Haunting Bombay

 Haunting Bombay by Shilpa Agarway, 359 pages.

Time to sneak in one last bonus point book! Haunting Bombay is a very Gothic style horror novel about the Mittal household, a wealthy family living in Bombay in 1960. We mostly follow thirteen-year-old Pinky Mittal, who was adopted by her grandmother after her mother died during Partition when she was a baby. Also sharing their home is her Grandmother Maji's son Jagindar, his wife Savita, their three sons, and a number of servants. The house is haunted by a ghost that has been disturbed after thirteen years, and I'm not sure what more to say on the plot without giving things away. Agarway is in no hurry to tell the story, and details are doled out only very slowly, which definitely helps add to the tension.

There are a lot of really interesting thematic things going on in here, and I've never run into Indian Gothic before, so that was a cool treat. I really enjoyed how the many, many character perspectives came together to form a cohesive web of story. I don't read much horror, so I'm still trying to process all of the things that were going on here, but overall I thought it was quite good.