I read Priyonkar Dasgupta’s ‘The Speaking Ghost of Rajpur’ while on a vacation in my hometown. The mood was relaxed, the mango blossoms ready and the city noise forgotten. Before I began, the coincidence of ‘Rajpur’ as a shared name of a place between the writer and this reader struck me. But after I read it, I realized there was much else to the novel that anyone who grew up in the 90s, with a gang of friends perpetually looking for adventures (or trouble!) would find enjoyably coincidental! The book is about a shared childhood, ‘a most gigantic wonder and yet one that is everyday’, of five boys who are neither Famous not Fantastic, yet they hook us to their adventures because they are so like us.

The languid unfolding of the many events in the story happens one ‘long, carefree summer with its unending days and windy nights, and its mysterious sounds’ in the small town of Rajpur, ‘neither lonely nor crowded’. If a place could be made a character, then Rajpur would be a fine one! The strong local flavour  Priyonkar endows his tale with gives not just the setting a permanence in the readers’ eyes but often recreates the scenes around our reading chairs. 

Wooden louvered shutters painted green, garages but no cars, Kadamb and Tamarind trees with a droning Ghugu, sports clubs and lazy smokers, ‘Champa’ theatre, weekly markets, mini buses, borrowed cycles, one empty highway with long power lines looping along, the current in them buzzing in the quiet wilderness, an abandoned factory, and at a distance chimneys turning the horizon pink and pungent with smoke, fed by the coal mafia. So lovingly done are the details that by the time the book ends, you have not just been there with Shomu, Cousin Joy and the others but also done what all they end up doing... and undoing.

Nature is present in all its summery details, often acting an ally in the everyday affairs of these youngsters. Add to all this the 90s of Rasna, when ‘everyone had a positive outlook and they welcomed it, watched it on TV and discussed it among friends.’

Priyonkar not just transports us to a new town, but he also makes us travel back in time to the era of summer vacations with cousins, video games which ‘were always difficult towards the end’, the dull ‘pitter-patter noise of the Censor Board certificate’ in a ramshackle hall, red and white packets of forbidden cigarettes and exotic magazines with golden-haired women, cold wet glass bottles of Cola shared in fairs, sun-mica covered restaurant tables and the Bengali Miss Universe. The 90s come alive! While this aspect of the book may not pull towards the depths of nostalgia those who knew not those times, it will make readers from other times know why some of us still wax lyrical about ours!

Girls are conspicuous with their thin presence in ‘The Speaking Ghost of Rajpur’. I would have loved to see Anjana in her purple frock riding alongside the boys, off to discover the ghost in the abandoned factory or eating ripe mangoes in the orchard, after setting them on fire. But I stopped minding my kind missing from being in the inner circle of boys when I saw the notable portrayal of boyhood, undisturbed in all its hues of friendship and betrayal, adventure and cowardice, in Priyonkar’s novel. Why is it notable? Because while it is real enough to make you say ‘Yes, boys are like that only!’ you would hardly find it typical. The things they do, and how, makes the story of the book unique and even endows each character with a personality, no matter how small (or shady) the appearance!

‘It was enough that we existed and that we were happy.’ Which they are mostly, boasting of imagined skills or proving a point, making animated descriptions of brave fights or hoping the other would ‘pull the brakes’ sneaking into a deadly tantric’s house! Many lies are born in moments of machismo and many moments lived by ‘sitting like two accomplished monkeys’ atop a bus, or near a girl. Jhalmuri-sellers are like family, the drunk jilted lover always a friend and the (ghost) ‘seeing-type of person’ the centre of attention on stormy nights.  

But being a boy is not all fun and games, right? There is the other side, the one that comes at the cusp of adulthood, standing torn between a playground and porn. The narrator, the youngest boy Shoumo, longs to be taller, ‘to be a part of their so-called team’, often lost, say trying to decipher what ‘never without a parachute’ could mean. We are privy to his innermost fears and fondness, because he talks to us, taking us along on his various trips inwards where all his boyish thoughts lie. Or the not so boyish ones, for example, how can cops be bad? They are supposed to be good? Aren’t they? ‘Everyone looked confused. What Tonu said not only did not fit into the well-founded ideas about the world we had lived with and been told and taught but somewhere, deep down, it also made us feel a strange thing such as we had never known before: the illimitable pain of desertion and betrayal.’

While we feel close to Shoumo, who befriends us as he takes us along, all other characters also come through as flesh, sweat and dirty knees. Priyonkar has endowed each with a different personality, and Cousin Joy with ‘that peculiar way of making the most unexpected suggestions in the unlikeliest of situations … that made him an incorrigible rascal, who poked his nose in almost anything and everything in search of some intrigue.’ A desi Tom Sawyer? Not there yet but in the making, no doubt.

It is the bunch of boys, with the narrator at the helm, who steer the story of this novel forward just as they please and when they please. In keeping with how children talk, there is a lot of story-telling within the main story-telling and the reader is led into a space where she doesn’t know real from imagined, true from false. (Clever Priyonkar!) This helps keep the mystery, or rather some mystery or the other, alive throughout the book. 

Now, the mystery of the ‘speaking ghost’ is not the most constant and compelling thread, as the title may suggest. It gains prominence only in the climax. But that hardly matters now because these kids were creating suspense throughout, with madmen and talking skulls, each idea as serious as the previous one and yet nothing compared to the one that comes next. While they are doing it to add spice to their summer vacation, they have the reader’s full attention too. Ask them ‘How did you know?’ and one would say ‘I didn’t. It just came to my mind.’ What all? That I won’t tell! Except, that most days end with the thought ‘there is nothing more we could do to solve the mystery of that night, if there really had been one.’ 

The reader is completely involved, wondering alongside, throughout. This, despite the iffy bits in ‘The Speaking Ghost of Rajpur’. Iffy bits?

Sometimes, the narrator doesn’t sound like a child. While all the adventure and discoveries make this character grow, in some places it is the mature author’s voice which comes through, sitting on a philosophical note. That perfect separation between an adult writer and his child character fails Priyonkar a few times. In some places Priyonkar’s efforts to explain the mysterious events far exceed the need. Readers will join the dots without help. I also felt that the final scene of action in the factory falls short in that the characters don’t express enough terror and seem oddly calm (and too mature!) in so deadly a situation. I also wish the book was better edited, with clear paragraphs. 

Even if the last bit of the book disappointed me, I enjoyed reading ‘The Speaking Ghost of Rajpur’. I find myself wishing for more such books from Indian authors. Am I saying it because context affects reaction to a book (There’s a thought!) and I was sitting on a real Rajpur Road, steeped in nostalgia in a place where I made my own adventures? No. Priyonkar’s book is lovely for it makes you live those days when your ‘dreams were still real and we knew, not the ones which slip away the moment before things turn real.’ It makes you realize that there’s ‘a story behind everything’ and it makes you yearn to get up and create a vacation’s worth of adventure around it. You might just itch to tell stories of your own, knowing ‘one must add a little spice, you know or they take it too easy’.

A fun read!