Sanjoy K Roy
Harper Collins
INR 599
The book recounts Sanjoy K Roy’s real-life supernatural encounters, from eerie happenings in Kolkata to mysterious events involving his young son.
The memoir blends ordinary life with sudden paranormal experiences across India and abroad, including haunted retreats, Himalayan legends, and mystical moments in Jerusalem and Valladolid.
Told in a casual, memoir-style tone, the book explores the uncanny and the unexplained, leaving readers questioning the boundaries between the natural and supernatural.
This is a memoir with a difference – or rather it is a memoir with occasional snatches of the supernatural that cause sudden sparks in what seems to be the story of a hard-partying producer of TV shows with a family and high-profile life in Delhi. Sanjoy K Roy’s first encounter with the supernatural was in the form of a severed hand clutching a scimitar invading his mosquito net in his grandfather’s sprawling mansion in Kolkata.
There is the alarming incident of bloodstains on the bed around his baby son Avik with no wound anywhere on the child’s body and the only clue being the child muttering, “Woh aa raha hai.” The mystery of the bloodstains was finally solved by a friend of Roy’s with tantric leanings who told Roy that his son was an ‘old soul’ with links in another time, and the tentacles of the past were reaching out to the child.
There’s a Ghost in My Room is probably an appropriate title since there is a very by-the-way kind of tone about the apparitions. As far as Roy is concerned, they all seem to be part and parcel of things – they go bump in the night and then vanish. There are also predictions which come true, as in a horrific multiple motorbike crash in a monsoon-lashed Goa. Most of us would be sceptical about predictions since they do not work for everyone – however, for Roy they obviously do work – at any rate, this one did.
Roy’s stories involve people that many readers of a certain cultural background will be familiar with – Tarun Tejpal and his family, for example, who feature in several of the stories. Tejpal’s idyllic Two Chimneys retreat in Gethia also turns out to be haunted and the ghost is seen by both Roy and Tejpal’s sister-in-law.
Not all the memories are equal in ghost quotient though – a trip to Ladakh is curtailed by landslides and altitude sickness, and though Roy suffers from an excruciating headache while stranded in a bus on a landslide-hit road he reports no sightings, talking briefly about types of Ladakhi spirits. A conversation with erstwhile royals of Kumaon only raises gooseflesh among the women of the party who refuse to go to the toilet unaccompanied – this caused by talk of a spirit like a Himalayan black bear covered in fur, a Kumaoni version of Bigfoot perhaps!
Roy’s sightings also take him abroad – he is visited by a gentleman with a goatee in Berne who it seems only wants to say hello, but that encounter terrifies Roy. On questioning the owners of the property he discovers that no one else has ever had any sightings, which makes the whole affair even more mysterious. But then his encounters abroad are for the most part mystical stretching from Jerusalem to Valladolid and encompassing a few close escapes across contents which makes Roy realise that an unseen force protects him.
What comes through is the fact that Roy is never quite used to his encounters – except for the accident victim in Gurgaon who he and his wife console with love and light vibes. His wife and her colleague Urmila have both trained in reiki and have an Ouija board through which they try to communicate with the dead. However, Puneeta is possibly more spiritual in her approach to lost souls than her husband is, thinking it is her task to console the dead for the way in which they have shuffled off their mortal coil. What Roy learns from his encounters is unspecified on many occasions and the book is not about how his encounters with the supernatural transformed him.
What sets the book apart from other paranormal encounters is its incidental quality – the supernatural is not the major part of the story but makes a sudden appearance to jolt the reader out of his or her comfort zone simply because the narrative was going so normally. Though some may feel they’ve encountered similar “nothing-is-as-scary-as-it-seems” arcs before, as with memoirs one needs to be familiar with the milieu in which Roy writes – ghosts everyone understands.
