Description

When thirty-one-year-old architect Tania Sengupta inherits her great-uncle’s three-storey house on Elgin Road in central Kolkata, the only condition in the will is unusual but, she assumes, harmless: she must spend the first three months living in it alone, before deciding whether to keep or sell.

Her great-uncle’s solicitor will not look her in the eye when he hands over the keys.

The house is beautiful — wooden shutters, marble floors, a courtyard with a tamarind tree older than the city. It is also, Tania notices on the very first night, strangely planned. The main staircase climbs from the entrance hall to the upper floors in graceful, lit sweeps. And then, behind a peeling door near the kitchen, there is a second staircase — narrow, unlit, servant-built — that climbs the entire height of the house in absolute, breathing darkness.

On the third night, Tania hears footsteps coming down it. There is no one in the house.

Slow, atmospheric, and genuinely terrifying, *The Servant’s Stairs* is a Kolkata haunting in the great Bengali tradition — a horror novel about colonial guilt, the unpaid debts of old families, and what happens when the people a great Calcutta house was built to forget finally decide to walk down the stairs and be remembered.

Not to be read alone after dark.