Scary living for 'uncle ghost'

PAKURTALA, India, Sunday (AFP) - Mothers use his name to scare their children while even adults hope they don't bump into him in the dark - for more than 40 years Gopal Haldar has been making his living in India's Sunderbans mangrove region as a ghost.

Measuring a mere 1.21 meters (four feet) and weighing a slight 24 kilograms (52 pound), Haldar - now near to retirement age - says he has been malnourished all his life.

"My mother was very weak. So I am. I am unable to work in the field," Halder said in an interview in the Sunderbans village of Pakurtala, about 90 kilometres (56 miles) south of the eastern Indian city of Kolkata in the Ganges River delta.

"I have hardly had the money to buy good food or visit a doctor. I have been suffering from malnutrition since my childhood. Because of his poor health and stick-like physique, he added, neighbours had said he was "born to play a ghost".

He took to the idea and his reputation began to spread through the myriad islands that make up the Sunderbans.

"Wherever I go children call me 'Uncle Ghost' and peep at me through windows," a smiling Haldar said. "Women and children are even scared of going out at night in case they meet me."

His friend Sunil Chakraborty helps him perform on candle-lit stages in Sunderban villages yet to be reached by electricity and where people prefer to confine themselves in their homes after sundown.

He says it takes him only 10 to 15 minutes to do his makeup and transform his emaciated self into a ghost-like creature - mainly by painting his sunken face, protruding ribs and skeletal limbs with soot.

"I see it as acting," said Haldar, adding that while he roams from village to village scaring the daylights out of people, his wife and son work in the fields.

"I have no regrets. Sometimes I enjoy it," he said of his spooky profession. He mainly does his shows during the festive seasons and earns 40 to 50 rupees (about a dollar) a time, said his wife Malati, adding resignedly.

A doctor at a local government-run hospital said Haldar had likely suffered acute malnutrition as a child which had resulted in hormonal imbalances.