Aleya

Also Known As: Bengali আলেয়া; also transliterated Alaya or Aleya-r alo, “the aleya light”; the ordinary Bengali word for the marsh light known in English as the will-o’-the-wisp or ignis fatuus, and used figuratively for a delusion or a false hope
Region/Culture: South Asia
Mythos: Bengali Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: A cold hovering flame over wet ground that takes hold of the mind of anyone who watches it too long and draws them off their path.
Role in Mythos: It is the visible remainder of people who died in the water, and the reason a boatman on a dark creek keeps his eyes on his pole.
Relation to Humans: Most accounts make it a killer, leading fishermen and travellers off the safe channel until the mud takes them, and there are tellings in which the drowned are found with no mark of injury on them at all. Other accounts turn it entirely around and make the same light a warning, standing over the danger to tell the living to go no further.

The tide runs out of the Sundarbans creeks after midnight and leaves the mud bare and warm and smelling of salt and rot. That is the hour the light comes up. It is small, no bigger than a lamp flame, and it burns a hand’s breadth clear of the water without touching it, without a wick and without a boat under it. It does not throw a reflection. When the air moves along the channel the flame goes with the air, and a man standing in a dinghy with his pole in the mud will find he has turned his whole body to follow it without deciding to.

Bengali has a plain word for this and has had one for a long time. Aleya is what you say in a village in the Gangetic delta when a flame stands up over a flooded paddy field at the end of the rains, and the word does double duty: it also means the thing you chase that is never there, the hope that keeps moving away from you. Poets took the second meaning and ran with it. Jibanananda Das put a poem called Aleya in Jhara Palak, his first collection, in 1927. Kazi Nazrul Islam gave the name to a musical play, published in 1931 and staged that December at Natyaniketan in Kolkata with twenty-eight songs in it. Both of them were reaching for the same idea, which is that the light is beautiful and that going towards it is a mistake.

Out on the water the mistake is not metaphorical.

What the fishermen of the delta say is that the lights are the dead, and specifically their own dead: men who went out at night and did not come back, still burning over the place where the water took them. The belief is at its thickest in the Sundarbans, where the channels shift, the mud is deep enough to hold a leg, and there is a tiger somewhere in the mangrove behind you. Someone who meets an aleya is said to fall into a kind of daze in which judgement simply stops working. He does not decide to follow. He follows. Then either the water closes over him or he is found later with nothing wrong with his body at all and no way to say what killed him, which is the detail people repeat when they want the story to land.

Not every light is hunting. A good many tellings insist the aleya is standing there to keep you alive, hanging over a bank that will crumble or a channel that runs out into open water, telling the living to stop. The people who ignored that particular light are the ones the tellings then use as examples. Some villagers do not call them ghosts at all and say they are fairies. The record does not settle which reading is older, and the two have been living side by side long enough that the same fisherman will give you both in one evening.

There is a story in the delta that explains the name. A king called Shrutanjay ruled that stretch of the Sundarbans and had one son, Alanjay, who was liked well enough that people used a pet form of his name for him: Aleya. When the time came for his coronation he had to prove himself first by hunting, and what the family hunted was the man-eating tiger. Two nights his barge went up through the creeks. In the moonlight he found a tigress drinking with her cub, closed the ring around her with his men, and killed them both, the cub as it ran for the trees. The next night, coming home, he saw a second tigress at the water with her cub and went towards her exactly as he had gone towards the first. His men watched her take him in her mouth and go into the forest, and nobody saw either of them again. The old king went home shouting. The prince’s spirit never left the water, and the light over the creeks has carried his name since.

That story and the dictionary do not agree, and the disagreement is worth noticing rather than tidying. The delta says the light is named after a boy. The language says the light already had a name and the boy was given a nickname that meant it. Neither side is going to give way.

Its power is entirely a matter of attention. The aleya does not seize anyone or speak; it stands over bad ground and lets a person look at it, and the looking does the rest. That is also the shape of its limits. It cannot leave the wet places that make it, so it never comes into a house or up onto a road. It cannot be caught, because walking towards it is precisely the failure it depends on. It goes out. And it is undone by the least glamorous thing imaginable, which is knowing what it is: rotting vegetation under the mud gives off methane, which will not light itself, but phosphine and diphosphane come up with it, and diphosphane catches fire the moment it meets air. The whole assembly burns blue and travels on the wind.

The chemistry has been public knowledge in Bengal for generations and is taught to schoolchildren there. It has not made the slightest difference. People still see the light, and people still drown.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Aleya?

Aleya is the Bengali name for the ghost lights seen over marshes, flooded fields and the tidal creeks of the Sundarbans in West Bengal and Bangladesh. In folk belief they are the souls of people who died in the water, especially fishermen. The same word is used in everyday Bengali for the English will-o’-the-wisp and, figuratively, for a delusion or a hope that keeps receding.

Are Aleya lights dangerous?

In most accounts, yes. The aleya is said to put anyone who watches it into a daze in which ordinary judgement stops, so that they follow it off the safe channel and drown in the mud or the deep water. Some tellings add that the dead are found without a mark of injury on them.

Can an Aleya ever help you?

A substantial strand of the folklore says it can. In those tellings the light hangs over the danger rather than beyond it, warning the living not to go on, and the people who came to grief are the ones who pushed past it. Both readings circulate in the same villages.

Where does the name Aleya come from?

Bengali usage treats aleya simply as the word for a marsh light. A story told in the Sundarbans gives a different origin: a prince named Alanjay, son of King Shrutanjay, was nicknamed Aleya, killed a tigress and her cub on his pre-coronation hunt, and was killed by a second tigress the following night, after which his spirit stayed in the creeks. The two explanations contradict each other and both are still told.

What causes the Aleya lights?

Decaying plant matter in waterlogged ground releases methane along with phosphine and diphosphane. Diphosphane ignites on contact with air, setting off the other gases, which is why the flame burns blue and drifts with the wind rather than staying put. The explanation is widely known in Bengal and has done nothing to reduce the belief.