It was on 1st August 2005 that she suddenly got dispirited and felt that I should know more about my family. Here is what she revealed before leaving this materialistic world.
“Your grandfather had very good intuitive powers. Whenever he met people, he could read their lives instantly. He always said, ‘I am clearing the Shadripus (six enemies of humal in physical existence) of this life. The wheel of life teaches all of us a lesson. Everyone experiences a flat fall in life which makes us realize that there is always someone above us who is the universal controller. So, learn to be generous, kind and forgiving. It will always help you come out of your problems.’
“In the year 1993, just a day before Diwali** there was a strange couple who visited him. The lady entered our house through the main door and she directly entered the kitchen where I was cooking lunch. I looked at her a couple of times as her appearance was very detached. I had tremors running down my spine as no stranger dared to enter our house without a knock on the door. Before I could say anything, she raised her voice and asked, ‘Is the astrologer at home?’
“I controlled my tongue and politely requested her to wait in the entrance room that was dedicated for astrological consultations. Her aura was heavily negative and I was sure that she was under some spell. With auburn hair flowing over her shoulders, oversized eyes, scary lips and a heavy chest with folds of fat, she had a thin tapering bottom. I assumed she had some deformity but I kept quiet. Suddenly, a short-heighted man with a lacerated-face appeared from behind her. He laughed carelessly and said, ‘I am ha… her husband.’
“He cried the next moment and then became normal. He appeared like a psychological wreck. I cannot recollect their names, but they had come for an astrological consultation related to childbirth. It was a nightmare to be with them even for that moment. However, I accompanied them to the entrance room and then prepared myself to quietly walk out of the room when your grandfather arrived.
“I remember crystal clear that your grandfather immediately stepped back after looking at the couple and said, ‘People who commit sacrilege perish miserably. Please, go away from here, Mr. Chiku. Even in your last visit I had requested you to forget about any possibility of having children in this life. You need to understand your karma and then decide your path forward. Anything you do wrong, doesn’t stay obscured for long, it always comes back.’
“By this time, I had just entered the narrow passage accompanying the entrance room but on hearing all this, I stepped back, turned and looked at them. Chiku’s face was full of frowns. His wife replied in an annoying tone, ‘This old man is partial. He is not a true astrologer who claims to help everyone.’ As my head whirled with confused thoughts, Chiku angrily replied to his wife, ‘Sheetal, look at the old man’s disguised face. I had already warned you before coming here that he doesn’t want to help us. Bloody old astrologer. Just spit on his face.’
“I could see your grandfather standing still and waiting for them to leave. He didn’t utter a word and a mask of patience was evident on his face. Suddenly, Chiku seized Sheetal’s hair with a firm grip and with horror on his face he screamed, ‘We shall take revenge from you and your family even after death. Be careful. This is a warning that shall materialize soon.’ They stormed out of the house and banged the main door. I rushed to close the doors and then perspired profusely. I was scared, but your grandfather didn’t show any signs of regret. He asked me to put up a barrier to this episode and forget everything. His positive words with a pleasant smile made me feel comfortable and relaxed.
“Later that evening, he blessed me during his regular prayer time and humbly said, ‘We need to be careful, Sheila. This couple may die soon. I will have to cover my family with a protective shield and this is required as it may help our future generations as well. Remember, don’t reveal about this to anyone or it may harm you.’ Shivendra, my son, when you were about to be born in the month of December, there were many bad incidents in my life and I was afraid that this couple was trying to kill you.”
I was shocked and jumped out of the bed and interrupted, “Mummy, there is some inner voice forcing me to share with you a strange incident that happened quite recently.” On hearing this, I could see the grapes in her hand were squished beyond consumption, but she controlled her emotions and gently caressed my hair and asked, “What is it dear?”
