Aftertaste | There’s a Ghost in My Room — Sanjoy Roy’s haunted human comedy

A Calcutta childhood: Where the supernatural meets the sensible

Roy begins in Gooptu Baari — the ancestral Calcutta home that feels carved from century-old shadows. Chandeliers dim in mourning, corridors stretch endlessly like unanswered questions, and mirrors multiply fear the way only childhood mirrors can. It is here, amid the teak cupboards shaped like lion paws and the heavy mosquito net that felt like a veil between worlds, that young Sanjoy has his first unforgettable encounter.

A dismembered hand holding a scimitar cuts through his net. He screams; the house awakens; disbelief battles belief. And in that moment you realise fear is the first ghost we meet, and the last one we outgrow.

The scene could have been gothic. Roy makes it cinematic. A child’s terror ricochets off marble floors, grown-ups rush in with lanterns and logic, and an entire household negotiates that delicate border between imagination and the inexplicable. It sets the emotional grammar of the book: ordinary life trembles with extraordinary possibility.

Journeys and jitters: A country carved from contradictions

Each chapter moves to a new city, a new landscape, a new encounter with the inexplicable. Safdarjung Enclave. Tughlaq Road. Rishikesh. Khajuraho. Narkanda. Goa. Neemrana. Ranikhet. Jerusalem. Valladolid. The Maldives. Some are spooky. Some are silly. Some slice deeper, into grief and history.

At Neemrana, heavy antique doors open on their own — outward-opening doors that cannot be blamed on the wind. At Talla Ramgarh, a resident ghost “the size of a large Himalayan bear” supposedly twists the necks of unsuspecting visitors. At a haunted fort suite, a door creaks open, but the corridor is empty: no footsteps, no figure, no logic.

And yet these stories refuse to settle into horror. They burst with humour, friendship, food, and familial frenzy. Roy narrates with the deadpan timing of a seasoned raconteur.

Ghosts of a growing nation

The book’s most unexpected turn comes when the hauntings blend with the socio-cultural shifts of India in the 80s and 90s. (Express Photo)

The book’s most unexpected turn comes when the hauntings blend with the socio-cultural shifts of India in the 80s and 90s. Roy’s world — television studios, theatre rehearsals, frenzied travel, low budgets, high ambition — becomes its own ghost story. The paranormal merges with the pressure of making India’s first TV award shows, first food programmes, first multicultural festivals.

He writes of endless dashes through Delhi traffic, shoestring crews improvising on set, the sleepless nights of filming, and the emotional cost of building cultural institutions in a country racing into modernity. Suddenly you realise that some ghosts are not supernatural — they are schedules, expectations, responsibilities.

In these portions, the book transcends anecdote. It becomes a map of India’s creative evolution. A chronicle of how art, media, and madness shaped an industry and its people. And through it all, Roy makes you see that some apparitions are not spirits — they are stories waiting for a witness.

Jerusalem, history, and the hardest hauntings

The emotional zenith might be “Jahannam,” the chapter set in Jerusalem. It is less about ghosts and more about grief — about violence, history, exile, and the unsettling weight of human suffering. Here, Roy’s storytelling sheds its playful tone and becomes sharper, deeper, more contemplative: ghosts are not always what we fear; sometimes they are what we cannot forget.

Humour as exorcism, memory as magic

What makes There’s a Ghost in My Room linger long after the last page is the tone: humorous, humble, and heartbreakingly human. Roy never tries to prove the existence of spirits. He simply honours the experience of feeling something beyond logic. He respects the rituals of his mother, the scepticism of his father, the imagination of his childhood, the absurdity of adulthood, and the wild unpredictability of India itself.

The Aftertaste

Sanjoy Roy gives us a narrative that glows with mischief, meaning, and memory. A memoir of hauntings that becomes a homecoming. A chronicle of chaos that becomes comfort. A ghost story that becomes a guide to living with grace, grit, and good humour.