रामपुर का कुआँ

कथा 2

The Stepwell at Chanderi

Chanderi is a small town in the Ashoknagar district of Madhya Pradesh, known for its Chanderi saris and for the ruins that outnumber the living structures — crumbling mosques, Bundela-era palaces, and over three hundred stepwells scattered across the plateau like open mouths in the stone. Most of these stepwells are dry now, their water tables dropped below reach decades ago, but the architecture remains: geometric staircases descending five, six, seven stories into the earth, ending at a square of green water or, more often, a floor of cracked mud and blown leaves.

In 2009, a photography student from Bhopal named Priya Sharma came to Chanderi to document the stepwells for her thesis. She worked alone, spending two weeks moving from well to well with a tripod and a medium-format camera, photographing the play of light on descending stone at different hours of the day. Most of the stepwells were accessible — no gates, no guards, just the silent geometry and the occasional goat sheltering from the heat on a lower landing.

The stepwell at the eastern edge of the old town was different. The local guide Priya had hired — a retired schoolteacher named Rajendra Bundela — told her about it on her third day. It was one of the deepest in Chanderi, seven stories below ground, and it still held water. The water was clear, fed by a spring that had not dried with the rest. 'Nobody goes there after four in the afternoon,' Rajendra said. He did not explain why. When Priya pressed, he said the light was bad for photography after four.

Priya went at three. The stepwell was magnificent — descending arches framing the water below in a perfect rectangle of reflected sky. She set up her tripod on the third level and began shooting. The silence was absolute. Not the silence of an empty room but the silence of a place that was listening.

At three forty-five, she heard crying. Soft, rhythmic, the exhausted weeping of someone who had been at it for hours. It echoed off the stone walls in a way that made the direction impossible to identify — it could have been from below, from above, from the water itself. Priya stopped shooting. She listened. The crying continued. She called out: 'Hello? Is someone there?' The crying stopped. The silence returned, but it was a different silence now — watchful, present, weighted.

Priya packed her equipment and climbed back to the surface. At the top, she found Rajendra waiting for her. He looked at her face and said: 'You heard her.' Priya asked who. Rajendra sat down on the wall and told her.

In 1947, during Partition, a Muslim family in Chanderi — a cloth merchant, his wife, and their three daughters — had attempted to leave for Pakistan. They were intercepted on the road by a mob. The merchant and his wife were killed. The three daughters ran. Two were caught. The third — the youngest, fifteen years old — reached the stepwell and went down. Whether she jumped or fell or hid and could not get out, nobody knew. Her body was never recovered. The well was deep and the water was dark and in the chaos of 1947, nobody looked.

Since then, the stepwell had a presence. Not a violent one — the Bhootni of the Chanderi stepwell did not attack, did not pull people into the water, did not appear as a terrifying apparition. She wept. That was all. She wept in the lower levels of a stepwell where she had died at fifteen, in a country that was tearing itself in half, running from men who wanted to kill her for her religion. The crying was not bait. It was biography.

Priya published her photographs. The stepwell series won a university prize. She included a note in her artist's statement: 'I was told not to go after four. I should have asked why before I went at three.' She never returned to that particular stepwell. But she sent a print of her best photograph — the descending arches, the rectangle of water, the quality of light at three in the afternoon — to Rajendra. He hung it in his front room. He told visitors it was one of the most beautiful places in Chanderi. He did not mention the sound.

कथा 3

The Night Nurse of Varanasi

The old government hospital at Kabir Chaura in Varanasi was built by the British in 1896 and had been continuously operational for over a century by the time the events described here took place in 2012. The building was a colonial relic — high ceilings, arched corridors, walls so thick they stayed cool in the Varanasi summer and cold in the winter. The women's ward occupied the eastern wing, overlooking a courtyard with a defunct fountain and a banyan tree that had pushed its roots through the flagstone floor.

The night nurse on the women's ward between 2010 and 2014 was a woman named Sister Mary Joseph — a Keralite Christian who had trained at CMC Vellore and been posted to Varanasi against her preference. Sister Mary was practical, competent, and entirely uninterested in ghost stories, which in a hospital as old as Kabir Chaura were as common as bedbugs. Every ward had its story. The night shift had its rituals — certain corridors avoided after midnight, certain rooms where the lights were left on, certain beds that were filled last because patients in them complained of dreams.

In September 2012, a patient named Meena Devi was admitted to the women's ward with complications from a difficult delivery. The baby had survived but Meena was hemorrhaging and her blood pressure was dropping. She was placed in the bed nearest the window overlooking the courtyard — the bed that was always filled last. Sister Mary checked on her every thirty minutes through the night.

