The summer holidays had begun after school and I was at my grandparents’ house bored out of my 12-year-old mind.
That was when I decided to take a look at my Grandmother’s bookshelf and found the first gothic novel of my life.
It was a hardbound book with pages printed on wood pulp. That particular fragrance still triggers old memories of lazy days reading and mental travel to another place and time.
The story was written by an author called Anya Seton set in mid-1800s New York. It wasn’t a light read and maybe the themes were too heavy for a twelve-year-old kid but I had no regrets about reading it then or now. After all, real life isn’t all curated sunshine and happiness.
A little later, I read “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte, thought it was weird and macabre at first, and then got intrigued with its obsessive characters and psychological explorations.
I still like Gothic novels and I’m playing with the idea of introducing some of the classic gothic tropes into my particular genre of historical fiction.
Straightforward formulaic stories that follow the typical progression, and where you know what to expect are quite popular in the niche I write in… But… I want to try something different.
Where’s the fun when you can guess how it will end right from the first chapter?
Work hard Hooman! My treats depend on it!
In high school, most of the girls in class used to borrow books from lending libraries. They tended to binge on Mills and Boon or Harlequin romances, which are somewhat predictable and don’t really sustain interest for long.
Even in college hostel, I’d sometimes walk into some of my neighboring girls’ rooms and find stacks of these on their desks. I’d pick up one and read a few pages and know exactly how it was going to end. And lose interest.
I found it a little strange that they were so popular despite the predictability.
But as a writer now, I want to give my readers a page-turning experience.
Evolving with the times
A massive transformation is currently going on that is already upending life as we know it. AI is increasingly getting into everything, and it’s already writing formulaic fiction.
AI is good at replicating what already exists. But its logical process gets confused with creative experiments. It may be able to write formulaic fiction but I hope it can’t write emotional dynamics that don’t follow a mathematical logic.
The path forward for creatives now looks like experimenting and trying new and different things.
Mixing genres can be risky because readers usually want more of what they already like. But I think introducing some gothic, unexplainable and mystical elements might amp up the stakes and add moments of tension and suspense to keep the readers turning pages.
A couple of days back I was listening to some of my favorite rock songs and ballads by a much-loved band that I grew up on and some of the music and lyrics had a muse-like effect and got the mental wheels turning. It was about a destiny that is already written. Isn’t this a theme that storytellers just love?
The mysterious muse got me playing with the idea of a time slip with modern protagonists going into the past, probably two centuries ago… Something along the lines of Tristan and Iseult (a medieval tragic Celtic legend) meets Outlander (time travel).
A recipe that blends parallel lifetimes, longing, difficulties and gothic elements for the atmosphere and energy.
There’s a scene in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander which gives you chills down the spine and serious reading thrills.
It’s the eerie moment where Jamie Fraser’s ghost watches the 20th century Claire in the present time before she even knows of his existence. But he knows her from the past.
It’s a memorable scene because Claire later travels back in time two hundred years and meets the flesh and blood Jamie.
The Outlander series is genre bending enough to combine time travel, historical romance, adventure, gothic atmosphere and some fantasy. It keeps you guessing from page to page.
One minute, the female protagonist is in 20th century Scotland. The sense of suspense and foreboding builds up, and then she finds herself in a history she’s already read about. This takes her through the bizarre experience of trying to alter a history when she already knows the ending. Plus you keep wondering if she’ll ever come back to her real world again.
And then there’s Amy Harmon and her intriguing stories with a supernatural twist. I loved her “What the Wind Knows” and “Slow Dance in Purgatory”. She bends most of the known laws of time and physical existence to create a beautiful world of make believe where the impossible becomes possible.
Each story has a unique twist. One protagonist has the gift of telepathy and helps the detective who is after a well-known serial killer. Another is an American pioneer living in a dangerous time. Another time travels to become the foster mother of a child who later turns out to be someone she knew very well. These are highly intriguing plot lines.
I’m also quite fascinated with the concept of Carl Jung’s synchronicities. Strange events that feel like meaningful coincidences that feature almost a soul to soul telepathy.
I want to paint my stories with these hues and build storylines that include these mind-bending, lifeline blending dynamics where earthly timelines, and the past and present are not rigidly set in stone.
It’s the intricacies of “the space time continuum”, as Doc Brown calls it in the “Back to the future” movies that keep the audience performing mental gymnastics over all the “What Ifs” and keep them engaged with the story.
