A completely different genre, intriguing and pulsating with an unknown energy, gripped me as I read ‘Bhangarh to Bedlam: Haunted Encounters’ by Deepta Roy Chakraverti.
Chakraverti is a corporate lawyer and a psychic investigator who brings to fore the existence of a world parallel to the one in which we live.
The disclaimer at the beginning of the book reads as, “The incidents written of in this book are my true life experiences,” while leaving “the discerning reader to draw his or her own conclusions.”
Chakraverti’s quest for the unexplained led her to many places in India and UK attempting to understand her experience with the paranormal realm through science, historical records, news archives and the Wiccan philosophy.
In ‘Bhangarh’s Trapped Souls’, the author, her mother, Wiccan priestess Ipsita Roy Chakraverti, and their team of researchers witness the spectre of Sooraj Bai, once a dancer in the court of Akbar, still trapped in the ruins of Bhangarh Fort that pulsates with black magic. A powerful energy residing in the idol of Lord Vishnu at the Shore Temple in Mahabalipuram is the subject of ‘God of the Elements’ while a childhood encounter with the spirit of the Iranian priestess of the Konark Sun Temple is repeated during a recent visit in ‘The Healing Code of Konark’.
A Persian scholar with kohl-rimmed, pale grey eyes — a victim of court intrigue during the reign of Bahlol Lodhi — continues her academic pursuits at the Lodhi Gardens in ‘Tryst with a Sultan’. Then there is the tormented spirit of Shyama Pallavi, abandoned by her son in Puri, and held back in this realm by grief, who finds deliverance in the benevolence of Lord Jagannath in ‘The Nightmarchers of Puri’.
The author narrowly escapes harm when sought out by a ghost — possibly Sweeney Todd’s associate Mrs Lovett — in London’s Bell Yard in ‘The Night of the Soul Bell’.
In ‘Pathways to Power’, Chakraverti investigates the energies that dwell in Indira Gandhi’s house on Safdarjung Road. Chakraverti narrates the stories in a crisp yet descriptive and vivid manner that makes the reader (even a discerning one) sit up with a cusped feeling of terror and awe! A page turner indeed, as it takes you right through the thin veil separating two worlds.
— The reader is a teacher based in Dubai.
