“There are no coincidences,” a character in Amitav Ghosh’s new novel declares, “only synchronicities.” Chances are, if you happen to be reading Ghost Eye right now, you are or have been willy nilly dwelling in a state of consciousness in which you are acutely aware of realities which traditionally “science” or “rationality” cannot explain. Call it synchronicity or coincidence. If not, Ghosh’s narrative will evoke it for you, for sure, in a way words cannot, like a dream or a memory.
Reincarnation or rebirth is the underlying theme but as Ghosh tells me during an interview, he prefers to refer to it as “past life memory,” which is what it essentially is. A little girl, three-year-old Varsha Gupta, who is born into a wealthy and strictly vegetarian Jain Marwari family in Kolkata, suddenly demands to be served fish instead of the insipid roti and dal which is fed to her daily. Shoma Bose, the Bengali psychologist whom her family appoints for her “treatment” eventually traces her utterly inexplicable behavior and her astounding knowledge of various species of fish back to a past life when she was a poor fisherwoman living in a hut beside a river in a Bengal village.
The fictional plot unfolds rivetingly spanning a period of over five decades and taking the reader on a journey from Calcutta to Brooklyn to the Sunderban to the American Midwest. These are all places that Ghosh is familiar with like the back of his hand, having lived there, traveled to and toured extensively. And therefore it is easy to read into it autobiographical elements, especially since the protagonist Dinu, like the author himself is a Calcutta boy who is now settled in Brooklyn. But then Ghosh points out during our interview (in response to a question on how the episodes of past life memory he describes in the book appear to be so empirically experienced) that he himself has never had memories of a past life. However, he has met or known a number of people who did experience powerful feelings of a past life. He has also encountered people who did not themselves remember their past lives but were reminded of it by others who remember them from a past life.
What sets Ghost Eye apart from Ghosh’s earlier works which too have often delved deeply and with empathy into the worlds of our land’s ancient legends and lores, mysteries and myths (from Manasa Devi, the Goddess of Snakes to Bon Bibi, the Goddess of the Jungle) is how he captures that transitional space between the material and the spiritual and makes us dwell in a kind of no man’s land. It is up to the reader to decide which side of the border the individual would traverse….though essentially they are the same….like the proverbial two sides of a coin. Like the borders around the globe, our ideas of life and death, of spiritual and material, are essentially an artificial construct.
And so we have the cynics like Shoma’s husband, Monty, a doctor who dismisses his wife’s theories with a wave of his hand or certain members of Varsha’s family, who while believing in the idea of Gods and Goddesses (and doing daily Puja), find it hard to believe in reincarnation when it comes to their own child. Voices of “reason”, ironically, belong, in this novel, to the “believers” like Varsha’s father, Abhay, a compassionate, sensitive and loving man, a photographer at heart, who is reluctantly forced into the family business or even to avowed materialists like Western psychologists sworn to “science” and “rationality” like Dr Booth
(who in India becomes known as Dr Bhoot or Ghost….when she starts to research on “cases of the reincarnation types”).
Ghosh’s novels are celebrated for their ability to bring into focus contemporary issues of grave concern, especially climate change and the horrors of the gradual destruction of ecosystems like the Sunderban, with tales, usually fictional, of ordinary people going about their day and life.
Ghost Eye (the phrase usually refers to the phenomenon of individuals who have two different eye colors but is also used to refer to “seers” and others with special powers), is a book which is reassuring for those of us who believe in the beyond. Characters like Tipu, one of whose eyes start changing color after he is bit by a snake and Dev, a Burmese boy, who can see and sense things ordinary people don’t are the outer layer of a nuanced belief system with some characters, (including a surprising one revealed at the end) who are actually Ghost eyes but don’t see it or know it.
This book is a beautiful blend of the “scientific” (commentary on climate change), the political and social (corporate greed) and the “spiritual” in which intuitions, premonitions, gut feelings lead the way.
The writer is Editor, Features