Massachusetts – Borderless

By Tulip Chowdhury

Bengali Spooks. Courtesy: Creative Commons

Around the early ’70s, in my village home in Bangladesh, we kept ourselves far away from anything spelled “ghost or jinn.” I grew up hearing my Grandma saying, “Shh. Don’t even utter the word ‘bhut (ghosts) or jinn’ because words have power, and they might feel the vibe as an invite.” However, every Halloween is a culture shock for me after coming to Massachusetts, USA, when the celebrations of haunted houses, witches, ghosts, and spirits occur. My late Grandma might turn in her final resting place if I could message her, “Ghosts and witches are subjects of colorful celebrations, Grandma.”

Thoughts rewind to life with the villagers in Bongaon, when the fan-palm trees — taal gach — were supposed to be favourite places for ghosts and jinn. Myths held that ghosts and spirits lived as invisible souls among visible humans but liked to live on the trees. The trees they wanted to inhabit were trees standing beautiful and tall. Yet the beautiful sight was pregnant with danger. The long fonds looked like fingers beckoning passersby. The fan palm had delicious fruits called taal. The trees sent alarming vibes to the villagers. But getting the fruits from the tree was challenging and had to be done during broad daylight when ghosts were supposed to be non-active. The fan palm was not the only tree that welcomed them. The tamarind tree was also avoided, especially after sunset. Not just the trees, but their shadows spelled trouble too, and people avoided stepping in the shadows. The advice to weary souls was, “Don’t let the bhut get on your shoulders.” It seemed that the chosen place was the shoulder. It was different for the ghosts; they didn’t get into the victim’s head like other spooks.

Whenever I passed near our tamarind tree, I imagined a possessive spirit jumping down from the tree and landing on my shoulder. I would run for life faster than a deer when I passed one of them. Ghosts were known to haunt their victims for the rest of their lives if they got a chance to get on the shoulder. I ran home; I did not want to be possessed for the rest of my life.

According to the people in Bongaon, nighttime was the favourite time for ghosts and evil spirits. Starting from the late evening to the descent of darkness, no one walked without a flaming torch made from kerosene-drenched cloth on a thick stick. Much as darkness spelled fear and mystery, fire was the force to power the evil over to burn and destroy—similar to fantasy stories of modern times. In life, it seems we are connected like a spider’s web. A person suspected to be possessed by a spirit sought help from special prayers and charms. Some of the healers had harsh methods and had the victims smell burning dried chilli — supposed to clear the mind. And others sprinkled holy water around the person and the house.

Theories on haunting spilled beyond the trees and dipped below the waters surrounding my village. The water lilies in the rainy season bloomed in abundance in the swamps — haor, ponds, and the water-clogged areas around the town. The seeds and stems of the water were gastronomical delicacies for us. The stems cooked as curries and the grains got toasted over the fire. However, evil spirits and jinns were said to roam around swamps at night, and no one tried to pick these up in the dark. Growing up, I wondered if the whole thing around the evil supernatural was to keep people safe because plenty of water snakes coiled around the lily stems, and people were likely to get bitten. Often, people invented ghost stories when logical explanations failed or, perhaps, to safeguard without having to give lengthy answers.

The sweet shops and their connections to supernatural beings baffled me then and to this day. Few charming shops sold traditional deserts, like rosogolla, cholchom and kalojam; the display trays were usually well stocked. It was well known among people that if you entered the shops after the Muslim evening prayer, the Maghrib, the sweets would be gone from the trays. The good jinn were supposed to like the sweets and, on their way back from the mosque, feasted on them. Our village did not have electricity, and there was no refrigerators to preserve these. So, when fresh sweets were replaced on trays the next day, there was no explanation given for the disappearing trayful until the maghrib prayer. No customers came because they wanted to avoid jinn altogether since they could change from good to bad ones. The disappearance of the sweets at a particular time remains a mystery added to many others in my lifetime.

The people in Bongaon believed there were two kinds of jinn: good and evil. Good jinn were with the steady and truthful people who prayed regularly. If the good people, especially women, happened to walk with loose hair in the evening or night, they were exposed to danger of being possessed by the evil jinn. There were dos and don’ts, right and left, for women to keep themselves safe from evil jinn and ghosts. As far as I remember, men were almost excluded from the “wanted list” of the feared beings. How was that possible? The male-dominated society of the early 70s seemed to set boundaries for the ghosts and jinns. In the modern digital world, men and women have found some common ground, and even spirits no longer come only for female humans. Now that we have electricity, in the village scenario, women are smarter with computer skills; in reality, male dominance gets veiled. I am pretty sure the tamarind or the fan palm trees have their versions of the surreal world. However, the deep-rooted world of the spirit world still chains many, especially around the nighttime.

