The Next Realm

So many of us have lived a life, unafraid of each other, surrounded by loved ones who would pick each of our complaints and not rest till they have been resolved.

So many of us were given, or in fact, handed out pleasures in this life that our ancestors worked so hard to get to begin with.

I say this because I want to impress upon the fact that some of us – boy, we were born lucky.

My grandma would get up early in the morning and give the pigeons and the sparrows some uncooked rice grains to eat. Only then would she prepare a meal large enough to satisfy our appetites – but wait – she would cook the meal and first offer it to God with flowers from our garden and pray. Only then were we allowed to have our fill.

My grandma had married an Indian. Our grandpa was jolly and hearty, although he could be a little insensitive at times.

“Are you being haunted, or bullied?”

A pause.

“Son, in both cases, you can either keep silent or punish the person who did this to you. When you are being bullied and pushed to a corner in fright but can’t find who has been doing this to you – you’re being haunted,” my grandfather said in a large guffaw.

“What about Grandma?” I asked sincerely.

The merriment in my grandfather’s face disappeared.

“She has been through a lot of things no one should have to go through,” he said.

“But she is locked in an asylum,” I said.

“She likes it there,” my grandfather said, in earnest.

My grandmother was one of a kind. She always had a pleasant countenance, was always happy and always praying with her fingers rolling the rosary beads.

“One should always take the Name of God and everything settles down by itself,” she used to say.

My grandmother’s grandmother was one of a kind too. She had married young – a Jewish guy in Germany and was held in a concentration camp during the Second World War.

Even though both survived, any loud noises or anything said in the German language frightened them out of their wits. Her grandfather didn’t escape unscathed. He had PTSD.

My grandmother could soothe them with her charm. Also, they were always reminded about how Germany had lost the war and they could now be happy.

…………………..

The atmosphere was clouded with the dust that the army tanks spread while moving from one place to another.

They had been given construction work in the middle of what seemed like a desert. Their throats parched, they dredged through the work given to them. The food they were given was meagre. The camps themselves were crowded. The sick stayed on one side of the camp but the conditions were unhygienic. Those who disobeyed the officers even in the slightest three times in a row were branded as troublemakers. During the end, women, children and men were killed without any reason.

My grandma’s grandma had been ill for three days straight. So all her grandpa did was give his portion of the food to her.

Because of this reason, he was branded as a defaulter. He was made to watch the experiments carried out on the Jews who had no other value – their screams drowned his peace, bereft him of his sleep.

Even when he came back home, he carried the haunting of those who had died in front of him to his own grave.

………………….

My grandmother kept a journal filled with the anecdotes of her grandparents’ past. I read some of it – it was just as gruesome as I had expected.

Everything was going smoothly in our family, when THAT happened.

My grandmother had her first epileptic fit. While having the fit, she was turned over to one side, a spoon was stuck inside her mouth so that, one – she wouldn’t choke on her tongue if it turned backwards and second – she wouldn’t bite her tongue out involuntarily.

It began twice a month but as it progressed, it became more frequent – 4 times a week.

To everyone else, it had started off as an innocent incident, not meaning anything at all – except when my grandmother told me what had happened really.

The ghosts of her grandpa’s past had come to haunt her – and she started having these fits.

…………………….

I took the orchids – her favourite flowers when I went to visit her.

“Come, my dear!” she said, happy to see me.

“I saw Nolen in my dreams today, Ria,” she whispered.

“Ask them to stop my medicines, dear. They don’t allow the spirits to talk to me,” she complained.

“Nana, you know that is going to harm you,” I said.

Frankly, I was worried. The nurse said, although quite normal, she did stuff that were out of the ordinary. For instance, one day she lit an incense stick in the Church and went around the Church three times before dispersing the ashes in the air. She said, it helped a “little wandering girl” who had lost her way while going away from a concentration camp find her way back to her home. Another day when the spirit of Abel couldn’t cross a river, she fed biscuit leftovers to the fishes starting from one bank of the river over to the other bank saying that the fishes would now help him cross the river and help him move on.

I said, “You need to stop this, grandma. Everyone is worried about you.”

“But Nolen. My child, Nolen is stuck trying to escape the mind-numbing games they’ve played on him. It is our duty, child, to help those who came before us, to pass onto the next realm.”

I fought with her over this regularly.

This time she was adamant.

The next thing I knew, she was shivering and then started to have an epileptic fit.

Soon, they declared her dead. She had had a brain stroke in the middle of her fit.

I cried silently. That day I had a dream where I took a crying baby in my arms who was stuck in a concentration camp, trying to reach up for the Moon. I had my first epileptic fit.

Standing by her coffin at her funeral, I remembered what she said before she died –

“It is our duty, child, to help those who came before us, to pass onto the next realm.”

I don’t know why we were chosen to bear this great weight. So I did what grandma would have wanted me to do.

Let the spirits haunt me and tell me what was to be done so I could help them pass onto the next realm.