At two AM, Sister Mary heard Meena talking. She was alone in the corner of the ward, the nearest patient three beds away and sleeping. Meena was talking softly, continuously, in a tone that sounded like one side of a conversation. Sister Mary approached. Meena was facing the window, speaking to the glass. When Sister Mary touched her shoulder, Meena turned and said, quite lucidly: 'She says her baby died. She says she has been looking for it.'

Sister Mary checked the window. The courtyard was empty. The banyan tree threw shadows across the flagstones in the moonlight. She took Meena's temperature — normal. Blood pressure — stabilizing. Meena was not delirious. She was alert, coherent, and entirely calm. She told Sister Mary that a woman in a white sari had been standing outside the window for the past hour, pressing her palms against the glass, crying silently. Meena said the woman had not spoken — not with words — but Meena had understood her anyway. The woman had lost her baby in this ward. She was looking for it. She had been looking for a very long time.

Sister Mary was from Kerala. She did not believe in Bhootnis. She believed in post-surgical delirium, in the effects of anesthesia, in the power of suggestion in a ward where ghost stories were ambient noise. She moved Meena to a bed in the center of the ward, away from the window. She drew the curtain. She made a note in the chart: 'Patient reports visual hallucination — likely post-anesthetic. Monitor.'

The next night, the patient in the window bed — a different woman, admitted for a routine procedure — rang the call bell at one thirty AM. Sister Mary found her sitting up in bed, hands gripping the sheets, staring at the window. 'There is a woman outside,' she said. 'She is crying. She wants to come in.' This patient had not spoken to Meena. She had been admitted that afternoon and had no knowledge of the previous night's report.

Sister Mary closed the window bed permanently after that. She did not file a report. She did not tell the ward supervisor. She simply stopped assigning patients to that bed, marking it as 'out of service — frame damage' in the allocation register. The bed remained empty for the rest of her posting. Other nurses who came after her maintained the practice without being told the reason. They learned, as night nurses in old hospitals learn, that some protocols are inherited rather than explained.

कथा 4

The Bride of Morena

In the Chambal ravines south of Morena in Madhya Pradesh, where the landscape is cut into deep gorges by seasonal rivers and the villages sit on isolated plateaus connected by dirt tracks that wash out every monsoon, there is a story that every family in the region knows but no one tells to outsiders without considerable persuasion.

In 1978, a young woman named Rukmini was married into a family in a village at the edge of the ravines. The marriage was arranged — all marriages in this region at that time were arranged — and Rukmini's family had been told that the husband was a farmer with good land. What they had not been told was that the husband was a drinker, that the family was violent, and that the previous wife had 'returned to her parents' home' under circumstances nobody questioned because nobody wanted the answer.

Rukmini endured eighteen months. She sent no messages to her family — the village had no telephone, no post office, and no one traveling to her parents' village. In February 1980, during a dry spell when the ravine rivers were reduced to trickles, Rukmini walked out of the house at night, walked to the river at the bottom of the nearest ravine, and did not walk back. Her body was found two days later by a goatherd. The death was recorded as drowning. The police did not investigate. Her family was informed by a letter that arrived three weeks after the cremation.

The river where Rukmini died is narrow — barely five meters across, even in monsoon — and it runs through a gorge where the walls rise thirty meters on either side, creating a corridor of shadow that sunlight never fully reaches. After Rukmini's death, the gorge acquired a presence. Goatherds who used the ravine path reported hearing a woman singing — not crying, singing, specifically a wedding song, the kind sung by the bride's family as the procession leaves. The singing was always faint, always coming from the direction of the water, always stopping the moment anyone called out or turned toward it.

Over the years, the stories accumulated. A truck driver who broke down on the road above the ravine at night said he saw a woman in red — not white, red, the color of a bride — standing in the dry riverbed below, looking up at him. A group of teenage boys who went to the ravine on a dare reported hearing bangles — glass bangles, the sound of a bride's wrists — from inside the gorge when no one was visible. A village elder said that on the anniversary of Rukmini's death, the river rose by six inches, even in the dry season, even when no rain had fallen anywhere in the catchment.

What made Rukmini's story different from the standard Bhootni archetype was the color. Bhootnis wear white — the color of mourning, of widowhood, of death. Rukmini appeared in red — the color of marriage, of life she was denied, of the celebration that had delivered her into suffering. The village understood this without anyone needing to explain it. White is what you become when life is over. Red is what you wear when life is being taken from you. Rukmini's ghost did not mourn her death. She mourned her marriage — the event that was supposed to be the beginning of her life and instead was the beginning of its end.

The ravine is still avoided after dark. The singing is still reported. And every year, on the anniversary, the women of the nearest village walk to the edge of the gorge and drop marigold garlands into the water — the flowers that should have been at her funeral, that should have been at a different kind of wedding, that fall into the darkness of the ravine and are gone.