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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

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...