Of ghosts and their habits

It is unknown if there are races of ghosts barring all the different ranked supernatural ghost-like beings animated in The Arabian Nights, perhaps Aladdin or Badr-al-Budur would know better about how many kinds of djinns exist and what their favourite haunts were back in the day. I read about djinns carrying away sleeping princesses to help them fall in love. Then there were stronger djinns called ifrit – I recall them as being capable of intelligent conversation and to plot for or against people.

In 2003 or perhaps in 2004 we were introduced to monochrome Telugu movies – Mayabazaar, Paataala Bhairavi, Chikkadu Dorakadu…, quite a few of which were from Madhira Subbanna Deekshitulu’s Kasi Majili Kathalu and bore remarkable similarities to stories from The Arabian Nights. Yet again ghosts, djinns and their Indian counterparts – which were, in my view then, much more sinister were major characters in the stories.

As time passed I watched Dayyaala Kota, Pisaachaala Veta excellently dubbed into Telugu by Sri Lakshmi Ganapati Films (the lady who voiced the advertisement sounded a lot like the lady who used to scream Narayana and Sri Chaitanya Techno School ads on AIR) along with my cousins in the sticky summers of Chirala. Midnight trips to the kitchen were scary given how streetlights hadn’t yet invaded that little town, leaving the sleeping residential area under a pitch black sky with an ever so slight breeze rustling the leaves of every tree surrounding us – much like in the horror films we watched.

Over the years, having watched a number of English, Telugu and Hindi horror-thriller films, I’ve observed ghosts all over the world have some common habits –

1. English ghosts are not beauty conscious – they can be faceless, formless or can manifest themselves in objects and will even possess ordinary looking humans but will almost never take over bodies of beautiful women – it is a rarity! On the other hand, most Indian ghosts have a penchant for beautiful female human bodies. You see, it is always the beautiful woman, the heroine more often than not, who gets possessed!
2. Most often ghosts belong to royalty and were nice people when alive. All of them have a history of facing betrayal by close friends or relatives ending in cruel deaths – leading to the birth of a bhoot or a pret or deyyam or pisaacham depending on the type of vengeance they seek to exact.
3. Ghosts love rocking chairs, swings, doors, windows, bulbs – basically anything that they can use to mark their attendance.
4. Ghosts like lifting weights – Chandramukhi lifted a cot all by herself, Bhagamathi could twist and break a person’s arm while beating another person, Pashupati could break out of incarceration in an iron strong box, Imhotep could shift large amounts of desert sands! Being possessed works better than gym!
5. Ghosts find old, dilapidated buildings comfortable. Dilapidated buildings have enough rotten woodwork and creaking doors which can be used by ghosts to mark their attendance.
6. Indian ghosts do not damage much the possessed body while English ghosts set it to bleed and rot. It seems as if Indian ghosts can take better care of human bodies – until they leave.
7. All ghosts, across the globe, achieve full power only before they are eliminated. Such a waste of all the 90 minutes they spent powering up!
8. Most Indian ghosts are stuck in a time-frame perhaps because they are shut-ins in general, they happily assume that centuries of waiting in a building is going to keep their tormentors alive for them to kill!
9. Ghosts kill time plotting centuries-long revenges!