None of us was ever able to confirm whether she was a witch or not, nor have I ever found proof that they do exist but it was a story that stayed with me all these years. I never found out if the tale was to keep us kids in check or if my granny really did believe it. But this was just one of the many she used to tell us. Not all were magic and myth, some really made all of us think and except for these dark tales, most of her stories had a solid base in morality. Granny passed away about twelve years back but many of her stories have stayed in my mind.
There was a English graveyard across the street in the locality where I grew up in Ajmer. This was an ancient remnant of the Raj. In the days of the British, Ajmer was a hub for the railways and many of its offices and manufacturing was done there. Because of that there were a lot of resident British nationals during their rule in India. When they died, this was the graveyard they were buried in. Many of those buried there were influential people and their gravestones were simply awesome – almost all of them carved from spotless white marble. I remember some of them were more than ten feet high. Intricate angels, goliath crosses and huge mausoleums – all arranged in perfect rows and maintained to perfection.
Hindus don’t really have much to do with graves so we were never scared of the graveyard by itself. Our main ghosts and demons came from the cremation grounds and since that was several miles away from my place, evil was more of a direction than a location. And yet there were stories about the graveyard that I came to know much later, twenty years later as a matter of fact. The last time I had visited Ajmer was more than ten years back when I got married and as per the tradition, the bride visits the ancestral home of the groom soon after marriage. We had gone there for about two or three days after I got married and it was only for the traditional ceremony of praying before the family well (water-well). It was still another ten years before that I had last visited Ajmer prior to my marriage and a lot of family and friends had gotten together for the occasion. Many of the stories about the graveyard, now abandoned but still there in entirety, reached my ears for the first time in my life.
While the women happily chatted away with Swati in my ancestral home, I had sat late in the night with old friends outside on the front porch overlooking the graveyard. Though none of the graves had been defiled by people, many years of neglect had left very few graves intact. The funding to maintain the grounds dried up eventually and it was left to weather the neglect of time. The community of Indian Christians living in Ajmer have their own separate graveyards. The majority of the damage to this one has been caused by monsoons when huge gusts of wind and lightening break some of the heavier branches from the thousands of very tall neem trees planted on the grounds. Many of these fall on the graves and while few years of natural exposure to the elements and worms turns those branches into dust, the broken headstones and mausoleums have remained.
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