Last year, Amitav Ghosh regaled his readers with a book of non-fiction comprising essays primarily focusing on environment and climate change and called it Wild Fictions. Now he has just published a novel and called it Ghost-Eye, a rather complex tale that also includes planetary crisis and climate change, but in which he develops a story that moves around the idea of rebirth and reincarnation. In the novel, Ghosh uses the irruption of the people with special abilities, those with ghost eyes, who can see between the realms of the real and the invisible, to achieve this feat. He refers to a condition found in Tipu, one of the characters in the story, who suffers from heterochromia, of having eyes of different colours.
The story is set in two different time zones – that of Calcutta in the late 1960s and Brooklyn, New York, in 2020 at the time of the pandemic- and both the past and the present collide in interesting ways to carry on the narrative as logically as possible. Since Amitav Ghosh himself grew up in Calcutta at that time, his narration is full of details of actual streets in South Calcutta, the Gariahat bazaar, the power-cuts, the rule of the CPI(M), the Naxals, the ubiquitous Ambassador cars, etc. The actual story begins when one three-year old Varsha Gupta from a strict vegetarian Marwari family wants to have fish– maach-bhaat– for lunch. The Guptas don’t allow it inside their Calcutta mansion. But Varsha claims that she can remember another life: a mud house by a river where she caught and cooked fish with a different mother. Perplexed, the Guptas turn to Dr Shoma Bose, a psychiatrist who has been investigating what are known as ‘cases of the reincarnation type’ for years. Shoma tries to take the girl outside their house secretly and to stimulate her memories, feeding her with different kinds of fish. It is here that, let alone non-Bengalis and vegetarians, the fish loving Bengalis will also be bowled out by the way Ghosh mentions the different kinds of fish along with their original scientific names and the details of the Bengali food culture. But Shoma’s understanding of the world is changed forever by Varsha’s revelations.
She has been researching parapsychology for a long time, and we are told of the haptic system, which is a sensory apparatus through which individuals gather information about their environment. It is through this system that we assess or understand everything we touch or feel. She had written an article about the Great Cyclone of 1970 and about issues like reincarnation, rebirth, prerecognition of both past and present, and the use of ‘dissociative memory’ where subjects could do both – recall events from the past and preview fragments of the future. The characters use a faculty that ranges freely along the spectrum of space and time.
An interesting character called Dev Thapa is introduced in the story, and he works as a driver of the Bose household. But apart from coming from a village near the town of Lashio in Burma’s Shan State ( another area Ghosh knows first-hand because he lived in Burma for a certain period of time) it is he who takes Shoma to a Burmese ashram in Bowbazar, and we are therefore introduced to a priest-like figure called Shindaw Nat, who foresees many things and advices Dev to act accordingly. This same character would also later in the story send Tipu visions of the great etheric gathering of ghost eyes that would help Varsha rediscover her being.
When the story moves half a century later, we are told how Varsha’s therapeutic case file catches the attention of a group of environmental activists. Shoma’s nephew Dinu is drawn inexorably into their plans. Dinu finds himself caught up in the search for Varsha. He finds that his aunt Shoma had corresponded a lot with a US professor called Cathy Booth (who continued her research project on metempsychosis), and he goes to Charlottesville to the offices of the Division of Perceptual Studies to follow up and eventually discovers many facts about himself. He learns that his was not a case of simple schizophrenia or psychosis, but his behaviour was triggered by aquatic fauna – ‘a case of the reincarnation type’ – which involved the transference of non-linguistic consciousness into a human body. Thus, Dinu’s buried memories of his own past begin to surface. A lot of hurried incidents take place in Brooklyn while Dinu tries to trace Varsha, who was then working as an investor and day trader in New York, and he wants to feed her fish so that the body remembers the taste. His search for buying authentic fish from Chinatown, his experimenting and trying to cook it in the most meticulous way possible in his apartment, and his trying to impress her with a typically Bengali ambience take up a lot of the story.
As mentioned earlier, Amitav Ghosh’s penchant for writing about environmental issues also finds a place in the narrative when Tipu wants to create awareness of the common people to stop the projected coal-burning power plant that a giant energy corporation was planning to build on Lucibari, an island in the Sunderbans. But unlike an ordinary activist, his advocacy had a more unconventional approach. He takes support from the ghost-eye guild to support him in creating an irruption in the Sunderbans as a test case to see if the strategy might be effective. The site chosen is the temple of Manasa Devi, and the day chosen is that of the Makar Sankranti, which was significant for many reasons – for the puja of Bonbibi, the pilgrimage at Sagar Island, and Save the Dolphin Day. Tipu wanted his protest to be linked with the Rights of Nature movement that created awareness throughout the world. In the meantime, Shindaw Nat was sending him visions of the great etheric gathering of ghost-eyes that was helping Varsha rediscover her being. True enough, Varsha was able to do it as thousands of people waited for the apparition to arrive at dawn at the contested site.
Some of the characters in this story are found in Ghosh’s earlier novels like The Hungry Tide, The Glass Palace, and Gun Island, and he skillfully manages to get those characters, symbolism and backstories in this one. We find Piya, Dinu’s ‘friend’, now working as a professor of Marine biology in Oregon, still researching the Irrawaddy dolphin population of the Sunderbans, and she is also manager of the Badabon Trust at Lucibari. Her semi-adoptive son Tipu and his friend and partner Rafi, who had travelled as migrants from the Sunderbans to Europe and landed in Italy, are now back in the Sunderbans. We have Nilima (Mashima) of the Badabon Trust in the Sunderbans, Haren Naskar, the boatman who will act as a guide for the trip to Lucibari, and, of course, Dinu, aka Dinanath Dutta, the semi-retired, middle-aged antiquarian in Brooklyn who is also the narrator of the story. In his younger days, Dinu grew up in his aunt Dr. Shoma Bose’s house in Calcutta instead of in his own parent’s house, and that too was because of certain behavioural attitudes which would only be resolved towards the end of the narrative.
After a lot of twists in the story, almost verging like a whodunit, the ending is quite surprising, and it establishes Ghosh as a master storyteller once again who has the exclusive ability to tie up different issues, characters, and settings within the two covers of the book. Unlike the definition of metaphysical poetry, which is said to have ‘heterogeneous elements yoked by violence together’, Ghosh really manages to bring in diverse topics and yet does not make the narrative feel digressive at all. It remains unputdownable and as a popular jingle says, “Ye dil mange more!”. We look forward eagerly to reading his next venture.
The writer is a critic and translator, and is a former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan.
Spotlight:
Ghost-Eye: A Novel
By Amitav Ghosh
Harper Collins Publishers India, 2026
Price: Rs.799, 322 pages