What Lies Beneath: Book Review of The Bucket

This is a narrative that blends psychological tension with the weight of memory. Rather than relying on conventional horror devices, the story builds its unease around guilt, friendship and the unsettling return of a past that refuses to remain buried.

The narrative follows four men whose lives have taken very different paths. One Ishaan is now a Bollywood superstar, another Basab, a physics professor in California, a third Ronodeep is on the verge of becoming a government minister and the fourth Krishanu is dying of cancer. Three decades earlier, however, they were simply boys, best friends navigating the hot blooded twists of adolescence.

Ray frames their story around what he sees as two emotionally turbulent phases in many men’s lives — at eighteen, when the future feels wide open but uncertain, and around fifty, when most possibilities have narrowed and the middle age crisis is on the verge of arriving. The Bucket moves between these two points in time. The characters encounter tragedy first as teenagers, and then again decades later when they must confront the fact that what they have carefully avoided so long is on the verge of being revealed to the public at large through a very popular documentary.

The trauma that holds them together, stronger than the friendship, is the mysterious death of the young, beautiful Pramila, who was found drowned in a bucket and who was Ishaan’s girlfriend. The police arrested a man known as Loony, who eventually died in jail and it was all put down as a nasty accident. The Musketeers as the friends called themselves, pushed the episode into the recesses of memory and went their different ways.

However it is difficult to bury the past and that regretted episode threatens their future when a documentary team begins asking questions about the night of Pramila’s death as happens quite often in stories like this which strive to create drama from something that happened many summers ago. As old memories resurface, the narrative shifts between past and present, revealing how the men have their different perspectives on the episode.

Ray’s strength lies in the psychological undercurrents of the story. The bucket itself becomes an unsettling symbol: a mundane object that carries the weight of an unresolved tragedy. The cover’s striking image of a woman’s knowing evil grin in icy blue as if looking up from cramped drowned waters reinforces this visual and symbolic focus.

However, Ray has a tendency to over-explain; moments that might have been sharper in a few lines are often stretched out, and the accumulation of detail can dilute the tension. The suspense builds effectively at first, but the writing for something to happen gets in the way, taking away from the impact. By the time the narrative reaches its emotional payoff, the reader may feel something like, “Okay so that was what it was about.”

Then there is the fact that Pramila, whose death drives the entire story, remains largely more a playtoy than a person though the horror undercurrents related to her are striking. We never understand what drove her to model when she was the poster girl for dance and rabindrasangeet in her school. Ishaan and his father believe that women should stay home and be decorative or submissive which seems to spill over into Ray’s portrayal of the women characters except perhaps for the Black Envelope Ria though even she is defined by what her profession would make her.

At times the story feels compressed - the four men’s intertwined histories could have been explored more fully, and certain revelations arrive rather too quickly. By placing its characters between the uncertainty of youth and the clarity of middle age, Ray builds a story about how buried memories have a way of resurfacing, often when it is least convenient to confront them a premise that is the foundation for many Hollywood movies like What Lies Beneath. Perhaps OTT is on the cards for this book.

The Bucket may not fully realise its potential as a thriller, but it succeeds as an unsettling exploration of memory and responsibility, a reminder that what is left unsaid often carries the greatest weight.