I wanted to say everything that had happened on my birthday, but at that moment words had become alien to me, my eyes flickered and lips quivered. Somehow, I went ahead to ask her, “Was Chiku’s mouth eerily and strangely overflowing with stink? Did he suddenly laugh and the next moment cried in pain?”
“Yes, you are right. But how do you know all this?” she asked in despair. I didn’t answer instantly, but I knew that I had no option but to divulge the entire episode that had happened on my birthday. I started narrating everything non-stop.
On hearing my story, she said, “Chiku is back with his wife. We have to leave this place immediately, else, they will kill us.” Expelling all the available air from her lungs, she rushed to her cupboard and removed a plastic sheet partially wrapped within a muslin cloth and said, “Take this and keep it with you. I believe this to be your grandfather’s protective shield that saved you during your birth. This is the plastic sheet that you were wrapped in when you were born.” As she said all this, she started shivering, her neck turned around 360 degrees, a bout of asthma started, and she collapsed in a second. Her fists clenched and jaws tightened, and by the time I struggled to understand what had just happened, she was dead. There was total vacuum in and out of my body. I was all alone in the house. This was the most painful episode of my life to see my mother die in front of my eyes and I could do nothing to save her.
Now, it was impossible for me to stay alone in that house anymore. My aunt Rinky knew that I was emotionally very weak and hence took me along with her on the same day after completing my mother’s funeral. Weeks passed and I was attempting hard to adjust with her family at their residence that was around a few kilometers away from Powai. But, after about six months, I decided to leave my aunt’s house and return back to Pyramid society. It appeared that I was becoming a burden on her family. I was not sure if it was actually so, but some incidents forced me to take this decision.
I decided to return back to Powai the same night I left my aunt’s house. I took a cab and got down near the lake and decided to walk further. All along the way, the night appeared very still and the moon was at the full in the heavens. As I looked around to be sure that there was no one following me, I saw a miserably lean shadow thrown forward from behind and I heard something retreating in a hurry. This squeezed the breath out of my body. Numbness crept in my veins and I was dead and alive at the same time. I had urine flowing along the length of my legs. Without thinking anything, I started running and reached the entrance of Pyramid society. I was horribly disturbed and scared to death to enter flat number seven once again. The nasty incident on my birthday, followed by my mother’s sudden death, was hammering badly inside me.
While I was half-asleep in my bedroom, I heard someone shouting for me on the streets. I got up to look outside the window but could see no one. Then, I heard a sudden whisking of clothes behind me. I turned around but there was no one. Vainly, I attempted to balance myself and cried within to be sure that I was still alive. Suddenly, someone pressed my left shoulder and I heard a frightful yelling on the other side of my body. I was shocked when I looked up to see a human shadow on the ceiling. The streetlight was sufficient to prove that there was some intruder in the house. The shadow appeared to hover over my body and then it switched on the light in the room.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. The same short-heighted man whom I last saw in my bathroom on my birthday was just over me. My scared mind compelled me to remember his name—Chiku. I closed my eyes hoping that this was just another bad dream, but I could clearly hear Chiku banging his head against the ceiling and paddling his legs in the air. There was an outbreak
of screams, so I opened my eyes. Chiku appeared, running in and out of the ceiling, preparing to do something catastrophic. He screamed at me, “I need you now. My wife is boiling in anger.” He vomited and then farted too loudly. I buried my head deep inside the pillow but Chiku dragged me out of the bed and pushed me near the window and yelled in my ears, “Look outside the window in that café shop. The lady in the logo with a star-studded crown is my wife.”
There was reek emanating from his body. I started feeling giddy and then vomited on him. When he forced me to look, I could see the lady in the logo expanding her size and as she stared at me, I could feel she was torturing me psychologically. Her negative energies were penetrating my body from all angles and settling inside me. I had acid tears rolling down my face and as I looked deeply into her expanding eyes, the pull from her became so strong that I could visibly see her moving out of the logo and being seated on a chair in front of the coffee machine. The next moment, she scoffed plates of food and gulped bottles of water and then jumped out of the chair and hurriedly crossed the road through a field of water, mud, and electrical wires and bumped into my face. The impact of this collision was so strong that I started bleeding profusely.
