Author Amitav Ghosh on Friday spoke about returning to fiction after nearly seven years since 2019’s Gun Island with his new novel Ghost-Eye, set in the Sunderbans much like The Hungry Tide, at the Kolkata Literary Meet at Alipore Museum.
“It’s wonderful to come back to the novel. I wrote a lot of non-fiction in between, but my heart longs for fiction. It’s absolutely wonderful to dwell in a dream world,” said Ghosh.
The 69-year-old writer also opened up about the research that went into his latest novel during a conversation with festival director Malavika Banerjee.
Ghosh spoke about alternative ways of viewing the world — ways that are not reductive and do not treat everything on earth as inanimate objects meant to be expropriated and exploited.
He shared that his wife, Deborah Baker, is from Virginia, home to the Division of Perceptual Studies under the University of Virginia. The institution houses the world’s largest archive of accounts involving people with memories of past lives. These memories, Ghosh explained, are often tied to language and food.
For instance, a child might suddenly begin speaking an unfamiliar language or demand food their family has never consumed. Ghost-Eye is based on this very premise.
The novel begins with Varsha, a three-year-old girl from a Jain family and therefore vegetarian, who one day suddenly fails to recognise her mother and begins asking for fish.
Addressing how the novel straddles the uncanny within the everyday, Ghosh said, “I try to see the unreality of the real. Behind everything that is real is something unreal. That’s the real challenge. How can you join the two?”
The novel is rich with details of life in Kolkata and the Bengali way of living.
However, Ghosh said he needed no research despite having lived in New York for several years. “I had to do no research so far as Kolkata is concerned. It was all in my head, and I was drawing on memories of different kinds,” he said.
The Padma Shri-awardee also addressed the echoes of his previous novels in Ghost-Eye. “You cannot say goodbye to your characters. They keep growing in your head, and you become curious about what happened to them,” he said.
Ghosh went on to discuss how the novel connects to the broader theme of environmentalism. “I am a believer of nature movements,” he emphasised, before speaking about the significance of the book’s title.
“I was inspired by a Native American belief for the title. Tipu gets bitten by a snake and develops heterochromia. The belief states that people with bi-coloured eyes can see two different worlds. That’s where the title comes from,” he explained.
Ghosh also expressed gratitude for being awarded South Korea’s prestigious Pak Kyongni Literary Prize in 2025 and for his inclusion in Norway’s Future Library Project.
He then went on to cut a fish-shaped sandesh cake, a nod to the crucial role played by different kinds of fish, especially at the end of Ghost-Eye.
The session concluded with hundreds of readers queuing up to get their copies of his books signed.