The title story, ‘The Phantom’s Howl’ is in a different sub-genre of ghostly tales. In the trope of a lost traveller being given night shelter in a haunted mansion, certain hair-raising details may be expected but here the violence is blood curdling and almost kills the protagonist. The savage ghouls, denied rightful revenge, continue their search for victims and some living beings succumb to their macabre attack.
Sandipan’s roots reach into the avant-garde, cultural-literary Hungryalist Movement of Bengal initiated in the early decades of the 1960s. This was a distinct impetus to uproot conventional ways of looking at themes, especially those of love and desire. The opening story, ‘With Ruby in Diamond Harbour’, engages with Arun’s extra-marital affair summarized by himself for his wife, Ranu, whose face turns ‘pale as a seashell’, her expression frozen. Yet the one-night stint happens thereafter and ‘Ruby keeps talking.
The most common thread in this collection is of the highly suspicious nature of men regarding their wives or girlfriends, of whom they are never sure, sometimes rightfully, many times because of their lack of confidence in their own attractiveness. ‘Yet Again’, ‘Chance’ and ‘God’s Good Man’ are three such illustrative stories. Destroying domestic harmony, fragile male ego plays havoc in couples’ relationships. ‘You have poison in your gaze,’ (p. 17) aptly summarizes Leena, the wife in ‘Yet Again’.
It is daunting to tell a multilayered story through the thinly disguised characters drawn from a middle-class family headed by an avowed patriarch of his time, Ram Mohan, who is essentially a man of consequence. In the mid-seventies, India was rocked by issues such as popular unrest in Gujarat, the JP Movement, the imposition of Emergency, the defeat of Indira Gandhi, Operation Blue Star, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the spurt in caste policies and the emergence of Kanshi Ram, and the bloodstained agitation for reservation. They created an air of unease, desperation, moral outrage and reprobation.
At the centre of Oberoi’s novel is the voice of a dead young mother, for the most part housed on an old torn suitcase in a dusty little storeroom containing cupboards full of her now unused things: fine saris, jewellery, knickknacks and baby clothes. Her narration of small events, tidbits about her two adorable daughters’ infancy and childhood is interrupted by mournful visits from the now grown-up elder daughter whose grief is compounded by a falling out with her younger sister.
The identity of the blacks and the browns on the Matilda is distinctly diasporic West African. The women on the lower deck whisper about Juju, and Aster’s friend, Giselle, sharply asks her as she writes down a list if it is juju. Juju, a form of spiritual power in African belief systems, often involving the mediation of spirits, ancestors or deities, was an integral part of the lives of enslaved Africans.