husband missing at the time of the murder. She might have just realized that based on simply the facts. She was an intelligent woman whose eyes had not been fogged up like mine from fear and superstition. Maybe from what Dada had said about me, she deduced that I was the next in line on his death list. Dada saw me as a rival for the throne, that was an open secret, and when she knew he was going to travel with me to Calcutta, just the two of us, she feared that he would make a move on me.
He had killed once. He could kill again.
Of course, she could not say it in these words – your elder brother will kill you.
After all, he was her husband. Maybe she feared for her own life, that if she revealed the truth, Dada would turn on her. One more thing I will never know.
What I am sure of is that she saved my life. The tragedy is I could not save hers.
So now what I think of, in my waking nights, is Soudamini. A little girl walking the fields ploughing the land to feed her family, then growing up to be a girl of rare intelligence and knowledge, then as a young woman, making a choice that destroys what she had of her life, packed off to be married to a madman, being humiliated at our house, then tortured and killed because she was intelligent and strong, and then to be remembered as a demoness for all eternity.
As I said before, there was evil in that house. Just not her.
It was easier for us to think of her as a witch than as a human being.
There are still a few things to explain. If Dada was not possessed, why did he change his voice when he killed Baba? How does a man, otherwise so weak and fragile, have the strength of a bear in full wrath? I am not a doctor of the mind, though I have enjoyed the work of Freud and Jung. I think there were two Dadas – one we saw and the other that he transformed himself into, once in the grip of a frenzy. If we had been there when he was killing Catherine, the horse or Ma, I am sure this is the Dada we would have seen, a man possessed by the demons inside him.
What happened to Dada? According to the legend, he was possessed by the Shakchunni and vanished into the nether realm. The more prosaic explanations are that he either changed his identity and lives elsewhere or was eaten up by animals in the jungle that night. The first choice fills me with terror that he is somewhere in the world, walking the line between his two selves; one insufferable and eternally complaining, the other murdering without question.
The alternate outcome is that he became food for animals. I find that more comforting. Hence, I chose to believe that. There is another reason for my belief. Once the frenzy had died down, and Dada returned to his original character, he would not last more than a few hours on a stormy night in that jungle. But it is also true that his remains were not found. Maybe, the flood waters of the river could have carried his fragments away. Perhaps they dragged his body down to a ditch, and it rotted away there among the dead leaves and animal carcasses.
We will never know.
If you are still with me, you will remember I had two tasks to complete to prove my case. One was going to London.
The other, I am coming to now.
The final person that I needed to see to close out the story was Handi. I thought finding her would be easy. It was not. I will again skip the details, but ultimately, I located her in Benaras. Even after I knew where she stayed, it was very difficult to get an appointment. Handi had changed her name. Our Kalikinkar Ray’s daughter no longer went by the name of Alo. Her new name is unimportant, so I do not mention it, but she was now a big person. She owned many businesses in Benaras – stores, mills and godowns. A true-blue capitalist, as I am sure you would say. She travelled around in a motor car and was always with a group of bodyguards. From what she and her father had siphoned off from our house, I was sure that all of her prosperity could be traced to our family’s fortunes. After my father died and I left for good, I think Kalikinkar stopped the pretence of cooking books, and just took ownership and sold everything we had left. Kalikinkar knew each hiding spot of our ill-gotten wealth and so clearing us out was quite easy.
I cannot feign feeling very injured by being robbed by Handi; it was ill-gotten money that we had taken from others, and now it had flowed to other bad people. Justice was served and for that I cannot complain. None of this mattered, though, for I was not there to take account of her finances or impinge on her generosity.
I tried to meet her, went to her business establishments and sat patiently. Still, I never got further than her guards and employees. One of them, a big burly man I only knew as Singh ji, finally told me that madam had told them to break my knees if I was ever so much as seen around her establishments. Taking the message to heart, I decided to leave Benaras.
Imagine my surprise when I come back from school a year later, and there standing outside my door was none other than Handi. No bodyguards, no Singh ji, no attendants, just her.
I invited her out of politeness to come in, but she did not move from the stairs. She told me she came here for two reasons; one was to see how the last of the Banerjees lived, and the other was to answer whatever questions I had.
On the first account, I deduced that my state of very obvious penury had caused her much mirth.
So, I asked her.
‘You made all of that up about Soudamini, about seeing her go into the forest, about asking the Shakchunni to come into her body, did you not?’
You see, Benimadhabh, I did not really need her to reply. I was sure by now that she had lied. Soudamini had exposed to the Raibahadur the treachery of Kalikinkar. She had made him lose his job. So she, the dutiful daughter, had taken revenge, through the power of her tongue.
