Editor’s Note: When I met Tina Sobti to discuss her psychological horror novel “Whispers of Kuldhara,” I expected to talk about ghost stories and abandoned villages. What unfolded instead was a conversation about inherited memories, the weight of legacy, the fine line between devotion and obsession, and why some silences are louder than screams. Tina speaks with the cadence of someone who listens to stories the desert tells, and this interview captures that haunting quality exactly as it happened.
Priya Srivastava: Tina, you come from Bollywood royalty. Your grandfather Charan Das Shokh was a legendary screenwriter and director, your uncle Praveen Kumar Sobti played Bheem in BR Chopra’s Mahabharata. That’s a hell of a legacy to carry. Why psychological horror? Why not continue in mainstream Bollywood storytelling?
Tina Sobti: You know, that question assumes legacy is about imitation, and it’s not. My grandfather told stories that moved millions. My uncle embodied strength that became mythological. But legacy isn’t about doing what they did. It’s about doing what only you can do with the foundation they gave you. Horror, real psychological horror, is the most honest genre there is. You cannot fake it. You cannot rely on formula. You have to go deep into uncomfortable truths about human nature, about obsession, about the parts of ourselves we don’t want to acknowledge. That’s what my grandfather did with his scripts. He made people feel things they didn’t know they could feel. I’m doing the same, just with different tools.
PS: But why Kuldhara specifically? There are hundreds of haunted locations in India. What drew you to this abandoned village in Rajasthan?
TS: Kuldhara chose me as much as I chose it. I kept having these dreams, months before I even decided to write the book. Not scary dreams exactly, more like whispers. Fragments. A woman’s voice calling a name I didn’t recognize. The smell of desert after rain. The feeling of being watched by something that wasn’t malevolent, just persistent. I’m a clinical hypnotherapist, I work with the subconscious mind daily, so I know when something is trying to surface. When I finally researched Kuldhara, the abandoned Paliwal Brahmin village that was cursed and left overnight in 1825, everything clicked. This wasn’t just a ghost story. This was about collective trauma, about what happens when an entire community chooses silence over confrontation, about curses that are actually protection twisted into prison.
PS: Your protagonist Akina hears whispers, sees reflections that don’t obey her, dreams memories that aren’t hers. As a clinical hypnotherapist, you must understand dissociation, inherited trauma. How much of your professional knowledge went into crafting her psychological unraveling?
TS: All of it. People think horror is about scaring readers with jump scares and gore. That’s not horror, that’s shock. Real horror is watching someone question their own sanity, their own memories, their own identity. Akina isn’t haunted by ghosts. She’s haunted by the possibility that she might not be who she thinks she is, that her memories might belong to someone else, that the boundary between past and present is far more permeable than we want to believe. I’ve worked with clients who carry trauma they don’t remember experiencing, who have phobias they cannot explain, who react to triggers that make no logical sense. The mind is not a clean timeline. It’s layered, it’s porous, it remembers things the conscious self has forgotten. That’s what Akina experiences. The whispers aren’t madness. They’re memory trying to surface.
PS: There’s a line in your blurb that stopped me cold. “She is not uncovering the story of Kuldhara. She is the story.” That’s not just atmospheric. That’s identity dissolution. That’s terrifying on a primal level.
TS: Thank you. That line took me three days to write because I needed it to be exactly right. The most terrifying realization isn’t that you’re in danger. It’s that you might not be you. What if the person you think you are is just a story you’ve been telling yourself? What if your identity is borrowed, inherited, imposed? Akina goes to Kuldhara thinking she’s investigating a mystery. She realizes she IS the mystery. The village didn’t call her randomly. It called her because she carries something it needs, or maybe because it carries something she needs. That ambiguity, that uncertainty, that’s where real horror lives.
PS: You write about forbidden love and dangerous devotion. The blurb mentions “love curdles into control” and “devotion becomes a chain.” That’s not typical horror imagery. That’s relationship psychology.
TS: Because the scariest monsters are human. Always have been. Kuldhara’s curse, in my version, isn’t born from hatred or evil. It’s born from protection taken too far, from love that refuses to let go, from devotion that becomes possessive to the point of suffocation. Think about it. How many abusive relationships start with “I’m doing this because I love you”? How many controlling behaviors are justified as “I’m protecting you”? How many times does devotion become a cage disguised as care? That’s the real curse. Not supernatural entities. Human emotions twisted until they become unrecognizable. The village was abandoned, but the patterns of control, obsession, possession, they didn’t leave with the people. They stayed. They waited. They found new hosts.
