Tag: ghosts

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The media on my latest novel on Manipal

I’m always both excited and panicked when a new novel is launched. It’s out there, with a lovely cover, and you don’t know if it’ll do good or sink in, if readers would enjoy it or frown while reading. It’s panicky, but then what’s an author’s life without it? Sharing a quick listing of all the lovely interviews, reviews How to Steal a Ghost @ Manipal, an ebook which got published with Juggernaut has received so far. It also stayed in Top of the Charts within the app! Yay!

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INTERVIEWS

“A young student turns into a paranormal investigator to impress her boyfriend.” – Best subhead  found at Asian Age along with a rather lazy, old photo of mine.

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Are ghosts real?

Are ghosts real? As an author interested in the paranormal and supernatural, this is the question I get asked a lot. Do I believe in ghosts? Have I experienced any? Do I think ghosts exist around us? I’ve had a few experiences which defy logic. And I’m okay with them, because you cannot find a logical or scientific answer to everything. Continuing the blog series of real life ghost stories, here are four more tales.

 Mystery man in Patna

When she was little, a friend of mine moved to a new home in the outskirts of Patna. It was pretty much undeveloped then and the kitchen window overlooked a farm. Everything was great except her mom noticed a man sitting outside in the farm, when she cooked. He looked like a farmer and stared at her, silently. She called out. No response. She ignored and continued cooking. Every afternoon, he was there, for five odd hours, staring in through the kitchen window as her mother made food. In the beginning, she was freaked, but later on her mother got used to the situation and ignored the man. “He remained there, sitting outside in the overlooking farm, staring, for five hours, for two years,” she said. “We assumed he was a peaceful ghost and let him be.” Two years later, he vanished just as mysteriously as he’d appeared.

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Woman in white in Manali 

A long time ago, as a teen, I’d gone to a camp from my school. We camped in a valley near Manali. It was a beautiful clear night, the sky was laden with stars. We’d finished dinner. It was late and we sat on a ledge away from the camps, chatting.

About 30 meters behind the ledge, I saw a figure in white. At first I thought it was girl, but there was something weird about the figure. It was hazy and gliding towards us. Not walking. I blinked and asked others if they saw the same thing as me. The figure shimmered in the starlight almost like she had a torch under the white ensemble. And kept gliding towards us. All of us were now looking at the figure, wondering what it was. We tried to fit a lot of logics, but nothing worked. The figure vanished a few minutes later. Till now I don’t know what it was.

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The fat lady in Haridwar

This story comes to me from my grandmother who recently passed away. By retelling her tale, I hope to immortalize a part of her. She’d heard it from her brother, who’d heard it from the rickshaw driver who experienced this. One day this rickshaw driver gave a ride to a really fat lady who wanted to go to Har-ki-paudi, the popular holy ghat on the banks of Ganga. Surprisingly, though she was really fat, the driver peddled the rickshaw as if it was empty. She felt weightless. They reached the ghat, the lady stepped down and asked him to wait. “I’ll be back in 15 minutes after a quick dip in Ganga.” She gave him a handkerchief tied up into a pouch. The driver waited for the lady. He waited an hour, a few hours and begun to worry. Had she drowned? He went to the ghat and found her clothes, floating in the water, without any woman inside them. He finally remembered the little handkerchief that she had given him and opened it. The kerchief had precious emeralds and rubies and diamonds inside it. He went back to the same road he had picked her up from and inquired about the lady. Finally he found out that she was a rich lady and had died in an ashram with a wish to take a dip in the Ganga on her lips. A year before she’d met the rickshaw driver. He’d been rewarded with money because he’d helped with her last wish.

Backtracking woman on the Lonavala road

“It’s a true story,” stresses my friend from Mumbai, who called up to understand exactly what he’d seen. Early morning, as he was returning with his two friends from Lonavala back to Mumbai, they saw a woman. “We were driving slow as we wanted to enjoy the early morning scenery on that road. The woman from afar looked like a beggar, really tall, thin and lanky.” The weird thing was, she was walking backwards. They were driving slow, at 40km/hour, and passed her and saw her disappear into their rearview mirror. “Maybe she was drugged or a nutcase,” he says, “else why walk backwards?” Though they were tempted to, they didn’t dare turn around and see who the person was upclose.

