Dusk in a Bengal village came with rules. Nobody whistled after the lamps were lit. If a voice called your name from the bamboo grove you kept walking and did not turn and certainly did not answer. 

No one explained any of this to children. A grandmother would lower her voice and press an iron nail into a small palm while the kerosene wick sputtered behind her.

The voice belonged to the nishi and she needed no introduction.

Bengal had little use for a general ghost. Its dead arrived already filed. The petni had died in childbirth or in a pond or unmarried and she sat in a tamarind tree with her feet turned backwards waiting for anyone who passed beneath it after dark. 

Near the house lived the shankchunni. She was a wife from a respectable family who still wore her conch-shell bangles and folk accounts gave her a weakness for fish. The brahmadaitya had been a Brahmin who died before his rites were finished and he kept his sacred thread and took a bel or banyan tree for his own. 

He was more often spoken of as a guardian than a threat. The mamdo bhut was a Muslim man restless in death and his name is thought to be a worn-down Muhammad. He was known for his nasal voice.

Lined up this way they make a map of the village itself. Caste sits on it along with gender and religion and who was allowed to eat what. A Brahmin stayed a Brahmin in the branches exactly as he had been in the lane. Death had reshuffled nothing. These were neighbours who had stayed on with a complaint and everybody knew roughly where they lived.

The language knew it too. Bengali grammar files the past tense as bhutkal which shares its root with the word for ghost. What has happened and what refuses to leave sit in one drawer.

And they could be handled. A muttered Ram Ram or an iron nail in the pocket kept most of them at the edge of the path while the rest could be argued with. A petni wanted something. A ghost with a name has a grievance and a grievance has terms. Nothing of the sort works on a zombie. Seoul sent its own in 2016 with a Train to Busan and nobody aboard got to negotiate.

Writers noticed. Tagore published Kshudhita Pashan in 1895 and set it inside a marble palace at Barich where the past seeps out of the stone after sunset. Satyajit Ray filmed Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne in 1969 and gave Bengal a king of ghosts and a dance of the dead so cheerful that fear hardly had room to enter. 

Anik Dutta pushed the idea furthest in Bhooter Bhabishyat in 2012 where the ghosts of an old Kolkata mansion fight to keep their home against a promoter who wants the plot. The dead had become the ones with a housing problem.

Halloween came from a similar place. Samhain was a Gaelic festival around the last night of October when the dead were thought to cross over and a portion of food was set out for them. Irish migrants carried the custom to America in the nineteenth century and there it was scrubbed of its old village obligations until it could be sold by the box. 

Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897 and in 1931 Universal gave Bela Lugosi the cape. The zombie travelled further. The word comes from the Haitian zombi which meant a body raised to work without a will and the fear was born on slave plantations before George Romero turned it into a flesh-hungry mob in Night of the Living Dead in 1968.

The vampire waits at the door for an invitation. The zombie asks for nothing and knows nobody. It has no tree or caste and no grievance that anyone could settle.

Only hunger and numbers. A monster like that needs no village so it can be packed and shipped like anything else and it reaches Dhaka by cinema first and by streaming after. 

This late October the cafés hang cotton cobwebs and the young arrive with painted faces as if the dead had always dressed for parties.

Nobody defeated the petni. Her tamarind was cut for timber and her pond was filled for plots and the lane outside got an electric light that never switched off. The young went to cities where a flat has no tree and a night has no proper dark.

A ghost needs a path after sunset and someone fools enough to walk it. Dhaka has the fools but the paths are lit. A crowd needs only a crowd.

Both festivals belong to autumn and both concern feeding the dead. On Mahalaya before the pujas many Hindu families rise before dawn and walk to a riverbank or a ghat to pour water for their departed ancestors. Each one is called by name into the water. One of these became a party. The other goes on mostly without photographs.

The cafés close late. Pumpkins glow on the tables. Behind the car park one old tamarind survived the plot-sellers and its leaves are moving though the air is still.

A voice says a name. Nobody at the tables turns. Wind perhaps. Though the nishi never called at random and the names in this city have been changing.

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Mahmud Newaz Joy is a freelance feature writer based in Bangladesh.