Chhota Pegs

I am a big fan of creepy stories. No, I’m not into Stephen King or Dean Koontz or their choleric forerunners: Lovecraft and (alas often) Poe among them. I will take M.R. James though, even though he sits uneasily on the fence between baroque excess and darker understatement. But how not to love “ Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad ”? I’ll take Stoker too (yes, yes, Dracula , but read The Squaw ). Among my all-time favorites, however, are the more nuanced but nevertheless not unusual suspects; say Ambrose Bierce’s " The Boarded Window ," W.W. Jacobs’s " The Monkey’s Paw ," H.H. Munro’s " Shredni Vashtar ," or that great eerie masterpiece by Henry James, The Turn of the Screw . I’ll also take The Little Stranger , a chilling novel by Sarah Waters. So it was with interest that I recently picked up a reissue of Robert Aickman’s oddly described “strange stories,” this one a collection called Cold Hand in Mine . I liked the description “strange stories.”...

It's 4.30 in the morning in Calcutta, and I can't sleep. I can't sleep for a good reason, which is that my few days here are invariably tinged with some jetlag, accentuated by the need to get work done in New York when the Americans are up and about. But this strange late-night early-morning transition has always been part of my life in Calcutta. As a college student, such transitional experiences --- followed by bunking the morning classes --- were an invariable part of my routine. Often it was nerdy: I still associate Lagrangean multipliers with a faint whiff of candle or kerosene. Sometimes friends stayed over, so I associate those nights with the tail-end of intense conversations. Sometimes there was a book. (Recently I found my battered screenplay --- with photos! --- of La Dolce Vita and understood why Anita Ekberg is also associated with humid Calcutta nights.) But it was always half-magical, and if you've done the same (or perhaps even if you haven't), y...