Not everyone believes in spirits and the other world. But DEEBASHREE MOHANTY spoke to some professionals who have experienced such graphic episodes in their life that it made them believers of the paranormal activity. They tell you how their deceased loved ones would constantly keep in touch either through personal communications or by way of physical wounds that never heal. They show you empirical evidence of being possessed. They have seen their loved ones alive and walking after their death.
Bangalore. Five years ago. It was a rainy October evening and Nisha, a physiotherapist, was pacing up and down. Tired of waiting for her husband Raj to return from work, she dozed off on the dining table. A little past 11 pm, she woke up to the clutter of spoons and ladles and saw her husband serving her food. He was completely drenched due to rain but he was heating food in the microwave. He seemed to be in a hurry. He sat down next to her with a dinner plate in his hands and told her all was not well. That something had happened to him. That he may have to leave her and their daughter. It was unfortunate, he said, but she would have to let him go.
Shocked but angry, Nisha started shouting at her husband. She thought he was playing a prank. He then tore a piece of paper from a notebook and wrote down a friend’s landline number asking Nisha to contact his family and let them know that something miserable had happened.
Just then Nisha’s mother stormed into the dining hall. She had just received a call about a terrible car accident on Kanakpura road in which both occupants had died on the spot. The occupants were Raj and his friend.
A shocked Nisha couldn’t believe her ears, just seconds back Raj was with her, talking to her, serving dinner. The dinner plate he had given her was still warm. But there was no one in the room when she looked back. She rushed to the accident site, only to find her husband lying mangled, in a pool of blood, dead!
Half-an-hour later she was back home. Everyone around her was crying inconsolably but her eyes were fixated at the pool of water that had gathered around her dining chair. She remembers how a drenched Raj was standing there earlier. On the table was that piece of paper which Raj had scribbled the number on. She knew he was there, somewhere, watching her.
“I have been communicating with him for five years. When the contact happens, I go into a trance. My limbs don’t move. Eyes are fixed on Raj. Every episode varies from five to 15 minutes. Initially, I could just see his shadow and hear voices. But the vision and the audio got clearer with every episode. Later, I could feel him physically too. Raj would talk about his world, how he was finally at peace. He used to say his world was very bright and clean. Everyone had a job but no monetary transactions. Everyone was happy and punctual. He begged me to stop crying and to move on. That was the only way, he said, he would feel free. He didn’t want to communicate with me but felt guilty enough to come every time I shed a tear,” Nisha says.
After her husband’s death, she quit physiotherapy and took up a job in a reputed IT firm in the Human Resources Department. The communication with her husband stopped two years ago. The last time, he made her a cup of tea and kissed her one last goodbye.
But Nisha has been getting another visitor. Her father, who passed away two years ago due to an ailment, keeps this communication line open. “After Raj, I was completely dependent on my family, emotionally and financially. My father was a constant support. When he died, I turned into a nervous wreck. Everything fell apart. One afternoon, I just couldn’t bear the loss and started weeping. My father appeared that day. I could only hear his voice. He sounded disturbed. He spoke with me about life and death and how the latter is as much a reality as life. After a few weeks, I started seeing his apparition and a month later, he was standing in person next to me. He would sometimes travel with me to office too,” Nisha says, adding that, strangely, during the episode, she didn’t feel scared or unhappy.
Being a science student, she didn’t want to believe in after-life and spirits and she thought it was just a bad dream. But when she started getting unexplained scratch wounds on her body that wouldn’t heal easily, she realised something was amiss. The scratches meant someone was pulling her or someone wanted to enter her world. The pain was unbearable and the wounds were getting bigger.
“I was in Mangalore with family friends and we were having cups of tea over gossip. Out of nowhere, there was a cloudburst. We all hurried downstairs. I was making way for the children and the elders. As I was about to lock the door behind me, I felt someone pulling me towards the terrace with great force. I couldn’t move. My relatives started shouting at me for not getting out of the rain. That very instance, someone let go of me and I fell backwards. Later that night, I discovered fresh scratch marks on my inner wrist. There was an impression of three fingers. I decided to get help,” Nisha recalls. She met Gaurav Tiwari, founder of the Paranormal Society of India, at a workshop in Bangalore and told him what she was going through. It was through his sessions that she got better. Today, she has shared her story on Bhoot Aaya on Sony.