Aastha Malpani shares her horrific experience of staying with a girl who undertook witch-like activities
I am a simple girl from a small town in Maharashtra. My parents had taught me that the only way to succeed in life was through hard work as we belonged to a middle-class family. In 2008, I moved to Pune for graduation, found an apartment through a broker and settled down here. I got along really well with my roommate Neha as she seemed cool and we both were into singing and watching Bollywood movies. We enjoyed each other’s company in the beginning. We even made the same group of friends in our society.
But after some days, I came to know her true colours. She started smoking and drinking on my bed. She told her friends that she did not need a laptop as her roommate (which is me) already had one. If she poured too much lotion on her hand, she would wipe it on me thinking it was okay. Things turned ugly when she began bringing weird people into the apartment and they would light candles and chant weird stuff for hours. She even wore my clothes without asking me and when confronted, she would say that she thought they were her own. The behaviour turned from annoying to erratic and then threatening. She started filling our apartment with weird objects and started acting crazy. She claimed to have cured a man of AIDS with her witchcraft spells. She purchased black dolls and weird witchcraft items. She told me how she hated ‘skinny girls’ and wanted to kill them all (I am skinny, by the way). She was not joking and did become physical a few times by shoving me out of her way. Of course, to our other friends, this roommate was charming, exciting and fun, so the few nightmarish stories I shared in the friend circle were perceived to be exaggerations.
The torture took a new level when she started locking me in the bathroom or outside the apartment just for fun. I remember once I was in tears as I was locked in the bathroom for two hours. When I confronted her, she simply said that she had headphones on and hence could not hear me banging the door from inside. I was sick and tired of her behaviour. And I felt scared and unsafe in my own apartment. But having paid the enormous security deposit, I was scared to ask my parents to help me shift to some other apartment.
One day, an old friend was visiting me. He observed Neha carefully and asked me what was wrong with her. I couldn’t control my tears and blurted out everything that was going on between my roommate and me. When he heard the story, he said, “What do you think all this means? It means get the HELL out of here!”
Which I did. After harassing the broker for weeks and sleeping on someone else’s floor, I finally got my own room in a different society! While I was still moving out, she had already put many of my things back in my closet.
My ex-roommate’s crazy ways quickly became apparent to the rest of people in our friend circle, and I had multiple people seek me out to tell me they were sorry for thinking that I was crazy. I started in my new apartment afresh and have never looked back ever since. The memories of that horrific time in my life still give me the chills.
As told to Khushi Qazi
@ikhushiqazi
