The Sprit Of My Cousin

Here I am going to narrate a paranormal incident which my mom had experience way back in the summer of 2004. My mother had two sisters, both married. My elder aunty worked in a renowned and one of the high-ranked universities as a senior Librarian. Her husband was lecturer in applied sciences in the same university. She had one daughter named Tanya and a son named Chirag (both the name is changed). Her elder daughter was pursuing engineering from the same university and her youngest son Chirag was in the 12th standard.

My aunty often comes to visit us in her summer vacations. We enjoyed her company as she always had something new to tell like stories or anything new related to the university etc. I especially used to wait for her visit as my aunt carries some authentic and tasty homemade achars (pickles) and murabbas (sweet jam pickle) of which I am fond of.

Coming back to my story, as I have mentioned above that it was summer, my mother used to make some papads (it is a thin, crisp disc-shaped Indian food typically based on seasoned dough made from black gram). One evening, when she gets to the terrace to collect all the papads which were drying up, while climbing the stairs, she saw a black owl which flees from left to right and it sat in one of the cloth hangers in the staircase area which is sign of a bad omen.

My mother gets disturbed from that incident. The same evening somewhere around 7-8pm, she went to the terrace in order to get some fresh air and at the same time she was thinking about that owl incident when she saw her elder sister's daughter Tanya standing about 10-15 feet away from her silently. My mother was full of surprise to see her. She called her and stretched both her hands with joy, but instead of replying, she started walking towards the staircase.

My mother observed that she was rather like floating instead of walking. My mother followed her to the staircase and she was surprised to see that there was nobody in that area. She came down and started looking here and there. We asked my mother regarding what she was looking for. When she told us about what she had seen in the terrace, we all were surprised with a pinch of fear that my mother might have seen a ghost which might have made itself look like our cousin.

But my mother was not convinced with our explanations, she made a phone call to my aunty but she didn't pick up her call. She tries 3-4 time but there was no answer from the other side. My mother thought that she might have been busy or her phone might be in vibrate mode and this could be the reason behind not answering to her. But the same night, we got a tremendous bad news from my father about my cousin as she had committed suicide that evening somewhere around 7 to 8 pm. My father said that he had got that news from one of my aunt's neighbors. We immediately went for Allahabad, a nearby city to Varanasi which is approximately 130 km away. I and my elder brother along with father reached their somewhere around 2 A.M.

Till then her body was taken by the police and had been sent for the autopsy. My uncle said that she had been found dead in her bed. She had taken poison. The reason behind her suicide is still unknown or un-said.

It still shivers my spine when I remember that night when my mother saw her. May be she wanted to meet with her for the last time that is why she had showed herself up just after her death.