Tagore's short story "The Hungry Stones" deals with ghosts on both a literal and a figurative level. On a literal level, the story's protagonist, Srijut, encountered a number of ghosts when he spent a week at a mysterious palace rumored to be haunted. On a figurative level, he was haunted by memories of the past.

The precise boundary between the literal and figurative levels of Srijut's story is difficult to determine with any degree of accuracy. On the face of it, it seems that he's spinning a good old-fashioned ghost story complete with spooky visions of a young woman with blood on her face.

But at the same time, there seems to be something going on beneath the surface, perhaps the belated emergence of something buried deep within the storyteller's subconscious.

It is this ambiguity that makes Tagore's story so fascinating. We sense that something else is going on, but we don't know quite what it is. All that we can say is that the story as a whole, as well as the ghost story it frames, represents an absorbing exploration of the relationship between what is real and unreal, between fantasy and reality, whose very ambiguity yields a potentially endless series of interpretations.