Between the Lines: The Supernatural
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Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she turns to the supernatural and how ghosts, spirits, and the unseen drift quietly through South Asian writing.
Most South Asians grow up with at least one ghost story that someone swears is true. Not from a book, but from a relative, a neighbour, a bus ride conversation that begins with, “You know that old house near the temple?”
Here, the supernatural rarely belongs only to the realm of horror. It lives alongside the ordinary. A spirit lingering in an old courtyard. A river that remembers what was drowned in it. A voice heard in the wind just before dusk. The unseen is not always treated as an interruption. Often, it is a continuation. In these stories, the supernatural rarely feels distant. It sits easily beside the everyday: a spirit said to live in a banyan tree, a voice heard on a lonely stretch of a road after dark, a dream that feels less imagined than remembered.
