And now the ghost gets real ghostly. 'Jokhini and the Princess' is the first story out of my speculative collection, Berserk Banshees, to be published. The title story, Berserk Banshee, should be finally out next month.
Jokhini is an assamese female ghost who lives in trees. Women with unfulfilled desires become jokhinis when they die, so it's totally me. But my jokhini is very nice and doesn't kill anyone. So, I am honoured, flattered etc etc etc to actually have this in the Fiction Special of The Bangalore Review. The editor, Sucharita Dutta-Asane has truly taken a lot of pains with it. You can find it here.
Jokhini and the Princess
Jokhini the ghost was stark naked. She hid herself among the branches of the huge, sprawling tree on the left lawn of the castle. The vines of this crooked-branched tree that straddled the castle wall were known to bewitch people, like intoxicating wine. The tree was partly in the castle premises, partly out. Just like Jokhini. She couldn’t decide what she was, where she was. She had lived all her life in the castle until her banishment. She had another favourite tree in the castle grounds, a kachnar that scattered its pink and cream petals on the ground in hordes.
Jokhini’s hair was an unruly, uncontrollable mass, like a million long curvy wires. Her kohled eyes were deep black. But Jokhini was not always called Jokhini. Before her death, she was called Ivy, the daughter of the gardener who tended the palace grounds. Ivy had been in deep, obsessive, lifelong love with Princess Wisteria. But her love found no response from the princess; her efforts were in vain. So, she consumed the poisonous Wisteria flowers and turned into a ghost. The walls on the right-hand side of the castle were covered in wisteria, in honour of the princess, of course. How could a castle where Princess Wisteria lived not have wisteria flowers? Ivy had found it very apt that the wisteria flowers had killed her. Had she not died for Princess Wisteria after all?
The legend goes that women who die with unfulfilled desires turn into Jokhinis. They live in trees and can kill men with their eyes. But Jokhini loved women, not men. She was in love with the princess, had always been, but she did not want to kill her.
Ivy was autistic, her passions and emotions intense and obsessive. Her love for Wisteria continued to grow even when she had no direct contact with the princess. She had loved the princess for years and years and years. They played together as children, and later, when they grew up, she tried to be friends with the princess. She would give her little gifts and plan joyful surprises. Initially, Wisteria seemed to bask in the attention lavished on her. Occasionally, she would hand over a chocolate to the girl who doted on her. This was until the princess developed the consciousness that she was a princess, until she started having evening parties and young princes as visitors. She had her personal maid-in-waiting, and the gardener’s daughter was not offered this post. According to the princess, Ivy was too clingy, she overstepped her boundaries, and did not know her place. She complained to the king that Ivy was stalking her, and the king banished Ivy from the castle grounds.
Ivy was mortified. There was so much she wanted to talk to the princess about, so many carefully decorated bouquets that she wanted to give her. A rose of a different colour everyday of her life. But the princess had crushed and crumpled her as if she were a fallen petal.
Ivy and Princess Wisteria both had the enchanting powers of the vines of the villa. Ivy’s power was to cling and climb and she tried to attach herself to Wisteria by clinging to her. Wisteria had the power of royal purple beauty and her bountiful blossoms were quite irresistible. Ivy spread and covered the entire wall with her leaves in her efforts to gain entry into the Villa. Her heart-shaped leaves glowed with her love for the princess and her attachment to the castle. How they attempted to cling on to both for dear life! The Royal Purple Wisteria hung in wreaths, drooping under their own weight and falling to the ground. Some of Ivy’s leaves were purple too.
Ivy and Princess Wisteria both had the capacity to be poisonous. Indeed, they were poisonous to each other by turns.
Ivy yearned to make peace with the princess. She would wait outside the castle to see if the princess would come out. Did the princess like her a little bit, she wondered? But the princess came out rarely. When she did, she was accompanied by a retinue of courtiers and soldiers. She took it as further stalking by Ivy if she found the gardener’s daughter lying in wait for her outside the castle grounds and immediately complained to her father, again.
Ivy had always lived in the castle. The castle seemed to send out little tendrils to bind Ivy to itself, tethering her to its wall. Now, deprived of her beloved castle, she missed her favourite, sprawling trees. Finding herself abandoned by the castle, unable to make peace with the princess, and consumed by her own intense passion, which grew despite being spurned, Ivy consumed the poisonous wisteria flowers and killed herself.
She returned as Jokhini.
As Jokhini too, she finds herself bound to the castle walls, the tendrils reaching out of the very wall to bind her to itself. As if in response, an umbilical cord jutting out of her stomach attached itself to the castle’s trees and wall. Now she stayed among the branches of her beloved trees, but she could not step onto the grounds of the castle. The king had ordered his wizards to place such a magic enchantment on the castle grounds that Jokhini could not set foot there, even after death. She could hide in the trees, but she was too scared to live in them.
