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Big Neem, Red Jaguar and Mrs. Samson’s Lammergeir. Ranjeet Lal’s book hovers between the tangible world of realism and surrealism. He has dexterously created a nightmare type situation, plumbing the human psyche. Anirudh, the protagonist, narrates the three real happenings in his teen-age life that his parents would otherwise attribute to his "overheated imagination and too much free time during the holidays." The happenings involve a crotchety-voiced neem tree, a phantom scarlet E-type Jaguar sports car and a lammergeir, a very large vulture, that dropped a scull with a golden tooth at the narrator’s feet. The reader can easily discern Anirudh’s loneliness, being an only child with working parents, wrapped up in their manufacturing business, glad to send him away during the school vacation. Probably to elude this isolation, Anirudh forges a link with the animals, unearthly beings and the souls in limbo. Except for the inexplicable supernatural phenomenon the three incidents are unrelated. The first occurs in the cemetery next to his house where Ambi the little unghostly ghost with the leopard eyes calls out to him from up on the big neem tree. She cures Anirudh’s vertigo problem and turns him into a fearless climber of trees. The second occurrs at the hill station of Sonekote where he drives Kavita’s dead father’s fabulous red E-type Jaguar phantom sports car at breakneck speed on the narrow mountain road to save Kavita from the goons. The third incident is in the Himalayas where his school Principal, Mrs Samson, took the students for a trek. This section is full of improbable probabilities—the ghost helicopter and Mrs Samson’s dead Squadron Leader son rescuing stranded shepherds and Gujjars on at least three occasions; the lammergeir following the trekkers and flying low whenever there is any danger, and the revelation that it is Squadron Leader Bharat Samson’s spirit! Aarti’s parents’ ghosts re-acting night after night the brutal horror of their gruesome murder — otherwise attributed to accident — too, is quite sensational. The penultimate chapter gears up the action-packed denouement. The reader, at times, is sure that the characters must be imagining things, but the deft writer overlaps the rational and irrational in a way that the incidents seem real. Te narrative seems to be pervaded by a labyrinthine consciousness of a lonely child through whom the novelist plumbs the sombre depths of human experience. Though the reader, at times, waits too long for the mysteries to surface, the simple language, pictorial quality and conversational tone of the prose makes it a good read, especially for children who love friendly ghosts.
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