The Literary Mirror

Bhaduri's gothic novel is set in a decaying Shimla taxidermy workshop inherited by a daughter more interested in its account books than its stuffed leopards. The expected haunting arrives on schedule and is, refreshingly, almost beside the point.

What the novel actually excavates is the colonial trophy economy — who commissioned the mounts, who paid, whose signatures are missing from the ledgers precisely where they should appear. It's a more interesting book about empire than about ghosts, whatever the marketing copy suggests.

The prose occasionally strains for period atmosphere it doesn't need; the ledgers do the atmospheric work better than the adjectives do. Trust the account books over the fog machine, and this is a genuinely unusual entry in a crowded hill-station genre.

“Bhaduri's horror lives in the paperwork of empire, not in anything that goes bump at night.”