by JINOY JOSE P.
Dear reader,
“I saw spirits,” he told me. I had no reason at the time to doubt him. I was barely 10. Ravi* said he had worked in a submarine—a vessel I had heard of, abstractly—but he described its inner life, how pressure plates hummed, corridors tunnelled, and people lived and died inside the iron cocoon. He had eyes so arresting, skin soft as dusk, and he smiled like a child but spoke like a friend. One Sunday morning, on my way to church, he caught me near the banyan tree that marked the entry into my village.
He said: there is a space inside the submarine where we stand, staring into infinity. You see a wall, then a glass shield, and beyond it a place we call “vacuum”. That is where the spirits arrive. He described them: giant translucent tadpoles, illumination coiling through their wavy forms. Their eyes—ah, their eyes—were like mini-screens. Look closely and you would see life: events, places, voices, the whole arc of a life projected into that silverine retina. The owner of the spirit, dead now in flesh, lived again in those eyes.
He went on: I peered through the glass and I saw lives: quarrels, wars, deaths, rituals of gore, processions, suffering, torture, offices, witnesses, even regrets. But never laughter, never love. I did not know why; I just knew I never saw them. Because of the partition between us, I could not ask questions. But I am sure they saw me. Once, the spirit—its bulbous eyes with dancing blue and red dots—drifted close. It stared. I blinked. It blinked back. We did that Morse code of eyes for minutes.
“Do you know what Morse code is?” Ravi asked. “No,” I replied. “Ah, you will learn,” he said, and continued his story: I still believe it was a spirit that knew me—perhaps a friend, a tortured colleague, someone I once loved—because I somehow know its language. The spirit lingered, then drifted away. I told my friends. They heard me out, later I was sent home, Ravi summed up.
Over time, our meetings near the banyan tree multiplied. Ravi would arrive in a slim white dhoti, striped shirt, and kerchief tucked inside his collar. He told me stories: of flying waters, of a sea bottom carpeted in glowing roses, of lotuses that spoke and dwarfed whales, of currents that carried voices, and more.
Then one day, someone saw us talking and scolded him for “talking to children”. Others murmured, ”Why did his brother let this lunatic roam free?” They pushed him away. I remember how his face fell. I smiled back and longed to whisper, “I believe you”.
After that, I rarely saw him. When I did, we exchanged smiles. But to speak openly, to engage with him, was unthinkable. Those days, talking to a “schizophrenic”, a label I learnt later, invited ridicule, shudders, and scoldings. Soon I heard that he was ill-treated, then sheltered by some relatives, and eventually put on medication.
When I encountered him years later, he was a shell. No spirit stories, no childlike mirth. Thin, shivering, exhausted. Eyes empty. The stories had left him. His face had shrunk. I didn’t see him after that. But I remembered his stories.
Frontline for more