Two hundred years is a long time to wander the site of a forgotten mass grave.

     In the earthly days of his most recent life, The Ghost had never imagined such an end as the one he’d suffered. He’d never imagined it because imagining one’s death rather missed the point of Samsara. Death was part of Samsara, that sacred transition between cycles of reincarnation when after a long karma mindful life, his family would burn his body at the Ganges and offer rice balls and flowers and chant mantras and usher him back to Deva Loka to await his next reincarnation. Instead, he had died a soldier in the Indian Army with his mouth and nostrils full of French trench mud, beard, scalp and groin seething with lice. He had died wet and cold only to be buried uncelebrated in an unmarked grave alongside English Christians and Tunisian Muslims. He had been buried, not burned, by men too traumatized by the scale of slaughter to know what to do with so many dead.

     In the beginning, tethered to that earthly body without cremation’s release, he had remembered his name and his history. Remembered the warm, black eyes of his mother. Remembered his father’s austere affection and stiff spine. The laughter of his little sisters. The scent of orchids and lotus at his eldest brother’s wedding. He had cried until he had laughed at the evenhandedness of Karma. In life he’d held family and friendship cheap, disdaining human connection for its messy entanglements. In death, he found himself condemned to solitude, unable to reach out to the living and cut off from even those who shared his fate. Sick with grief, he had wandered the black mud field beside the trench, paced and howled at the vast sky full of clouds too dense to glimpse stars through. He’d beat his fist on the Earth, rent his ghostly garments, cursed every God that he could name and sobbed for his family, and he did it all alone. Vainly, he called to the men who’d outlived him. He’d crouched beside them when they huddled against sandbags and wrote letters home by the feeble light of a match. He prayed beside them before combat, hoping their entreaties for safety and peace in the face of death would help him loose the bonds of his connection to the rotting prison in the grave so few feet from the mine pocked battlefield.

     As the years passed, memories, feelings, and impressions began to slip away. His mother’s features smeared like wet paint in his mind. His father’s figure withered to ash. The voices of his brothers and sisters faded to an insect’s drone. And around him, the prison burial ground began to change. Sun dried the mud. Green grass furred over the blackness and left behind a meadow splashed with wildflowers instead of blood. Buildings sprang up along the horizon like rows of smiling teeth. People came and went, lived and died, sprinting through the lonely ghost’s dimming consciousness like herds of fleet antelope. The unfamiliar world became more unfamiliar still, until all he knew was earth and sky and field.

     At first The Ghost’s grief left him angry and jealous of the lives streaming around him while he lingered, trapped by the prison of his un-cremated corpse. But as the flesh blackened, putrefied, and melted from his bones, as he watched lovers tangle under trees in the field that time forgot once played theater to war, as his spirit matured past its grief into acceptance, he could feel the peace of heaven extending its hand. Soon. Soon he would finally pass into the sacred realm of the Gods to await reincarnation.

     But just when he felt sure the spiritual bonds that held him were dissolved, two unexpected things happened. Strangers erected a rectangular block of concrete capped with a sheet of writing etched bronze. The block told the story of this field and its thousands of dead men beneath the ground, and it drew a stream of visitors. The mourning, the curious, and the strange. The strangest to The Ghost was a waif-like girl child with hair and skin the color of kheer but with lips and eyes painted ink black like the strange clothes she wore.

     The ghost who could no longer remember his own name and could barely remember why he yet wandered this patch of foreign land, stopped his wandering to watch the girl.

 

#

 

     Sam swung her backpack down from her shoulders and sat at the foot of the memorial. She drew her knees into her thin chest and leaned against the cool concrete. Beside her, she could feel the weight of her bag and its hidden purpose. Inside was a burden she’d brought along and whose use she’d not quite settled upon. Absently, she picked at the frayed holes in her jeans with her black fingernailed digits, giving bent to a subconscious need for destruction. Her throat felt swollen with the unspoken. Emotion clogged her windpipe as effectively as a snotty head cold, but she knew from experience nothing would shift it. She decided to scream anyway, just in case. Now her throat was sore, but the depression sat like a stone at the bottom of her soul, solid, fixed, immovable. She couldn’t remember what it had felt like to be happy.

     She placed her palm flat to the wall of the memorial and smoothed her hand along the stone. This is a reason to be sad, she told herself. Millions of people died, torn from their families and forgotten by a racist government who didn’t think they mattered enough to spend the money to send them home. It helped to take her mind off her own sadness to focus on other sadnesses. Tragedies not at all connected to her. Big events which rendered her insignificant and her morbid obsession with the output of her serotonin deprived brain a selfish trifle. She couldn’t remember how she had stumbled across this memorial to the vanished Indian regiment. According to the plaque, they had died in a bid to win independence from a Britain who had falsely promised to return India to its people’s governance after The Great War was won. But in the midst of her depression – or as her Aunt Claudette called it her “ingratitude for the life God gave her” – Sam had found the pathetic concrete pillar and become transfixed. Her reaction to this marker for scores of anonymous dead had coalesced into a single thought. I relate. She’d immediately retracted it. Relate? To a bunch of dead soldiers from the first world war who were from a country she’d never even seen and of whose culture she was completely ignorant outside the curry restaurant from which Aunt Claudette was forever ordering take-out? To what could she possibly relate?

