An Aura of the Supernatural

It's been a while since I have had the chance to write something. Time is of course the primary reason. It's Halloween tonight and I decided to run my fingers through the keyboard and see what jumps out of nowhere at me while I also watch a couple of matches of premier league and La Liga football.

I don't celebrate Halloween. But in my medical school almost everyone did. During one such halloween, I tried to sleep in early as my friends were wandering the campus forests to get a "feel" of spookiness! I guess they failed terribly because by 12 a.m. they were knocking on my door. But it wasn't the typical bang bang bang knock! It was more a very subtle, rhythmic knock. They were probably trying to create the spooky feel themselves which they failed to in the darkness of the campus wilds. (Yes, our campus had a tiny forest, a lake, a swamp....)

I reluctantly got out of bed, opened the door and as expected a bunch of shenanigans making weird noises and wavy hand movements. I rubbed my eyes, yawned and said "Salam."

Oh boy the disappointment in their faces LOL!

"Dude we came to scare you and you just say "salam?" WTF?" said one super annoyed "ghost" and we all laughed hard as I was forced to get my coffee beans out and we chatted on over hot coffee deep into the night.

In my country there really is no celebration of halloween, maybe in posh areas of Dhaka. So all I have seen of halloween was during my 6 years at medical school and this is the only memory of Halloween I remember!

I guess I never got the appeal of halloween because I grew up reading horror stories of Humayun Ahmed and my definition of anything remotely supernatural had to have a rainy evening or a stormy night. Or a cold foggy winter night.

If there's no rain, if there's no wind going out of control, no blinding mist in the shivering cold with some burning wood in the distance, there's no ghost. Period. No if but or coconut!

When it rains, that's when I feel the "vibe." Sitting alone in a room, a glowing candle about to go off in the mad wind, maybe a flickering of a kerosene lamp in the hands of an old man in a white gown walking the barren fields....