Credit: Special Arrangement
Everybody’s favourite writer Ruskin Bond once said ghosts are all around us and we only have to look for them to find them! Now, Ruskin Bond’s ghosts are often harmless if not downright gentle — one presumes the same cannot be said about ghosts in general, and perhaps it is prudent to not go looking for them!
Avinash, the police-protagonist of this collection of paranormal stories, evidently modelled on the author himself, does not exactly go looking for ghosts — it is the strange and inexplicable that somehow find him. Former Director General of the National Security Guard (NSG) M A Ganapathy, another Ruskin Bond admirer, has come out with a collection of eerie tales — mostly imaginary but inspired by real-life incidents and mysterious occurrences he came across in his storied career as a police officer. As he writes in his prologue, he grew up with a healthy respect for the paranormal and candidly admits the influence of writers like the aforementioned Bond and Kenneth Anderson whose books fired his imagination as did the wild stories his grandfather, a retired forester who served in the remote corners of the country, told him.
The first tale in the collection is one of the most evocative with its setting being a small village in the Western Ghats where Avinash is growing up amidst the melody of bird song, coffee groves and paddy fields. But the woods are dark too, and shrieks are heard in the night while a particularly suspicious character insists on taking a shortcut through the woods...
While some of the stories hold your attention till the end (The Curious Case of the Class of 1986, for instance), a few others lose steam midway and end up being a bit predictable. That said, this is a breezy read, especially enhanced by the author’s sincere telling and the weaving of the real with the supernatural.