Finding Gothic story inspirations in unlikely places
This reminds me of a famous Colonial-era story with gothic tones which originated from an unlikely small town with an interesting past.
This town, which is currently being developed into a deep sea port for cargo ships was once an ancient fishing port and international trading settlement.
It was colonized by the Dutch centuries ago, by the French and then by the British so it has quite a lot of European and South Indian history all mixed up like a salad.
The story is about the origins of St Mary’s Church which is located in the town. Someone called it the ‘Taj Mahal of South India’, which is definitely not an architectural comparison. It’s a small heritage church with a cemetery attached to it but the comparison is about the love story that brought it into existence.
The original Taj Mahal was built as a mausoleum of love by the Persian/Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his wife Mumtaz and St Mary’s Church was built with a similar intention.
To get back to the famous story of the historical town and its monument of love…
The story goes that sometime around the early 1800s, a certain Major General John Pater of the British Army, who was stationed for a time at the Bandar Fort, fell in love with a Miss Arabella Robinson.
This is where the tragic, obsessive and forbidden love part of the story begins. This story definitely has the elements of a Gothic romance.
He was married. She was a Catholic and he was a Protestant. Some say she was Anglo Indian. They wanted to marry but their churches and society wouldn’t allow them to. So she eloped and began to live with him, which apparently caused quite a scandal in their community. But after all the high stakes drama, they still couldn’t find a happily ever after.
She caught Malaria and died in November of 1809. None of the churches would allow him to bury her in their graveyards because they had violated the rules of that time. And so, he had her body embalmed and kept it in his house where he grieved over his lost love alone.
Eventually, he had to buy a piece of land to bury her. But he didn’t exactly bury her in the full sense of the term.
He was so heartbroken that he had her embalmed body dressed in her wedding gown and put her in a glass coffin which he visited frequently. The coffin was operated by a lever and pulley mechanism that would cause it to rise out of its tomb.
This part of the story reminds me of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights. It’s the same kind of obsessive love that doesn’t let go after death.
John Pater built the building around her grave a few years after he buried her. And called it Arabella’s Chapel.
Shot this picture of St Mary's Church, built in the 1800's, around Christmas time when we visited the cemetery (decked up for Christmas but badly needs repairs)
There’s not much information about what happened to John Pater after these events.
Some say that he was later stationed at Madras (which is currently called Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu, and located a few hundred miles away).
There was a General Patter’s Road in Chennai (although the inscription on the gravestone says ‘Pater’, which must be the correct spelling since he placed it there himself). The road was supposedly named after him. But time eroded that memory.
In recent years, it’s been renamed after a local and politically significant figure (The politicians like to keep things interesting and confusing for the postal delivery guys and everyone who uses navigation systems, because they think renaming places will get them more votes.)
As for John Pater, some sources say he moved back to England after he retired while others say he was buried in Madras.
Some more research online revealed that he was in fact buried in Madras. One source is from the “List of inscriptions on tombs or monuments in Madras, possessing historical or archaeological interest” by J.J. Cotton, 1905. It says,
Lieutenant General John Pater, The Honorable East India Company (H.E.I.C.). Son of Charles and Elizabeth (Powell) Pater.
' A very good natured but enormously fat man of the Cavalry. The founder of Patter's Gardens and Patter's Road. He erected a monument to Miss Arabella Robinson at Masulipatam, November 6th, 1809. He was Captain on April 22, 1784, Major on November 19, 1790 ; Lieut.-Col. on December 31, 1796 ; Col. on January 1, 1798 and Major-General on January 1, 1805. He retired on the Off reckoning Fund, May 13, 1813.'
I also found this summary which repeats much of the old story that’s still going around:
Captain John Pater, fell in love with the Catholic, Arabella Robinson, daughter of Captain W. Robinson. They could not marry because Pater was a Protestant, also he had a wife back in England. So they lived together causing a great scandal. They had a daughter Sapphira, born in 1790. Arabella died in 1809 at Masulipatnam and was refused burial in consecrated ground. Pater had her body embalmed, laid in a glass casket and kept it at home. A month later, he bought a piece of land and started building a chapel to bury her in. This took him three years to complete. Pater would visit the chapel, opening her tomb lid with a pulley system to see his beloved's body. In 1816, he handed over 'Arabella's Church' to the East India Company. The church was consecrated in 1842 and renamed St Mary's Church (Masulipatnam). Pater married a second wife and had two sons, John and James. Lt-Gen John Pater died in Madras in 1817. He had a brother Rear Admiral Charles Dudley Pater of the Royal Navy.
