Narrative Record

Ramkhelawan Dubey, age forty-three, irrigation clerk of the Phulpur Canal Sub-Division, reported this incident on the morning of 4 September 1961 to the tehsildar's office and again, at length, to this researcher two days later. He had been cycling home along the Tons river embankment road past Chandmari Crossing at approximately half past ten at night — the sky fully dark, the new moon absent, the air still wet from an afternoon rain that had left the road surface pale and reflective under his lantern. He had dismounted to adjust his cycle chain near the large pipal tree at the crossing when he heard a woman's voice, low and unhurried, speak the name Munna — the milk-name his mother had used until her death in childbirth when he was eleven years old, a name he had shared with no one in Phulpur. When he raised his lantern, he saw a figure standing perhaps eight yards away: a woman in a white cotton sari, hair loose, and her feet — this is the detail he returned to three separate times in his account — oriented so that the heels faced him and the toes pointed away, toward the river, though her body faced him directly. She spoke the name a second time, then was quiet.