Skip to main content

Campus Ghosts

 

Book Review



Title: Young Blood

Author: Chandrima Das

Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2021


People enjoy reading horror fiction or watching horror movies because the emotional roller coaster rides provided by them are delightfully scary while being mere illusions. Chandrima Das’s short stories in the collection titled Young Blood are brilliant creations based on certain legends and beliefs particularly on ten Indian university campuses. Every story in this book succeeds remarkably well in creating tension, fear, stress and shock in the reader. Moreover, they have some very memorable characters.

The stories are all set in a university campus – ranging from the defunct Khairatabad Science College in Hyderabad to the sanctimonious St Anthony’s College premises in Shillong. Each story is unique too. If a whole college building becomes a monstrous and gigantic ghost in the first story, a witch (chudail) haunts us in the second, and one’s own inner demons apparently metamorphose into ghosts in another, and so on.

One of the delightful charms of this book is the way the characters are shaped by the author as well as their own pasts. Das gives a very realistic and convincing background to each of the major characters who are haunted by the ghosts in the tales. Aditi of St Bede’s College, Shimla (second story), seems to invoke upon herself the ghost that haunts her with all the pent-up negativity of hers. Are the ghosts who attack Nirav and Pavitra in the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (fifth story), conjured up by their own mutual misgivings?

One of the bonuses of these horror tales is that they force us to look into our own hearts too sometimes. Are we nurturing a devil somewhere down there, in one of the dark chambers of our heart?

Not all of the ghosts we encounter here are malicious. The ghost on the campus of Fergusson College, Pune (6th story), is very benign at least to the protagonist. Manisha is in a terrible condition having lost her father and with her mother lying in coma in the ICU of a hospital. She is running out of money. Vishesh, her boyfriend, helps her but he is a psychotic of sorts. It is her helplessness that keeps Manisha glued to Vishesh and it takes the ghost of Jhanvi to make her realise that “love is not control.” After all, Jhanvi was killed by her own boyfriend on the campus.

Chandrima Das is dexterous with the creation of not only characters that haunt us as eerily as the ghosts that haunt them but also the setting and environment. The putrid odour of Khairatabad lingers with us much after we leave it at the end of the story. The “dozens and dozens of bloated maggots wriggling in unison” in the mouth of Ashutosh Mukherjee of ‘Ghost of a Chance’ (8th story) will haunt the feeble-hearted for long.

However, it is not just terror that Chandrima Das presents us. She works with a whole range of human emotions from love and hatred to jealousy and rivalry. Along with the moments of pure and utter fear lie moments of stillness. That is where Das emerges as an effective story-teller.

The book is a delectable pick for those who love horror fiction.

PS. This review is powered by Blogchatter Book Review Program

Order your copy at Amazon India

Comments

  1. I generally dont want horror movies because I am easily scared. But I do pick a horror book once in a while, because I can just put it down when scared. Guess this would be my scary book of 2022

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I am not fond of horror fiction too though as a young man I used to enjoy it particularly the Dracula variety.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Sex and Sin

Disclaimer: This is not a book review The first discovery made by Adam and Eve after they disobeyed God was sex. Sex is sin in Christianity except when the union takes place with the sole intention of procreation like a farmer sowing the seed. Saint Augustine said, Adam and Eve would have procreated by a calm, rational act of the will if they had continued to live in the Garden of Eden. The Catholic Church wants sex to be a rational act for it not to be a sin. The body and its passions are evil. The soul is holy and belongs to God. One of the most poignant novels I’ve read about the body-soul conflict in Catholicism is Sarah Joseph’s Othappu . Originally written in Malayalam, it was translated into English with the same Malayalam title. The word ‘othappu’ doesn’t have an exact equivalent in English. Approximately, it means ‘scandal’ as in the Biblical verse: “ If anyone causes one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around t...