

Worse still, for a long time, I could feel the weight of presences on my body, day, midday, dusk and night.”

I felt a real visceral fear of harm and a grisly nearness to evil. His version, recounted each time with beading perspiration, is this: “I had a feeling in my muscles and in my gut, I will be physically injured. The one time a villager Nagamuttu did, he said, he was inexorably bound to ill fate. Yet it is a walk no villager from Venthila will undertake. It is a long walk from the flat grounds of the cremation area to the mini-grove in the middle, one that eventually twines its way into a thick forest. I walk alone in the cool damp of midnight from the rim of the cremation ground where I live to its midpoint, or the place closest to its middle.

It is November, an odd time for rains, perhaps, yet it is when the north-east monsoon wavers over our region, sometimes generous but mostly not.