Read a real-incidents inspired ghost tale based in Manipal

Have any paranormal incidents to share? Put in a comment below. I would love to hear your experiences.

 

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Real life ghost stories I’ve heard

Have you heard a real life ghost story? Whenever I’m travelling and meet someone new, this is the first thing I ask people. Have they seen any ghosts that have jumped onto them from spooky corners or any hazy female figures dressed in white that they saw shimmering on a lonely, dark road? I write ghost stories because I’m highly curious about ghosts, monsters and all things that belong to the dark. In this blog, I wanted to share with you a few stories I’ve heard from friends and strangers over the years. They’re all true, atleast to the people who told them to me.

Double suicide in IIT Kanpur

I stayed at the beautiful IIT Kanpur campus for a few weeks a couple of years back. It’s a dense, big campus, a whopping 1055 acres of lung space in the outskirts of the chaotic madness that is Kanpur. At a literary meet, on asking, a student told me about a room in one of the hostels, where there had been two suicides in a row. After the second one, the authorities locked up the room. In the night, some students could hear a rattling sound from the room, if someone was trying to open the door from inside. This student even approached the room door one night when the noise was disturbing him from his late night studies. “The door knob turned even though I knew there was no one inside,” he said. He ran back to his room, firmly shutting the door. “Yeah,” said another, “but the next year the room was cleared and just given to a first year student. The ghost is forgotten.” I wondered if the first-year student had experienced anything, but I never got to talk to him.

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The man with a lantern

I heard this story in the mountains somewhere in the Himalayan region. Most people there have various paranormal experiences in their pockets. They tell them as if it’s an everyday occurrence and don’t think of ghost stories as something unnatural, the way we city dwellers do. In this case, an old man told me about a time when he was young. He was walking down a lonely stretch of road at night, in darkness as there was not much moonlight. He saw a man up ahead of him walking with a lantern and called him since it was too dark and the jungle had a lot of snakes and wild things. The man didn’t turn. He reached the man and touched his shoulder. The man turned and the lantern he carried illuminated his face. There was nothing there. No eyes, no lips, no nose. “I turned and ran so hard that I have no idea where I went,” said the old man.

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A dancing table in Switzerland

I got this story from a friend, an enthusiastic blogger who has experienced it herself when she was little. “My great-grandmother had a small round wooden table, a tabletop with a central stand on three split legs that would rock and knock when people gathered around it for a ‘spirit’ session,” she says. Ever the curious, she approached the round wooden table one evening with a few cousins and an uncle, determined to dispel the illusion. When the table started to wriggle and tilted to stand on one leg, she asked her uncle to stop pushing it and freaking them out. “I got an electric shock from the offended table because I refused to believe it could shake on its own accord.”

Read a real-incidents inspired ghost tale based in Manipal

 

Have any paranormal incidents to share? Put in a comment below. I would love to hear your experiences.

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I stole a few ghosts from Manipal

It’s a paranormal adventure, full of romance, jealousy, gadgets and ghosts, set in the beautiful university of Manipal. And it has the craziest name you’ve heard of. Welcome to my latest title with Juggernaut Books. Tadaaa!

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The only way Twinkle Kashyap can win Rohit Dandi’s heart is by becoming the best paranormal investigator in Manipal and stealing a few ghost-catching tricks from retired professor Susanto Das. But when a string of mysterious murders complicates things, Twinkle is forced to dive deeper into the supernatural world than ever before. Can she solve the cases and get a happy ending?

Buy now: Juggernaut Books App

I’m so delighted to inform you of this special book. I wrote it squeezed between two parts of Anantya Tantrist series and almost shelved it.

Thanks to a lot of encouragement (Uthara, Suki, Saba, Ashwani, Indra, Kanishka, Anchal, I’m looking at all of you), I edited it again and again till it became what it is today. And I’m so glad to see it getting published. For the protagonist, Tinker, deserves it. She’s a first year student in Mechtronics in Manipal University, full of hope for her future and love for a senior. It’s her adventure with the dark side of Manipal that you’re going to read. And how she stands up to the challenges she faces. I’m proud of the 17-year-old. For what she achieves. I would personally recommend this book for anyone above the age of 13. It’s published with Juggernaut Books, which is a mobile ebook publisher, so the only way for now to read it is on your smartphone.

