ताशिदिंग का झाक्री

कथा 2

The Drumming That Would Not Stop

In the village of Lingchom, perched on a ridge above the Teesta River in North Sikkim where the air thins and the prayer flags snap in perpetual wind, there lived a Jhakri named Pemba Tamang who had served the community for thirty-seven years. He was initiated at age nine — taken by the Ban Jhankri during the monsoon of 1972, returned four days later with hands that shook and eyes that saw behind things. His teacher, an old Jhakri from the next village, trained him for eleven years before declaring him ready. By 2009, Pemba had performed so many rituals that no one — including Pemba himself — could number them.

The problem began in October, during Tihar. Pemba performed a routine healing for a neighbor's wife who had been suffering from insomnia — three weeks of sleeplessness that no medicine could touch. The ritual was standard: juniper smoke, the dhyangro drum, the calling of a local mountain spirit known to govern sleep and dreams. Pemba entered trance, negotiated with the spirit, secured its agreement to release the woman. She slept that night for fourteen hours. The healing was successful.

But when Pemba returned from trance, his wife Diki noticed that his hands continued to make the drumming motion — small, rhythmic taps of his fingers against his thighs, his knees, the table, any surface. He did not seem aware he was doing it. She pointed it out. He looked at his hands as if they belonged to someone else and said: 'They are finishing the song.' He could not make them stop.

For three days, Pemba's hands drummed constantly — during meals, during conversation, during sleep. The rhythm was not random. Diki recognized it as the specific pattern Pemba used to call the sleep-spirit. But the ritual was over. The spirit had been dismissed. The pattern should have ended when the trance ended. Instead, it continued — as if the calling were still happening somewhere inside Pemba, on a frequency that only his hands could detect.

On the fourth day, the neighbor's wife returned. The insomnia was back — worse than before. She had slept for one night and then the sleeplessness had returned with a ferocity that frightened her. She was not just unable to sleep — she was unable to even feel tired. Her body had lost the capacity for exhaustion. She felt alert, wired, hollow.

Pemba understood immediately. The spirit had not been properly dismissed. His hands had been telling him this for four days — the calling pattern continuing because the spirit was still engaged, still present, still connected to both Pemba and the patient through the thread of the unfinished ritual. The spirit had complied with the healing request on the first night. But it had not left. It had simply stayed, awake, watching, holding the sleep it had been asked to release without actually releasing it back into the world.

Pemba performed the dismissal ritual — a different drumming pattern, a closing rather than an opening. But his hands would not play it. They continued the calling pattern, overriding his intention. It was as if the spirit had taken up residence in his muscle memory, refusing to allow the closing to be played through the same hands that had played the opening.

He went to his teacher — old Mingma Jhakri, now eighty-six and no longer practicing but still sharp, still connected. Mingma listened to the situation and said: 'The spirit likes your hands. It has been coming when you call for thirty-seven years. Now it does not want to leave. You are its favorite house.' Mingma performed the dismissal himself, using his own hands and his own drum. Pemba sat in silence while the old man played the closing pattern.

The tapping stopped. Pemba's hands went still for the first time in six days. The neighbor's wife slept that night and every night after. But Pemba never again called that particular spirit. He told Diki: 'There are spirits you work with, and spirits that want to work through you. I confused the two. That one wanted to stay. I was almost gone before I knew it.'

कथा 3

The Child Who Refused the Forest

In Soreng, a small town in West Sikkim where the road descends toward the Nepal border and the cardamom plantations fill the valleys with their dense green rows, a twelve-year-old boy named Ashish Rai began hearing drums in 2015. Not the drums of festivals or ceremonies — those he had heard his whole life and they meant nothing unusual. These drums came from the forest above the town, from the dense subtropical vegetation that climbed toward Barsey Rhododendron Sanctuary. The drums played at night, between two and four in the morning, and only Ashish could hear them.

His parents were educated — his father was a school administrator, his mother a nurse at the district hospital. They were Rai by ethnicity, with a family history that included jhankris three generations back, but they lived modern lives. When Ashish reported the drums, his mother took him to the hospital in Jorethang for hearing tests. Everything was normal. His father suggested the boy was dreaming while half-awake. They told him to ignore it.

Ashish tried to ignore it. But the drums were specific — not random noise, not auditory hallucination, but a recognizable rhythm that repeated in patterns. A calling pattern, though Ashish had no training to recognize it as such. Within a month, the drums began pulling at him. Not metaphorically. Physically. He woke one night to find himself standing at the back door of his house, barefoot in his underwear, his hand on the latch, facing the dark hill above the town. He had no memory of getting up. His body had carried him to the threshold of the forest while his conscious mind slept.

