Monsters on the screen
I was in school when I watched my first horror film and I remember being afraid of darkness even months later. That was also the time when the name Ramsay stuck to my mind as a synonym for horror. This may appear strange but after that experience windows nearly always creaked mournfully on their hinges and lizards with their ‘nervous tongue flickering, bolted across the window frame’ more often than might have happened in Ramsay films like Veerana, Purana Mandir, Do Gaz Zameen ke Neeche, Telephone or any of the others that came one after the other in the years that followed.
We were in the business of films in a way as my father ran a cinema in Jhansi… and I got to spend a lot of time there going in and coming out of the darkened hall after watching spine-chilling scenes like a trembling rotting hand push itself out of a grave in some cemetery somewhere or a bat rush out of nowhere to scare the daylights of the heroine on the screen. It was always a relief to come out into the foyer and see the ushers counting their ticket counter-foils, the aroma of coffee being brewed, and the chit-chat of the few people waiting for the show to get over. Coincidently, those were also the times when out of nowhere I kept coming across strangers recounting the way they had stumbled upon one or the other supernatural experience. Someone had a relative who always looked up towards an imagined rooftop and speak to someone not there, while another talked about having seen a shadowy figure cross the road and nearly getting crushed by a car. There were truck drivers who talked in hushed tones about having had ghosts that flew alongside the window or a visitor who mentioned some tree in her village that gobbled up people. And no, I had never paid any attention to any of these tales before I saw that Ramsay film… and now I am glad that Alisha ‘Priti’ Kirpalani, the grand-daughter of F.U Ramsay has decided to chill readers with her version of incidents where ghosts walk in at every turn of the sentence. ‘Ghosts in our backyard’, however, isn’t just a collection of such stories about ‘hill stations with isolated lanes, quiet graveyards and deep forests – the perfect backdrop to create an atmosphere of horror’ but is also a neat little compendium of family history where one meets the Ramsay family and their encounters with the supernatural world.
What I liked about this collection of 22 tales is that they are of the right word count where ghosts neither lose their unsettling presence to digressions that bring the reader back to his mortal world nor do they try to draw explanations and conclusions or worse, preach. The only thing that I missed is the eerie musical background of a typical Ramsay movie where the screech of an owl and the flutter of bat-wings add to the drama. But then we are all readers who can imagine a lot – though I must admit that there were times when I did think that some of the horrifying tales seemed like the imagination of the writer added a pinch of spices of all sorts to the story. Like the one where the human in the tale meets a monster and wondered later if ‘the actor playing the monster know his barbaric character from the film had a twin from another world residing in the palace?’ Well, this monster called Saamri later on did get elevated to becoming the Ramsay brothers’ iconic archfiend.
The stories with all their bewildering ‘thak-thak’ and ‘thump-thump-thump’ interspersed with cupboard doors opening on their own and bed-sheets getting crumpled without anyone being there, transform ghostly appearances ghastly, and do reflect a sort of family history and to my mind this is completely out-of-the-world. I mean, I am not like Gangu and Veena, for instance, who ‘live alone but never feel alone, because along with the moon, someone always seems to be watching’ and I am sure Hotel Anarkali in Mahabaleshwar where Hotel, Guesthouse and Dak Bangla were shot isn’t any more in the ghost-perturbed zone.
For those readers who are constantly looking for biographical elements in books by celebrities, this one has plenty. By the time one is done with reading the tales, a reader may end up feeling one of the family and miss not being there on location as the films were being shot. The household snippets are enough to help one trace the family tree rather well, if that is what interests a reader and one does love filmi trivia like films being jokingly called ‘tiffin-box productions’, a term coined by F.U.Ramsay himself.
The strange thing about this book is that even innocuous words like bungalow, walk, hitchhiker, lamp, jogger, palace, and knock take on ominous tones as one progresses through the stories. Dread, fear, and terror walk with every word in these stories… so beware, you’re going to finally imagine quite a few ghostly apparitions as you read these stories. Let me admit here that after years of being unafraid, I have once again begun seeing glowing eyes in the dark as I wake up at night and walk to the kitchen to drink some water. When I told Specky, my wife about this, she got up and came back to tell me, ‘Those eyes are called input-output indicators on the AC stabilizer. Now sleep.’
.
Book details:
Title: Ghosts in our backyard
Author: Alisha ‘Priti’ Kirpalani
Publisher: Harpercollins India
ISBN: 978-93-9032-760-7
.
Arvind Passey
16 July 2021
