Vanished Supernatural Beings
By Shaphalya Amatya
EVERY body has sometimes in their life might have experienced some thing which is very difficult to believe. If some of us have not had such experiences it was just our luck nothing else. My uncle has told me several times that my father had frequent fights with the Khyak or a supernatural being in our old house at Joreganesh Tole in early forties.
My mother has also told us this story many times. According to them, in those fights some times my father was defeated and he was kicked out of the room and sometimes the Khyak disappeared. The Khyaks had hey days till the beginning of the regular supply of electricity in the Kathmandu Valley. In my maternal uncle's house at Ombhal Tole many of us have seen the Khyaks coming out of the store room and walking along the open verandas. During my school days I used to sleep in the next room of that store, once I have seen a pair of the Khyaks about three to four feet tall entering into that room. They looked like the shadow of some woolly brown ape. After seeing them I found myself little intoxicated and I slept immediately. Believe it or not the Khyaks disappeared from the house of once the grain store could not reserve enough paddy after the introduction of land reforms in the country.
In the kitchen of our house at Ombhal frequently at mid night we used to hear some sound as if some one was cooking the food. We heard on numerous occasions the sound of utensils, and pots. Some times it sounded like they were pouring water from the jar and arranging plates to serve food. But when electricity became regular we did not hear these mysterious sounds.
The people of Kathmandu Valley believe in different types of Khyaks. Generally they were covered with long woolly hair. They lived in dark rooms. Some of them were good-natured and guard granary and treasury. They are depicted in pictures alongside the Goddess of wealth Laxmi, with a bag full of money in their hands. The most impressive stone image of a pair of the Khyaks can be seen at the temple of Mahakali in Bholachhen Tole, Bhaktapur belonging to the seventeenth century.
It was in the year 1951/1952 I was a young boy studying in class four. I used to sleep in a room just next to the worshipping room in the house of my maternal uncle. The entrance door of the worshipping room and my room stood face to face. Once at mid night I got up suddenly by the sound of a bell which my grand mother used to ring every morning while worshipping. But to my surprise what I saw inside the worshipping room was an old lady exactly looked like my granny. But when I tried to open the door of my room suddenly that lady figure vanished. It was not yet the morning and I was so terrified that I got sick and could not get out of the bed for weeks. When I described the scene to the elderly ladies of the family they told me that it was the spirit of the grand mother of my mother. It was told to me that the spirits of the dead ones were likely to return to their homes and do their favourite household chores.
Whether it was a coincident or not I can not say but it is true that I encountered all these supernatural beings at the house of my maternal uncle at Ombhal Tole.
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http://www.gorkhapatra.org.np/risingnepal/archives/2002/August/15/editorial.htm
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