Let it be clear from the very outset that Lamplight: Paranormal Stories from the Hinterlands is not for the hardcore aficionado of blood-curdling tales of the supernatural. In fact, Kankana Basu’s depiction of phantoms and paranormal phenomena is unlikely to make your jaw drop or your heart stop. Nor is she striving for such an impact.
Infused with a gentle charm, her narratives belong mostly to a bygone era of large extended families dominated by patriarchs and matriarchs, of stately mansions, well-tended gardens, eccentric but loyal retainers and a gracious, aristocratic lifestyle far removed from the hectic, rat-race-propelled environment of today. Basu keeps her spotlight trained largely on the Chattopadhyays, an illustrious Bengali family settled for generations in Monghyr, Bihar. Characters we meet in one tale reappear in another, sometimes in the forefront, but often on the peripheries. Not all is well with their world. As in every sphere of life, here are human beings who, despite their privileged existence, lack self-esteem or are riddled with envy towards others. From the heart of such anger, frustration and unfulfilled desire are born intense vibrations of negative intent, paving the way for tragedy, be it in the form of death, destruction or the most crippling physical and mental disability, as portrayed in the grimly sinister “Monghyr Fort”.
Interestingly, such death and destruction can trigger the manifestation in our world of those unhappy spirits who need to be laid to rest, as in the opening story, “The Séance”, “Monghyr Fort” and “Blood Emerald”, which acquire a different dimension through Basu’s use of history and folklore. Not all spirits are evil, though. While “Rosy” is based on the power of premonition and “Mala’s Story” is driven by malevolent intent in its human and paranormal forms, benign spirits too populate Basu’s canvas, as in “The Guide”, where a teenager is saved from a fatal fall by a phantom who shows him the way through a dense forest, or in “The Terrace”, where the spirits of ancestors help the young Ronny to regain his self-esteem.
My personal favourite is the most light-hearted of the tales, “The Wedding of Tigmanshu Pramanik”, where the narrator, Tigmanshu — Basu’s only character who is not a scion of the Chattopadhyay clan and comes from humble origins — begins in the following manner: “If only I had died with a slightly more dignified expression on my face. The pretty village belles then would have remembered and grieved over me in their dreams.” There is an infectious humour at play here, a quality less apparent in the other stories, and Basu seems, in fact, at her best when depicting her male narrators, be it Tigmanshu, Balai or Benu, Shontu or Ronny, whose self-deprecatory first-person perspectives on life endear them to us, although their depiction is closer to a cameo than a portrait. Her women protagonists, intense and assertive though some of them are, leave less of a mark.
While Basu reveals a very contemporary writer’s flair for riveting opening sentences, what strikes us most about these tales is their deliciously old-fashioned flavour, an indefinable quality that is hard to trace to its source, be it in the delineation of a way of life that belongs to the past, in the portrayal of female characters, or in a narrative style so strongly evocative of literature from another era that a word like “edgy” can seem both affront and anachronism when it appears in the text. Basu’s paranormal stories should, therefore, be explored for the powerful sense of nostalgia they stir in us and not for the more predictable thrills we tend to anticipate as we go looking for things that go bump in the night.
Lamplight: Paranormal Stories from the Hinterlands; Kankana Basu, Pan Macmillan India, Rs.250.
