Woh Main Hi Thi by Mridula Garg | Books That Stayed With Me

 Some stories scare you while you are reading them.

Others make you uneasy only after you have finished them.

वह मैं ही थी (Woh Main Hi Thi) by Mridula Garg belongs to the second kind.

I came across this story while exploring modern Hindi literature, and at first it seemed like a ghost story. A pregnant woman moves with her husband to an industrial town. The house they move into comes with an unsettling history: the previous woman who lived there was also pregnant, and she died during childbirth on the very same bed.

That sounds like the beginning of a supernatural horror story.

It isn't.

And that is what makes it so disturbing.

The bed

The protagonist, Uma, is pregnant and has moved to a dusty industrial town because of her husband's work. The town is surrounded by the dust and pollution of a cement factory. The house is unfamiliar, the surroundings are oppressive, and then she learns what happened to the woman who lived there before her.

She died on the bed.

As Uma lies on that same bed, the past begins to seep into the present. The distinction between the woman who died before her and Uma herself slowly begins to disappear.

The bed becomes much more than a piece of furniture. It becomes a link between two women who seem to be living the same life.

And slowly, the story makes you wonder: is Uma seeing a ghost, or is she seeing her own future?

The most frightening thing is how everyone gets used to it

What stayed with me most was not the ghostly element.

It was the casual way people around the women accept suffering.

The previous woman had complained about difficulty in breathing. But the response was essentially that it was only cement dust and that people eventually get used to it.

That sentence is chilling because it extends far beyond pollution.

People get used to bad air.

Women get used to loneliness.

Families get used to suffering.

And sometimes, society gets so used to something being wrong that it stops seeing it as wrong at all.

That, to me, is where the real horror of the story lies.

A woman alone in her own home

Uma's fear becomes even more disturbing because she is not physically alone. Her husband is right there.

But he might as well be miles away.

He sleeps while she lies awake with her fears. Her surroundings are unfamiliar, she is pregnant, and she has no real support system around her. The person who should be closest to her does not really see what she is going through.

This is one of the things Garg captures so well: you can be living with someone and still be completely alone.

The bedroom, which should be the safest space in the house, gradually becomes a place of confinement.

And then comes the title

The title Woh Main Hi Thi—"That was me"—is where the story finally comes together.

The woman who died before Uma is no longer simply another woman from the past. The distance between them begins to collapse.

And this is where I think the story becomes much larger than a ghost story.

The two women are separated by time, but not necessarily by experience. They occupy the same house, sleep on the same bed, face similar fears, and are trapped within similar expectations.

The question is no longer simply whether a ghost has returned.

The question becomes: How different are the two women really?

The part that made the story even more powerful for me

After reading the story, I discovered something about its background that completely changed the way I looked at it.

In her introduction to 10 Pratinidhi Kahaniyan, Mridula Garg writes that Woh Main Hi Thi was, in fact, drawn from her own life. After her marriage, she had to leave Delhi and move to Dalmianagar, an industrial town dominated by a cement factory.

She writes that the story was her own experience—but with one crucial difference.

In the story, the woman dies in childbirth.

In real life, Garg survived.

That knowledge makes the story much harder to dismiss as fiction. The dust, the industrial town, the isolation, the pregnancy and the fear were not simply inventions. They came from a lived experience that Garg transformed into fiction.

And perhaps that is why the story feels so unsettling.

It doesn't feel like someone imagining what fear might be like.

It feels like someone remembering it.

So, is it a ghost story?

Yes—and no.

There is a ghostly presence in the story, but I don't think the ghost is the point.

The real haunting comes from the idea that one woman's suffering can simply be repeated in another woman's life.

The previous woman died. Uma arrives. The bed remains. The town remains. The dust remains.

And the question is whether anything has actually changed.

That is what stayed with me.

Woh Main Hi Thi is a short story, but it doesn't feel small. It takes something as familiar as a bedroom, a marriage and a pregnancy and slowly turns them into a story about fear, isolation and the ways women can become invisible inside ordinary lives.

There is no need for an ancient curse or a haunted mansion.

Sometimes the most frightening ghosts are the ones we have learned to live with.

And sometimes, the ghost in the room is simply the woman who came before us.

Or perhaps, as the title suggests, she was me.

-----

A powerful voice of the post-1960s era, Sahitya Akademi winner Mridula Garg took the essence of the Nayi Kahani movement to its ultimate, unapologetic peak. She is celebrated for her radical, intellectually driven depiction of a woman's bodily autonomy and mental sovereignty.