It’s been three decades since Black Team disbanded in the wake of a disastrous war in Sri Lanka and decided to lock away their secret forever. They haven’t set eyes on each other since then. Three decades later, the four former spies, now in their fifties and sixties, have moved on with their lives, and have no intention of returning to the place where it all went wrong. However, when each of them receives a mysterious message, written in a once-familiar code, they realise that their secret has followed them home. The former spies are then interrogated about the mysterious code. You have to read the espionage-horror novel Yesterday’s Ghosts, published by HarperCollins, to find out what happens next. It possesses everything from the numbers stations to real-world intelligence ops and occult myths.
Talking about what influenced Nikhil Pradhan to pen Yesterday’s Ghosts, he says, “I don’t think I’d be a reader much less a writer if it weren’t for thriller, mystery and horror. So, when it came to thinking of a new story that I would also enjoy as a reader, it was a no-brainer. My attempt with my new book was to meld the page-turning qualities of the mystery and thriller genre with the sheer terror and claustrophobia of the horror genre.” He is also the author of Cold Truth, which is being turned into a web series.“I wanted it to be a slow burn and while I knew that I wanted to write a horror story, I didn’t want it to be of the ‘in-your-face’ variety from the get-go. That’s why various elements such as mysterious radio stations, secret military operations and the hint of the supernatural were used to ratchet up the tension before letting it all explode at the conclusion,” he adds.Nikhil divulges details about the intriguing elements he came across while researching for this book, “I found the MDZhB numbers station, more affectionately known as ‘The Buzzer’, a mysterious radio station that has been broadcasting weird voices and numbers since 1982 the most enigmatic. It was also quite fascinating to read about the IPKF’s operations in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, especially Operation Checkmate, a real-world operation, that plays a key role in my book. Through the course of the research, I also discovered that famed occultist Aleister Crowley had visited India and Sri Lanka more than 100 years ago, something that inspired the supernatural plot in ‘Yesterday’s Ghosts’.”The author continues, “Besides the research into numbers stations and SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) protocols, I also had a lot of fun coming up with the timelines and narrative styles. My intent was to bring to life multiple unreliable narrators and to get the reader to feel unsure about what they were reading. I did that by setting up multiple timelines, and a narrative that combined an interrogation setting with one character’s POV.”The storyline shrouds a mysterious code which seemingly plays a crucial role in the lives of the aged former spies. The author reluctantly says that he doesn’t want to spoil things for the reader so all he can say is that the mysterious code is connected to the shared past of all the main characters—the four former spies, and what it represents scares them like nothing else on earth.Reminiscing his childhood reads, Nikhil says, “I was born a reader and some of my fondest memories as a child have to do with reading whatever I could get my hands on. My love for mysteries was sparked by the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and the ‘The Three Investigators’ books that I read growing up while it was Stephen King who made me look at writing as more than a hobby.” Thus, he ended up penning his first ‘serious’ book at the age of 13, which led him to receive a flurry of rejection letters from publishers all over the world. However, he didn’t let that stop him and has been writing ever since.When asked about if he could meet a character from any book ever written, including his own, who would it be, he exclaims, “From ‘Yesterday’s Ghosts’, I’d love to meet Zorawar ‘Zed’ Phuntsok and get him to tell me what it was like being a gay spy in the 1980s in a country as socially conservative as ours. From ‘Cold Truth’, I’d definitely want to have a long conversation over coffee with Gloria Lama and mine her brain for all the things it takes to be a great investigative journalist. From fiction at large, I’d want to hang out with Roland Deschain aka Stephen King’s ‘The Gunslinger’ as he takes me on a (hopefully safe) tour of Mid-World.”On the creative ideas that are keeping him occupied these days, Nikhil says, “I’m currently working on two ideas. The first one is a mystery set in a boarding school that explores themes of love and friendship in the face of bullying, deeprooted conservatism and abuse. The other one is a political thriller that explores authoritarianism and authoritarian figures in an age of breakneck technological progress.”
