Shakchunni by Arnab Ray [PaperBack]

Shakchunni: a demon from Bengali lore, one who possesses married women.

The Great Famine scours Bengal. The once verdant countryside is now a mass morgue. Yet none of that pain seems to touch the Banerjees, the lords of Shyamlapur. They rule their fiefdom with an iron fist and great pomp and pageantry.

There is the Raibahadur, his wife, and his two young sons – Narayanpratap, the slender poet- intellectual, and Rudrapratap, boisterous and handsome. When Narayanpratap comes back from London, abandoning his education as a barrister and having been heartbroken by an Englishwoman, Raibahadur and his wife marry him off to a poor girl from a distant village, the ethereally beautiful Soudamini.

But on the day of the wedding ceremony, just before a tantrik dies, he sounds an ominous warning.

'The Shakchunni dances tonight. You shall all fall dead like flies.'

Soon it starts.

Soon it starts. The terror.

And a haunting of dark secrets that refuse to stay buried in the past.