PS: Your background in music, your YouTube covers, your work as an English trainer with Bhanzu. These seem disconnected from psychological horror writing. Or are they?
TS: Everything connects if you look closely enough. Music taught me rhythm, pacing, the power of silence between notes. Horror is all about rhythm. You build tension slowly, you let silence do the work, you know when to hit the crescendo and when to pull back. Teaching English taught me precision with language, how a single word choice can change everything, how cadence affects comprehension and emotion. As a clinical hypnotherapist, I learned that the subconscious responds to patterns, to repetition, to suggestion delivered at the right moment in the right way. All of that went into writing Kuldhara. The book has rhythm like music, precision like language teaching, and it works on your subconscious like hypnotherapy. I wanted readers to feel like they’re not just reading a story, they’re being pulled into it, like the village itself is whispering directly to them.
PS: You describe the book as “slow burn atmospheric” rather than jump scare horror. That’s a hard sell in an age of instant gratification and short attention spans.
TS: I’m not interested in easy sells. I’m interested in stories that stay with you, that burrow into your subconscious and resurface at 3 AM when you’re alone with your thoughts. Jump scares are fast food. They give you an immediate reaction and then they’re gone, forgotten. Atmospheric horror is a slow poison. It seeps in. It accumulates. You finish the book and think you’re fine, and then three days later you’re in a quiet room and you remember a line, a scene, a feeling, and suddenly you’re unsettled all over again. That’s what I wanted to create. Not a story that chases you, but a story that waits. Because waiting implies intention. And intention is far more terrifying than random chaos.
PS: The Amazon reviews mention readers feeling “watched” while reading, having vivid dreams about Kuldhara, being unable to shake the atmosphere days after finishing. That’s not typical reader feedback. That’s almost like the book is doing something beyond entertainment.
TS: Books are consciousness transfer devices. You’re literally downloading someone else’s thoughts, emotions, carefully constructed experiences directly into your mind. When you read fiction, your brain doesn’t fully distinguish between imagined events and real ones. That’s why you cry at sad books, why you get scared reading horror. Your subconscious is experiencing it as if it’s happening. I wrote Kuldhara with hypnotherapeutic techniques embedded in the prose. The repetition of certain phrases, the way Akina’s thoughts spiral, the descriptions of the desert and ruins, they’re all designed to put you into a light trance state. Not manipulative, just immersive. So yes, readers feel watched because I want them to feel the presence of the village. They dream about Kuldhara because I’ve planted seeds in their subconscious. That’s not accidental. That’s intentional craft.
PS: That’s either brilliant or slightly disturbing. Maybe both.
TS: The best horror is always both. If it’s only disturbing, it’s torture porn. If it’s only brilliant, it’s academic exercise. You need both. You need to make readers uncomfortable while also making them admire the construction, the craft, the precision. That’s the sweet spot.
PS: Let’s talk about Aarav, the male character. The blurb mentions identities fracturing and lifetimes colliding. Is this a love story wrapped in horror or horror wrapped in a love story?
TS: It’s neither and both. Love in my book is not a redemption. It’s a complication. Aarav represents… let’s just say he represents the kind of love that doesn’t let go even when it should, even when letting go would be the kindest thing. Akina and Aarav’s connection spans lifetimes, but that doesn’t make it healthy. Sometimes the most dangerous relationships are the ones that feel inevitable, fated, written in the stars. Because “meant to be” can also mean “trapped together.” The question the book asks is this: if someone loved you so much in a past life that they cursed an entire village to keep you, is that devotion or obsession? Is that protection or imprisonment? And if you carry that connection into this lifetime, are you honoring it or are you just repeating patterns that should have ended centuries ago?
PS: You’ve mentioned your grandfather and uncle several times. Did they influence your actual writing process, or is their influence more about giving you permission to be a storyteller?
TS: Both, but more the second. My grandfather used to say that stories are how humans make sense of chaos. We tell stories to organize reality, to process emotion, to communicate truths that facts cannot capture. That belief, that stories matter fundamentally, that’s what I inherited. Not his specific style or genre, but his conviction that storytelling is sacred work. My uncle Praveen Kumar Sobti, who played Bheem, he embodied strength, but he also understood vulnerability. Bheem in Mahabharata was strong but he was also emotional, he was loyal to the point of blindness, he made mistakes born from love. That complexity, that understanding that strength and vulnerability coexist, that went into my characters. They’re not heroes or victims. They’re humans caught in something bigger than themselves, trying to make sense of it, trying to survive it.
