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Let’s read the story of a mischievous ghost who creates problems in the author’s home.

It was Grandmother who decided that we must move to another house. And it was
all because of a pret, a mischievous ghost, who had been making life intolerable for

everyone.

In India, prets usually live in peepul trees, and that’s where our Pret first had his
abode—in the branches of an old peepul which had grown through the compound wall
and had spread into the garden, on our side, and over the road, on the other side.

For many years, the Pret had lived there quite

happily, without bothering anyone in the house.
I suppose the traffic on the road had kept him
fully occupied.

Sometimes, when a tonga was passing, he

would frighten the pony and, as a result,
the little pony-cart would go reeling off
the road. Occasionally he would get into
the engine of a car or bus, which would
soon afterwards have a breakdown. And he

liked to knock the sola-topis off the heads of
sahibs, who would curse and wonder how a
breeze had sprung up so suddenly, only to die

down again just as quickly. Although the Pret
could make himself felt, and sometimes heard, he
was invisible to the human eye.

At night, people avoided walking beneath the

peepul tree. It was said that if you yawned beneath
the tree, the Pret would jump down your throat and
ruin your digestion. Grandmother’s tailor, Jaspal,
who never had anything ready on time, blamed the
Pret for all his troubles. Once, when yawning, Jaspal had

forgotten to snap his fingers in front of his mouth—always
mandatory when yawning beneath peepul trees—and the
Pret had got in without

any difficulty. Since then, abode: the place where one lives Have you ever heard Let’s connect
ghost stories from your
Jaspal had always been reeling: unsteady, like you might fall over parents, grandparents or
suffering from tummy breakdown: when something stops friends? Can you describe
working or falls apart
upsets. mandatory: something that is required or one of them in short?
you must do
life skill expression skills
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