She howled in an unholy tone, “Forget the rules of life and the laws that govern the world after death. What is right in the heaven is a waste for me. I am full of vendetta against your family who forced me and my husband to commit suicide. I need you to be humiliated and be fed with so much pain that happiness should be scared to approach you. Sadness, shame, hopelessness and disgrace should be your life companions. Let me bleed you with my axe. Let the bloodshed happen on the streets. Your grandfather made an incorrigible mistake. Today is the day for raw justice which has been pending for decades.”
The horror in her tone was unbearable. Chiku was holding me tightly. I could feel he had one arm longer than the other and his shoulders were abnormally hard. I saw from the corner of my eyes that his long lanky fingers were hooked like claws. I was completely maimed by now and waiting to see if death was looking for me. I was helpless and couldn’t think of any possibility to tease and escape death, so, I said to myself, “Let it happen now.”
I looked up in the skies to see if there was any help from the heavens and could hear my mother’s words being pumped from my heart.
She always said this to me, “Life’s biggest lesson is to clear our pending debts. It’s better if it’s done in this lifetime; if not, then in some other life you may have to pay a very heavy price. Forgiveness teaches empathy, compassion and love. So, release your karmic burden. You need to free yourself from all these bondages.” Responding to a call from my heart, I felt my mother was begging me to ask for forgiveness. Her words instilled momentary confidence in me and without a second thought, I screamed for help from the deepest bottom of my heart and pleaded, “I ask for forgiveness on behalf of my entire family and all my forefathers in time and space and I request you to forgive us. I apologize for all what has happened over these years. Please, please, I humbly request you to forgive us.”
My nerves were in disorder and I had a thousand suffocating breaths under my chest, all struggling to get out of my body into the open. There was riot and confusion in my head in equal proportions. Chiku’s wife had suddenly gone invisible and Chiku was rubbing his swollen lips against my strained back. I looked out of the window and saw Chiku’s wife struggling to push herself in the logo. In no time, she appeared in front of me and then with a smirk on her face she cried, “My emotions are off and I am getting detached. I am at the zenith of absurdity and I refuse to forgive you and your family.”
Tapping the breast-pocket of her dark, silky gown, she licked my face, laughed cruelly and said in a bitter voice, “Let me make you aware that I don’t believe in death, but I remember many lifetimes and the magical equilibrium of this universe is something that will compel me and Chiku to be born again. This time we will be your children. You still have scope for horror in your life. Get married soon.”
*Ajmer: This is a small city located in Rajasthan state of India and is a very popular spiritual destination. As per the belief in Hindu tradition, ‘Pushkar’ is a small town in Ajmer and is the only place in this world where there is a temple dedicated to lord ‘Brahma’ (Believed to be the creator of this world).
**Diwali: This is a festival of lights and is celebrated every year in India around the month of October/November. It is celebrated by all Hindus across India to mark the victory of good over evil.
That’s the end of my story.
“Did you ever get married or have kids?” Aiden asked.
“No, and I never will,” Shivendra said. “The curse will die with me.”
“Wow, that’s pretty weird,” Schroder said.
“Okay, Aiden,” Samantha said, “you’re up!”
“UNICORNS AND ZOMBIES”
“Okay, my story is even weirder than all of your stories. That’s why I have never told it to another person. I lived it and I barely believe it,” Aiden said. “I used to work for a church…let me just say that I’m not religious at all, but it was a job. I also lived there. Naturally, next to the church was a very old graveyard, and the creepy thing was that nobody really knew just how old it was. All the dates and names were worn off the headstones and mausoleums.
“Some of the mausoleums were really creepy, not just because they looked old and creepy, but they felt creepy. Sometimes it felt like something was watching from inside them, some of them felt…well… evil.