Nighttime and darkness seem to hold endless mysteries, and most are shrouded with danger in many cultures as they did in Bangladesh society. But was the dark so scary? Sleep at night came with dreams and nightmares. To be fair to the darkness, I would often sit on the porch and take in the night sky with its unique, moving life. The sky was never the same, moonlit or with the new moon. Clouds played hide and seek over the moon on rainy days. And the stars, their endless games of winking at me made me as happy as a child every time I looked up at them.Some nights, an owl would greet me with the “Twoo, twoo,” and I would whisper my hello back. I was sure the night bird heard me loud and clear; if it could see at night, why not hear at night, too? Whenever the owl called, thoughts winded to village childhood days, days when village myths held beliefs captive. Whenever we listened to owls’ hoot, we were urged to say, “good”, because if there were something ominous, the power of our words would take that away.

Halloween in Massachusetts digs into memories of my childhood’s haunted and ghost-ridden world in a Bangladeshi village. I was scared then, but now it’s more about exploring life. Life balances fears and hopes, sorrow and joy; between it all, ghosts, jinns, fairies, and angels hold me spellbound in real life. I relish every magical moment of it. I am not scared of witches, black cats, or ghosts that roam around my hometown during Halloween. The ghosts on the tamarind tree and the fan palm were kind to me, and I guess the evil spirits here will also be.

In my present, the black cat on the shop window, the witch on the broom, or the masked stranger are said to spell danger. There are clubs and social groups that share experiences and do not avoid them like we did back home in Bangladesh. I stand in between cultures, wondering at the reality that connects the spooks I grew up with and the ones I grew into in my adopted world.

Tulip Chowdhury is a long-time educator and writer. She has authored multiple books, including Visible, Invisible and Beyond, Soul Inside Out, and a collection of poetries titled Red, Blue, and Purple. The books are available on Amazon, Kindle, and Barnes and Noble. Tulip currently resides in Massachusetts, USA.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories

Author: Amitav Ghosh

Publisher: HarperCollins India

Amitav Ghosh has been traversing the boundaries between fiction, non-fiction, history, anthropology with ease for a long time. After the publication of his Ibis Trilogy [Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2012)] more than a decade earlier, he has been primarily focusing on issues related to environment, global warming and ecology in his later novels like Gun Island (2019), The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021), a non-fiction like The Great Derangement (2016), and two slim volumes of fables, Jungle Nama (2021) and The Living Mountain (2022). Now in his latest book Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories (2023), he blends travelogue, memoir, and historical tract into a multi-textured narrative that tells us about how ‘opium is a historical force in its own right’ and ‘must be approached with due attention to the ways in which it has interacted with humans over time.’ When he began his research for the Ibis Trilogy, he was startled to find how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote of were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean, but also by a precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Through both economic and cultural history, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India and China; the trade and its revenues were essential to the Empire’s survival.

Of the eighteen chapters of the book, the first two enlighten the reader about little knowledge of China and the way tea (cha or chai) became an inevitable part of living both in the West and in India. It was after Ghosh’s first trip to Guangzhou (anglicized later to Canton) that the epiphany occurred about the very subtle influence of China and how the British actually stole the technology of tea plantation to make it flourish in the colonies. Thus ‘tea came to India as a corollary of a sustained contest – economic, social and military – between the West and China.’

From the third chapter onwards Ghosh gives us the history of the opium poppy and how social conventions that had developed through centuries of exposure to opium may have helped to protect some parts of Eurasia from highly addictive forms of opioid use and also how the drug was instrumental in the creation of a certain kind of colonial modernity. We get to know how it was the Dutch who led the way in enmeshing opium with colonialism, and in creating the first imperial narco-state, heavily dependent on drug revenues. But in India, the model of the colonial narco-state was perfected by the British. In the entire region of Purvanchal, the British created a system that was coercive to its core. The growth and cultivation of opium poppy was entirely controlled by them and the drug was mass produced in the two largest factories in Patna and Ghazipur. Though the dangers of opium were certainly no secret to the British government, yet they did not bat an eyelid in exporting the drug to China, knowing fully well it was a criminal enterprise utterly indefensible by the standards of its own time as well as ours.

