A true polymath, Satyajit Ray was not only a visionary film director, but also a brilliant writer, illustrator, designer and music composer. His literary works, spanning short stories, novellas, poems and articles in Bengali, continue to captivate readers of all ages. Apart from being the creator of the beloved Feluda series of detective stories, Ray had a penchant for writing stories full of mystery, magic, macabre and the supernatural. As his son Sandip Ray informs us, since childhood Satyajit was an avid reader, drawn to the adventure stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne and others. Later, he subscribed to foreign magazines on ghost stories, paranormal and science fiction. In 1961, after a long hiatus, when he decided to revive the Bengali children’s periodical Sandesh, originally founded by his grandfather Upendrakishore Ray Chaudhuri in 1913, Satyajit started writing a great deal and became an immensely popular writer for young readers, writing in different genres.
Ghosts, Supernatural and Tales of the Uncanny is a classic collection of fourteen eerie short stories by Satyajit Ray written originally in Bangla and translated into English, some by Ray himself and the others by Gopa Majumdar and Indrani Majumdar.
The first thirteen stories appeared in Sandesh from December 1962 to July 1985 issues, and the last story ‘Telephone’ appeared in the festive number of Ananda in 1987. The stories explore the themes of doppelgangers, metamorphosis, ghosts, supernatural encounters, as well as uncharted gray areas of human psychology. Usually, the protagonists are often solitary figures, thrust into extraordinary circumstances that disrupted their otherwise mundane lives. Ray always tries to kindle the imagination and inquisitiveness in the young reader’s mind and offers a chilling yet poetic look at haunted houses, themes of mystery, magic, and the macabre with a quiet suspense rather than loud horror. In the stories strange things happen all the time—doors creak open, shadows shift when no one’s looking and some places never quite forget their past; a man transforms into a bat, a snake transforms into a man. Each story has a dramatic and often unexpected twist at the end, which is also the hallmark of a good short story. They also bring out Ray’s keen eye for human behaviour belonging to different social strata and the complex intricacies of their subconscious thoughts.
It is very difficult to even summarize the stories here because the twist at the end of each tale would not permit me to do so. Nevertheless, some of the titles and their backdrop and characters can be briefly mentioned here just to give the readers an idea about what to expect. In ‘Anath Babu’s Terror’, the protagonist Anath Babu, who is supposed to be an authority on ghosts and all things supernatural, goes into a hundred-year-old dilapidated Haldar mansion to encounter ghosts and spend his night there. In ‘The Vicious Vampire’ we find the menace of a bat in an old, dilapidated house and encounter a character called Jagadish Mukherjee who lived in the graveyard and used to hang himself upside down from the trees every evening just like a bat. In ‘Indigo’, a twenty-nine-year-old bachelor called Aniruddha Bose stays for the night at an old bungalow where an old indigo planter lived a hundred years ago, and the narrative tells us about his strange experience at night when he himself turns into the old planter. The title of ‘Ratan Babu and That Man’ is suggestive as Ratan Babu visits a little town with the railway station not far away and encounters a stranger who turns out to be his look alike whom he cannot dismiss. ‘Fritz’ takes us to the small town of Bundi in Rajasthan where the protagonist has a tryst with a broken doll that he buried thirty years ago as a child. ‘Mr. Brown’s Cottage’ is set in Bangalore where two friends go and spend the night witnessing a ghost in an old, dilapidated cottage.
One of the most macabre stories in this collection of course is ‘Khagam’ where Dhurjati Babu, who dismissed tall stories because he thought people heard of strange happenings all the time but never saw one himself, goes into a hermitage in the forest to meet Imli Baba and encounters his pet cobra called Balkishen who apparently came every evening to drink milk. What happens when he kills the King Cobra is the climax of the story. In ‘Bhuto’ we read about a ventriloquist and what happens to him after his puppet comes alive and resembles a live person. All the stories have such unique settings, locale and treatment.
The volume presents all these hauntingly beautiful stories, featuring Ray’s original sketches, illustrations and artworks which help the less perceptive reader to savour the stories even more. It is indeed the USP of this edition. All said and done, it is wonderful to read and access old wine in a new bottle, and the book is strongly recommended as a collectable edition to be possessed as well as gifted to a new generation of young adult readers, especially for people who do not or cannot read the original stories in Bangla.