Ghost stories from India

The Cartographer’s Grove

I’ve been in Kolkata for a week now, staying with my aunt in the old northern part of the city. The lanes are a labyrinth of crumbling mansions and sudden...

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The Sixth Tenant

After the incident with the blood-soaked staircase in our previous home, my family relocated to the coastal town of Morrow’s End. Dad’s new posting at the lighthouse museum came with...

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The Salt Road

It happened in the autumn of last year, when I was still living with my family in a cramped ground-floor flat in the old quarter of Karlstad, just a stone’s...

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The Salt and Chili Pact

The day the lemons started appearing, I knew something was wrong. I was living in a sprawling farmhouse outside of a town called Hollow Creek, a place where the cornfields...

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The Salt on the Windowsill

The first time I noticed the salt was three winters ago, on the night my grandmother died. We had moved into her old farmhouse in the hills of Himachal, a...

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The Thirteenth Step

The corridors of the Meridian Apartments always smelled of boiled cabbage and floor wax, a combination that clung to your clothes like a second skin. I lived in unit 2B,...

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The Last Rakhi

The monsoon had turned the narrow lanes of Chandrapur into a maze of slick, black stones and overflowing drains. I remember the smell of damp earth and marigold, the cloying...

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The Glass Eye of Pemberton Hall

The house on Maple Street was a Victorian relic, all gingerbread trim and peeling paint, but its true wrongness was not in its appearance. I grew up in Pemberton Hall,...

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The Painted Kitchen Door

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. My grandmother had her stories, of course, about my mother’s college years and the dormitory séance gone wrong, but my mother forbade any...

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The Ledger of Room 4

I never believed in ghosts. Not until the night I spent in the old Nilgiri Lodge, a crumbling relic of the British Raj perched on the outskirts of Dehradun. I...

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The Saltstatic Hours

Elena lived in a saltbox house wedged between the tidal marsh and the sea. Her summers were a blur of brine and barnacles, but one scorching June afternoon, she fell...

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The Last Goodbye

I was sixteen when my father finally slipped away, but the part that haunts me isn’t his death—it’s the night before. We lived in a small town in the hills,...

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The Lantern of Ghatsila

The night air in Ghatsila, a sleepy town in the eastern hills, was thick with the smell of wet earth and burnt coal. I was there for a family function,...

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The Mud-Filled Maw

Nestled in the arid expanse of the Kutch region, far from the bustling city of Bhuj, our new home stood like a solitary monument to misguided ambition. My father, a...

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The Lantern at Dusk

The house I’d rented in Haripur was a relic of another century, its red-brick façade crumbling in places and its wide veranda sagging under the weight of monsoon vines. My...

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The Weeping Vines

We moved to the old Harlow estate when I was seven, a decaying Victorian manor at the edge of the boggy Fenwick Marsh. My father had inherited it from an...

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The Last Stranger on Carter Road

I was twenty-two when I moved into a flat off Carter Road, in a neighborhood that felt too new for its own good. The building was called Sea Breeze, a...

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The Uninvited Table

For months after I sent those two stories to the online archive, I convinced myself the worst was over. 2014 had been a quiet year, a respite I attributed to...

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The Granite Counter

It was the winter of my tenth grade, and the board exams loomed over me like a granite slab. My parents had converted the puja room into my temporary study...

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The Glass Counter

In the autumn of 2016, I found myself in the smoky, labyrinthine city of Kolkata, visiting my cousin Rohan and his friends at their flat in a crumbling art deco...

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The Late Caller

Ruth had been married for barely a year when she and her husband, Daniel, moved into the creaky old house on Marrow Lane. The house was a narrow, two-story Victorian...

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The Jasmine Requiem

I spent most of my childhood in the sprawling, humid arms of my grandmother’s homestead in the eastern reaches of Maharashtra. Ours was a sprawling, aging Brahmin family, and I...

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The Gutter’s Thirst

In the autumn of 2014, the rains had turned the streets of Chandni Chowk into a ribbon of slick, black mirrors. I had returned to Old Delhi after years in...

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