Ghosh then gives details of the poppy cultivation in Malwa and the western provinces of India. By thwarting the British efforts to impose a monopoly on the trade, Malwa opium sustained Bombay and left a large share of the profits to remain in indigenous hands. Throughout the colonial era therefore, Calcutta and Bombay defined the two opposite poles of India’s political economy; the way in which business was conducted in the two cities were completely different and soon the Parsis turned out to be the maximum number of the non-western merchants who were present in Guangzhou in the years before the First Opium War. Thus, Bombay and its hinterlands benefited from Malwa’s opium in multiple ways. From Mumbai’s Parsis we go to the horticulturists and weavers, potters and painters of China, especially of the great city of Guangzhou. The intricacies of the Parsi Gara saris are traced back to weavers of Guangzhou, and so are the origins of an artistic ferment in Bombay when Jamsetji Tata, the founder of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, brought back many paintings to India from China. The idea for an art school in Bombay came to Jamstjee Jejeebhoy after his Guangzhou visits, and the JJ School of Art came about.

Ghosh describes how opium money seeped so deeply into nineteenth century Britain that it essentially became invisible through ubiquity. After Britain, the country that benefited the most from the China trade and therefore, the global traffic in opium, was none other than the United States and the beneficiaries included many of the prominent families, institutions, and individuals in the land. By 1818 Americans were smuggling as much as a third of all the opium consumed in China thereby posing a major challenge to the East India Company’s domination of the market. Known as the Boston Concern, all the rich families from Boston, Massachusetts and the fortunate Americans were a series of names from the Northeastern upper crust — Astor, Cabot, Peabody, and so on. The young returnees from China ploughed their opium money into every sector of the rapidly expanding American economy. Even the opium money used in the railroad industry also came from China. “Opium was really a way that America was able to transfer China’s economic power to America’s industrial revolution”. In the United States the connection between opium and philanthropy has endured till the present day. It also left a distinct stamp on American architectural styles, modes of consumption, interior décor, philanthropy, and forms of recreation. Interestingly, Ghosh’s narrative keeps circling back to the present, when in the US as well in many countries around the world including India, the opioid crisis has reached epic proportions and the American government is bullish about its “War on Drugs”. Ghosh candidly states, “The ideology of Free Trade capitalism sanctioned entirely new levels of depravity in the pursuit of profit and the demons that were engendered as a result that have now so viscerally taken hold of the world that they can probably never be exorcised.”

Ghosh reiterates through the book that binary narratives about countries and culture — like, China is evil — that is entrenched in popular perception is misleading and takes away the historical context of trade relations among nations. “The staggering reality is that many of the cities that are now pillars of the modern globalised economy — Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai — were initially sustained by opium.”

There are many places in the book where Ghosh skilfully refers to his actual borrowing of historical details in his Ibis trilogy and these interjections add flavour to the non-fiction narration. Chapter Eight again is a memoir of Ghosh’s own lineage and how that has connections with the opium trade. Moving away from their ancestral home in East Bengal, it was the opium industry that took his ancestors to Chhapra in Bihar and kept them there. Like the millions of people that opium trading affected, uprooted, and dehumanised, his father told him stories of growing up in Chhapra and seeing opium ruin as well as make lives. These digressions add zing to the often-monotonous narration of facts and figures of the opium trade.

Ghosh goes on to devote pages to the nature of grassroots psychoactive substances and how opium was different in this class of psychoactive because it became a mainstay among pharmaceuticals too: “The reality is that all other efforts at curbing the spread of opioids have failed: the opium poppy has always found a way of circumventing them.” Towards the end of the book, after Ghosh finds that the wealthy and powerful people of the world to be suicidally indifferent to the prospect of a global catastrophe vis-s-vis the drug scenario, he asks a seminal question: “In such a world does it serve any purpose to recount this bleak and unedifying story?” Apparently, this question had haunted him since he first started working on the book, many years ago. It was the reason why, at a certain point, he felt he could not go on, even though he had already accumulated an enormous amount of material. It seemed to him then that Tagore had got it exactly right when he wrote: ‘in the Indo-China opium traffic, human nature itself sinks down to such a depth of despicable meanness, that is hateful even to follow the story to its conclusion.’ So persuaded was he of this that he decided to abandon the project: he cancelled the contracts he had signed and returned the advances he had been paid by his publishers.

Now we are happy that the story of the opium poppy had its cathartic effect upon Ghosh and in retrospect, after a period of more than a decade, he could give us the story from multiple perspectives today. Like his other books, this text is also accompanied by voluminous end notes which will deter the layman reader from enjoying the book. The amount of material and the different issues that Ghosh mentions is fit for at least four books but it is to his credit that he manages to present to us this world-roving tale in his signature method of weaving diverse narrative strands together into this book. How Ghosh establishes the interconnectedness of economic agency with geopolitics, a plant with human flourishing and wreckage and produces a narrative as luxuriant as it is painstaking in detail and density is his mastery as a prose writer and thinker.

Somdatta Mandal, author, academic and translator is former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International