The Persistent Flicker

The first time I noticed it, I was reading a novel on the couch, the one with the worn spine and the tea stain on page forty-two. It was the third week of October, and the musty smell of monsoon rain had finally subsided, replaced by the crisp hint of approaching winter. The apartment on the third floor of the newly built complex on S.N. Banerjee Road was still fresh with paint, the walls a sterile white that made the rooms feel larger, colder. We had moved from Mumbai barely three months prior, and the city of Kolkata, with its trams and its intellectual fervor, was still an enigma to us.

But on that particular evening, as I turned a page, the overhead light in the living room—a simple, modern LED fixture that we had installed ourselves—began to flicker. Not a subtle dimming, but a stark, rhythmic stutter, like a dying fluorescent tube. I looked up, expecting to see a faulty wiring, a common issue in new buildings. The flickering stopped the moment my eyes locked on the bulb. I shrugged and resumed reading, but the moment I lowered my gaze, the light started again. It was as if it was demanding attention.

My father, who had been in the kitchen brewing chai, came out with two cups. He saw the flickering and frowned. ‘That bulb is faulty,’ he said, and he was right to think so. The next day, he replaced it with a brand new one, a more expensive model that promised a lifetime of steady light. For two days, it held. Then, on the third night, as I was preparing for bed, the hall light began its erratic dance once more, a staccato of bright and dark that threw my shadow across the walls in broken pieces. My father called the building’s electrician, a wiry man named Mr. Ghosh, who spent an hour with a multimeter, checking every junction in the hall and the first bedroom. He emerged with a shrug. ‘The wiring is perfect,’ he declared, ‘No fluctuations. Maybe there’s a ghost!’ He laughed, but we did not.

The flicker became a companion. It was not confined to the night; it happened during the day, too, when sunlight streamed through the windows and made the artificial light seem redundant. It was as if the light was trying to tell us something, and I began to feel a strange unease that I could not name.

The second occurrence was more subtle, but infinitely more disturbing. Our refrigerator, a sturdy LG model that had served us in Mumbai for years, began to hum a new tune at night. It was a low, guttural drone, almost like a chant, that seemed to vibrate through the floorboards. At first, I thought it was the compressor, old and worn. But the pitch was too low, too human. I would lie in bed, listening to it, and I would swear the sound was coming from the kitchen, not the appliance itself. My mother swore she saw the kitchen door slowly swinging on its own one evening, despite there being no draft. The door had a firm latch, and it would not move without force.

Then, the doors began to shift in the first bedroom—the one next to the hall. We used that room mostly for storage, boxes of our old life in Mumbai, unopened and collecting dust. I would hear, in the dead of night, a soft click and the whine of a door moving on unoiled hinges. The first time, I assumed it was a rat, but the sound was too deliberate, too rhythmic. I would get up, heart thumping, and find the door closed as it should be. I decided to test it: I closed it firmly, then returned to my bed, my eyes fixed on the door. For a few minutes, nothing. Then, ever so slowly, the door began to swing open, just an inch, before stopping. It was as if a ghostly hand was resting on the knob, hesitating. I did not sleep that night.

The most unnerving event, however, happened a week ago. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the city was buzzing with the sounds of a football match from a nearby television. My sister, Mita, was playing with her dolls in the living room, humming a Bengali rhyme. Suddenly, she stopped and looked up, her eyes wide. ‘Baba, the lights are talking,’ she said, her voice a whisper. I laughed, trying to brush it off. ‘It’s just the flicker,’ I said. ‘No,’ she insisted. ‘They are saying my name.’ I felt a chill run down my spine. That night, I decided to stay up, to catch whatever was happening.

I sat in the dark of the hall, the only illumination coming from the moon through the balcony window. The kitchen door was slightly ajar, a sliver of blackness. The minutes crawled by. Then, I saw it. A faint, almost imperceptible shimmer in the air near the light fixture, like heat rising from a road, but there was no heat. The shimmer moved, slowly, towards the bedroom door. As it passed, the door creaked open. I held my breath. The shimmer vanished, and then the hall light flickered once, twice, three times, and went out completely. The silence that followed was profound, broken only by the distant rumble of a tram.

A voice, thin and reedy, as if from a great distance, whispered, ‘Let me out.’ I froze. It was not a voice I recognized, not any of my family’s. I fumbled for my phone, switched on the flashlight, and shone it around the room. Nothing. The air felt heavy, and the light, when I finally managed to turn it back on, was steady. But the words remained etched in my mind.

The next morning, my father, ever the pragmatist, called a local exorcist, a man named Baba Pradeep, who was rumored to have dealt with such matters before. He arrived with a bundle of incense and a bell, his eyes sharp and skeptical. He walked through the house, muttering prayers, and paused at the storage room. He turned to us with a grim face. ‘There is a connection here,’ he said, pointing to the ground. ‘This building was not built on an empty plot. There was an old madrasa here, a school for orphans. Many children died in a fire decades ago. Their spirits may not have found peace.’ I felt a cold knot in my stomach. The truth was, the building had a hastily covered burial pit, the workers who laid the foundation had discovered old bones, but they were just thrown away, considered rubbish.

Baba Pradeep conducted a small ritual, lighting camphor and reciting mantras. He left with a promise that the disturbances would cease. But they did not. The flicker persisted, the doors continued their stealthy openings, and last night, I woke to see a shadow in the corner of my room, it seemed to be a child, its hand reaching towards me. I screamed, and it vanished when my father burst in.

We are now desperate. We cannot move; we have nowhere to go. And so, I am writing this, hoping that someone out there might understand. The light is flickering right now as I type. The kitchen door is clattering. I think I hear a soft, singsong voice, calling, ‘Mita… Mita…’ And I am terrified that one day, my sister will answer.