India is full of ghosts. At least, it was when I was younger. When my mother returned from her first journey, she told me tales of the Himachali bhoot she’d glimpsed on dark forest roads, identifiably not-of-this-world by their fixed on backwards feet.

When next she travelled, she took me with her. I was nine-and-a-half years old, just a year older than Sudeshna Shome Ghosh’s boy-hero Poltu in her young reader’s novel, A Home to Haunt. Like Poltu, I too was rather wary of the old guys sleeping under blankets on station platforms and benches, of the lone wanderers cruising the Maidan. Could they also be bhoot? Or were they for real?

I also got the major shivers when I thought of the remnant bones of 2,000-odd colonial bodies buried beneath ostentatious monuments or shielded by the wings of marble angels in Kolkata – then Calcutta’s – Park Street Cemetery. As I sat sketching resident crows perched atop a mini Nelson’s column, I wondered if the antique spirits would rise up and recognise me as English before begging me to take them “home” to eat English food. Or perhaps they would simply latch onto me, tail wispily around the sub-continent because I spoke their language…

A world of ghosts

With or without them, it was soon time to return to my native little island and take my exams. I didn’t see India again for many years, not until I was quite grown-up, but all the while I was away, India’s ghosts haunted me. Certain scents in the air; colours only properly visible under an Indian sun; textures and tastes, cacophonies and melodies in keys rarely heard in London. Poltu describes “the smell of smoke, sweat and food all rolled into each other” as the smell of “grown-up adventures” and it was perhaps unsurprising that I came back to live my own grown-up adventures in India as soon as I could, bringing with me my own daughter and regaling her with tales of old Calcutta. As my own eyes had once widened in delighted terror, so too did hers.

Sudeshna Shome Ghosh both teases out memories and entrances a contemporary younger audience in A Home to Haunt through the invocation of railway travel, street food snacks, sweets, graveyards, cricket and song. Her cast features supporting roles of headless ghosts, child ghosts, sporty ghosts and (my personal favourite) hungry ghosts; and co-stars “Mama”, Poltu’s Feluda-esque uncle as Ghost Traffic Warden.

Viewing the story through an adult lens, the idea that took me beyond the last page was the notion of ghosts being rendered homeless, just as our many endangered peoples, birds and animals are becoming, through relentless, ongoing “re-development”. As bhoot’s natural habitats – abandoned and crumbling ruins, mossy wells, hidden ambling rivers, quiet forests – become increasingly threatened by new-builds, deforestation and pollution, so the nation’s ghosts (like so many real-life citizens and refugees) are forced to seek alternative dwelling space in India’s big cities.

Sharing the world

The thought that our human realm shares an interdependency with the realm of spirits and hungry ghosts, as well as with the animal, bird and insect domains, is both revelatory and intriguing enough to expand the mind of any young reader.

Poltu’s frequent references to favourite books and such classic heroes as Feluda, Tintin, Percy Jackson and the Phantom comic’s “Ghost Who Walks” provide cultural referents, identifying familiar literary terrain between reader and protagonist. When, in a moment of stoicism, Poltu asks, “Did Tintin stop to cry?” I felt like reassuring him. Yes, Poltu. He did. When he thought he had lost his best friend, Chang, in Tintin in Tibet. It comes as cathartic relief, therefore, when our brave young ghost guide allows himself the luxury of tears.

“All the love I felt for Ma, all the excitement of going on an adventure, that feeling of happiness when I open a new book, the sadness when I think of my absent Baba…some tears leaked out.  They fell and tickled my nose and ears.  But I didn’t want to wipe them away.”

A Home to Haunt, like the eventually rehabilitated ghosts within its covers, will choose a corner of your own internal bookshelf, quite happy to take up residence there while you consider some of the infinite questions this book poses: relational and cosmological questions about cause and effect in time, space, environment, death and after-death. Whatever you do whilst you are pondering these, be sure to have a veritable stockpile of sweets and snacks by your side. A Home to Haunt’s characters will almost certainly demand that you feed them while you read.

A Home To Haunt, Sudeshna Shome Ghosh, illustrated by Pankaj Saikia, HarperCollins India.

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