Buried behind the crumbling edifices of its colonial era buildings, the City of Joy is home to many tales of the supernatural. Tales of bridges haunted by ghosts, and of apparitions that haunt cemeteries, but primarily, of memories of Kolkata's past that are all but lost in time.
It was the desire to lend voice to the fading narratives of its ghostly inhabitants, that drove the French consul-general Fabrice Etienne to dive headfirst into the storied past of Kolkata.
Diplomat by day, moonlighting as a ghostbuster by night, Etienne has penned down his experiences in his recently released book, "Ghosts of Calcutta", in which fact and fiction blur along the meandering lanes of history.
"It is hard to say what exactly this book is. It is a mix. There are some non-fiction parts. It is partly a travel log. Then there is a fiction part in which the ghosts tell their own stories.
"So I was merging fiction with historical fact actually. In some places, with reality not there to help me, I had to use imagination the fill the gaps," he says.
The novel is not a genre horror or thriller as some have been reporting, he says, rather it is a glance into the ghosts of its past.
"I believe in ghosts as a metaphor - of dead among the living, of the past mingling with the present, of history. It not a genre novel, not a thriller, its a quest of a man who wants to feel his past, to walk in the footsteps of the man he used to be."
Ortiz, returned to Kolkata after a gap of ten years in 2005. The search for ghosts in the city, he writes in the prologue, was a pretext for him to rein in his own ghosts. What his return did reveal was that with the passage of time and the despite the material changes in the city's facade, the soul had not really changed.
"The soul of a place does not depend on the cars, the roads and the malls coming up there..It very much depends on the soul of the people, in their ancient architecture that represents the past. In Northern Calcutta its still very much there," he says.
The search for these apparitions of the British-era led him to territories which a diplomat would rarely visit. He spent hours poring over books and archival material, ventured into cemeteries, a haunted post office, bribed a watchman to let him enter a haunted building and took taxi rides along a bridge supposedly frequented by ghost of a silent constable.
"I went to the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, the archives to look for chronicles from those colonial days. I went through a lot of documentation out of which I selected some...And then added the fiction to make it come alive," he says.
