"Betty" by Maria Rose

                                                                             Betty

Maria Rose

(Translated by Priya K Nair)

Story taken from Grandhakaarante Maranavum Mattu Bheethikathakalum.

Mathrubhumi Books, 2020.

 

 

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth in uglier ways.

-          Sigmund Freud

 

Decisions taken at some strange moments can be life saving, but you may not realize it at the time. You may not know that your life itself was at stake when you made this choice. I am about to narrate one such incident that happened in my life—I can say now that it was the most fearful chapter of my life.

It happened five years ago when I was teaching at a government college. The college was nearly 80 kms away from my home. As I was reluctant to commute every day a colleague and I decided to rent a house near the college. But after two years my colleague decided to bring his wife and children over. I moved out and rented another house. Though the principal told me that I could use the staff retiring room to stay I decided to take a house on rent.

I asked several of my acquaintances to look out for a place for me to stay. As I was a bachelor I was quite excited at the thought of staying alone in a  house. So I told them that I wanted a nice place to stay in even if the rent was high. One evening as the house hunt was going on, a friend Hari rang to say that he had found a house for me. When I asked him about the rent he said, “there is a house, but there are some problems. Come over and let us talk in detail.”

Planning to stay at Hari’s house that night I packed an overnight bag and left immediately.  Hari’s  words had made me curious. As the bus moved my thoughts travelled to all the haunted houses I had heard and read about. I imagined myself wandering in the corridors of the house with a lantern talking to a beautiful ghost aka the hero of Basheer’s  Barghavinilayam.  I was also a bit doubtful of staying in a house where a gruesome death had occurred. I was not superstitious, but a house where a gory death had happened would fill me with fear because it would  keep reminding me of the inevitability of death and the dangerous evil that lurks within human beings.

When the bus reached my destination it was nearly 7 pm. Hari was waiting for me at the bus station. We went to a café nearby. Hari told me about the house. It was a terraced house a little away from the town and the rent was Rs.5000/-

“What is the problem then?”

“Let’s order a masala dosa and then talk.”

As it was I who had taught him these tricks to prolong the suspense I quietly agreed and waited for him to begin the tale.

Our food arrived and Hari slowly eating the dosa, began the story,.

“The house is in Kottayam and has been lying vacant for the past five years. It belongs to a family who had come over from somewhere in Kanjirappally. They went back five years ago. The eldest son inherited the house after they divided the property. He repaired the house and rented it out. His wife belongs to Kottayam and he lives two houses away from this place with his family.

“Why can’t they live in this house then?”

“Oh they can, but they wont. That is the story,” said Hari. “The previous owner’s wife Rosamma died in this house. I was an unnatural death. I remember attending the burial. She wasn’t very old, just fifty, I guess. She slipped and fell down the stairs when there was a power failure. But the real hero and progenitor of the story is somebody else. I will tell you about it.” Hari got up to wash his hands.

As we walked home Hari said, “Joseph, a registrar officer was Rosamma’s husband.  Their   younger son  Jason was a  bit abnormal in his behavior. He dressed like a hippie and  rumour said that he practiced black magic.”

 “Black Magic?”

“Yes, imported from Africa. Voodoo!”

“Oh!”

“He was stoned most of the time. Once he hung their cat upside down and killed it by lighting a fire underneath. His theory was that when the cat died the person against whom he was casting his spell would also die.”

“And did anyone die?”

“I am not sure   about that, but several mishaps occurred after this incident. Jason  had an elder sister Cecily who suffered from vitiligo. She was unmarried. People said that one night she woke up mewing like a cat.

“And?”

”Everything changed for the worse after she fell ill. It was said that Rosamma chechi fell down the stairs tripping over a cat.”

“Where is this Jason now?”

“I don’t know, he is around somewhere. After Rosamma chechi died Joseph and the family moved back to their village. His eldest son Francis owns the house now and wants to rent it out.”

I thought for a while. There was no beautiful ghost in residence as I had imagined. Rosamma might have tripped in the darkness and fallen to her death.

