An anonymous collector has spent a lifetime gathering the objects no one should keep.

A gold mangalsutra that will not go cold. A knotted cord that has never once been cut. A hospital file that keeps reopening itself, decade after decade. A red thread carried across a burning border. A live-streamed exorcism, its comments still open, still counting. An app that corrects your home for you — and opens a room that was sealed for a reason.

Eighteen bound things, from a locked room outside Birbhum to a colonial casebook to a delivery route in present-day Mumbai. Each comes with an account: of the woman it was tied around, and of the truth the record never kept.

Across eighteen linked stories, India's Bound Spirits maps a single, quiet horror — the binding of the inconvenient by the powerful, always called protection. In every account, the thing that was bound is real. In not one does its reality make the accuser right.

The collector has now done the thing every tradition forbids. He has gathered the bound things under one roof, set them into a book, and let the book go out into the world — knowing exactly how such things pass from hand to hand.

You are holding one now.

From Shri, author of India's Forgotten Ghosts.