So then, why trek to Benaras, at risk to my finances and the health of my knee, to find out the answer to something I already knew?
I had a different motive. When I asked her this question, I just needed to see her face. I just wanted her to know that I knew.
Her silence was the reply, as well as the acknowledgement. We stood for a moment, the only sound being of our breathing, and then she turned her head away and walked down the stairs.
I knew our conversation was at an end.
But not quite.
Once at the bottom of the stairs, she looked up. I will not forget what she said.
‘The Shakchunni, if you remember the stories we heard, is a spirit that possesses a married woman. She does this to experience the bliss of love. She does this to experience the joy of family. She does this to feel wanted and desired. The tragedy in the story is that she has to possess another body to get all this because she has no hope of getting any happiness in the body the world gave her. There was a Shakchunni in that house, Chotobabu, and she took everything from that family worth taking. For that, she feels no remorse or regret. But the curse of the Shakchunni is that even when she gets everything, she still ends up with nothing.’
That leaves me with the final piece of our story, another woman, a woman who was always there but one we never saw. Her face burned away by a spilled rice pot, her future as the daughter-in-law of the Raibahadurs gone to flames taking revenge, most terribly, on the woman who she felt had taken her place, for living the life she felt was hers. In the hellfire of her wrath, we had all been reduced to ashes.
So now that the story is done and the mystery of the terrible events that happened in Shyamlapur has been laid to rest, here is the explanation I promised at the beginning of the letter.
I left that night because I love you, Benimadhabh. I always have. That is why I have not written letters or come to visit. You have a family and children, and I hear you are now even a grandfather. I can never be a part of that.
The only way I could truly show my love was to stay away. It is one of the very few decisions in my life I do not regret.
But then why did I have to write this letter, you ask? And why now, twenty-two years after I left?
I needed to write down the truth. So that at least one person knows what truly happened in Shyamlapur, and who else can I give this honour but to you?
I have been keeping badly of late. When the early symptoms started, we blamed it on the touch of the Shakchunni. Now that I no longer have that comfort, I have to confront the truth. My malaise is now so evident that even the doctors can see it. Over the years, my liver cirrhosis has progressed to cancer. The darkness has spread through my body and death courses through me as I write.
The doctor said I have a few months left, but only if I stay off the bottle.
And that is why I write to you with a half-open bottle at my side.
Now that the questions are done, and the answers given, it is time to draw the ending line and lie down for the long night.
Keep these pages or throw them into the fire.
It matters not for the truth or for the legend.
Remember me, kindly, if possible.
Sincerely,
Rudrapratap Banerjee,
Calcutta,
2 July 1968.
Acknowledgements
The biggest gift one can get is time. For that, I owe a debt of gratitude to my daughter and my wife, for it was family time that was siphoned off to write this book. And, of course, my parents, for making me who I am, and cultivating in me a love of stories.
I would also like to thank my literary agent, Kanishka Gupta, my editor, Anupama Manral, and Thomas Abraham, managing director at Hachette India and Divine Comedy for the cover design.
Finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my readers, especially those who have asked me: ‘When is Shakchunni coming out?’ on social media. By keeping the faith all these years, it is they who have kept me writing.
Arnab Ray, better known as Greatbong, is one of India’s most widely read bloggers (http://greatbong.net). He is also the author of six books, including the horror classic The Mine. Two of his books have been made into web series on major OTT platforms: Sultan of Delhi in Hindi on Disney+ Hotstar and Mahabharata Murders in Bengali on Hoichoi. A PhD in Computer Science from State University of New York at Stony Brook, and an alumnus of Jadavpur University, Kolkata, he is currently based in Los Angeles. Arnab Ray has a running column in the Times of India and can be found on X (formerly Twitter) at @greatbong.
SHAKCHUNNI
Shakchunni: a demon from Bengali lore, one who possesses married women.
The Great Famine scours Bengal. Armies of the starving walk the lands, fighting for scraps of food.
Yet none of that pain seems to touch the Banerjees, the lords of Shyamlapur. They rule their fiefdom in all the pomp and pageantry of the Raj at its height.
When Narayanpratap Banerjee, the eldest son of the ruler of Shyamlapur, abandons his education in London and returns home, his heart broken by an Englishwoman, he is married off to a poor girl from a distant village, the ethereally beautiful Soudamini.
But on the day of the wedding, a tantrik sounds an ominous warning.
‘The Shakchunni dances tonight. You shall all drop dead like flies.’
Soon it begins.
The terror.
And a haunting of dark secrets that refuse to stay buried in the past.
www.hachetteindia.com
Arnab Ray, Shakchunni
