Short Story: Didan by Sanchalika Das

In this story, Sanchalika Das captures the fragility of human relationships and how, often we know our distant family members through others before actually knowing them well.

She used to tell amazing stories. Stories laced with bhoot, pret, chakchundi. Stories filled with no-name ghosts, Brahmin ghosts who used the holy water on you and caused your skin to burn and melt, ghosts who hang from a tree like a bat, and as you pass by them, they grab your hair and swing you around, ghosts of married women who were wronged by their husbands and ghosts of people who died by falling into the cesspit. She could imitate any animal’s sound from her mouth, her expressions making the story real, making the hair on your arms stand, making you want to crack her head open and see how many stories are sitting in there passing each other notes on the endings. That’s how I remember her, my Didan. My grandmother’s sister. 

We never had any interaction of more than 20 minutes, as a child I had trouble speaking fluent Bangla and that made understanding fluently spoken Bangla a huge task and she was simply too old to try and translate everything into Hindi.