The Right Ghost
A couple of weeks ago, I was tinkering with the ending chapters of a middle grade novel that has resided in my files for some time. I’ve read pages from it occasionally at VCFA residencies. But now I’m down to the last stretch of writing it, and I’m noticing something.
I tend to be picky about what I read at this stage of a draft. Something very different seems best, as if I ought to put a wall up between the reading and writing spaces in my mind. I read Rajani La Rocca’s novel in verse, Red, White, and Whole, which was quite lovely and moving, yet suitably different from my draft. More on that later.
I wasn't going to read a ghost story because my novel is one. But somehow I found myself tiptoeing closer. I listened to Esi Edugyan’s wonderful CBC Massey lectures. Excerpt:
History is the stories of the dead and the stories of feats past and the people who enacted those feats. And I think, you know how we contextualize that history or how we come to view it enormously shapes our present world.
That was wonderful. It helped me think about the strand of history in my fictional world.
But then I needed to inch closer, to find something ghostly set in India, that spoke in the imagery and idioms of the region. I found an essay by Deepti Paikray, in her collection, Stories at my Doorstep: Extraordinary Moments in Ordinary Life.
“A Wedding and the Ghost” evokes the heat and bustle of an Indian wedding, with torrents of rain, scented plumeria, and a pallid sun over the city of Bhadrak, which is named for the “goddess in her fierce warrior form.”
The slice-of-life (and death) narrative, part of a collection of 21 pieces, tumbled along at a quick clip, taking me to a place where the heat is overwhelming, children ask pointed questions and adults give them fondly outrageous replies, where relatives size up the visitor from overseas, and a ghostly presence feels most chilling in the person of a thin man with blank eyes.
I didn’t need particulars to feed my process. What I needed was a mood. Deepti’s essay offered me the right infusion of creepiness, in the right accents, placed in a setting that came alive in my mind.
