What do you do when you discover that the person who walked 10 kms with you the evening before, had passed away a week ago or a village you visited to investigate mysterious death of a young couple, just vanishes a day later as if it never existed? You keep wondering if they were a figment of your imagination or such incidents did happen in your life.
Please click on this link to watch his full interview…
Former IPS officer Mr MA Ganapathy’s debut book – ‘Whispers in the Shadows, Paranormal Encounters Of A Policeman’ blurs the line between the facts and fiction. Most of the stories have been set in real places and situations seem almost real…or surreal. It is such a compelling read that the reader keeps longing for more.
Normally, one expects a retired top cop to pen down his memoirs containing his experiences in the services – encounters with criminals, peers, seniors and navigation of tricky situations. Mr Ganapathy’s book is indeed a memoir but of a different kind.
In story after story, the protagonist, Avinash, a cop like Mr Ganapathy, keeps having encounters – more with paranormal things than criminals and gangsters. These are experiences one doesn’t describe for fear of being labelled superstitious. But, as readers navigate Avinash’s career, they keep searching how much of these stories is true and how much is fiction.
In some stories, the protagonist is helped in the investigations or discharge of his duty by paranormal beings, in some he is just a confounded witness to some inexplicable incidents and in some a complex crime scene is resolved through paranormal intervention but without any intervention of the police. Situations and characters might change in every story but two things are constant – one the protagonist Avinash and second the paranormal factor.
In an interview with Indian Masterminds Mr Ganapathy doesn’t spill the beans. He maintains the cloud of uncertainty over events and characters as beautifully as he did in the book. One thing that he does reveal is that most incidents are true and that he added only the paranormal factor in these stories to provide, what they call, an X-factor.
Thus, one story is about a spooky meeting in North Bloc of Central Secretariate that houses Union Home Ministry where Mr Ganapathy was posted to handle Left Wing Extremism (LWE) commonly called Naxalites, another of a similar meeting in Mr Ganapathy’s alma matter New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), another story is set in a marshy salt-planes of Uttar Pradesh in a district where he served as SSP, yet another story has Delhi’s Lodhi Garden as its backdrop which is next to CBI Headquarter where he was posted for some time. Some other stories are out of his home town of Coorg and his experiences in Chhatisgarh’s Naxal-affected areas and a national park in Uttarakhand.
These stories not only describe a crime or an incident but the ambience and surroundings too have been used as a character in many a stories. Each story has a different plot, different settings, different characters, different treatment and of course different result.
Mr Ganapathy from his childhood, has been an admirer of Ruskin Bond and the latter too has turned Mr Ganapathy’s fan after reading the manuscript of his book. That also reflects in the introduction Mr Bond has written for the book. Mr Ganapathy had investigated Cricket Match Fixing Case ordered in the wake of South Afica’s captain Hansie Cronje’s admission to be involved in match-fixing.