His grandmother — his father's mother, seventy-three years old, sharp-tongued and devout — watched this happen three times before she spoke. Then she said what the parents did not want to hear: 'The Ban Jhankri is calling him. If you do not let him go, he will go anyway. If he goes unwilling and unprepared, he may not come back right.'

Ashish's father refused. His son was a student, not a shaman. The twenty-first century did not require jhankris. There were hospitals, there were psychologists, there were medications. He enrolled Ashish in a boarding school in Gangtok — physically removing him from the forest, from the drums, from whatever was calling.

In Gangtok, the drums stopped. Ashish slept normally. He studied. He appeared fine. His parents were relieved. His grandmother was not. She said: 'It has not stopped. It is waiting. It is very patient.'

Two years later, at fourteen, on a school trip to Rumtek Monastery, Ashish walked away from his class group during a break. He walked calmly across the monastery grounds, through the gate, and into the forest that surrounded the complex. He was gone for six hours. When found — by his panicked teachers and a search party of monastery monks — he was sitting cross-legged in a clearing, perfectly still, perfectly calm, humming a melody that the monks recognized as a shamanic calling chant.

Ashish's father brought him home from boarding school. The grandmother arranged for a local jhankri to assess the boy. The jhankri's verdict was immediate: 'He has been chosen. You can delay it but you cannot prevent it. The longer you delay, the more forceful the taking will be. Let him train. Let him learn. Give him the skills to negotiate with what is calling him, or what is calling him will not negotiate with him.'

Ashish began training. He is now twenty-three. He practices as a jhankri in the Soreng area. His father does not discuss it publicly. His grandmother, before she died in 2022, told neighbors: 'The spirits do not care about our plans for our children. They have their own plans. The only choice we get is whether our children go prepared or unprepared.'

कथा 4

The Spirit That Spoke English

Dr. Sarah Chen was a medical anthropologist from the University of Edinburgh, conducting fieldwork on traditional healing practices in Sikkim in 2017. She had spent three months observing jhankri rituals across the state — recording, photographing, taking notes with the meticulous documentation that her discipline demanded. She was respectful, curious, and absolutely certain that what she was observing was performance rather than possession. The Jhakri entered an altered state of consciousness — she acknowledged that. The community believed spirits were present — she acknowledged that too. But spirits did not exist in her framework. Consciousness altered was her explanation. Cultural performance within a shared belief system. Nothing supernatural.

In her fourth month, she was invited to observe a ritual performed by an elderly Jhakri named Bir Bahadur in a village above Pelling. The patient was a young man who had stopped eating — not from physical illness but from what the family described as 'something sitting on his appetite.' Dr. Chen set up her recording equipment and took her usual position: back wall, unobtrusive, observing.

Bir Bahadur began drumming. The trance came quickly — the old jhankri's eyes rolled, his body swayed, his voice changed. He spoke in Nepali to the family, identifying the spirit causing the problem. Standard procedure. Dr. Chen took notes.

Then Bir Bahadur turned toward her. His eyes — or whatever was looking through his eyes — fixed on her. And the voice that came from his throat spoke in English. Clear, grammatically correct English with no Nepali accent. Bir Bahadur did not speak English. He had never left Sikkim. His education had been limited to primary school in the village.

The voice said: 'You are here to watch. But watching is not neutral. Your watching changes what happens. The spirits feel your doubt. Doubt is cold. It makes the room harder to work in. You may stay. But know that your presence has a temperature and the temperature is low.'

Dr. Chen's recording equipment captured the entire exchange. She listened to it seventeen times that night in her guesthouse. The voice was undeniably coming from Bir Bahadur's body. The English was fluent. The content was directly addressed to her — referencing her role as observer, her skepticism, her presence in the room. These were things a non-English-speaking elderly jhankri in trance should not have known how to articulate.

She included the incident in her published ethnography, framed carefully within academic conventions: 'an unexplained linguistic phenomenon during trance state, possibly indicating access to latent language capabilities or an as-yet-unexplained information transfer mechanism.' She did not claim spirits existed. But she stopped claiming she could fully explain what she had observed. The certainty was gone. In its place: a more honest uncertainty.

When she returned to Edinburgh, colleagues asked her whether she 'believed' in the spirits now. She said: 'I believe that something addressed me in a language its vessel did not know, and said things about me that required access to my inner state. Whether that is a spirit or something else — I cannot say. But I can no longer say it is nothing.'