What do you call something that possesses no body and soul? A Boba (Bengal) that waits till the sun goes down and you sleep, strangle your throat ever so slowly, that you go into sleep paralysis and slowly die. Many people have experienced a certain feeling of numbness in the body, even after they become awake. They can see but not talk. They can feel but not shake the deep paralysis that has hit the body.
This Amuku pei (Tamil Nadu) or ghost that presses you down, is sinister as no one really can verify if you have been attacked by a malicious ghost or just have sleep apnea. The symptoms are almost the same for most people. Yet there are those few who mention a few symptoms
1. A feeling that something is lying on top of you that you cannot push down
2. Complete wakefulness with eyes open but an inability to move or talk
3. A strange numbness that permeates the body and dissipates very slowly
4. An unknown fear and cautiousness, that usually pushes people to move over to the parent’s bed or to homes of friends for a few days
5. A strange feeling of disorientation and an inability to sense time and space.
Why does the boba come after you? What makes you it's target?
This can happen for a variety of reasons. During the day, you may have broken/ violated its living space, or you may have entered his quiet space unknowingly. There are instances of people cutting trees and being attacked by bobas or yakshis that inhabit that tree. Very rarely does the boba attack the same person for consecutive nights. If that happens, get help. You are in serious danger of being strangled to death in the night. A doctor would pronounce the death as a cardiac arrest, as there will be no physical symptoms to show the strangulation.
But you and I know that it was asphyxia-induced cardiac failure.
Boba in Bengali actually means 'speechless'. The being has a certain mastery over the udana vayu in the human body. Udana vayu flows in a circular manner around the neck and head. This vayu regulates speech, growth and self-awareness. Udana vayu is also responsible for taking the mind from waking to sleep and to deep sleep, as well as to higher planes of existence. This is one of the reasons why, when the Boba takes over your body, you are neither awake or asleep and you lose sense of your body and time.
The Boba is not a being peculiar to India. In Kurdish culture, sleep paralysis is often referred to as motakka. It is believed to be a demon that attacks people in their sleep, and particularly children of young age, and steals their breath away as they breathe heavily and keeps it out of reach. In Pashtun culture, it is known as "Khapasa". In Finnish folk culture sleep paralysis is called unihalvaus (dream paralysis), but the Finnish word for nightmare, painajainen, is believed to originally have meant sleep paralysis. In the Americas, during the Salem witch trials several people reported night-time attacks by various alleged witches, including Bridget Bishop, that may have been caused by sleep paralysis. In Greece and Cyprus, it is believed that sleep paralysis occurs when a ghost-like creature or Demon named Mora, Vrahnas or Varypnas (Greek: Μόρα, Βραχνάς, Βαρυπνάς) tries to steal the victim's speech or sits on the victim's chest causing asphyxiation.
Isn't it strange that cultures that have had no connections before, still had a being that haunted them in the same manner, across geographies? Pre-internet, people could not even share stories. That is because the Boba is not an imaginary ghost that has been fantasized by the adults in a town, to scare the children into discipline. The Boba is real.