“Let me see the house before I decide. Who is the hero of the story? Is it the sister?”

“No, it’s the cat, Betty.”

 

2

The next day Hari and I went to have a look at the house. It was an ordinary two-storied house that defied all clichés. It was painted in pale pink. The front yard was covered with gravel. In a corner was a Sapota tree with a paving around it. We entered opening an old fashioned gate. The house had been cleaned to attract potential tenants. The place looked quite peaceful and all my anxieties melted away. The place was worth Rs.5000/- When I went inside I was quite satisfied with the amenities and decided to take the house on rent.

Francis lived two houses away on the other side of the road. We spoke to him and handed over some money as an advance deposit on the house.

On our way back Hari said, “usually people hesitate to rent out their houses to bachelors, but Francis  closed the deal without any questions. Didn’t you notice?”

“Why did he do that?”

 “This house has quite a reputation in these parts.”

I moved in the very next day with a couple of suitcases and an induction cooker. I lived in that house for exactly one week and four days. Thinking back I recollect that something strange happened  on each day of my stay in that house, and subsequent changes also took place. But I did not notice all this during my stay there. I noted all this down as a process of diagnosis and treatment. It was important to maintain my sanity and to scrutinize my mental state very closely.

The first day I explored the house thoroughly. There were other houses close to it. If I screamed the neighbours would surely hear me and come over to help. It was as if I expected the need for help in my subconscious mind. The  pink tiles on the floor were old and faded.  The walls were stained with marks of water that had seeped in from the parapet. The showcase was empty and the lights had shades around the bulb. The house was a model of the terrace houses that had been fashionable when I was a child. When it grew dark the only thing that disturbed me was the thickening silence. I did not have anything much to do. I whiled away the time wandering from room to room picking up things and putting them away. As the house was nearly empty, every sound echoed. Though nothing untoward happened by morning I was convinced that such a large house was quite unnecessary for a single occupant. It just served to remind me of my solitary state. The size of a house must be in proportion to number of people living in it.

The next day I went to college. I decide to go by an autorickshaw as the college was quite close by. In the evening I decided to explore a room upstairs where a lot of old things had been stored.  As I climbed up the  cold steps, I  remembered that Rosamma had fallen down  from these steps. The staircase was steep and narrow. After the cat was found dead, someone must have cooked up a story  that the cat had tripped the woman on the stairs.

I had noticed  a strange smell that hung about the house, the smell of old things and dust. Smell and taste take you to the past, but I could not remember what the smell reminded me of. As I looked at the old things I experienced a sense of déjà vu. In the room apart from  a table that had been ruined as it had been used as a  step stool for painting, there was a chair, a huge box  and  a few cardboard boxes. Later I realized that the bog box was the speaker of an old radio. We had a radio like this at home when I was  a child. One of the cardboard boxes was full of books. Overjoyed at this find I carried the box downstairs.

As I opened the box I felt that the smell I had mentioned earlier filled the room. There were several old English and Malayalam books in the box. Many of them had lost their covers. My happiness overflowed when I found a book by Enid Blyton, Secret of the Moon Castle. It was a favourite book of mine in my childhood. I saw that the name Cicely Joseph Thotatthil had been scored out and someone had written ‘Jason Joseph’ over it in a childish scrawl. I saw a couple of black and white photographs in frames inside the box. I guessed that the young man with long hair in bell-bottom pants who resembled John Travolta was Jason-- the boy who practiced black magic. I looked at the family photograph again; I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. Joseph was sitting in the center and at his feet was a cat; a plump black and white cat.

When I went to bed I felt that it had been an unusually long day. It was as if I had seen many places and met a lot of people. I felt that my life had started traversing to the past instead of towards the future ever since I had started staying in that house. It was just the second day of my stay in that house, but it did not seem so.

