The Lantern’s Last Light

The monsoon had retreated, leaving the earth steaming and the air thick with the smell of wet earth and rotting leaves. My mother, Rukhsana, was eight years old, and her family had converged on her grandmother’s homestead—a sprawling cluster of tin-roofed houses and outbuildings on the edge of a vast paddy field in rural Bengal. It was a reunion of sorts; cousins she’d never met, aunts and uncles who had migrated to the city and returned with stories of electric lights and trains, and the old grandmother, Amma, whose face was a map of wrinkles and whose eyes held the ancient wisdom of the village.

The farm was a world unto itself—mango and jackfruit trees encircled the main house, a bamboo grove rustled at the edge of the property, and beyond that, the dark mass of the forest loomed like a wall. At night, the darkness was absolute. The villagers relied on kerosene lanterns and clay oil lamps, whose fragile flames barely pushed back the blackness, creating small islands of light that seemed to make the surrounding dark even deeper.

Rukhsana’s favorite cousin was a boy named Imran, two years her senior, who lived in the city and was full of tales about electricity and moving pictures. They would sit on the veranda, watching the fireflies dance over the paddy, and Imran would tell her about the world beyond. But there was one story he refused to tell, one that the village children whispered about—the story of the ‘Bon Bibi’ and the ‘Kalu Rai’, spirits of the forest, and a local legend about a wandering soul that would appear to travelers on moonless nights.

One evening, as the family gathered for dinner, the conversation turned to the old days. Amma, rarely speaking, suddenly said, ‘I remember a time when our workers had a house at the edge of the forest. One night, they came running, saying they saw a figure—a woman in white—standing among the trees, calling out their names. They refused to go back, and we never kept workers there again. The house has been abandoned ever since.’ Laughter rippled through the adults, but Rukhsana noticed that some of the older ones exchanged uneasy glances.

That night, Rukhsana couldn’t sleep. The room was stuffy, and the moonlight trickled through the slats of the window. She slipped out of bed and tiptoed to the veranda, where she found Imran already there, staring at the dark line of the forest. ‘Do you believe it?’ she whispered. ‘The legend?’ Imran shrugged. ‘My grandmother told me that the woman was a bride who died on her wedding night, killed by her husband, and now she wanders, looking for her bridegroom. They say if she calls your name three times, you must never answer, or else she will take you with her.’ Rukhsana felt a chill despite the warmth.

Determined to prove the adults wrong, they decided to visit the abandoned house the next day. It was a half-collapsed structure of mud and thatch, with a rusted tin roof, hidden behind a thicket of banana plants. The inside was dim and smelled of decay. Dust and cobwebs covered everything. In the corner, they found an old lantern, its glass sooted and its metal corroded. On a whim, Imran lit it with a match he had stolen from the kitchen. To their surprise, the flame sputtered to life, casting eerie shadows that danced on the walls.

Suddenly, a sound came from outside—a low, mournful wail that seemed to echo through the trees. Imran extinguished the lantern, plunging them into darkness, and they pressed themselves against the wall, hearts pounding. The wail grew closer, and through the cracks in the wall, they saw a shape—tall, dark, and swaying—moving towards them. It stopped right outside the door, and a voice, soft and feminine, called out, ‘Imran… Imran… Imran…’

Frozen, Imran grabbed Rukhsana’s hand. ‘Don’t answer,’ he breathed. But then the voice changed, becoming his mother’s voice, pleading, ‘Imran, come home, it’s late.’ It was so real that Imran almost spoke, but Rukhsana clamped her hand over his mouth. The voice outside continued, now a child’s voice, ‘Let me in, it’s cold.’ Then it began to laugh—a high, tittering laugh that was utterly inhuman.

Terrified, they crept to the back of the house, where a small gap in the wall allowed them to slip out. They ran without looking back, crashing through the undergrowth until they reached the safety of the main house’s veranda. They collapsed there, panting, and when they finally told the adults, they were dismissed as having imagined it. But Rukhsana could not shake the feeling that something had followed them.

That night, she lay in bed, listening to the wind. At around midnight, she heard it—a soft knock on her window. She looked, and there, standing in the moonlight, was the figure from the forest—a woman in a white sari, her face obscured by darkness. The woman raised her hand and beckoned. Rukhsana’s mouth went dry. The woman began to move, walking around the house, her bare feet making no sound. When she passed the veranda, she paused, and Rukhsana saw her face clearly—it was her own reflection, but distorted, her mouth open in a silent scream.

Suddenly, the woman was inside the room, standing at the foot of the bed. Rukhsana tried to scream, but no sound came out. The woman leaned closer, and whispered, ‘You should not have lit the lantern.’ Then she vanished, leaving behind the smell of wet earth and a single drop of water on the floor.

The next morning, Rukhsana told her mother, but again, no one believed her. They thought she’d had a nightmare. But when they went to the abandoned house to retrieve the lantern, it was gone, as if it had never existed. And at the edge of the forest, they found something that chilled them all—a fresh grave, neatly dug, with no headstone, and a single white flower placed upon it.

From that day on, Rukhsana never slept near a window, and she never spoke of the lantern again. But sometimes, on moonless nights, she would wake to the sound of a woman calling her name, echoing from the depths of the forest, and she would cover her ears and pray that she would never hear the third call.