You would expect a book on ghosts to be filled with grim foreboding and ghastly happenings, with a blood-soaked back story of assassinated ancestors panting for revenge. But There’s a Ghost in My Room shimmers like sunbathers at a Goa beach party. That’s not because these ghosts happen to love the good afterlife. It’s because the man telling the story is Sanjoy K. Roy.
Of course, you know who Sanjoy Roy is. If you don’t, pretend you do – at least when you’re in company. In cultural circles, Roy is the human equivalent of the Aadhaar Card – you won’t get anywhere without it. Inventor of the much-imitated, never equalled Jaipur Lit Fest, quick-footed evangelist of music, art, and theatre, and the man who proved that culture shows in India could be made vigorous, vibrant and, most importantly, viable.
In his book, Roy tells us how he managed to achieve all of the above. In Kolkata, he gets a head start as the baby in a family that is as bhadralok as they come. His father, a senior naval officer, built a home for him in Lutyens Delhi. The address says it all. It opens many doors and young Sanjoy sails through them with aplomb. Despite theatre and other distractions, Roy emerged university topper. Then begins a career that never strayed far from the limelight. Where do the ghosts come in all this, you ask? Answer: in every chapter – from the gleaming scimitar in dismembered hand which rips up his mosquito curtain when he was a child to eerie happenings on the many tours he conducts as an adult. Some of these happenings are enthralling, others are LOL – like the case of disappearing drawstrings when undergarments are hung out to dry.
Roy is a consummate storyteller. He packs in mouth-watering details the way he and his wife pack picnic baskets, and the pages flip by as though turned by an unseen hand. The locale changes and so do the ghosts. After all, running into the same apparition morning, noon and night could have got tiresomely familiar. It’s not Sanjoy alone who communes with spirits. Wife Puneeta joins in periodically, sending conciliatory notes attached with ‘love and light’ to ghosts whom she may have inadvertently offended.
Roy is the host with the most. The tables are well-laden, and his bar is stocked with spirits, mercifully of the kind which manifest in bottles. So, the get-togethers teem with names from Delhi’s ‘A’ list – Shah Rukh and Gauri Khan (they got married on Roy’s terrace), Prannoy and Radhika Roy, Aroon Purie… There’s also Tarun Tejpal. One would have thought Roy would judiciously omit Tejpal’s name because of what happened at the Goa ‘Think’ fest in 2013. But to his credit, Roy remains loyal to his pals.
Also to his credit, Sanjoy knows how to steer through conflict and controversy while keeping his relationships intact. A decade and a half ago, the late Girish Karnad had stirred a beehive saying publicly that Rabindranath Tagore was a great poet but a ‘second-rate playwright’. Almost every Bengali worth his machar jhol had screamed for Karnad’s blood. In the countrywide brawl that followed, the sanest voice one heard was Roy’s.
One does not associate that kind of keen-eyed pragmatism with belief in the supernatural. But as I see it, even if you don’t believe in ghosts any more than you believe in fairies or a politician’s promise, you can still read There’s a Ghost… as the biography of an impresario en route to becoming an icon. At the end of the book, you don’t feel spooked or silly. You feel as if you have had a satisfyingly heady drink in the course of a stuffy afternoon.
Title: There’s a ghost in my room
By Sanjoy K. Roy
Published by HarperCollins Publishers
Price: Rs 599 ; pages: 211