I woke up before dawn disturbed by a dream. I  would not have written about my dream but for one thing. I dreamt of Joshua who lived with us when we lived in a joint family, uncle Joshy as we called him.  He had come to stay with us under strange circumstances. My aunt had some mental problems and Joshua had been brought to treat her. Quite extraordinarily, he had some power over everyone in the family. He was tall and had hypnotic eyes. I used to think that Rasputin would have resembled Joshua. I remember I was scared of him. He used to pick me up from school. Once….

Let us not talk about it. I woke up as my dream that had begun with Joshua ended in the new house. Hearing the tick-tock of the clock I turned to look at it and saw a cat hanging upside down in the place of the pendulum.

 

3

Lighting a cigarette I tried to decipher my dream.  It was quite simple—Jason who practiced black magic, uncle Joshi who somehow reminded me of Jason and Betty’s story had somehow become mixed together in my dream.

The third day was a Saturday and I spent the day at home. I corrected papers and in the evening I went for a walk. When I got back home I sat on the sofa smoking a cigarette. Though it was getting dark I hadn’t switched on the light. It was very quiet.  It was 7 pm and the bluish darkness of the night was slowly filling the room. I got up and  went into each room without making any noise. I looked at the light that entered through the round opening above the stairs. Silence Silence. I felt that all the sounds in the  world had dimmed. I did not want to do anything but sit in the silence.

I don’t remember when I went to bed or when I fell asleep that night. But the room wasn’t pitch dark as it had been the day before. I was floating somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. I could see the room quite clearly. Then I heard the hooting of a train –and in my semi conscious state it got louder and louder. It was the yowling of a cat. When it became very loud I woke up. Experiencing the gravity of fear I got out of bed. I went out of the room with my torch and looked around. I saw my neighbor standing on the verandah of his house.

He shouted, “What happened?”

 I walked towards the gate. “I heard some noise.”

He crossed the road  and came over to my gate. “What noise did you hear?”

For a moment I wondered whether I should tell him about the cat as it would only fuel the rumours.

He asked me, “Was it a cat that you heard?”

“Yes, did you hear it too?”

“My wife woke me up. She said she heard a cat yowling from your house.”

I felt my blood run cold.

“I thought the noise came form outside the house.” I wanted to go back inside.

My  neighbor continued, “We had heard a similar noise one night when Cecily…”

 

I nodded as I didn’t want him to continue with the story.

But he said, “Don’t worry. There is a reason why we heard the noise today. Jason has come back. He is in Francis’ house.”

As no further explanations were necessary I went back into the house.

 

4

I had arranged extra classes in college. On my way to college I met Francis, the house owner. He invited me in to have a cup of tea.  I saw someone sitting on the verandah. Without him telling me I somehow knew that it was Jason Joseph. I felt that he was younger than he looked. He had a thin face with a greying beard, no wonder I had thought of  uncle Joshua. Francis introduced me to his brother. Declining the offer of a cup of tea I went to the college.

As the days went by my inner turmoil increased. More than my teaching or research the mysterious atmosphere at home was besieging my thoughts. Each time I went back home from work I felt I was entering a strange place that  disturbed my peace of mind. I began thinking of things that I had only hear about. I was constantly expecting to hear  the sound of a cat. I used to be completely immersed in my work till I moved to this house. Perhaps my over active imagination was to blame. But a week after I had moved in something happened which made me decide to leave the place immediately.

It was raining outside when I dropped off to sleep. I could hear the faint rumbling of thunder. I remember sitting on the verandah watching the rain. After a while I went inside to sleep. In my semi conscious state I kept hearing the cat. As I was wondering where the sound was coming from I woke up. I used to hear the noise at the same time every night, at around 3 am. As I sat up I felt that my feet were wet. When I looked at my feet I saw that they were muddy. I could bet that my feet were clean when I went to bed. Did I walk in my sleep? I saw that the bedroom door was bolted from the inside. But the muddy footprints that lead to the door convinced me that I had started walking in my sleep.

