On the last night of the blasted year just past, I suddenly woke up because I thought I heard a noise at the door: knock or whistle. I could not tell what hour it was. I stumbled downstairs to check my garden door and then my front door. Had I dreamt it? The whistle was a wild wind. The knock – it was someone, or something, I was sure, though my eyes just met darkness. But, like Bottom, and any audience in Shakespeare’s theatre, I was hearing sights (and perhaps seeing sounds too). In fact I thought I knew, for a minute, that it was Ma – my mother, who had died on Christmas day in Kolkata, while I was stuck here in cold and dark Cambridge, desperately and ceaselessly trying to get home to India through successive flight cancellations and Covid chaos. I was desperate because place seemed to matter. But perhaps it doesn’t to the dead. And it must not, to the living, when they want to hear-see the dead, and hear-say with them, against distance and spatial reality - a heresy best expressed not in prose but in poetic form, perhaps even in rhyme:

Some one came knocking At my wee small door; Someone came knocking, I’m sure – sure – sure…

The theatrical analogy is pertinent. Ma was inherently dramatic: she took part in amateur theatricals all her life, wherever she found herself: from her crowded household with eight siblings as she was growing up, to stage-plays at social clubs later in life. She also read and loved poetry in her youth and remembered it, fitfully, in age. And she was fascinated by ghost stories: the only person in our house who knew and loved de la Mare’s stories as well as his poems. Her theatricality and her pleasure in the fiction of phantoms came together in impish pranks she played on people – she got into terrible trouble once when she scared her newish sister-in-law by springing on her from behind a cupboard dressed like a goblin in the night, her face obscured with pale gauze.