     I relate to being uprooted. Shipped to France from small town Kansas after her parents’ death in a car accident, she’d arrived at her Church of God missionary Aunt Claudette’s door with a penchant for black nail polish and punk rock and found herself the immediate object of a campaign to “Purge her sinful upbringing.” Her Aunt had thrown away all of her make-up and burned the wardrobe, stripping her of her identity and masking her instead in blue jeans, turtlenecks, and jewel tones. No, the experience wasn’t the same as traveling thousands of miles from home to fight and die in a war she didn’t start, but on reading the memorial plaque’s story of the Indian soldiers’ conflict driven diaspora, she’d felt a twinge of kinship.

     I relate to being betrayed by someone who’s supposed to take care of you. Naming Aunt Claudette her legal guardian in the event of her parent’s death had been “Throwing the crazy bat a bone,” in her father’s words. Her mother had been more delicate and rephrased his joke to, “Including her in the family despite her decision to trapse off to an atheist country to go bible thumping.” When Sam had read the description of The British Empire’s treachery to these men, the kinship twinge had strengthened to bond.

     I relate to feeling invisible. Living in a foreign country had robbed her of all ties to the familiar. Gone were her oceans of wheatfields, replaced with forests of concrete decorated with tumorous eruptions of foliated carvings, arches, gargoyles, and dirty old glass. A language barrier rendered her stupid and friendless for being unable to speak French. And the forced adoption of boring, bland, “Modest, Christian clothing,” had robbed her of her identity as a rebel, the kooky chick. Her armor was gone, and she was open to a world who instead of despising her, did worse. They looked past her. She was invisible. Anonymous. She might as well be a ghost. It made her wonder if any of the soldiers commemorated by this lame plaque were ghosts too.

     As she sat with her palm flam to the cool stone, she tried to drum up hope that these scraps of imagined connection she’d felt upon discovering the memorial had meaning. But they were not enough. They couldn’t replace what she had lost. For two years, she’d mourned her parents and the life she’d lost along with them. For two years, she’d endured the change to her identity, and the meanness of Aunt Claudette. No amount of grieving for strangers and making their story about her could erase her sorrow. She gripped the zipper on her backpack and yanked at it, unable to continue to fight the sadness that stemmed from her trauma driven change in circumstances and the daily misery of having her only remaining human connection be with a woman who didn’t want her, didn’t like her, and felt free to emotionally abuse her in the name of righteousness.

     Sam reached into her backpack and retrieved a notebook and a pen. She bit the lid off, flipped open the cover, and began to write.

 

#

 

     The Ghost, more connected now to his astral body than the long vanished corpse of his former life, found himself able to read the words that the sad, whey colored girl was writing in her notebook.

 

                                                        Dear Aunt Claudette,

          If hell is real, I’ll see you there, you evil pig.

                          Your sister’s daughter,

                                    Sam

 

     Deep sadness and sympathy welled in The Ghost’s heart. She did not know. She did not understand. No one who understood the truth of Samsara could knowingly inflict such suffering upon herself and the ones she would leave behind. And so fruitlessly, for suicide would not relieve her suffering. She’d reincarnate in various lower forms until she reached this exact same spiritual maturity only to face the very same sorrow and misery for a new opportunity to make a different decision, to accrue different karma. Better karma that would guide her forward on the path toward enlightenment.

     The girl pulled a sharp, wicked looking knife from her bag, and The Ghost reached out fruitlessly, wishing with all his heart to stay her hand. She she cut the arteries at her thighs, then opened the veins in her wrists with vertical slashes from elbow to wrists. Witness to her violence, his soul wept for her.

     But as she died, The Ghost prayed. This ghost who had spent two hundred years imprisoned by his own untimely death, two hundred years alone and stripped of companionship, two hundred years accepting his fate and yearning for Deva Loka and release, this ghost prayed for the girl. He prayed to the Divine Mother, to Brahma, to The Divine Beloved, that instead of reincarnating into a better, more spiritually evolved body, that he might be reincarnated alongside the soul of this sad girl. That he might accompany her soul through the lower forms on its journey back to the state of sadness she had now abandoned. Let me, Gods of light and love and air and land, let me help her. And if not me, let her have a friend. Be merciful and let her soul not suffer overlong for its terrible deeds. Allow me to make this sacrifice and allow that deed to atone for us both and to lead us into a brighter future.

     When his prayer was finished, The Ghost looked upon the dead child. Then he looked up to see the girl’s soul standing beside him. He stretched out his hand to her and smiled. Her cheeks were streaked with black tears, but she smiled back.

​

The end.