If for whatever reason you can’t read it on the app, write to me and I’ll send you a e-copy or a PDF. I would rather Twinkle’s fantastical adventure is read by everyone who loves to read paranormal tales.

Buy now: Juggernaut Books App

 

 

 

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Dona Paula and her lovers

Seven kilometers from Panaji, Goa’s capital city, as the moonlight hits the crashing waves at the rocky Dona Paula beach, an apparition rises, floating to the shores, crying in its anguish. She’s a lady, stately and elegant, wandering and lost, gliding on the rocky shores of the hammer-shaped headland that divides the Zuari and Mandovi estuaries, the two major rivers of Goa. She’s naked and wears nothing but a shiny pearl necklace that glitters around her neck. Her long hair whip and gasp, constantly in motion, like the waves she glides on. She walks up the steps, reaching the viewpoint so popular with tourists during the day, and cries out in pain, a silent scream that dissolves in the crashing of the sea.

Two whitewashed statues, ravaged by the salty air, stand by the bay. Even through the corroded marble, the two lovers look away, one to the east, one to the west. I imagine Paula to be a soft spoken, polite and cultured Portuguese. The official story says she was part of an extremely affluent family, the daughter of the Portuguese Viceroy of Jaffnapatnam, in Sri Lanka. Her family arrived in Goa in 1644 which is when she married Dom Antonio Souto Maior and became Paula Amaral Antonio de Souto Maior. She was a kind woman, who helped the villagers and worked for the betterment of the local peole. So much so that when she died, the fishermen renamed their village after her. Her tombstone, says the same version, lies in what is now the official residence of the Governor of Goa, at the westernmost tip of Dona Paula. In the Chapel at the Governor’s Palace at Raj Bhawan, she lies. There on her tombstone, is an inscription in Portuguese by her inconsolable husband, who begs those who might read it to pray for the salvation of her soul. Which makes me question. What would such a kind hearted, generous lady would’ve done to need the blessing of salvation from strangers till eternity? What crime has she committed that she hasn’t been able to find peace in more than three hundred years? dp

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Continue reading “Dona Paula and her lovers”

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An obituary to my ghosts

It’s painful to sacrifice ghosts. I don’t mean it allegorically in a past baggage sort of a way but rather literally. Let me begin in the beginning. I have been working on a kids’ story for the past eight months trying to get it approved with a publisher. The story, which I was very excited about started out as a ghost story and now has converted into a kids’ detective story. This is a result of about eight back and forths between me and the editor. Now, the editor has quit and I am working with a new one. This results in another series of back and forth. But this post is not about the shaping. It’s about my ghosts.

My pretty, enthusiastic ghosts who were the ones who coloured the story with their pale sights. They were funny, sarcastic and made the story their own. I loved writing about them. They owned the story from Day 1. On Day 154th, they are being chopped out of the story. First it was just rendering them in the second half of the book, then they appeared only in the climax, now they are being completely chucked out. It’s a simple case of the camel taking over the tent and pushing the poor owner out in a cold desert night. Sigh.

I, their creator and the one who loves them the most, is kicking them out of the ‘real world’ created in my fiction story. Making them story-less. Killing them off in cold blood. In other words, I am selling my ghosts to the suggestions by a series of editors who claim to know more about their ‘audience’, ie, the children.

So this is a post to give them a hug and bid them goodbye. Today is the day they die and are forgotten. But only by the story, not by me. I will bide time and create another story – this time exclusively for them. A story where they are the heroines. Till then, I know they have enough space in my imagination. At least they have no choice.

This post is my exploration of the pain of killing characters you have grown to love and associate with a story. It hurts. It’s as bad as taking out a thorn from your hand. Or cutting your own limb, without anesthetic. I am emotional over this today.

My poor ghosts are quiet. They don’t blame me. They just stand there in a corner, waiting. Biding their time. Another time. Another world. Another story. I owe it to them.

Now back to my story for the final kill.