Chapter 6: The Night at the Canal
What happened next is the part of the story I know least firsthand, because my mother — quite reasonably, given what had already happened to me — refused to let my brother or me anywhere near the canal again for the rest of that visit. So I'm telling you this part the way I heard it afterward, first from Rotan Kaka in fragments over several years of summer visits, and later, much later, from my mesho himself, on an evening maybe a decade after it happened, when he'd had enough tea and enough time to finally talk about it plainly.
Rotan Kaka told my mesho, the morning after my encounter, that this thing wasn't behaving like an ordinary mecho bhoot — or rather, it was behaving exactly like one, but with an intensity and a persistence he hadn't seen in his own sixty years living beside that canal. Ordinary hauntings of this kind, he said, were opportunistic — a lone traveler at dusk, bad luck, bad timing, and if you were careful afterward, careful about walking that stretch after dark, it generally left you alone. This one had come back a second time, for a child, within days of the first encounter, and that told him something was different this time — that whatever restless hunger was driving it had grown sharper, more deliberate, less willing to wait for an easy, accidental victim.
He told my mesho a version of the origin story that I hadn't heard before, and that I've never fully been able to verify, though Rotan Kaka swore he'd had it from his own father, who'd had it from his father before him. He said that stretch of the canal, near the collapsed banyan tree, had once been the site of a fishing dispute, decades and decades before any of us were born — a poor fisherman accused, falsely according to the story, of stealing from a wealthier neighbor's nets, beaten badly enough by the neighbor's men that he died of his injuries within the week, his own family too frightened and too powerless to demand justice. He had died, Rotan Kaka said, still insisting he'd caught every fish in his own basket honestly, still hungry — in every sense of the word — for something that had been taken from him unfairly. And ever since, the story went, he waited at that bend in the canal for anyone who passed with a full fish basket, as though by taking their catch, taking their strength, taking their very weight upon his own back, he might finally settle a debt that death itself had left unpaid.
Whether or not that origin story is literally true, I genuinely don't know. But Rotan Kaka clearly believed it, and my mesho, having felt what he'd felt, was in no position to argue with him.
What they decided to do, that third evening, was something between an exorcism and a negotiation — the kind of practical, improvised ritual that village life produces when there's no priest specializing in exactly this problem and no time to find one. Rotan Kaka insisted my mesho had to go back to the exact spot, at the exact time of dusk, because a debt of this kind, he said, could only be settled where it was incurred. He was not to go alone — Rotan Kaka went with him, along with two other older men from the neighborhood who had, it turned out, their own quiet histories with that stretch of water and needed no convincing that the danger was real.
They carried with them a small clay pot of milk and rice, a length of iron chain that Rotan Kaka wrapped twice around his own waist beneath his shirt, mustard seeds in a cloth pouch, and — this detail has always struck me as strangely, mundanely practical — a full basket of fish, freshly caught that same afternoon by one of the other men, intended as an offering.
My mesho told me, years later, that standing at that bend in the canal as the light failed felt like standing at the edge of something enormous and patient, a hunger so old it had stopped being angry and become simply, endlessly waiting. Rotan Kaka spoke the words he'd used over my mesho's unconscious body that first night — the naming, the accounting, an acknowledgment, spoken directly to the water, that a wrong had been done long ago and had never been properly answered, that no one living now could undo it, but that the fisherman's hunger did not have to keep collecting on a debt that belonged to men long dead.
Then they set the basket of fish into the shallow water at the base of the banyan roots, and Rotan Kaka scattered the mustard seeds in a wide circle around where my mesho stood, and for a long, terrible moment, my mesho said, the whole canal went unnaturally silent — no frogs, no night birds, nothing but the small sound of water moving against the bank.
And then, he said, he felt it one final time — not the crushing weight of those two earlier nights, but something lighter, almost hesitant, resting briefly against his shoulder, the way a tired hand might rest there before finally, finally letting go. The whistling came once more, faint and receding, drawing away across the water toward the deeper part of the canal, and then there was nothing at all — just three frightened, sweating men and an old one, standing in the dark beside an empty fish basket, listening to the frogs slowly, cautiously, start singing again.