Oh, the challenge of turning in that riveting Amitav Ghosh interview! I mean, you would think all the familiar things from having read a lot of his previous works, the geographical and cultural resonances, even the experience of having interviewed him less than a year ago, would make you sparkle with brilliance, except that doesn’t happen.
What happens instead is you — in this case me — end up agreeing with a lot of what he is saying. It is a Zoom interview, so the Gen Alpha daughter sans any sense of awe decimates the respectful distance, and waves at the man who has five Lifetime Achievement awards and eight honorary doctorates, not to mention the Erasmus Prize of 2024, and the Jnanpith and Padma Shri. He waves back and I forget the decided line of questioning practised in sedate tones and end up saying things like — so how did you write this book, did you have a goal in mind when you started out (of course, he did), do you cook (shudder, shudder) and instead of becoming the interview of the year, the conversation is suddenly perilously close to ending before it has even begun. And that is when he pulls off his rescue act and with a swirl of some invisible cape, turns the whole thing into a weekend adda.
Illustration by Manoj Roy
Me: I thought I recognised some of the characters from Gun Island and The Hungry Tide. So it is a little bit of all of your works in this book. And I remember you telling me last time when I spoke to you that you have done so much research about so many different things that you now take less time to write.
AG: Yes. My head is full of lots of useless information. So it is certainly easier.
Me: But why reincarnation?
AG: Why anything? You know, it’s just a story.
Me: And a fishy story too.
AG: I’m a Bengali. We all like to eat fish. I love to cook. I don’t cook that much fish because, you know, the fish that you get here in the US is not really the kind of fish that we are accustomed to. I like river fish. But just the other day I had dinner at a friend’s house and she made some wonderful tilapia. I mean, really wonderful. Tilapia is now worldwide. It comes with very heavy inputs of antibiotics…
Me: I remember having pet tilapia when I was growing up.
AG: Really?
Me: Yeah, so they had just started farming tilapia and my kaka got me four or five fish, as a gift. We had a tank in the backyard and that is where I kept them. I don’t eat tilapia because of that.
AG: Well, that’s a good thing.
Me: When I spoke to you last, you told me that the Sundarbans is a place that lives inside your head. I presume Calcutta is also a place that lives inside your head.
AG: Yes, yes. And this book is very much about my memories of Calcutta in the 1960s and 70s, when we were just living with daily morchas and gheraos and so on, and also with an incredible amount of load shedding. In some ways, you know, it was a different world.
Me: In Ghost-Eye, the fish-craving little girl is born in a Marwari family. Was it some kind of wink-wink humour?
AG: There’s no nod-nod wink-wink in it. The story doesn’t really work unless it’s a vegetarian family. And the main vegetarian families in Calcutta are Marwari. I mean, they have their food customs as they should. And, you know, I have many Marwari friends, which is why I felt it possible to write about Marwaris. I mean, really, you know, the life in Calcutta is inconceivable without Marwaris. They’ve kept so many aspects of the city alive.
Me: The sections on cooking are as good as meditation. In the sense that you focus totally on it and then you build it up step by step, which is what cooking is.
AG: For some reason, I was always kind of drawn to cooking. In my family, like once a week, my father would cook. That goes back generations. The men would always cook a big feast once a week or once a month or whatever. So I was certainly a part of that. And my father was also really kind of very obsessed with cooking and food. But no more so than most Bengalis. We are all obsessed with food, aren’t we?
Me: True, though I really hate to generalise.
AG: I think this is one thing Bengalis have in common with Italians. My wife doesn’t understand it at all. That I get up in the morning and think what’s for lunch and what’s for dinner.
Me: I really loved this book, but I cannot seem to think of a single question to ask you, which is really bad.
AG: No, no. It’s really good. It means you really got into it.
Me: So if it is not too weird, I want to ask you, do you really think that the only solution to climate change is going to be something metaphysical?
AG: Let me put it like this. Certainly, in climate-concerned circles, there’s absolutely a recognition now that the standard solutions that are being proposed or not being proposed are not going to work. They’re not going to work at scale. So, we are pretty much committed to a very... to a very high degree of global warming. The other day, I was very interested to see this very highly regarded writer saying, well, it’s time for magic. That’s all we can hope for now. Or as, you know, the German philosopher Heidegger said in 1964 — only a god can save us now.
Me: So you know these things, and think these things, and you have planned out your book. But when you sit down to write, does it become something else?
AG: See, it is difficult to explain the process of it. I mean, how can I tell you how I do it? It’s like asking an engineer — how do you build a building? I mean, it’s just what I do. I suppose one could write books and books about how to write books.
People do that but that would take a very long time.
Me: What about the whole exercise of writing the manuscript for the Future Library project? (Every year, for a hundred years, the project will invite an author to contribute a manuscript. The first was Margaret Atwood in 2014. In 2026, it will be Ghosh’s turn. All the books will be printed in 2114.)
AG: It’s actually really interesting to write something that won’t be open for almost 100 years. My grandson may live to see it. But yeah, it’s interesting to do it because, in a way, it takes away all constraints. You know, you can just write whatever you want in a way that sets you very free. It’s very different from writing a piece that, you know, will be published tomorrow or the day after or next year or whatever. And at the same time, you know that one of the reasons for this whole project is to talk about the various crises that the world faces right now. So, yes, it’s been very interesting working on this project. That’ll take me a while. Look, I’ve written lots of stuff. Maybe it’s time for me to cook more and write less... It was great to speak to you.
Me: So, and I have... I got... No, I didn’t get an answer to why reincarnation. But, yes, thank you very very much.