PS: You’re also from Delhi, born in Mumbai. Those are two very different cities with very different energies. How did growing up between them shape your worldview?
TS: Mumbai is relentless. It never stops, never sleeps, never lets you rest. Delhi is layered. It has history buried under modernity, monuments next to markets, whispers of empires in every corner. Growing up between them taught me that reality is multiple, contradictory, layered. Mumbai taught me pace, urgency, the need to capture attention immediately. Delhi taught me that the past never really leaves, it just transforms. Both are in Kuldhara. The relentless pull of the village, that’s Mumbai energy. The layers of history, the way past bleeds into present, that’s Delhi. Akina is caught between those energies just like I was.
PS: You work with Bhanzu, an ed-tech organization, as an English trainer. That’s teaching, which requires clarity and simplification. Horror writing requires ambiguity and complexity. How do you toggle between those modes?
TS: They’re not as opposite as they seem. Good teaching requires understanding how minds work, how people process information, how to guide them from confusion to clarity. Horror writing requires understanding how minds work, how people process fear, how to guide them from comfort to unease. Both require empathy, precision, awareness of your audience’s mental state. When I teach English, I’m building confidence, removing barriers, making language accessible. When I write horror, I’m building unease, creating barriers, making readers question what’s real. But the core skill, understanding human psychology and using language precisely to achieve a specific mental state, that’s identical.
PS: Your other books are non-fiction. What made you pivot to fiction, and specifically to psychological horror?
TS: Non-fiction is teaching. Fiction is experiencing. I’d said everything I needed to say in non-fiction format about hypnotherapy, transformation, healing. But there are truths that can only be conveyed through story, through metaphor, through lived experience. You can tell someone “unresolved trauma resurfaces in unexpected ways” and they nod and forget. Or you can make them experience Akina’s journey, make them feel what it’s like when your own mind betrays you, when memories that aren’t yours feel more real than your present. That’s the power of fiction. It bypasses intellectual defenses and goes straight to the emotional, the visceral. As for horror specifically, I think we’re living in horror times. Pandemics, climate crisis, political chaos, social media anxiety. Traditional feel-good stories feel disconnected from reality. Horror acknowledges that reality is uncertain, threatening, often beyond our control. But it also shows characters navigating that uncertainty. Horror, good horror, is ultimately about survival, about facing the worst and still moving forward. That feels more honest right now than happily ever after.
PS: The book description mentions “the desert itself becomes a witness, and time remembers everything.” You’re anthropomorphizing landscape and time. That’s a bold narrative choice.
TS: In Rajasthan, the desert IS a character. It watches. It remembers. It judges. People who’ve been to Kuldhara, the real abandoned village, they all say the same thing. The silence isn’t empty. It’s full. Full of what, they can’t quite articulate, but it’s there. I wanted to capture that. The desert in my book isn’t backdrop. It’s participant. It has agency. It makes choices about what it reveals and when. Time, similarly, isn’t linear in Kuldhara. It loops, it echoes, it folds back on itself. That’s not magical realism, that’s trauma. Trauma doesn’t follow chronology. A traumatic event from childhood can feel more present than what happened yesterday. Kuldhara is a traumatized space, so time behaves accordingly. I’m not just telling a ghost story. I’m exploring how place holds memory, how land absorbs human emotion, how some locations become repositories of unprocessed pain.
PS: You mention you love reading and traveling. What books influenced Kuldhara, and have you actually been to the real Kuldhara village?
TS: I went to Kuldhara twice. Once before writing to feel the place, and once during editing to verify details. The second visit was… uncomfortable. The first time, I was a curious visitor. The second time, after spending months writing about it, living in that headspace, I felt like I was visiting something that knew me, that had been waiting for me to return. Sounds dramatic, but it’s true. As for influences, Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” taught me that the scariest horror is psychological. Sarah Waters’ “The Little Stranger” showed me how to make ambiguity terrifying. Mariana Enriquez’s “Things We Lost in the Fire” demonstrated how to make horror visceral and poetic simultaneously. Indian horror is often either overtly supernatural or overly Bollywood. I wanted to create something that felt distinctly Indian, rooted in our landscape and history, but with the psychological complexity of international literary horror.
