When I was a kid and growing up in Ajmer, I remember my granny telling me about the ‘witch’ living in the neighborhood. I must have been around five or six at the time. There were plenty of kids my age at the time living in our narrow lane. Those times were different. Everyone knew everyone else and very few people used to lock their houses. We would all gather together after school and play either in someone’s house or just in the street. Nearly everyone on that street worked in the Railways and most people could trace their ancestry so that there would be a common relative. No parent would ever worry about their child’s whereabouts, ever! I remember all of us eating at someone’s house together and then going off to sleep there. In the morning we all would find ourselves in our own beds. Sometime in the night, some grown-up would carry and drop us off at the correct houses. It was not a big deal and no one ever came looking after us.
Anyway, I never got to know the name of that woman everyone called a witch. She lived quite a ways away from our street. Her place was too far for us to go anywhere near it for play or purpose, it was another world. We knew our own limits. But to get to her own house, she had to go by our street. The main road leading to the town was close to our street. I was too small to be told why the woman was labeled a witch except the warning from granny that witches eat children. Every kid on my street knew her and as soon as she’s come walking by, we’d all run and hide like scared rabbits. That is what we were told to do. We were warned against teasing her or calling her name because she might come during the night when we were sleeping and steal our livers. And we would die.
We knew about death since ours was a old street and every family living in it was a joint family. Both old and young lived together and had done so for generations. So people dying was common place. Though I was too small at the time to be allowed to go to anyone’s cremation, I knew that it was a bad place and people who went there after death never came back. No mom, dad or any friends, it was a bad thing to die and be taken to the cremation grounds.
What we were told by our elders about witches was very simple. Don’t throw out any hair, nails or underclothes with the rest of the trash. They had to be properly disposed off, which usually meant burnt. If a witch, either male or female, ever got hold of these, they could control you with them by going to the cremation ground late in the night and performing magic rituals. We were terrified of that. The fastest way to tell witches apart was by their walk. Their feet were backwards, so they had to walk with a jump. They could not walk smoothly. And this woman did walk with a jump; she bobbed along and always wore a long black skirt scraping the ground so we would not be able to see her feet. And we never did. But to this day I remember her walk.
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