So, Jokhini lived in a forest near the castle. It was easy to hide there. She only visited the castle trees sometimes. She had the ability to fly in short spurts, although she could not fly much. When she laughed, the trees would madly wave their leaves and branches and there were strong winds. When she sighed, it became rainy and stormy. The ability to control the weather helped her hide herself.
Jokhini’s umbilical cord, jutting out of her stomach, was the remnant of the clinging power she had had as Ivy, made of her own flesh. It connected her metaphorically to Princess Wisteria with whom she had an intense oedipal attachment. Part of the reason for Ivy’s intense attachment to Princess Wisteria was that she played too many roles for Ivy — a romantic role, a mother-role, perhaps even a goddess-role. Ivy seemed to worship Princess Wisteria and the very ground she walked on. If the Princess was averse to a romantic connection, Ivy didn’t mind being her sister either—they had grown up together after all. Anything to find a connection with the princess. Anyhow.
The umbilical cord helped her tie herself to the tree branches so she didn’t fall off. The very trees of the villa mothered her, the trees she had clung to and swung from ever since she was a little girl. Once she was secure with the cord, she could spend hours in the trees, cackling and laughing and moaning and changing the weather as she wished. She could watch people for hours. Sometimes, she would swoop down and take away their hats, or drop tree branches on their heads, or howl with heartbreak. Terrified, people would look here and there, upwards and villa-wards, then towards the villa gates, or blankly and vacantly at the huge grounds. Or in the forest, she would drop apples on their heads, or oranges, peaches, mangoes. An empty bird’s nest, if she wished. She could make hooting owl sounds or cackling witch sounds or buzzing sounds, or any other sound that she wished to make.
Lying there, she would dream. She would dream of somehow getting a chance to speak to the princess. Even if the princess spurned her, she would get a few beautiful moments. She dreamt of the days when she and the princess had been young and played together. In childhood, they had been friends, before the princess came of age and began to feel that the gardener’s daughter was crossing boundaries and not sticking to her rightful place. Ivy would design special bouquets for her every day and hide love notes in them. She would be the princess’s personal escort till the outhouse or the swimming pool, or like the maid-in-waiting, who would attend on her during her morning and evening walks. She would cling to the princess as only Ivy could. The fact was that Ivy didn’t always know where to set boundaries and draw the line. She was spontaneous and did as she pleased. But the princess was alarmed.
Jokhini dreamed of going inside the castle and sitting with the princess. She yearned for the princess to know that she was out there, hiding in the trees. She wished it hadn’t come to this, that she didn’t have to die for her passions. Sometimes she was tempted – should she serenade the princess under the window? Leave anonymous strings of bouquets? She was still as much in love as ever and secretly nursed hopes that sometimes the princess remembered and missed her too.
Now, when Jokhini would visit the villa, something strange would happen. The vines would clutch Jokhini and not let her go. Her umbilical cord would cling to the branches. But Jokhini dared visit the castle grounds only for short periods, or perhaps at night, or whenever she managed to kick up a storm. Leaving the castle was painful for her because inevitably she would find herself tied by the umbilical cord to the tree branches. She never tied it herself. She did not realise how it tied itself. As if she were a daughter of the trees, of the villa. Would that make her the princess’s sister? Leaving the castle meant cutting the cord, breaking it each time. It was incredibly painful.
Now, Jokhini was forever in restless search and longing because her dreams had remained unfulfilled, and so she decided that the only way to satisfy her desires was to become the princess, the only way she could stay connected with the princess, even if indirectly. For this, she needed to use the Doppelganger potion. The Doppelganger potion, something like the Polyjuice Potion, was made of snakeskins and lizard tails, some moonshine, and the nectar of a particular kind of blue flower. The potion required something else too – a part of the person you wanted to turn into.
Now, this was really difficult. Jokhini collected all the ingredients and hid them away in the woods where she lived, where she had a large pot that served as a cauldron. Now Jokhini faced a seemingly insurmountable task: to find the princess. She kept creating stormy rains during nights in the hope of somehow trapping and waylaying the princess in order to snip off some of her hair.
***
A couple of years after Ivy’s banishment and subsequent suicide, the princess fell in love with a young prince of the neighbouring county. The prince was going away on a long journey and wanted to bid the princess goodbye. As he made his way to the castle on horseback, the weather suddenly turned stormy; there was little he could do about it.
Jokhini saw the princess walking underneath her tree. She followed the princess. She saw her walk down to a small side gate in the castle grounds. She was going to meet the prince, and she was doing this surreptitiously! The king must have told her not to go out in this stormy night. There were wild winds, thunder, and lightning. Branches from some of the trees on the grounds crashed down. But the princess hurried on. She had to meet the prince one last time before he left. He would be gone for ten months. She was going to give him a little souvenir to remember her by. She had to meet him in private; her father would be enraged that he had come in this weather. She had looked forward to a stroll with him in the castle grounds but that seemed difficult now.
