"Look Mama. Ghosts!"

“Mama, look! Ghosts!” The little boy tugged at his mother’s arm and pointed excitedly out the bus window.

His mother looked up distractedly, lines of weariness marking her still young face, and turned to where he was pointing. She knew there were no such things as ghosts, of course, but what could make her little Rishi think so?

Outside, the sidewalk was passing quickly as their bus trundled its way north. People were everywhere: business men and women walking briskly to get to work, school kids waiting or running to catch a bus, others ambling more casually to the shops. It was the typical, early morning rush hour – not the best time to be catching a bus to the hospital, but Maria wanted to get to her mother’s bedside as soon as possible.

They suddenly entered a dark tunnel but the lights within the bus remained lit. Maria blinked and all of a sudden she thought she knew what her little boy was seeing as ghosts. He hadn’t been on a bus before: everywhere else was in walking distance from their house. “Those are just our reflections, Rishi. Look, you can see you and me there in the window and we’re certainly not ghosts.”

Rishi groaned. He may only have been nine, but he knew a reflection when he saw one. “Not here, Mama,” he said, then the bus left the tunnel and they were out on the streets again. He sat up straight and pointed a second time. “Out there! Can’t you see?”

Maria looked again but all she saw was a similar crowd of people as before and rows of shopfronts with displays behind glass windows. “Oh Rishi,” she said, “those ones are just reflections of the people on the street.”

“Mama,” Rishi groaned. There were crying people on the sidewalk, not in the shop windows, standing just out of reach of the real people hurrying by. One of them lifted a hand in farewell. Rishi gasped. “Grandma?” he breathed. He tugged at his mother’s sleeve. “Look, it’s Grandma! She’s saying goodbye!”

“What?” Maria gasped. She searched through the crowd of people on the street but of course her mother wasn’t among them. Her mother was in hospital. Tears pricked her eyes and she grabbed Rishi’s arm. “Rishi, don’t make jokes about such things! That’s a horrible thing to do!”

Rishi’s brow crinkled. He was confused. All he knew was that he’d done something wrong and that meant he had to apologise. “I’m sorry, Mama.”

Maria sighed. “It’s alright, Rishi,” she said and gave him a hug. She hadn’t meant to snap at him like that but she had to set him straight. “There are no ghosts, honey,” she said with absolute certainty. “They don’t exist.”

Rishi looked at his mother – Mama knew everything and Mama wouldn’t lie – then back out the window. It didn’t surprise him that Mama was right. There were no ghosts. All he could see now were a crowd of people rushing back and forth on the sidewalk and their reflections in the glass windows. Grandma and all the crying people he thought he’d seen before had disappeared.