Every year, as autumn thins into the first cool evenings of Kartik, Bengali households prepare for a night that belongs to the unseen. Bhoot Chaturdashi is a ritual of memory, fear and food, and it arrives just before Kali Puja. It is part ancestor worship, part folk medicine and part ghost story, and it asks the living to remember that they are never entirely alone in their own homes. A date written in the moon The festival follows the lunar calendar. It falls on the fourteenth lunar da...