The ghosts have had enough OFFBEAT

Bhooter Bhabishyat 2 is being made, it is reliably learnt. The project is being kept under wraps because when it comes to ghosts, you never know. If they see trouble, they can cast a spell. Then that will be the end of the project.

For the benefit of those unfortunate souls who have not kept track of popular Bengali cinema, the original rib tickler, Bhooter Bhabishyat, was a great hit in 2012 and made a name for its greenhorn director. It was the story of the existential crisis that had suddenly loomed before a group of ghosts who had made their home in a palatial haunted house. A wellheeled property developer had launched on a project to break down the huge house and build a shopping mall.

If this happened then where would the poor ghosts go? Meanwhile an aspiring filmmaker who wants to use the house to make an ad film comes looking. His aim in life is, of course, to make a full length feature film but he does not have the finances. He dozes off while looking around the house and a friendly ghost tells him their story. The ghosts hit upon an idea. They scare the daylights (at night, of course) out of the property developer, thus restoring their home to themselves, find the money for the film-maker who eventually makes his feature film on the story of these ghosts.

Bhooter Bhabishyat 2 takes off from there. Time has passed, the ghosts have got much older. (Don’t ask me how ghosts age but in this case they do.) Then the inevitable happens, an aged ghost, a patriarch of sorts, dies and now has no option but to leave for narak or hell (after all, swarg or heaven will not admit ghosts who had remained in limbo on earth for some reason or the other).

The ghosts are hugely upset that a leading city nursing home turned away their elderly fellow member because they said they couldn’t admit a ghost as, forget everything else, the young nurses from Kerala would get scared and run away. Then all the other patients would have to go away, too. If the old ghost had received timely modern medical intervention then he would surely have lived a little longer.

So the ghosts bid a tearful goodbye to their old friend and get ready to organise an elaborate puja for the shanti of his atma so that he could end the life of a ghost. But, would you believe it, the old ghost is back in a couple of days, looking even more forlorn and ill than before. What had happened? It seems Yamraj had turned him away because he could not produce his Aadhaar card and establish his identity.

The old ghost tried his level best to explain that a ghost cannot get an Aadhaar card because he has no real form or shape that can be captured in a biometric scan. This set of ghosts had all died as humans and turned into ghosts before this Aadhaar business had begun.

As if this was not bad enough, what was truly upsetting to the old ghost was the treatment meted out to a cow which was in the queue behind him. The cow also did not have an Aadhaar card as, it explained, the proposal to issue Aadhaar cards to cows had been made but not yet implemented. Yamraj made an inquiry and found this to be true.

But the cow had its own problem too. Yamraj told the cow that it could not be admitted into narak because the cow was a goddess, Bhagwati, and should go to swarg. The poor cow said it had done so already but had been turned away from the gates of heaven because it had died an unnatural death and been turned into a ghost.

It seems the cow had gouged a human to death and the villagers in rage had killed the cow. Then the high council of narak held a special meeting and decided that since it was the ghost of a fallen cow and so not a devi, and since not possessing an Aadhaar card was not its fault, the cow would be admitted.

The ghosts were furious and decided to teach humans a lesson, like they did with the property developer. They would one evening raid the Aadhaar card issuing office (these day they worked till 8 pm), scare everybody away, give themselves cards with stolen biometric details and be gone before a doubtful police force from the local thana came to look for them. That way they would end their existence in limbo and become bona fide residents of the haunted house. But how would they sign for the cards when the Speedpost staff came to deliver them during daytime?

To find out what happened in the end, wait for Bhooter Bhabishyat 2, as and when it comes.