I wondered whether I should meet a psychiatrist. All this had begun after I moved into this house. I could say quite rationally that there was nothing wrong with the house. I had not seen anything untoward in the house. But I knew that the atmosphere of the house had a great impact on my unconscious mind as I had read enough on this subject

The next night I double-locked the grill door of the verandah. There was only a small gap between the grills and the roof and to go outside through that gap one would surely need to wake up. Feeling quite secure I went to sleep. But that night the yowling was louder than before. As the noise became eerily loud I woke up with a scream. I had noticed the echo that resounded after I woke up. This made me wonder whether the noise was real and not a creation of my imagination. But once I had remained awake an entire night and I had not heard this noise. I decided to ask Hari to spend a night at the house. But it turned out that the next night was my last night in the house. I went to bed quite early that night. I had learnt yoga and did a few breathing exercises before going to sleep. When I try to recollect the happenings of the night I remember crawling through thick bushes. I remember stopping at frequent intervals and looking around. I can’t piece together everything that happened as there are gaps in my memory.  Though it was dark I could see quite clearly. I remember that whatever I did needed physical exertion and my animal instincts were very alert. For a moment my dream became clear in the pitch darkness. I  was near a house, but I could not  recognize it. But I went to the house as though it was quite familiar to me. I knew that I was trespassing. But my instincts fuelled with rage pushed me on.

I jumped to the top of a tree  with the agility of an acrobat. From the branches of the tree I jumped to the terrace of the house. My memory fails me here; I can’t remember everything I did. I crawled over the terrace.  Though I was surprised at myself I wasn’t perturbed. I positioned myself at the edge of a roof like a cat! A cat??? Betty! Betty!

I suddenly felt that many doors were opening in quick succession. I felt like a drowning man who had come up for his last breath of air.  As usual I felt the yowls of the cat coming closer to me, as if the noise began inside my head and came out of my mouth. The last door opened, I came up for air from the depths of water.   I heard the cat! I woke up.

I can’t remember whether it was my vision or my hearing that came awake first. Now I feel that I opened my eyes after hearing the eerie noise of the cat coming out of my mouth. When I opened my eyes I saw that I was crouching at the corner of the roof of a house ready to pounce. As realization dawned I struggled to maintain my balance and keep myself from falling down. I recognized the house. It was Francis’ house. With trembling hands I managed to get down and walk towards the road.

Later when I tried to piece together the happenings of the night I realized that I had somehow wriggled through the gap in the grill door of my verandah. I do not know how I did that just as I have no answer to the question how I clambered on the roof of Francis’ house. This was not humanly possible and I can only thank my good fortune that no one had noticed me.

The next day I vacated the house and went to stay in the staff retiring room at the college. I analysed the strange incidents that had happened. After diagnosing the problem I understood that the best treatment was to leave the house. I could not explain it even to myself. But I knew that the key to these strange incidents lay in the hazy memories of being held upside down in uncle Joshua’s hands   that had somehow mingled with the musty scent of the story of Jason’s cat. I may have projected my thirst for revenge in Betty.

(November 2013)

Author’s Note

There are many stories that have been written about haunted houses. These gothic tales have become a genre. Most of these tales narrate supernatural occurrences. But writers like Henry James explore the possibility of a psychoanalytic interpretation in his narratives. I wanted to explore the possibility of a rational explanation to strange events and this is what led me to Betty.

Deciding to stay in a house that is said to be haunted is not a trivial thing. I know atheists and rationalists who purposely choose to stay in such houses. The unknown depths of the human mind may upset the balance of the mind when one stays in such houses. I am not trying to say that the persons staying there will be possessed by the spirits of the dead in order to fulfill their desires. What I am trying to say is that the unknown depths of your mind will use the story of the haunted house for strange reasons. It is not the spirit of the dead that possesses the human mind but the human mind that takes on the spirit of the dead.

Betty is a fictional narrative. My experience of having stayed in a house where an unnatural death occurs, the structure of some familiar  houses and a few people --- have contributed to this story. My interest in psychiatry and my conversations with friends who are also interested in this subject helped me write this story.