PS: The book has gotten 4.8 stars on Amazon, which is remarkably high for debut horror fiction. What do you think resonates with readers?
TS: Honesty. Readers can sense when you’re following a formula versus when you’re excavating something real. Every character in Kuldhara carries aspects of me, questions I’ve grappled with, fears I’ve faced, patterns I’ve noticed in myself and others. Akina’s struggle with identity, with memory, with wondering if she’s losing her mind or gaining clarity, that’s real. I’ve worked with dozens of clients experiencing dissociation, depersonalization, identity confusion. I’ve felt it myself during particularly intense hypnotherapy sessions. The book resonates because it’s not just scary, it’s recognizable. We’ve all felt disconnected from ourselves. We’ve all wondered if our memories are reliable. We’ve all experienced relationships that felt inevitable but unhealthy. The horror in Kuldhara isn’t alien. It’s amplified reality.
PS: You’re also a keyboardist who posts covers on YouTube. Does music influence your prose rhythm?
TS: Absolutely. Writing is music. Sentence length is tempo. Paragraph breaks are rests. Dialogue is melody. Description is harmony. When I write horror, I’m composing something with a specific rhythm designed to create unease. Short, staccato sentences for panic. Long, winding sentences for hypnotic dread. Silence, white space on the page, for moments where the absence of words is louder than words could be. I actually read my work aloud, multiple times, listening for rhythm. If it doesn’t sound right, if the cadence is off, I rewrite. Readers may not consciously notice the musical quality of prose, but they feel it. That feeling, that’s what makes writing memorable.
PS: What’s the biggest misconception about psychological horror as a genre?
TS: That it’s about ghosts. Psychological horror is about the mind. Ghosts, if they appear, are just manifestations of internal conflict, unprocessed trauma, denied truths. The real horror is always human. It’s gaslighting yourself. It’s losing trust in your own perceptions. It’s realizing the person you love might be the person hurting you. It’s understanding that your memories might be lies you’ve told yourself to survive. That’s terrifying on a level supernatural entities can never match. Because you can run from a ghost. You cannot run from your own mind.
PS: If readers take away one thing from Whispers of Kuldhara, what do you hope it is?
TS: That silence is never empty. Whether it’s the silence of an abandoned village, the silence we keep in relationships, the silence we maintain about our own pain, silence always carries something. The question is whether you’re brave enough to listen to what it’s saying. The whispers in Kuldhara, they’re not random noise. They’re communications from parts of ourselves we’ve buried, truths we’ve avoided, patterns we’ve denied. Horror, real horror, forces us to listen to what we’ve been trying not to hear. That’s uncomfortable. That’s supposed to be uncomfortable. Growth always is.
PS: Last question. What’s next? Are you staying in horror, or exploring other genres?
TS: I’m staying in psychological spaces, but not necessarily traditional horror. I’m working on something about collective memory, about how families pass down trauma disguised as tradition, about rituals we perform without understanding their origin or purpose. It might be horror, might be psychological thriller, might be something else entirely. I don’t write to fit genres. I write to excavate truths, and whatever genre best serves that truth, that’s where I go. But I will say this: Kuldhara isn’t finished with me. The village has more stories. Whether I write them or they write themselves through me, time will tell.
PS: Tina, this has been haunting in the best possible way. Thank you for pulling back the curtain on your process and your mind.
TS: Thank you for asking questions that required real answers instead of promotional sound bites. That’s rare. And to readers, if you do pick up Whispers of Kuldhara, read it alone, at night, when the world is quiet. That’s when the whispers are loudest. And once you hear them, you might find they follow you long after you close the book. That’s not a threat. That’s a promise.
“Whispers of Kuldhara: A Psychological Horror Mystery” by Tina Sobti is available on Amazon. For more about Tina’s work in hypnotherapy, music covers, and upcoming projects, follow her on social media.
With over 11 years of experience in the publishing industry, Priya Srivastava has become a trusted guide for hundreds of authors navigating the challenging path from manuscript to marketplace. As Editor-in-Chief of Deified Publications, she combines the precision of a publishing professional with the empathy of a mentor who truly understands the fears, hopes, and dreams of both first-time and seasoned writers.