Ghost stories from India

The Clockwork Leg

In the summer of my fourteenth year, a bicycle accident left my right leg shattered. The doctors in our small town could do little, so they sent me to the...

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The Cistern’s Lullaby

It wasn’t my story, but my grandmother’s, and she told it to me only once, on a night when the wind rattled the windows of her little cottage. Her name...

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The Moonlight Effigy

In the summer of 1974, my grandmother often spoke of the old haveli in the village of Rampur, where she grew up. The house was a labyrinth of decaying rooms,...

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The Last Ferry to Kherbari

The winter sun was a pale coin behind a veil of fog as I stood on the rickety wooden jetty of the Brahmaputra, waiting for the ferry that would take...

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The Coil of the Third Spiral

The attic of the old house in the fishing village of Port Blossom had always been a repository of strange things. I had moved there to escape the city, to...

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The Pattern in the Dust

I am a nineteen-year-old art student, renting a single room in a row of eight terraced houses in a town I barely knew before September. The houses are like sullen...

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The Hour of the Half-Light

In the autumn of 2008, I was a final-year student at the Government Arts College in the old town of Burdwan, and to make ends meet, I took on a...

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The Last Compartment

It happened two winters ago, when I was returning home with my parents from a family wedding in the hills. We had booked a sleeper compartment on the night train...

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The Unpainted Room

My grandmother’s ancestral home in the arid expanse of Kutch was a sprawling sandstone haveli, its ochre walls crumbling in places, its arched doorways whispering of a century of secrets....

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The Unfinished Room

I used to love visiting my aunt’s farmhouse. Every autumn, when the leaves turned and the air grew crisp, I’d pack my bags and head to the countryside. It was...

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The Severed Hours

In the late autumn of 2014, I was a graduate student in the eerie town of Blackwood, known for its dense fog and an old psychiatric hospital that had been...

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The Sixth Floor Landing

I have always been hypersensitive to the unnatural. A sudden chill in a warm room, the nagging sensation of unseen eyes, the inexplicable prickle at the back of my neck—these...

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The Persistent Crack of the Broken Chandelier

I started sleeping in my parents’ room after the break-in. Not that the police found anything, but the feeling of being watched wouldn’t leave me. I’d lie in my own...

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The Kiln of the Hollow Hills

For our fifth wedding anniversary, my sister Priya and her husband Arjun had chosen to spend it in Arjun’s ancestral village, a place called Chhoto Pahar, nestled in the foothills...

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The Chalk Circle

During autumn of my ninth-grade year, the old Greenwood Middle School felt heavier than usual. The halls smelled of damp plaster and dust, and the janitor swore the radiators knocked...

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The Hollow Cradle

In the autumn of 1994, on a decaying farmstead surrounded by skeletal oaks, my father, Elias, tended to my mother, Clara, as she withered after my birth. We were a...

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The Hollow at the Crossroads

The house my family rented sat at the edge of a dying town, its back windows staring into a swamp that locals called the Quagmire. The trees there were draped...

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The Kite of Red Thread

It was March 1998, and the heat was beginning to bake the red earth of our small town. I was thirteen, fresh out of my final exams, and the world...

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The Chalk Dust and the Crying Wall

I lost my mother in the spring of 2019, when I was fifteen, to a sudden heart failure. My father and I moved into a cramped flat in the city,...

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The Paint That Wouldn’t Dry

In the summer of 2015, I was twenty-two, a final-year architecture student in Pune. My parents had just bought a sprawling two-story house in a quiet lane off Baner Road,...

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The Lantern Room

I was raised on facts, not fables. My mother was a nurse, my father an engineer, and our home in the coastal town of Greyhaven was filled with logic and...

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The Mud Cradle

The monsoon had arrived early that year, turning the red earth of Bhootgarh into a slick, treacherous paste. I, Arjun, had come with my mother to my grandfather’s ancestral home...

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The Salt Harvest

Our college’s coastal ecology trip had promised mudflats and mangrove walks, but all we got was a crumbling guesthouse on a spit of land that seemed to exist only for...

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The Weight of Unremembered Things

After the accident, Marcus thought the worst was over. The doctors had called it a miracle, but he felt more like a ghost than a survivor. He threw himself into...

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