“One night, me and my buddy were bored, so we decided we’d go get drunk in the old graveyard and see what happened. We got a few other guys together and took a cooler, a boombox, and some food. It was more of a small party than anything else. We weren’t really expecting anything to happen, maybe hear a ghost or something. We did bring a video camera, though we certainly weren’t expecting anything like this to happen.
“After a few hours or so, we were pretty drunk. We had positioned our lawn chairs in front of the creepiest mausoleum in the graveyard. Suddenly, it started glowing. We all got very quiet, and stood up to investigate. There was hoof sounds or something coming from inside the door. We decided to open it. Strangely, it was a unicorn of all things, and it was pissed. It charged at us with its horn! It was trying to kill us. There was no gate around the graveyard. This thing was fast. It got my one friend, Will, in the leg. My other friend Gary Hall was skewered right through the heart. We threw rocks at it to get it to chase us instead. I was furthest away from it, and closest to the mausoleum it came out of. I hit it with a rock and ran to the mausoleum. When it charged me, I jumped out of the way and closed the doors.
“There was another flash of light. We were kind of afraid to look, unsure if something came in or it went out. After a few minutes, we didn’t hear anything. I opened the door and nothing was there that shouldn’t have been. I closed the doors back up for obvious reasons and went to the camera. It was knocked over, but otherwise okay. I watched the footage, and all it showed was static.
“We had to get Will and Gary to the hospital really fast. Will’s leg was mangled. We had no idea what to tell them. We couldn’t say, ‘He got stabbed by a unicorn that came out of an ancient mausoleum.’ We didn’t want to end up in a mental institution or even jail, and we knew Gary was dead, but for some reason we had to try to take him to the hospital. We had taken two cars, and still had to pack all our stuff. Will couldn’t wait. We decided two would take Will and Gary and two would stay and pack up. I, of course, had to stay. I wanted to stay. My friend, Greg Waddell, stayed with me. He said, ‘What the hell, we’re all going to die at some point anyway.’
“We left it to the other two to come up with a story, all I could come up with was some ‘Tucker and Dale’ type thing. ‘They just ran into branches,’ *shrug*. I’m making it sound like the death of my friend wasn’t important, it was. I needed to grieve, but then I would have to admit that he was dead. I wasn’t ready to do that yet. Let a doctor say he was
dead first.
“I was curious. ‘Was it that mausoleum in particular, or do they all do that?’ I said.
“‘I don’t know, want to try drinking in front of another one and see if we can get something new to try and kill us’ Greg said facetiously.
“‘Kind of,’ I said.
“He looked at me like I should be in a strait jacket. ‘Sure, why not? You should have at least two near death experiences per night, you know, just to feel alive.’
“‘Aren’t you curious?’ I asked him.
“‘Yes, but I don’t really want to die tonight. If we do this, we need a plan in case something bigger and badder comes out,’ he said.
“‘Hmm, good idea,’ I said. ‘Any ideas?’
‘Give me a minute,’ he said.
‘We need a flame thrower or something,’ I was half joking.
‘Hey, I have one!’ he yelled excitedly. ‘Let’s go raid my shed for weapons!’
“We put the extra chairs away and jumped in the car. It didn’t take long to get to Greg’s house. His shed was filled with stuff we could use as weapons. The first two things we grabbed were a flamethrower and a chainsaw. There was a pick axe and a few other pointy tools we put in a large duffel bag. We put all those things in the car. Greg was a hunter, so we grabbed two shot guns and some shells, too. This time, we were better prepared.
“We sat our lawn chairs in front of another creepy mausoleum and waited an hour and a half. Nothing happened. ‘What if the beer had something to do with it? We were pretty drunk,’ I said.
‘I can’t see why that would have anything to do with it, but I definitely need to be drunk for this,’ Greg said.
Protectors of the Veil Page 13