The princess let the prince in and ushered him into a nearby pavilion. Jokhini watched from the branches of a nearby tree. She saw the prince unwrapping a small rainbow-coloured package. “Oh, darling,” the prince said, “I got these for you. One for every month I’ll be gone.” Ten rings – gold, platinum, silver rings studded with rubies, emeralds and diamonds. “This is an amazing gift,” she heard the princess say. “I shall wear all ten of them on my ten fingers at once.”
Then it was the princess ‘s turn. “I made these for you,” she smiled a little coyly. She had knitted and embroidered for him ten neckties and ten handkerchiefs. “Remember me when you use them,” she said.
Jokhini burned with jealousy. Suddenly, she spied something and the strangest expression of wonder mixed with hope spread across her face. She smiled, the smile widening until it creased her face. She tried to get as close as she could. The umbilical cord still tied her to the tree branches but she could try to stretch herself as much as possible without revealing herself. Lo and behold, out of all the handkerchiefs and neckties Princess Wisteria had embroidered for her beloved, one handkerchief and one necktie for the month of June were covered in ivy. June was Ivy’s birth month.
Ivy was stunned. She still burned with jealousy but her mouth was suddenly dry. Princess Wisteria remembered her after all? Princess Wisteria did not hate her?
Overwhelmed with emotion, she failed to notice when the prince had departed. Princess Wisteria was already on her way back to the castle. Now was Jokhini’s chance. Perhaps her only chance.
She leaped back to her original tree, a tad more lithely, blithely. When the princess passed underneath it, her long hair got entangled in the tree branches. The princess tugged, but she was unable to free her hair. The storm raged on. The princess was scared, her eyes filled with panic. “Someone save me!” she cried out, but nobody heard her in the dark and stormy night. Deftly, Jokhini tied the princess’s hair to the tree and cut off a length. That would be enough for the Doppelganger potion. She did not intend to harm the princess. Those wiry black curls, so like Jokhini’s own, were enough for a lifetime. A souvenir of the princess. Nimbly, she cut loose the princess’ hair from the branch.
Finding herself suddenly free, the princess was unable to understand the bewildering experience. What was she to tell the king? That she had gone out in the stormy night when he had told her not to and had her hair cut by some strange, unfathomable experience? The king was not likely to believe such a story.
Yet, the very next day, the king gave orders for the palace grounds, the air and all the trees to be searched for any kind of spirits. There was a spell by which the air could be protected from flying spirits, but it was a complicated spell. It could backfire, and if that happened, everything would be destroyed.
If there was any suspicion in the princess’s mind that Ivy might have returned as some kind of ghost or spirit, she said nothing about it to her father.
Meanwhile, what happened to Jokhini?
She ran back to the woods with her amassed wealth of hair. It would be a very long time before she decided to visit again, though she sometimes perched on her favourite tree that straddled the wall. Jokhini called it her Forever Home. From there, the possibility of seeing the princess always existed.
Who was to say whether she was inside the castle or outside, insider or outsider? The tree trunk was inside but its branches spread out wide. There, she proceeded to undergo a penance of sorts.
She had internalised the princess’s rejection of her and bitterly regretted the actions that had led to her banishment. She would slap herself, prick herself with tree thorns, force herself to drink bitter concoctions brewed from the leaves and flowers, burn herself with the flame lightning she herself created. Perhaps the greatest task of all was not to shriek out or cry while pricking or burning herself. She could not afford to make so much as a sound or a whimper while she was in the tree that straddled the castle wall. This was her penance. Partly her masochism. She would slither along the tree branches rubbing her clitoris along them. This was her measure of self-control.
Back in her forest, she could howl and wail as much as she wished.
She set to work to make the Doppelganger potion which would turn her into the princess. Her thoughts and emotions, however, would still remain hers. She could look and dress like the princess and derive pleasure and peace from it. She had the wealth of the princess’s hair that she had carefully stored in a secret place. Tied to the princess and the villa through hair and umbilical cords and ivy vines, through her fantasies she tried to quench the intensity of her passions. She had managed it all quite successfully.
She shuddered to think of what might happen if the King and Princess Wisteria had any idea that Ivy had tried to enter the Villa. Innately honest, she had to practise this deception for now. She wondered if she could ever reveal to the princess that she had entered the castle and that she had cut her hair and had seen the ivy-embroidered handkerchief and tie. Could she ever risk that? Did Princess Wisteria have any inkling of what had just happened? That Ivy had just taken away her hair as well as the knowledge of a precious secret? Would she ever know what Ivy intended to do with the hair? What would happen if she and Princess Wisteria came face-to-face, whether by accident or design?