And there are some details about their daughter:
Nov 1794 Baptised in Trichinopoly, daughter of John Pater and ___ Robinson
(Major, H.C. Cavalry) Aged 4 years
9 Aug 1813 Married Captain Charles Hawkey R.N. Commander of HMS Barracoutta.
They had four children.
23 Jan 1826 ' Mrs Saphira Hawkey, late of Madras.
Her children were also in the army. There are some discrepancies between this record and the story that people tell. If Sapphira was born in 1790, then they must have been together for at least around 20 years, whereas the original story says they were together for only a short time.
I’ve seen the St Mary’s church in Chennai (which is in the State of TN hundreds of miles away from the one that Pater built, which is in the State of AP). It’s an old overgrown cemetery under a flyover that I drove past frequently but I never visited it.
The church’s architecture looks interesting although the place is sadly in ruins.
Anyway, I hope the souls of the protagonists of this real life story were reunited in the afterlife since they couldn’t find their HEA in their earthly life.
As for the glass coffin and the lever that moved it up, the local people say that the sexton of the church accidentally activated it one day when he was cleaning the place.
He was terrified when he saw the mummified bridal body and it scared him so much that he had a heart attack and died. And the church permanently sealed the grave under the floor.
One can still see the inscription and the monument which is built against a wall.
Arabella’s Chapel later became part of the mainstream Protestant Church and was renamed St Mary’s Church. And it’s currently run by the Church of South India (CSI) and is in bad need of repairs. They hold English language services inside the building and the grounds around it serve as the official Protestant cemetery now.
There’s a shopping mall and a big supermarket nearby and a busy road outside the grounds now so it doesn’t feel spooky or ghostly.
But there’s a sense of intrigue and a sensation almost as if the emotions and memories of those people who lived then are still hanging around, when I visit places like these. The ones that have been around for hundreds of years and have interesting stories associated with them.
And there’s a curiosity about the stories of people who once inhabited the same spaces and all that is associated with it.
This scene must have looked exactly the same centuries ago
Or this...
I took these pics on a drive to a river delta recently
My fictional stories are not set in this place but the feelings and motivations of people are the same all over the world. And so we see similar echoes in classic old stories like Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the legend of Tristan and Isolde and others that people like to talk about.
I’m intrigued by these shades of human nature. The many layers that make up a person beyond what is immediately apparent on the surface. They make compelling characters who linger in the psyche.
This Colonial-era officer with the glorious military career and his private and intensely painful heartbreak.
My great grandfather, the visionary who reclaimed land from the wilderness but died relatively young. He was a scholarly book-reading, violin-playing family man who was also a successful leopard hunter in the early 1900s.
I want to explore stories like these in my blog posts and find inspiration from them for the fictional ones.
To this day, people still talk about the story of John Pater and Arabella Robinson, mainly because of St Mary’s Church.
Some people dismiss it with an “Oh! That old story…” and an eye roll, but some romanticize it.
After all, this couple had a love so strong that they were willing to defy their society, families and institutions just to be together, and then it all ended in tragedy anyway. I wonder what kind of a pull there was between them that they went to such lengths.
This story definitely has a legendary feel to it and Gothic story elements.
It’s lingered in my mind for years and I’ve felt a compulsion to write something about it but… it’s their tragic story and it feels too sacred and disrespectful to write it as fiction.
But it does inspire me to write something similar.
I don’t want to write tragic storylines. But how do I turn a story with heavy Gothic elements into a happily ever after? It’s like making sunshine out of shadows.
I want to draw inspiration from the main thread and a few elements of the story. Not a dark tragedy but a HEA (happily ever after). That may be possible only with supernatural or mystical elements, time slips, synchronicities and bending the rules of material existence.
Don't write dull stories, Hooman, when you've got me for a muse!
I don’t really care for light, fluffy, superficial stories and casual interactions between the characters. Those are the skim through once and forget types of books. They’re predictable to read and boring to write.
When I first got into historical fiction writing with a ghostwriting side hustle, it was the equivalent of a creative mental playground to keep from the tech writing boredom. But it was heavy on the formulas and expected outcomes. I did that for a few years while simultaneously writing marketing content for IT so it’s easy to write those but… they’re for the audience that likes the comfort of knowing exactly what to expect.
But the stories that you remember and want to read again and again are those that linger in your psyche for years. The ones with high stakes, extraordinary happenings and a touch of the supernatural.
Just like the twelve year-old who couldn’t put down that old wood pulp book and still draws inspiration from it several years later.
