In a movie version, there would have been forks of lightning and ominous music as Alisha Priti Kirpalani was born. She arrived into the world in an Ambassador car, not long past midnight, just as her father raced them all past the Chandanwadi crematorium in Bombay, in 1966.
A few years later, her family’s great legacy would begin. From 1972 to the mid-1990s, the Ramsays (Kirpalani’s grandfather Fatehchand Uttamchand Ramsay and later his seven sons) would churn out some of the most successful horror films in Indian cinematic history. They were filled with dripping red paint, female apparitions in white saris, haunted houses and desolate graveyards. The films were camp, distinctly B-grade, and the movie-going public couldn’t get enough of them.
Kirpalani is now revisiting the Ramsay family’s spooks, but with a slightly unexpected twist. Her first non-fiction work (she’s previously published a collection of short stories and a novel about a budding affair between two writers) is a memoir called Ghosts in Our Backyard: The Ramsays’ Real-Life Encounters with the Supernatural (April 2021; HarperCollins) and it recounts tales of real-life supernatural encounters from within the Ramsay clan, as they have been passed down to her.
There are stories of ghosts in long-locked rooms, faceless apparitions, women with their feet on backwards. But this is not a compendium of cheap thrills, Kirpalani says. “The intention is to make readers aware of a world that lies beyond ours, urging them to keep an open mind.” Above all, it is a tribute to her mother, Asha Thawani (nee Maya Ramsay), the younger of the two Ramsay sisters and a potent if invisible force in the Ramsay legacy. She helped ideate for the family’s first horror movie but never claimed the credit. “My mum’s a really good storyteller. I always wonder, where would she have been in the Ramsay celluloid history if she was not a woman?” Kirpalani says. Three questions with the author:
*Why not just a book about the missing Ramsay, your mother?
The idea for the book started with the idea that spirit encounters seemed to run in our immediate family (my mother, my daughter and me). So was it happening to the extended Ramsay family too? Around the time I first told my mother about writing this book, there was a biography that came out on the Ramsay family and mom very excitedly asked her brothers if they had mentioned that it was her who narrated the story of the first Ramsay horror film, Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche, to their father [a woman is haunted after she murders her physically challenged husband with the help of her lover; Thawani put that story together based on a movie she’d seen]. They said they had forgotten to mention it because it was such a long time ago. They didn’t do it intentionally, but I sensed her disappointment. I had that at the back of my mind and once I had started piecing together my book, I promised her that her contribution would be first and foremost in it. “The world knows the Ramsay brothers but I promise you they will know the Ramsay sister too!” I told her.
This book was also a way to honour her legacy. She lost her parents and two younger brothers, Keshu and Karan, a few years ago. Later, in 2018-19, she lost three more brothers, Tulsi, Arjun and Shyam. This was my way of keeping the memories of the family alive for her.
What are some of the stories that stand out to you, from within the Ramsay clan?
The Jogger was a scary story to visualise and write. My uncle Gangu and his wife Veena were on their way back to their hotel from a shoot in Mahabaleshwar and were followed by the apparition of what they think was just the head of a man, with a bloated face and no features or discernible body.
My mother’s encounters began more than 60 years ago, when she was nine. In the house of her maternal aunt in Ajmer in Rajasthan, she decided to find out what lay behind a locked door on the first floor. She peered through the door to see a flickering lamp, the ghost of a woman with mercury-silver hair and rotting nails.
My uncle Gangu has witnessed a lot of spooky incidents. He’s a photographer so I wonder if that has something to do with it, because the world view, the lens, is different. And my late uncle Shyam says he gave a woman a lift out of a lonely hill station, late at night, and noticed hours later that her feet were on backwards. Some years later, this would be the inspiration for the 1988 Ramsay film Veerana.
What’s your favourite non-Ramsay supernatural thriller?
I love M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) and The Others (2001), with Nicole Kidman [both about ghosts who can’t face death]. I like films that delve into the psyche of the ghost, the thought processes of the living and the non-living.
E-Paper
