Chapter 4: What Mesho Remembered, and What I Saw for Myself
Mesho didn't remember much of that first evening, or rather, he remembered it the way you remember a dream that's already dissolving even as you try to describe it — in fragments, out of order, with gaps that made the fragments themselves feel unreliable. What he did tell us, over the following days, pieced together slowly because talking about it seemed to genuinely exhaust him, was this.
He had gone to check his nets near the usual bend in the canal, close to where an old, half-collapsed banyan tree leaned out over the water — a spot Rotan Kaka, we later learned, had specifically warned him away from years before, though my mesho, being a practical post-office kind of man, had never taken the warning seriously. The evening had been ordinary at first. He'd pulled in a decent catch, better than the last few disappointing days, and was walking back along the bank in the grey, thickening dusk, basket on his hip, feeling pleased with himself.
Somewhere along that walk — he couldn't say exactly where, exactly when — he became aware of a weight settling onto his shoulders from behind. His first thought, he said, echoing almost exactly what Rotan Kaka's brother had apparently said sixty years before him, was that it was cramp, or that his shirt had somehow bunched up strangely. He reached back to adjust it and felt, unmistakably, through the wet cotton of his own shirt, the distinct pressure of two hands gripping his shoulders — small hands, he said, cold and slick like a fish's belly, but hands nonetheless, with fingers, with a grip.
He said he turned around immediately, and there was nothing there. No one on the path behind him, no one in the water beside him, nothing but the darkening canal and the banyan roots trailing into it like they always did. But the weight didn't go away when he turned around — if anything, it seemed to shift with him, staying on his back no matter which way he faced, and by the time he'd turned fully around to face forward again, it had grown heavier, distinctly heavier, the way a sleeping child grows heavier the longer you carry them.
He started to walk faster. The weight grew faster too. He said — and this is the part that still makes the hair on my arms rise, even now, writing it down — that somewhere in that increasingly desperate walk home, he began to hear breathing, very close to his own left ear, a wet, rattling sort of breathing, like someone breathing through a throat full of water, and beneath the breathing, faint at first and then unmistakable, a thin, breathy whistling — not quite a tune, not quite random, just a low, wandering series of notes that he said made his skin crawl in a way he couldn't fully explain even to himself.
He ran, eventually, though running felt, in his own words, like running through waist-deep mud, every step heavier than the last, the weight on his back climbing until it felt — again, his exact words — "like carrying a full-grown man on my shoulders, a man made of river water, cold all the way through." He remembered dropping the fish basket at some point, not deliberately, simply because his hands could no longer manage to hold both the basket and his own balance. And he remembered, right at the very end, right before he reached our gate, feeling something lean in very close to his ear and say — not whistle this time, but speak, in a voice that he described as sounding like it was being pushed out through wet cloth — a single sentence, over and over: "Amay niye chol. Amay bariye niye chol." Take me with you. Take me home with you.
That was as much as my mesho could remember, and honestly, hearing it told secondhand like that, sitting safe on the verandah in daylight with tea going cold in my hands, it was frightening in the way a story is frightening — real, but at a manageable distance. What happened to me two evenings later was frightening in an entirely different, much closer way, and I have never told this part of the story to as many people as I've told the rest of it, because even now, it's the part that costs me something to say out loud.
My mother, understandably rattled, wanted to cut our visit short and take my brother and me back to Kolkata early. But my mesho — stubborn, and I think also genuinely ashamed at how frightened he'd been, in that way men of his generation sometimes were about admitting fear — insisted that whatever had happened was over, that he'd learned his lesson, that there was no reason for the children to leave early over what was probably, he said in a voice that didn't fully believe itself, "some kind of fever, some kind of bad dream that got out of hand."
So we stayed two more days, and on the second of those evenings, restless and not thinking clearly the way thirteen-year-olds rarely think clearly, I decided — without telling anyone, which I am still ashamed of — to walk down to that same bend in the canal myself, just before dusk, just to look at the place where it had happened, the way you press on a bruise to check if it still hurts.
I want to tell you honestly: nothing dramatic happened right away. I stood at the bend, looking at the collapsed banyan tree with its roots trailing into the darkening water, feeling faintly ridiculous, faintly brave, the way children feel when they've done something they know is against the rules and gotten away with it. I was already turning to walk back, already composing in my head the slightly embellished version I'd tell my brother later, when I felt it.
It started exactly the way Mesho had described — a settling weight between my shoulder blades, light at first, almost gentle, like a hand resting there rather than gripping. I remember going very still, every part of me suddenly, completely awake in a way I had never experienced before, and I remember, very clearly, very distinctly, in the fading light over the water, hearing — not imagining, hearing, with my own ears, the way you hear a real sound — a thin, wandering whistle, coming from directly behind my right ear, close enough that I felt the faint stir of breath against my skin.