I wrote:...I asked my mother to retell a spooky story that she told me years ago that I had forgotten. Before I asked her, all I could remember was the setting and the power because she was told it by someone who had heard the story first-hand themselves, which is unique to me. Spooky stories normally seem invented by someone far removed, to me.
The story was told to my mother when she was a child by her paternal aunts, who lived with the family in their massive house in Hydrabad in Sindh (this is the house that I remember from when I visited, a great, dusty, dry, antique, but living beast, from which the family was sadly driven out of by riots a few years later). In the Sindhi village that the aunts grew up in was a midwife, who at the time of the story was in her mid to late thirties, with husband and children, the oldest son about 20 as she was married very young, as per custom. The story starts with one of my mother's aunts visiting the midwife as she had started to recover from a fierce fever that had almost killed her. My great-aunt must have heard some stories, and being a gossipy Sindhi no doubt wanted to poke her nose into what might have brought on the midwife's sudden sickness. The midwife obliged and told my great-aunt the following:
A week or so before, she heard a knock at the door, which she opened to see a very tall man. Very tall indeed, freakishly so. He politely asked her if she could accompany him on his horse and cart to his home, where his wife was about to give birth. Though she had never seen the odd looking man before, she was the only midwife (it was a small village), so she agreed, as it was sort of her duty as well as her job, and she climbed onto the cart with him. Pretty quickly into the journey, her nervousness increased, as she realised that she did not recognise where he was taking her, despite the fact that it was a small village, and basically all that she had known. The forest that they had entered was unfamiliar, and we all know how frightening forests can be even in normal circumstances. She kept quiet: faith in silent prayer is beautiful succour.
They arrived at a small house in a clearing, inside of which was the very tall man's wife, who looked normal. The midwife did her job, and the birth went extremely smoothly. The pregnant woman gave birth quickly and showed remarkably little pain or effort. What really disturbed the midwife, however, were the twins that were born. The midwife gave my aunt who gave my mother who gave me no other description than to say that they looked alien. The twins did not look human at all to midwife, but of course she could not say anything, and the very tall man thanked her and took her outside the shack, leaving the woman and her unusual children to rest.
"I must pay you," said the tall man.
The midwife nervously stuttered, "No, really, no need, this is just what I do, please don't bother yourself..."
"I insist," replied the man.
He then took the midwife's dupatta (her shawl) and gathered leaves from the ground, wrapped them inside the dupatta, then passed this package back to the woman. They went back on the cart, and at a certain point in the unfamiliar forest he stopped and told her, "Close your eyes and count to 200. When you open your eyes, you will know your way home."
Scared and bewildered, the midwife nodded, got off the cart, and then watched in amazement as the horse, the cart, and the tall man, disappeared to leave the forest to her wide eyes.
I click my fingers at this point, as dictated by charlatan storyteller tradition.
She could not count, the illiterate midwife, so she did not know for how long she kept her eyes closed. A pretty long time, anyway. When she opened them, sure enough she knew where she was. Terrified, she ran back home. At some point, maybe when she left the forest, she emptied the dupatta of the leaves. Hell, who can blame her? Weird leaves probably cursed by magic man. She arrived back at her home where her husband and eldest son looked at her with surprise. Why so pale, out of breath, wide-eyed and gasping? And what has just fallen out of your dupatta? Wow! Where did you get that from?
She looked down: one leaf had not been shaken out by her, and of course instead of a leaf lying on the floor there was a bright gold coin. Seeing this, she fainted and fell into the fever which lifted just before my great-aunt's visit.
Woo! Spooky! My aunts told my mum this story many times, she says, and her father, a doctor, a sceptic, a rational man of science, was moved to comment, "Rubbish! If that was true, why didn't they show everyone the gold coin? Where the fuck is the gold coin?!?"
An eloquent man, my grandfather.
I'm pretty sure that this is a variation on a common theme (particularly leaves turning into gold), but still, it is nice to have heard this family folk-tale.