Meera’s father was a quiet man. Until he wasn’t.
In the final years before his death, he became the village spectacle.
He’d wander barefoot through the market, his shoulders jerking and dancing, head bobbing slightly, like he was trying to shake something off. He would sit in a weird posture as if someone is sitting on him.
“It’s a spirit,” the priest muttered.
“There’s an aatma sitting on him—riding his back.”
The rumor spread faster than reason.
Children imitated him. Shopkeepers looked away. And Meera, then just a girl, would watch her father tremble as if battling something only he could feel.
When he died by suicide at 58, no one was surprised. After all, he was a bad omen for the village.
…But who was the aatma going to grab hold of next?
Meera, now 36, dropped a ladle into boiling dal and didn’t flinch.
Later that week, she walked out of the house wearing two different slippers—and didn’t notice.
When anything funny happened, she wouldn’t laugh. The girl once full of joy stayed in her room crying for reasons known only to her. Probably family issues? Probably a breakup? who knows…
She blamed tiredness. A few skipped meals. A bit of stress.
But her body told a different story.
Her neck twitched, then her shoulders, in that same eerie rhythm.
She began sitting oddly, slightly bent, like her father had—as if making space for someone riding her back.
She started whispering to herself.
She avoided mirrors.
She forgot the names of her own students—the ones she had taught for years.
“I feel it,” she said one night, gripping her husband’s hand.
“He’s back. The aatma… it’s riding me now.”
Her husband took her to the city. The doctors asked her to walk, to speak, to remember.
She forgot the year. She forgot her father’s name.
She cried through it all, her fingers tracing invisible shapes in the air.
The tests came. Normal blood work.
MRI—atrophy in the caudate nucleus.
What will you do?