#sayance

14

Medium: Watercolor on watercolor paper and photoshop.

I’ve been trying to catch up with my illustrations. Sometimes I have difficulty putting the idea I have in my head onto paper. This is one of those times. I could have done a much much better job.

When I tell people about my stories from school, they usually look at me in disbelief. I tell them about how I sucked honey out of the stems of certain flowers, played sports barefoot, and that one scar on my shin came from falling and grazing my leg against the sand pit. Those stories, of course, are believable. However when I tell them that we had a panther that killed off the pet dogs, and that some of the fruit groves were destroyed by elephants, and that in the himalayas, I had to cross a freshly melted glacier, they commend me on my imagination.

I follow these stories with an explanation. My school was a 110 acre forest that was used as an elephant corridor. When the school first got the land, it was barren, but years of tree planting had made it a beautiful forest with fruit groves, lakes, and thick bushes. They took us on long trips every year, showing us different parts of the country, and giving us stories that would last us a lifetime.

When we were seventeen, and in twelth standard, our school took us to a camp in Dandeli. Dandeli is a town in the northern part of Karnataka. After a day of white water rafting, and swimming, we sat around a bonfire, exhausted. We sang some songs, ate some food, and slowly began to filter away into smaller groups to talk about nothing in particular.

As we were talking, the topic of ghosts and spirits came up. People talked about Ouija boards, and mediums who call spirits. Personally, I don’t believe in ghosts and spirits. When people tell me about haunted houses, it only makes me want to visit it. A lot of my friends thought the same way. But the rest of my friends believed that spirits were not to be disturbed. They believed that if you awoke for spirit for no reason, it would have a terrible effect on your life. They told us that the spirits were best left alone.

Half an hour o arguing later, we non-believers decided that we would prove to the believers that spirits didn’t exist by calling a spirit of our own. We had all heard plenty of stories on how to call on spirits. It was not going to be difficult. We marched into a room, and sat in a circle. We yelled “coward” at our believer friends who decided to stay out of the room. We then put off all the lights and lit a couple of candles. We held each other's hands, and a friend volunteered to call on the spirit. She closed her eyes and called on a spirit. She called out loud to a spirit to let us know if he or she was there. She called over and over again. Then she would pause, and call again.

Two minutes later I was bored. It was dark, and my friend’s mellow, monotone voice was making me fall asleep. I looked across the room to see another friend rolling her eyes. She was bored too. We were wondering how much longer we would have to do this before we finally gave up and decided once and for all that there was no such thing as spirits. We looked around the room, to ensure that everyone was feeling the same way. Many people were looking sleepy.