‘A Home to Haunt’: Ghosts and global predicament align in this horror novel for children

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...

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