These women have eternal cravings. One loves pabda curry, tender freshwater fish simmered in a light mustard paste gravy. The second loves fish too, but likes fluffy luchis and aloo posto, potato cubes delicately wrapped in poppy seed paste, even more. And the third loves mishti doi and nolen gurer paayesh, the soft rice pudding made with date palm jaggery. Except they are all women from the spirit world, reclaiming their agency after death and stealing what they loved from the earthly world that had little place or value for them. Certainly, death could not take away their appetite for shorshe ilish.And they return on Bhoot Choturdoshi, a day or two before the night of Kali Puja (equivalent to Dhanteras), to their former homes, families and unfinished desires. Folklore describes Bhoot Choturdoshi as a time of year when the boundary between the living and the dead become unusually thin, allowing spirits to cross over into human domain. Depending on the tradition, they may be welcomed, remembered, appeased or kept at a respectful distance. They wait beside a pond, lurk under a tamarind tree or appear near a kitchen, apparently attracted by the smell of freshly fried fish and spreads, something they do not mind using their fabled powers to steal. They are even believed to take human form but the smell of turmeric paste lining doorways repels them. So, they may sit on the tallest trees and prey on passersby carrying these goodies.Metaphorically, female ghosts carry stories of interrupted lives. The fish-loving petni, believed to be the soul of an unmarried woman who died with unfulfilled desires, and the luchi-loving shakchunni, the spirit of a married woman recognisable by her conch-shell bangles, are more than supernatural curiosities. They represent women whose lives were constrained by the expectations of marriage, domesticity and social respectability. In a society that had little patience for women who wanted too much, becoming a ghost was almost a form of liberation.Fish and rice are more than staples; they represent home, nourishment, belonging and cultural identity. Perhaps the petni craves them because she was denied the freedom to choose her own pleasures. The shakchunni is a more complicated figure. Traditionally imagined as the ghost of a married woman, she wears jewellery. Her love for luchi, aloo posto, khichuri or a bowl of payesh stems from the domestic intimacy she misses as the queen of her kitchen.ALSO READ | Up to 5 cups of coffee a day safe for most adults, say new heart guidelines: Top cardio decodesTheir collective appetite is almost a rebellion against the expectation that women should be modest, self-sacrificing and endlessly accommodating. And it’s because they are recognisably human that women ghosts feature in children’s tales, most notably in Thakurmar Jhuli (Grandmother’s Bag of Tales), written by Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar, which was first published in 1907. Grandmothers would tame pesky kids, saying, “There is a petni there; she will eat your fish curry.”Poet laureate Rabindranath Tagore turned the supernatural into a way of exploring women’s psychological and social imprisonment in his short stories. In Jibito O Mrito (The Living and the Dead), Kadambini discovers that the living cannot accommodate her existence. In Monihara (The Lost Jewels), Manimalika’s attachment to her jewellery box isn’t vanity. In a society where women had limited control over property, that wealth was her own.These women are not frightening apparitions. They are women returning to narrate the lives that society refused to hear. And they refuse to stop wanting more.